I’m driving Stephen Malkmus’ car. In America, that’s tantamount to possessing someone’s soul. But wait, it gets better: I’m listening to Slanted And Enchanted—make that Malkmus’ copy of Slanted And Enchanted—and it sounds great as I tool down the sun-kissed streets of Portland, Ore., with the windows down and the stereo up. There’s a parking ticket flapping beneath the windshield wiper—and it bores me. I look around at all the people, and I just don’t care. Not a care, really, in the world. I am, for a moment, Stephen Malkmus, fortunate son. Listen to me, I’m on the stereo.

Actually, I’m driving Malkmus’ girlfriend’s car. Which you would know is even better if you’ve ever seen his girlfriend. Her name is Heather Larimer, and she’s beautiful and bright and 28. She was a cheerleader and she has a master’s degree in creative writing—a major-league summer babe (AOL Keyword: Babia Majora). By the time you read this, you may have already seen her singing in Malkmus’ new band, the Jicks. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s back up.

I’m driving Malkmus’ girlfriend’s car because I’ve come to Portland to find out what it means to be Stephen Malkmus (AOL Keyword: Laconic), and the first thing he wants to do is get a friggin’ battery for his car. It’s a 1989 Acura Legend, and it’s been stranded for months in front of his former apartment up in the rich, old-money part of town. Up here, on this faintly Olympian perch where even modest homes list for $300,000, we sit waiting for the AAA guy. Malkmus, the man Courtney Love called “the Grace Kelly of indie rock,” doesn’t want to be interviewed yet, and it isn’t like I know him from Adam; for that matter, after spending three days with him, I will still not really know him from Adam. Aside from a bit of strained small talk, my first half hour or so in the company of one of indie rock’s most acclaimed wordsmiths is spent in silence, watching him clean out his trunk. A soggy copy of an old income-tax form. A Thin Lizzy album. A rumpled suit bag and battered dress shoes, probably last worn to the funeral of his friend Robert Bingham (author of a collection of short stories called Pure Slaughter Value and heir to a publishing fortune). Bingham died from a heroin overdose in the fall of 1999. “I don’t think he was really that into it,” Malkmus will tell me later. “I think he just tried it with this girl ... ” The rest of the thought trails off to protect the privacy of the dead.

There’s a song on Malkmus' self-titled solo album called “Church On White.” It’s prime Malkmus. He sounds sad-eyed and shattered, and the guitars clang languidly, loping along in figure-eights of resignation and regret. It ends with a tolling passage that closes the lid on the final chorus before flaming out in a wailing-wall guitar solo. If every Pavement song was about thinking, this song is about feeling. “Church On White” is about Bingham. He used to live at the intersection of Church and White streets in New York City.

The AAA guy finally arrives and gets the Acura started. Malkmus wants me to follow in Larimer’s car as we go shopping for a new battery. I fish Slanted And Enchanted out of the glove compartment and pop it in the tape deck as we zigzag through the streets of Portland, visiting five different auto-parts stores before Malkmus finds what he needs. File this under Doing Ordinary Things With Extraordinary People. Make no mistake, Malkmus is extraordinary—some say the finest songwriter of his generation—but he replaces his car battery just like you and me: He has the guy at the car-parts store do it.

That’s about all I can tell you about Malkmus with any degree of certainty. Other than that, you’re on your own. I hung out with him, asked him questions for hours, watched him make music, looked at the records in his collection, the books on his shelves, the magazines on his coffee table. I called his old bandmates and his record company. I even called his dad (great guy, by the way). The facts are all here, but, as with any good Pavement song, it’s up to you to figure out what it all means.

Being Stephen Malkmus is … easy. You’re born upper-middle class in Los Angeles, the son of a general property/casualty insurance agent. You live on Citrus Avenue in the City Of Angels, where the sun shines all the time. When you’re eight, you move upstate to the tony suburban subdivisions of Stockton, where you’ll live out your formative years. You meet this kid named Scott Kannberg on your soccer team. You play wing. You learn to play guitar by aping Jimi Hendrix on “Purple Haze,” which features this tricky E chord. When you finally pull it off, you realize you can now play the guitar. You spend your puberty at all-ages punk shows. You even start a punk-rock band called the Straw Dogs, which sounds like a cross between the Adolescents, Wasted Youth and Dead Kennedys, as was the style at the time.

At age 18, you depart cross-country for the University of Virginia, because it’s the best school that accepted you and, besides, your old man went there. You have the distinct feeling you were one of the last students accepted because you’re assigned a room in the basement of the freshman dormitory, which you call a “ghetto for all the dumb kids.” You don’t complain, because even though you fill out the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink, you don’t test well and you only scored 1180 on your SATs. After a couple of years, you declare a major in history because you get the best grades in those classes.
You meet David Berman, who will one day be regarded as one of the finest poets of your generation. You will one day make albums with him under the name Silver Jews. (You aren’t Jewish.) You will also meet a super-nice guy named Bob Nastanovich, who will one day talk you into co-owning a racehorse named Speedy Service with him. Who knows, you might even ask him to join your next band if you ever get around to starting one. The three of you become DJs at the college station and sit around drinking beer while raiding the deepest depths of the record stacks: Can, Chrome, Swell Maps, the Fall. These records will serve you well in due time. So well, in fact, that the Fall’s Mark E. Smith will one day curse you in the pages of Q magazine for riding his style to the bank. If someone told you this back in college, you would’ve never believed it.

You record an album under the band name Lakespeed, which even you have to admit sounds a little too derivative of Sonic Youth and the other college-radio superstars of the time. You send it around, but no label is interested. After graduating with a respectable 3.2 grade-point average and not even a vague clue as to what you want to do with your life, you go back to Stockton. You team up with Kannberg, because he’s the only one of your acquaintances who still lives there. He’s learned to play guitar. You make up aliases for each other: You call him Spiral Stairs, he calls you S.M. You record some songs for a seven-inch single you purposely try to make sound really bad, like Television Personalities or Chrome or Pere Ubu. Later, people will call this “lo-fi.” On the day you record, you’ll learn later, a grisly mass murder happens downstate, which is odd because you’ve already decided to call the seven-inch Slay Tracks.

You leave all the pedestrian details of pressing the singles and mailing them out to zines and record labels to Kannberg—who decides to call the project Pavement—and head out on a year-long backpacking trip across Europe. You’ll also visit Egypt, Jordan and Iraq, where you’ll hike out to the intersection of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which, in the Bible, is called Eden. When you get back, you’re amused to learn Slay Tracks has been well-received. You record another single called Demolition Plot J-7 and follow it up with a 10-inch called, rather archly, Perfect Sound Forever. The buzz builds. You move to New York to live with good ol’ Nastanovich. You and Berman get jobs as security guards at the Whitney Museum Of American Art, and to fill the endless ennui of standing for hours babysitting some of the greatest artistic achievements of Western culture, you make up an album’s worth of songs in your head.
Spending Christmas back in Stockton with your family, you record these songs. You call it Slanted And Enchanted. It will change music. It will change people’s lives. It will change your life. You’ll become the slacker prince of indie rock and, as befits the title, you’ll never have to work another day in your life.

That’s the beginning of Pavement (AOL Keyword: Irony); as the middle is well-documented, we’ll talk about the end.

“I wasn’t particularly proud of Pavement at that point,” says Malkmus, recalling the drudgery of recording the band’s final album, 1999’s rather dismal Terror Twilight, and the joyless tour that followed. “I thought it had gone on too long. I wish it would have ended after, like, two records or something. It’s not a bad band to be in, don’t get me wrong. We had been talking about it not being what it should to people for some time. There was an edge to it that was not as heartfelt as it should be to be going out and shoving shit down people’s faces.”

Did you feel that way, or did the other people in the band feel that way?
“You would have to talk to individual people,” he says. “I’m sure that there is a part of everyone that would like to keep it going, because anything they do after that isn’t going to be any bigger. It was a pretty successful run. You want to hold on to that. But I hope everyone realizes that it was the right time to pull the plug and end on an OK note ... I made it clear to people in many ways that there was no way I could make another record the way we made records. Making the Silver Jews album (1998's American Water) was another thing that made me realize that there’s such a better way to be making records, and I knew I could do it. We did that in four days and that was a breeze, and it was such a better record than [Terror Twilight]. I mean the performances, maybe not the songs or the mix, but the performances were much more inspired. I realized I could do that. I didn’t need to settle for uninspired performances.”

When was it official Pavement was over?
“It’s never official, I guess. Anyone that’s asked me for the last year and a half, I’ve said it was over. So I guess a year and a half.”

After the tour for Terror Twilight?
“Before that, even—during it. I never made a formal announcement and nobody asked me in an interview, so we never said anything. I would have liked to have maybe made it more official, but it wasn’t a pressing thing on my mind, and nobody else in the band wanted to do it. So I was like, ‘I’ll just wait until my solo album is out and I have to talk to people anyway for promotion.’ I can kill two birds with one stone instead of having some meaningless media thing last March.”

Do you ever write songs that reveal something about yourself?
“Not really. I’m always commenting or assuming voices about lives that would be interesting to me. I’m not particularly interested in my own feelings or my own struggles, so I wouldn’t write a song about them. But anything you write is a reflection on you, so if you are into being non-revealing, it shows your personality. So I never feel like I’m selling people short.”

What do you think about the way writers characterize you as being cold and aloof?
“It’s never been a problem. Just about every song I like is the same way. The Velvets are always singing about somebody else. Van Morrison is singing about Crazy Face or whatever, and it doesn’t have anything to do with him. People think he’s soulful.”

Do you feel naked going out there without Pavement and just your name up there in lights?
“No. I really don’t care at this point. I’m a big boy and I have my posse. I think it’s gonna be fine. I wouldn’t do it this way if I wasn’t over any deep, stoner-paranoia thing.”

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