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“This is not my favorite band,” exclaims filmmaker Alex Ross Perry about the indie rock group Pavement, who is the subject of his documentary Pavements.

That’s not a ding. The Stockton, CA born band, which came together in 1989, was the type of group you wouldn’t necessarily find on the top of a stack of alternative rock CDs alongside Red Hot Chili Peppers, Offspring, Garbage and President of the United States. And that’s because Pavement was a band that did it their way at a time when those groups who were breaking through were…selling out. Quite often one music video alone (i.e. “Don’t Let’s Start” from They Might Be Giants, “Come Out and Play” from Offspring) were the defining moments for such nice bands, catapulting them to greater marquee and million-plus album sales success in the ’90s.

Adds Perry on today’s Crew Call about what brought him to spotlighting Pavement: “This is my favorite era of cultural consumption of the way media was distributed, released, marketed: independent record label, mainstream record label; sell out, don’t sell out. And this is the band that you can tell that story with, better than any other band. So, the fact that they’re not literally my favorite band of all time is immaterial because they’re the absolute favorite band to tell the story that I was dying to tell.”

While their sound didn’t grate against the alternative bass of the era, and their sound not that far from Nirvana’s, Pavement was a band that stuck to their own pace, stylistically and image-wise.

“Beavis and Butthead definitely clowned on them,” said Perry.

Here’s our chat with Perry and Pavements EP and Utopia Boss Robert Schwartzman:

There’s was a pivotal moment for the band (which have broken up and reunited myriad times) when guitarist Scott Kannberg was arguing with a bandmate at Lollapalooza ’95; his anger got the best of him and he wound up flipping the crowd and mooning them before Pavement had no choice but to leave the stage.

In retelling the story of Pavement, Perry, too, has decided to do so in a road-not-travel type of way. Pavements, which the doc’s executive producer Robert Schwartzman’s Utopia released this past summer, is both music doc and satire. Band archival footage and interviews are intermixed with a movie-within-a-movie that has actors playing band members (Joe Keery as Stephen Malkmus; Fred Hechinger as Bob Nastanovich; Natt Wolff as Scott Kannenberg) and Robert’s brother Jason Schwartzman as Chris Lombardi, founder of the group’s label Matador Records. The movie employed a road show form of distribution this past summer with multi-city stops, becoming one of Utopia’s most successful movies, grossing close to $400K and pulling in Gen Z and boomers.

Schwartzman also had his own traveling music doc this past summer, Hung Up on a Dream: The Zombies Documentary, which had the former lead vocalist of Rooney touring with the 1960s English rock “Time of the Season” band at key cinema venues. Talking about taking indie docs to another level, Schwartzman says it’s about “exploring new tactics to get audiences to be engaged with these releases.”

“In today’s world, because there’s so much happening every day, you’re trying to keep up with people’s viewing habits. I think a music documentary is sort of perfect for the slower approach and to give it more time for discovery,” Schwartzman explains.

“When a movie is available everywhere on digital, I feel like some of the magic is lost at that point,” continues the EP, “The longer you can take before a film hits digital, the more events, the more activations, the more moments you can create to get people engaged, the more experiences people can leave with that have some of them.”

Pavements is one of the eligible documentaries for the 98th Academy Awards.

Pavements

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