Pavement Members Talk ‘Wild’ Format of ‘Pavements’ Biopic, Throwing Out First Pitch At Cincinnati Reds Game

If you were a fan of Pavement in the 1990s then it probably won’t surprise you that when time came to make a biopic of the quintessential indie slacker rock band director Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell) took a hard turn away from the typical hagiographic, soft-focus treatment.

In fact, unless you were a fan of the “Cut Your Hair” band back then, chances are Perry’s film, Pavements, will mostly just confuse you. Hell, even the band members aren’t totally sure how it all works. “We were informed via email things we needed to know, but for most of the process we didn’t know what was going on, because we didn’t have to,” multi-instrumentalist Bob Nastanovich tells Billboard about of the film in select theaters now and opening wide on Friday (June 6).

Addressing the project’s oddball format, which is part mockumentary, part documentary and includes footage from the fake Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical, as well as a movie-within-a-movie via the fake biopic Range Life: A Pavement Story, Nastanovich says, “if we wanted to have known more we would have. Our general attitude was: ‘lets see what happens.’”

Stranger Things star Joe Keery takes on the role of singer Stephen Malkmus (but also plays himself), while the band’s members play themselves alongside a passel of young actors who also take on their personas. In a three-way call from Cincinnati — where bassist Mark Ibold was born and spent many of his summers — and Kentucky — where former Louisville native Nastanovich was visiting a friend — the two men describe their feelings about the film and get pumped about a gig throwing out the first pitch at a Cincinnati Reds game on Wednesday (June 4).

Nastanovich, 57, says he was thrilled to meet “delightful” actor Fred Hechinger, adding as far as he’s concerned the 25-year-old White Lotus star is “spitting image of me and an extremely good-looking young man.” That said, after Ibold, 62, ran into Escape Room star Logan Miller, 33, at the restaurant where the bassist works, he went to visit the New York set of the film to see what was up. Describing entering a room where various actors were playing Pavement, Ibold says he thought, “‘whoa, this is really tripped out,’” even though he couldn’t tell who was playing whom.

“[Director] Alex explained the concept to me and he interviewed us before he started to get an idea of what he wanted to do, but even when you see the film it can be somewhat confusing what is real and what isn’t… the concept is pretty wild and he presented it to the band in a way that he said would be very different from other rock documentaries,” says Ibold of the movie’s unusual take in the wake of more straight-ahead recent biopics of Queen’s Freddie Mercury, Elton John and Bob Dylan. He describes going to the Taipei Film Festival last year and having to explain what was going on to the perplexed audience during a post-screening Q&A after they seemed confused by the entertainingly disjointed nature of Perry’s approach.

While Ibold jokes that his takeaway was that “we’re all more handsome than we really are,” Nastanovich says that he honestly saw some things he didn’t know about before, including shots of Malkmus’ original lyric drafts and real memorabilia sent in by band archivist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg, which appear in the movie’s fake museum.

In addition to the film, the band recorded their first new song in 25 years, a cover of Jim Pepper’s 1969 track “Witchitai-To,” which is on the sprawling, 41-track Pavements soundtrack. The song came together during rehearsals for one of the band’s 2022 reunion shows and it’s the first fresh recording from the group since their 1999 Major Leagues EP.

Speaking of the major leagues, Ibold is excited to be back in Cincinnati, where he was born and spent many summers attending Reds baseball games with his family during the team’s late 1970s heyday. “My brother almost got hit by a car while getting Pete Rose’s autograph a block from where I am,” he says of the late, disgraced Cincinnati legend and all-time MLB hits leader who recently saw his lifetime ban end earlier this year when he was posthumously reinstated and made eligible for the Hall of Fame.

In fact, when he takes the mound on Wednesday at Great American Ballpark, Ibold says he plans to wear a jersey with Rose’s No. 14 on it when he tosses to catcher Nastanovich, for whom he made a custom “Nast” jersey honoring late Reds first baseman Dan Driessen’s No. 22, despite Nastanovich being a lifelong fan of longtime Red rivals the Pittsburgh Pirates.

“We’re extremely excited about it,” says Nastanovich, who says the team reached out to the baseball-loving band to see who would be interested in the honor, a query he and Ibold immediately raised their hands for. He says he’s seen video of Ibold practicing and predicted that his bandmate’s arc is so “sweet” that he might not even need a glove at all.

The gig also comes naturally to Ibold because his great great uncle started the iconic Ibold Cigars company in Cincinnati in the late 1800s. “When we came in from the airport to go to my grandparent’s house we’d see all these Ibold ads on warehouse walls and old brick buildings,” he says of the stogie maker that used to occupy a 13,000-square-foot, five-story building downtown, where it pumped out more than one million cigars a month in the 1940s.

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