{"id":79177,"date":"2025-06-04T17:24:12","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T17:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/79177\/"},"modified":"2025-06-04T17:24:12","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T17:24:12","slug":"pavement-members-talk-pavements-biopic-cincinnati-reds-first-pitch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/79177\/","title":{"rendered":"Pavement Members Talk ‘Pavements’ Biopic, Cincinnati Reds First Pitch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIf you were a fan of Pavement<\/a> in the 1990s then it probably won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\n\tIn fact, unless you were a fan of the \u201cCut Your Hair\u201d band back then, chances are Perry\u2019s film, Pavements, will mostly just confuse you. Hell, even the band members aren\u2019t totally sure how it all works. \u201cWe were informed via email things we needed to know, but for most of the process we didn\u2019t know what was going on, because we didn\u2019t have to,\u201d multi-instrumentalist Bob Nastanovich tells Billboard about of the film in select theaters now and opening wide on Friday (June 6).<\/p>\n

\n\tAddressing the project\u2019s 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, \u201cif we wanted to have known more we would have. Our general attitude was: \u2018lets see what happens.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tStranger Things star Joe Keery takes on the role of singer Stephen Malkmus (but also plays himself), while the band\u2019s members play themselves alongside a passel of young actors who also take on their personas. In a three-way call from Cincinnati \u2014 where bassist Mark Ibold was born and spent many of his summers \u2014 and Kentucky \u2014 where former Louisville native Nastanovich was visiting a friend \u2014 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).<\/p>\n

\n\tNastanovich, 57, says he was thrilled to meet \u201cdelightful\u201d actor Fred Hechinger, adding as far as he\u2019s concerned the 25-year-old White Lotus star is \u201cspitting image of me and an extremely good-looking young man.\u201d 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, \u201c\u2018whoa, this is really tripped out,’\u201d even though he couldn\u2019t tell who was playing whom.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201c[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\u2019t\u2026 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,\u201d says Ibold of the movie\u2019s unusual take in the wake of more straight-ahead recent biopics of Queen\u2019s 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\u2019s approach.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile Ibold jokes that his takeaway was that \u201cwe\u2019re all more handsome than we really are,\u201d Nastanovich says that he honestly saw some things he didn\u2019t know about before, including shots of Malkmus\u2019 original lyric drafts and real memorabilia sent in by band archivist Scott \u201cSpiral Stairs\u201d Kannberg, which appear in the movie\u2019s fake museum.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn addition to the film, the band recorded their first new song in 25 years, a cover of Jim Pepper\u2019s 1969 track \u201cWitchitai-To,\u201d which is on the sprawling, 41-track Pavements soundtrack. The song came together during rehearsals for one of the band\u2019s 2022 reunion shows and it\u2019s the first fresh recording from the group since their 1999 Major Leagues EP.<\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking 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\u2019s late 1970s heyday. \u201cMy brother almost got hit by a car while getting Pete Rose\u2019s autograph a block from where I am,\u201d he says of the late, disgraced Cincinnati legend and all-time MLB<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn fact, when he takes the mound on Wednesday at Great American Ballpark, Ibold says he plans to wear a jersey with Rose\u2019s No. 14 on it when he tosses to catcher Nastanovich, for whom he made a custom \u201cNast\u201d jersey honoring late Reds first baseman Dan Driessen\u2019s No. 22, despite Nastanovich being a lifelong fan of longtime Red rivals the Pittsburgh Pirates.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe\u2019re extremely excited about it,\u201d says Nastanovich, who says the Reds \u2014 who front office includes a number of Pavement fans \u2014 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\u2019s seen video of Ibold practicing and predicted that his bandmate\u2019s arc is so \u201csweet\u201d that he might not even need a glove at all.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe gig also comes naturally to Ibold because his great great uncle started the iconic Ibold Cigars company in Cincinnati in the late 1800s. \u201cWhen we came in from the airport to go to my grandparent\u2019s house we\u2019d see all these Ibold ads on warehouse walls and old brick buildings,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tPavements will have a special screening at Cincinnati\u2019s Woodward Theatre on Saturday (June 7). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you were a fan of Pavement in the 1990s then it probably won\u2019t surprise you that when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2400],"tags":[5,535,50,4259,19744,4,19745,536],"class_list":{"0":"post-79177","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cincinnati-reds","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-cincinnati","10":"tag-cincinnati-reds","11":"tag-cincinnatireds","12":"tag-genre-rock","13":"tag-mlb","14":"tag-music-news","15":"tag-reds"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/114626262777579444","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}