Accidental careers. Sideways genius. A man who keeps insisting he isn’t the thing he very clearly is.

I’m talking about Bob Nastanovich, who will tell you he’s not a musician, which already feels like something he’s been telling himself for years, because there he is on stage with Pavement—sweating, shouting, hitting things, with that maniacal look on his face, a goofy, murderous smile as he drives his tambourine double-time into his well-deserved calluses, like he’s half in the band and half heckling it.

That’s when you start to suspect that “not a musician” is less a fact than a hedge, or maybe a little sleight of hand.

“I mean, I can’t drum worth a shit,” he says cheerfully from his home in Des Moines, which is both true and not the point.

The point is, he’s never just one thing, never has been, and anytime you try to pin him down, he wriggles out of it.