Pavement
Wowee Zowee

THE REVIEW

And so, with an imaginary cowboy hat on my head, I ride on a sunny Saturday, and I sing, I sing, I even do the chorus...

’95 was a special year, so many things happened, no doubt about it, just to give a few examples (without any order of importance):

1. “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” by Smashing Pumpkins is released
2. Jacques Chirac is elected President of France
3. Austria, Sweden, and Finland join the EU
4. The American Space Shuttle docks with the Russian MIR space station for the first time (good times...)
5. eBay is founded
6. The first Sony PlayStation is marketed in Europe
7. Israeli Prime Minister Rabin is assassinated by an extremist opposed to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process

And yet, Pavement releases “Wowee Zowee”, and, I almost forgot, a small secondary detail, I get married, just a few months after the album's release, of which I wasn’t even aware at the time, nor of Pavement in general.

A few days after the wedding, I board an intercontinental flight, destination Cayo Largo, Cuba.

The journey is long, very long, I listen to music, read a magazine (which I might still have) featuring a double interview with Daniele Silvestri (who had been in Sanremo and had just released his second album “Prima di essere un uomo”) and Samuele Bersani (who had recently released “Freak”).

I read “Quella vacca di nonna papera” by Bisio and laugh like a fool at every silly thing I read (back then I knew how to do it).

Every now and then I sleep, my wife beside me watches movies playing on the plane's monitors.

The journey is long, very long.

As long as we are over Europe, on solid ground, flight time seems to pass. The real drama starts when we reach the ocean, and without movies on the large monitor near the cabin, we only see a dot (our plane) seemingly frozen in the middle of nowhere...

The la-si, la-si, la-si of “Grounded” reminds me of a clock ticking away time, a song with a hidden melancholy I can’t decipher.

I don't remember what I dreamt during that very long flight in my hours of sleep, perhaps of always and only making happy the one beside me.

Or, like in Borges' “The Dream of Pedro Henríquez Ureña”, something very different, or so it seems, that I had to forget for destiny to fulfill itself (I know it won’t be like that).

Today, having discovered it with a slight delay of twenty-seven years, not everything on “Wowee Zowee” (Pavement’s Zappa-esque album) enthralls me, although recognizing its value now widely acknowledged, but some things “move” me, perhaps because I know it's the same age as my marriage.

It has that travel flavor, not necessarily by plane, maybe more by car, with the top down, I think of "Black out" and especially “Grave Architecture” (a mysterious and esoteric title, perhaps travel has nothing to do with it).

We are almost at our destination.

And then I imagine myself in flight on that intercontinental plane, in that summer of 1995, singing “Maybe someone will save me, my heart is made of sauce..”, listening with headphones to “AT&T”, a Pavement song released that year, which I’ve actually only known for a few days, but it was perfect to be known back then.

At a certain point, the song gets mixed up, overlaps, a voice, then a noise of sounds and voices, perhaps everything rewinds, then a countdown, “one, two, three, four….”

As soon as it's over, I get up from my seat, open the window to the astonishment of the other travelers, lean out, and let out a scream, which I didn't know I had inside me.

“WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?????????? HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHH!!”.

It travels across time and the ocean, after crossing even the Bermuda Triangle unscathed, it reaches Europe, flies over Spain, Corsica, arrives in Italy, arrives here as I write.

The atoll down there awaits us relaxed and full of sunshine…