Alt-rock darlings Pavement will headline Oakland’s Mosswood Meltdown music festival this July.
The band will be playing Friday, July 17, anchoring a lineup that includes North Carolina’s Wednesday and a reunion of Brooklyn indie rock trio Vivian Girls.
Formed in Stockton in 1989, Pavement was a signature post-Grunge act, briefly setting MTV ablaze with 1994’s “Cut Your Hair” and headlining a notoriously muddy West Virginia Lollapalooza outing in 1995. Following an initial run of a decade, frontman Stephen Malkmus and company went their separate musical ways in 1999 but can still be heard coming out of the coolest Subarus and RAV4s at school pickups from Portland to Burlington.
After a reunion in 2010, Pavement resurfaced with a 2022 tour, a faux “museum” devoted to the group in Manhattan, and hosting a run of Slanted! Enchanted!, a songbook musical. In 2024, the musical’s writer and director Alex Ross Perry released Pavements, a partly fictionalized “documentary” starring Stranger Things actor Joe Keery as Malkmus.
Notably, this period also saw the death of original Pavement drummer and longtime Stockton resident Gary Young, who died at the age of 70 in 2023.
The rest of this summer’s Mosswood Meltdown lineup has yet to be announced; it will once again be emceed by cult filmmaker and part-time San Franciscan John Waters. Originally known as the Burger Boogaloo, the event was rebranded by Total Trash Productions in 2022. It has previously hosted Iggy Pop, Devo, and Bikini Kill, as well as the Teddy Bear Orchestra, a band consisting solely of a maniacal conductor and his army of mechanized, instrument-playing teddy bears.
Compact, communal, and completely affordable (general admission tickets start at $99) compared to other big shows, Mosswood Meltdown is a perfect venue for Pavement, a band defined by its unwillingness to sell out. It remains to be seen if Pavement’s Oakland date is a one-off or the start of another cycle for the beloved rock veterans.
