Stephen Malkmus Series: “The Hook”

After 10 years as a singer, songwriter, guitar player and quasi-leader of Pavement, Stephen Malkmus finally released a solo album. The record was self-titled and put out under his name alone, despite Malkmus wanting to call it Swedish Reggae and crediting it to his new band, The Jicks. Graced with cover portraying a mulleted, half-smiling Malkmus during the Hawaiian golden hour, the album contained songs that felt familiar to Pavement fans as well as departures, such as “The Hook”:

“The Hook” begins with the type of cowbell-powered, white funk keyboard-soaked satisfying groove that would make The Rolling Stones and even Joe Walsh envious. Over this roadhouse boogie, Malkmus sings: “At age 19 I was kidnapped by Turkish pirates / Mediterranean thugs.” This opening line thrusts the listener immediately into a story. Yes, Malkmus is telling us a pirate yarn. He continues:

After some torture they considered me their mascot
Cypriotic good luck
I had to taste the deck and many other things
I had to pay the piper with my wedding ring
And I would never see my family again.

In contrast to the narrator’s bad fortune, Malkmus seemingly sings the lines with a smile, sounding breezy and good-natured. His light-heartedness could be attributed to the satisfaction that “The Hook” is most likely the only known rock and roll song featuring the word “Cypriotic”; perhaps the song’s origin can even be traced back to this word.

The two subsequent verses track the narrator’s development in the pirate world, each commencing with a statement of his age as a marker. He becomes adept enough at a pirate skill — “My art was a knife” — until it becomes second nature, singing that “It’s off with an arm / Or it’s off with a leg” in a cheerful, matter of fact way. This tone is reflected in the music itself as, in between the second and third verses, Malkmus plays a guitar solo, kicked off by a hearty “Oh yeah,” that could easily be mistaken for Mick Taylor’s solo in The Stones’ “Tumbling Dice.” This classic rock nod is in keeping with the sense of delight felt throughout all of “The Hook.”

The final verse sees the narrator ascend to the rank of captain of the vessel in a kind of Dred Pirate Roberts scenario. Even though there are numerous familiar pirate references to this point in the narrative, Malkmus goes out of his way to dismiss any thought of stereotypes:

We had no wooden legs
Or steel hooks
We had no black eye patches
Or a starving cook.

No matter, the narrative concludes with this group of buccaneers sailing off into the sunset — the same sunset glowing on Malkmus’s face on the album cover? — wanting the listener to know they are “killers” who possess “the cold eyes of a sailor.” 

Even with Malkmus’s denial of the accepted pirate tropes, the song is still called “The Hook,” though the narrator never mentions having a hook for a hand. There’s a reading of this track as a metaphor for joining a rock band at a young age (“I would never see my family again”). Who else in contemporary society are “killers with the cold eyes of a sailor”? The titular phrase could be an allusion to the pressure for songwriters to come up with hooks for their songs. Or it could refer to the hook or the siren call that teenagers hear to a life devoted to music. But because this is Malkmus, a well-established trafficker in irony to this point, the musical analogies in “The Hook” could be a gleefully satirical commentary on the perceived glamor of a rock and roll lifestyle. All interpretations are in play for this story song. 

In addition to “The Hook,” there is a second story song on Stephen Malkmus called “Jenny and the Ess-Dog”:

It tells the tale of a relationship between Jenny and Sean, nicknamed the Ess-Dog, and their coming together over the Dire Straits’ album Brothers in Arms. The story song contains lots of details about their early 21st century hippie lifestyle, which includes a dog named after Phish’s Trey Anastasio. After Jenny’s move to Boulder, “the strain was too much” and the song concludes with the current status of the story’s two main characters after the end of their relationship that feels like an epilogue text in a movie.

In all of Malkmus’s time in Pavement, he never wrote a narrative-based song. Then after leaving Pavement, he immediately included two on his first solo album. There’s a telling Malkmus quote about his songwriting in Pavement from a sprawling 2000 feature in Spin just before the release of Stephen Malkmus:

“I was just tired of doing the same thing over and over, different song progressions that were starting to sound the same. If you stick around for ten years you should be ten years better than young bands, try extra hard to be interesting. It didn’t feel like that was happening. It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Or a thirty year old male.”

Stephen Malkmus is a statement of sorts by this “thirty year old male.” It’s a demonstration of his songwriting experimentation after Pavement’s dissolution. In addition to the two story songs, Malkmus also wrote and recorded a song written in tribute to a friend who died too young. It’s a beautiful memorial with as much heart-on-his-sleeve sincerity as Malkmus had shown to this point in his body of work. Yet another songwriting mode not seen by Malkmus within the Pavement framework. 

Malkmus would return to the story song form a number of times in his subsequent albums. One example is 2008’s “Hopscotch Willie,” a story and character sketch which includes a number of noir references and funny slang such as “dick” for detective and “clink” for prison. The song even has a proper conclusion as Malkmus sings “A corpse was found in pieces underneath the pier with beer.” In an interview with Amanda Petrusich for The Onion AV Club, Malkmus said of the song:

“The guitar chords are very campfire-song rudimentary, and I thought it needed to have some kind of story, even if it was a weird story—it couldn’t be psychedelic imagery all the way through. It doesn’t go with the form. So there’s some craft, I guess.”

Another instance of Malkmus taking on this form is 2020’s “The Greatest Own in Legal History.” In an interview with The Fader, he described the song as about “a lawyer who’s trying to sell his client who’s a poorer kid in the juvie pen to work together. He’s a good guy. In the movie, you’d be rooting for this Mark Ruffalo type.” It’s written in the first-person and it’s very funny as Malkmus once again seems to relish employing the slang and vernacular of a specific scenario. In this case, “The Greatest Own in Legal History” is about the legal profession with lyrical references to the vetting the jury to ensure “there’s a couple of softies on our side” and “our jailhouse discussions will be fraught with innuendo, mutual respect.”

Despite this intermittent return to the story songs, Malkmus seems a bit sheepish and even dismissive about the form during a 2014 interview with The Rumpus:

“With some songs, I have written narratives or I’ve tried to carry it through, but generally the things that were more genius, as far as I was concerned, were not that. The narrative songs were well-written, like an article in The New Yorker. They’re nice and pat. They’re more like I’m just showing I can do that when I write a song like that. It’s not my true calling. Even though I like The Kinks somewhat, I don’t think it’s a big deal or it’s like magic. You want magic and something that surprises.”

Back to “The Hook,” Malkmus performed the song many times live with his backing band The Jicks. The ultimate source of live Malkmus can be found in the perfectly-named Jicks Picks collection. Compiled over the years from Malkmus fan message boards, the series features excellent renditions of Malkmus tunes and one-off, bizarre covers as well as documenting Malkmus’s unique alternative vocal deliveries and hilarious crowd work.

Malkmus and the Jicks perform a shambolic version of “The Hook” on May 18, 2003 in Lee’s Palace, Toronto ON:

This rendition sees Malkmus struggling with the lyrics, leading him to state, “I don’t really know it,” but then doing an admirable job of remembering. The highlight is right before his guitar solo, Malkmus yells to himself, “Take it, Stevie!” — a channeling of Lou Reed’s straight-faced declaration, “Take it, Lou” before his guitar solo in “Beginning of a Great Adventure.” Malkmus then proceeds to play the “Tumbling Dice” guitar solo, but it’s only one guitar figure repeated over and over the entire way through before he adds one little concluding piece. It’s obvious from this tape that Malkmus is having a blast while taking the piss out of the consideration of him as a guitar hero.

Malkmus and company took up “The Hook” again on March 25, 2008 at The Vogue at Indianapolis IN:

Instead of the pirates raiding the Montenegro shoreline, he substitutes “the coast of Indiana was my favorite target” as a hometown, “Hello Cleveland”-esque shoutout. After the song concludes to much applause, Malkmus asks, “Did you like the showbiz move, mentioning Indiana? I learned that from Obama.”

Regardless of his later partial rejection of the story song, it’s an approach that Malkmus relished taking up in the aftermath of Pavement’s break-up, writing both “Jenny and the Ess-Dog” and “The Hook” for his first solo album. Together they stand as a whimsical statement of independence from Malkmus, a demonstration that he was ready to have fun again after the constraints and pressure he felt during the end of his tenure in Pavement. With its references to a life in music and devotion to rock and roll, “The Hook” displays Malkmus exploration of new songwriting forms as he continues to utilize his particular strand of slightly sardonic humor, all while relishing in his newfound rock and roll freedom. 

Image: Illustration from The Black Pirate by MacBurney Gates, 1926. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.