#86 Stephen Malkmus

When we went out of the café, he was waiting for us, leant against the wall, smoking a cigarette. He looked like he wasn’t expecting anything, just smoking. He looked older, too, quite imposing, but Stephen Malkmus remained true to what we imagined. Cool guy, who didn’t seem able to be disappointed or pissed by anything in the world, neither to get really. involved, however. A guy with a guitar, who was about to sing three folk songs for us, then forget it, then tell his friends we asked him to do Pavement...

But who cares. For me, as for many people I think, only one second justified this session. That was on a bridge over the Canal St Martin, at 49". His voice went out-of-tune, carrying singularity, charm, the story of a band we once loved.

It goes without saying: kinda dull Malkmus was not a fascinating subject to explore, for impetuous Moon. He never paid attention to Pavement or to Malkmus alone, so here was just a man who did not show much... Hopefully, Paris was a great help to cheer up the whole session. A pile of chairs in a dark alley, a samba lesson in the basement...

...and then, this door which opened on the back of the Gibus, a famous club. It was empty, only two workmen were there, but too busy to talk. Malkmus wandered in the empty corridors, like an erratic troubadour in that sleeping rock club.

Then Malkmus said goodbye, and left...

Nate Chan more or less warned us, once. He had filmed Stephan Malkmus with the Jicks when they played at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. No Pavement, no Jicks... Just an anarchic bunch of old R.E.M. covers. Go figure !