The late Gary Young is best known as the talented and eccentric drummer on Pavement’s early records, including their breakout full-length Slanted and Enchanted. Naturally, there is more to the man’s life story, and the recent documentary directed by Jed I. Rosenberg does a solid job telling the musical side of it. Louder Than You Think: A Lo-Fi History of Gary Young & Pavement (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) gathers various relevant aural threads into a cohesive and pleasurable package. This portraiture is out on vinyl, compact disc, and digital January 30 through Independent Project Records.
Those with a casual appreciation of the band might not grasp the reality, but Jed I. Rosenberg’s loving but non-hagiographic cinematic tribute to Gary Young makes it pretty clear that Pavement simply wouldn’t exist in the form that we now know without his crucial shaping input as drummer and producer.
Louder Than You Think was Young’s studio in Stockton, CA, the town where Pavement was formed. Based on Young’s involvement in the local music scene, Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg chose his studio as the place to record Pavement’s debut 7-inch. Essentially a dual-guitar duo project, Young added drums and a guiding production principle that generated the initial subterranean buzz that first took them to Drag City and then to Matador Records.
Young’s often-entertaining, and just as frequently erratic, behavior is a major part of Pavement’s history. It can be argued that Young is the drummer for Pavement during their greatest discographical stretch. He hit the skins hard and loose, and loved drum fills in a manner that underlined his elder status in the lineup. If Young’s craziness could situate him as the Keith Moon of the band (which soon added Bob Nastanovich and Mark Ibold), his age added a curious wrinkle to the group dynamic.
Rosenberg’s film does a good job illuminating the ins and outs, the highs and lows, of Young’s life beyond his tenure in one of indie rock’s defining bands, and before his passing on August 17, 2023, but the doc will still probably be mainly of interest to hardcore Pavement fans. However, the soundtrack, which interweaves four main threads, will likely have a broader appeal.
One of those threads, both bookending and intermingling throughout the track sequence, is the original music for the film, scored by Edward W. Dahl and Noah Georgeson. These pieces cultivate a decidedly Electronic Music vibe and often include audio snippets of Young from the film.
It’s enjoyable stuff, but so is the thread collecting various 1980s Stockton-area punk bands, all with some sort of connection to Young. This includes Fall of Christianity, Hot Spit Dancers, CRLLL, and two tracks from The Authorities. One could argue that none of this punk stuff is particularly impressive (the best work by The Authorities isn’t included here), but it goes down easy and does situate the local Stockton scene as the fertile soil from which Pavement grew.
Pavement has four tracks here, three live from the Cattle Club in Sacramento in 1992, and one studio collab with Young, “Please Be Happy (For Us),” recorded in 2023. This is surely enough to rope in the heavy-duty Pavement heads, but the best track on the album is “Plant Man,” Young’s 1994 indie hit and a truly inspired hunk of mid-’90s weirdness.
Taken together, “Plant Man” and “Birds in Traffic” constitute the fourth thread in Louder Than You Think’s scheme, the pair of tracks establishing Young’s creative verve expanding beyond his period in Pavement. The album is a likeable and very listenable tribute.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
