Books like Perfect Sound Forever: The Story of Pavement

Almost the book this great, departed band deserves.The design, with its scribbled-in footnotes and 'zine-inspired layout, captures the graphic attitude of that era and of this band in particular, right down to the Steve Keene painting on the cover. Author Jovanovic does a lot of things right: he spoke to virtually all the players and brought back lots of good war stories, from the desolate suburbs of Stockton to the fertile Charlottesville scene of the late '80s that also included David Berman's Silver Jews to the Hoboken apartment from which these Whitney Museum security guards and future rock stars created the wild white noise that fed into the later Pavement sound (and which they sometimes played into Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon's answering machine when they somehow got hold of the Sonic Youth leaders' private number). His portrait of original drummer and confessed alcoholic mess Gary Young is unforgettable. But Jovanovic is otherwise slight on psychology, meager on analysis of the songs, and his heart is clearly with the early history, leaving the later work short-changed. The book badly runs out of steam. I feel there is still a great Pavement story waiting to be written, one that joins the banal upbringings with the surreal, uncanny rightness of their art—as well as an era that may have felt great but, to the participants' bewilderment, "came too late."