In deep water: Slint (from left)
Todd Brashear, Britt Walford, Brian McMahan and David Pajo get wet during the cover shoot for 1991’s
Spiderland
album.
Sebastian Mlynarski
HELLO SUMMER 1986
Before Slint, the drummer Britt [Walford] and I had a band called Maurice in Louisville, Kentucky. I was replacing Brian McMahan who also played guitar with Squirrel Bait, who were kind of taking off. I was already a huge fan – I didn’t know Britt really, then I showed up at the first practice and I knew all their songs. I have a tape of that first practice and it’s crazy. We’d never played together but we had this almost jazz, psychic connection, where I would throw in this lick and he would throw in a drum fill at the same time and they’d be exactly in sync. I guess the Louisville punk scene kind of recognised me as a musician when I started playing in Maurice, because it was total shredding, show-off, heavy extreme guitar. The last Maurice song, a song I wrote called New Dave, was all clean guitars, it was melodic – justifiably, the singer, who was more of a punk singer, was like, “I can’t sing to this.”