by Everett True
9 Iron Maiden are a UK heavy metal band, best known for song titles like ‘Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter’ and their mascot Eddie.
10 James Dean: leather-jacketed teen star of iconographic Fifties film Rebel Without A Cause.
11 One Super-8 film unearthed in recent years seems to be typical: a 10-minute short, filmed in ’84 by Kurt, Krist and Dale Crover on the streets of Aberdeen, known as the ‘Horror Movies’. The camera flicks between a turtle, a bloody hand, Kurt dressed in a Mr T mask, a scary female statue, some of Kurt’s Claymation, Kurt cutting his own throat with a fake knife, a picture of someone jerking off to people passing by, various dogs . . . all to a Melvins soundtrack.
12 This certainly ties in with what James Burdyshaw says later in the chapter about Kurt being “one of the last people to use”. Again, it’s impossible to know.
13 “The most disorganised band in Seattle,” recalls producer Jack Endino. “Cat Butt once did an entire session with me where they were so drunk that they had to come back and re-record it all.”
14 Jon Spencer fronted groovy hate-fuck Eighties NYC noise band Pussy Galore, and fronts present-day blues revivalists The Blues Explosion. Pussy Galore also spawned the all-girl STP and Royal Trux, among other bands.
15 The sprawling Appetite For Destruction was released in ’87, selling 20 million copies, and spawning the monster, lighters-waving hit ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’.
16 Ironically enough, Sebastian Bach’s heavier hair metal Skid Row sounded like a cross between those same two groups. Their moment of fame came in 1991, with the US number one album Slave To The Grind, before the grunge bands eclipsed them.
17 Evergreen is Olympia’s hippie college, an oasis of liberal thought and teaching in redneck surrounds.
CHAPTER 4
Gentle Sound, Half-finished Town
“Gentle sound/ Half-finished town . . . drinking water from wells/ Watching shows, kiss and tell/ Walk down the railroad tracks/ Never look back”
– ‘Olympia’, The Legend!, 2000
SO everyone’s seated on the floor, lights turned off, banging water bottles in accompaniment to the chant-song from Al, Tobi and Amy on stage, myself squat-legged in the middle of the audience sometimes breaking into a fresh verse of the old gospel spiritual, room stunned into silence and – gradually – more and more voices joining in. “There’s a man going round taking names/ There’s a man going round taking names/ He’s taken my father’s name/ And he’s left me crying in vain/ There’s a man going round taking names.”
Tobi and Amy’s voices swell and fade in the current of emotion, my voice cracking, my eyes downcast, people coming in at the back of the room looking for the music’s source. I wonder whether I should lie fully stretched out on the floor but decide not. My voice soars once more through the disharmonic groundswell of emotion as I come in with the line, “Death is the name of that man/ Death is the name of that man . . .”
(Everett True’s weblog, September 12, 2004, www.planbmag.com)
Olympia, WA isn’t the most beautiful of places on first sight.
Sure, there’s the state capitol up on the hill, imposing with its dome and white pillars; the old railroad tracks leading down to the beautiful woodland of Priest Point Park; timber houses without kerbsides or fences so one unruly garden merges into the next; the boardwalk and moored boats down by the organic supermarket; apartments occupied by punk rock librarians who don’t need alcohol for an excuse to party, just good music (alcohol doesn’t hurt either); the tiny park next to Starbucks with its deserted bandstand; the crumbling Capitol Theater; the docks; the muddy riverbanks; framed papercuts on coffee shop walls; fountains that double as water sculptures; backroom bars with dollar beer and cheap cocktails; cosy co-ops with retro clothes shops and fanzine and comic book stores nestling up to one another; disused temples that house independent record labels; Evergreen State College up in the hills with its gloomy concrete architecture and manicured lawns, home to KAOS radio.
Sure there’s all that.
But you have to know the city to appreciate it – to find the spontaneous house parties where earnest, engaging solo artists still perform, the secret water pumps, the working men’s clubs that hold underground rock festivals, the hipster bars and late-night redneck drinking establishments, the bewildering array of Outsider music and art.
Step off the Greyhound bus – two hours along Interstate 5 from Seattle, past Mount Rainier, one stop in Tacoma and one in Fort Lewis – and you find yourself in a cramped, small building filled with downcast people, shuffling along. The economy isn’t great in Olympia: mostly the work is either in Seattle or at the nearby Boeing aeroplane plant, little reason to stay in town if you’re not a student or musician. The weather isn’t good for tourism either: it rains, and when it’s not raining it’s overcast. The shops have all seen better days, and in recent years the downtown area has been besieged by an influx of vagrants: Tacoma and Aberdeen are too poor to make hassling worthwhile, Seattle too rich. Once you get outside the four blocks that comprise downtown, the place is deserted. Sometimes, Olympia feels like the town in Back To The Future.
Opposite the Greyhound depot is the Ramada Hotel where Madonna was rumoured to have stayed when she played the Tacoma Dome. (No one would have thought of looking for her there!) We set off in search of the K offices, walking past The Martin apartments, once home to K records’ founder and Beat Happening frontman Calvin Johnson, also any number of Olympia musicians and artists such as Tobi Vail, Al Larsen, Nikki McClure, Lois Maffeo, Stella Marrs, Kathleen Hanna, Candice Pedersen . . . in fact pretty much the whole of the nascent Riot Grrrl movement that started out of Olympia’s 1991 International Pop Underground festival. Tobi was one of the last to go, finally moving out after a 2001 earthquake damaged the building’s foundations.
We walk down State Street along the old train lines to the sprawling warehouse that is home to K. Downstairs is a large room stacked with shelf after shelf of independent CDs and vinyl and T-shirts. Upstairs are a few sparsely furnished offices and a massive hall that serves as the Dub Narcotic recording studio – where Calvin has recorded pretty much everyone from Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to The Gossip1 to . . . well, if The White Stripes didn’t record here it was an oversight on Jack White’s part.
Back downtown at kill rock stars, Tobi Vail is weighing parcels of merchandise to be sent out. An open-plan office overlooks an area stacked high with CDs and vinyl. Circular metal tubes cross the ceiling. At one computer sits Tobi’s sister Maggie with her Alsatian dog Jackson, listening to Ramones on iTunes, while label owner Slim Moon sits a few desks down, arranging with a pal to go to a basketball game. A few more musicians and interns good-naturedly hurl insults at one another. Someone mentions going for a beer: we clutch our heads and groan.
Last night was a riot of drinking and dancing, one boy racing up the side of walls on 4th, Maggie leading the entire crowd at the Brotherhood on to their feet. Asses were waggled and tail-feathers shaken. Then it was over to the gay bar for a quick last orders, before Tobi’s battery-powered toy record player took over and we played the ‘Mystery 45’ game. I’d hold a record up, dim in the light, and go, “What’s this I’m holding in my hand?” And then the room would explode into a frenzy of chanting and percussion, until the atmosphere was deemed sufficiently excited for Chris O’Kane to flip another record on – Rachel Sweet, Black Flag, Patrik Fitzgerald, Judy Nylon, Bangs.2
This is the town where Kurt Cobain received his schooling in ‘cool’ punk rock, 15 years ago. It sure hasn’t changed much.
“I moved to Olympia from Kirkland in 1987, to study politics and philosophy,” explains Ian Dickson, former Sub Pop computer tech savant. “Evergreen doesn’t have degrees. You just graduate when you have the right number of credits. I was a big fan of music, and an avid reader of The Rocket, especially Bruce Pavitt’s column on local bands.”
The Rocket was a Seattle music paper that started in 1979 as an insert in the Seattle Sun.
Ostensibly devoted to the Pacific Northwest, it was more notable for featuring out-of-town acts like Bruce Springsteen on its cover at the height of the first grunge explosion.
“My girlfriend Nikki [ McClure] had already moved down,” Ian continues. “She was heavily involved with the rock scene, as was I. We were huge U-Men3 fans. I was really into Melvins and Sonic Youth, that whole hard noise scene. Bruce turned us on to Beat Happening, and we started corresponding with Calvin in high school. That’s how we got to discover [Calvin and Tobi’s band] The Go Team, and compilations like Let’s Together and Let’s Kiss . . .”4
Calvin wrote you letters?
“Oh yeah, he would write us back – or Candice would, on his behalf,” Ian laughs. “In those days they’d always respond, on a little piece of stationery that had the K stamp.”
What did you like about K?
“The whole DIY concept appealed to us most. There was something about the Olympia rock scene that was so much more appealing than Seattle. Even Earth, which people probably think of as a Seattle band, was an Olympia band. Earth was the ultimate distillation of the Olympia aesthetic, even more than Nirvana. In fact, Nirvana and Earth and Beat Happening are like the same band; there’s no talent to speak of on a technical level. It’s all this raw expression of emotion.”
Many friends consider Earth to be one of the greatest bands ever. They’re primal, extreme, minimal and LOUD. Scary. Dense. Earth made it over to the UK for a show in the mid-Nineties. It was Dylan Carlson and Ian Dickson. Five minutes before the show was due to begin, Dylan walked up to the amplifier, plugged it in and left his guitar resting against it – so it started feeding back. He went back down and sat in the audience. Forty-five minutes later he turned his amp off, end of show.
The Seattle thing was much more testosterone-led . . .
“It’s almost working class versus middle class,” Ian says. “Seattle was way more working class. It was all about drinking beer and pounding dope and playing . . . metal. The U-Men bridged that gap, because Scratch Acid5 and Live Skull6 and that whole art thing influenced them. But most of the Seattle bands were either straight up hardcore or metal. In Olympia, people were doing experimental stuff. Even the bad bands would be interesting. You’d go to a show and be like, ‘Oh my God, what are they doing?’ Calvin had a massive influence. You wouldn’t have wanted to be in that downtown Olympia scene unless you were into that aesthetic.”
What was the aesthetic?
“It was The Go Team aesthetic,” replies Ian. “I’ll play one song and then switch instruments and then play another. Anybody can do it. Anybody should do it. You should do it now. It doesn’t matter how good you are. And you should express your nature, whatever that happens to be.”
“The Go Team was four people fighting for the back of the stage,” laughs Olympia musician Al Larsen.7
“My whole point of view in music has been about inclusiveness,” explained Calvin in cult UK magazine Careless Talk Costs Lives. “Making things accessible, making things open. I’m not saying, ‘Play your instrument badly,’ which is how it’s been interpreted. I never said that. All I said is that the expression should be the emphasis rather than the technical skill.”
It was Heather’s voice in 1985 that first drew me into Beat Happening. That and the bare graphics on their debut album: the cat on the spaceship! The band was Heather, Calvin, Bret – no bass, no stated instrument and no last names. The Greg Sage production was sparse. That, I could relate to. I’ve always hated extraneous noise, especially unnecessary drumming. In the mid-Eighties, I would sing on stage either a cappella or with minimal backing myself and was made to feel a freak for doing so.8 It was so nice to hear people halfway across the world doing the same.
Calvin’s deep-throated voice and Bret’s minimal guitar reminded me of early Cramps. Beat Happening played with a rigid structure that was both highly formalised and formal. Many people have mistaken their Richard Brautigan9-like schoolyard imagery and dry humour for naivety: Kurt Cobain stated the reason he got the K logo (a shield round the letter K) tattooed on his arm was to “try and remind me to stay a child”. However, there was nothing naïve in Calvin’s ability to manipulate crowds. Beat Happening delighted in inverting convention: his band was truly subversive in the way they superficially sounded so innocent yet were anything but. Childish dreams often have their dark side.
Calvin is one of the three most powerful performers I’ve seen.10 He reminds me of Johnny Rotten – he has the same manic, intense stare, the same way of intimidating an audience, the way he’d move so close to them. That’d be why he was once knocked cold by an ashtray hurled during a Fugazi support slot.
“You know the first time you hear out-there jazz?” asks Slim Moon. “Your brain goes, ‘That’s not music.’ It was the same the first time I heard Beat Happening. As minimal as they were, I was like, ‘These people must be 12, they have no fucking clue what they’re doing, and they probably just wrote these songs today.’ I was really offended. But the first independent record I bought was ‘Our Secret’ [ BH seven-inch]. I walked into Fallout Records [Olympia] and I was like, ‘Tell me what to buy.’ Bruce Pavitt [future Sub Pop boss], who was working there at the time, told me to buy that single. I really liked the Calvin song. I listened to that song all the time. It sounded like music. Somehow it didn’t connect that this band was that same horrible band. The next time I saw Beat Happening I realised there was no bass-player. Then I started to get that vocabulary of how to understand it.”
“There were two sides to Beat Happening,” says Mark Arm. “The Heather side and the Calvin side. Their shows were funny, great, sometimes infuriating, depending on who you are. They could totally piss people off.”
Do you think Calvin was a big influence on Kurt?
“I’m sure of it,” the Mudhoney singer replies.
How did it manifest itself ?
“His ‘K’ tattoo, embracing stuff like Daniel Johnston11 and The Raincoats.”
Do you think Calvin influenced Kurt’s attitude at all?
“I don’t know. Kurt was pretty reserved. When he and I would hang out it was like two introverts in a room.”
“I feel like that concept of being an outsider has basically formed my life and the idea of being included no matter what your ‘problem’ is,” Calvin says. “That confrontation is not about showing how much cooler I am than other people, it’s about confronting their privileged point of view, that they have the right to exclude me. It’s not like, ‘I’m so cool. I can piss you off.’ It’s, ‘I’m doing what I want to do. Now, why does that piss you off ?’ ”
It was while Kurt was living at the shack that he fell under the influence of Olympia. He journeyed up to the city as an unpaid Melvins’ roadie, carrying Buzz’s amp when they played one of the state capital’s tiny, community-led punk clubs.
Aberdeen’s underground scene was minuscule: when Krist eventually agreed to start rehearsing with Kurt, a year on from being given the Fecal Matter tape, pretty much anyone who had a quiff would come to visit their practice space (an empty flat above Krist’s mom’s beauty parlour). It was the only place to go. For equipment, the pair – plus ‘some jock guy’, Bob McFadden, on drums – used a cheap mic and beat-up guitar amp; Krist had given his old one to Matt Lukin in return for Matt bailing him out of jail after an incident involving some rednecks in a parking lot. Krist and Kurt didn’t like their new hangers-on: they referred to them disparagingly as ‘the Haircut 100 Club’ after the lightweight British pop band of the same name.
Kurt didn’t like the people who were hanging out at the shack, either: most would be under age drinkers with little respect for the place. Kurt was more into acid, or pot. “He was totally into getting wasted, whatever the time of day,” Krist recalls. “He was a real mess.”
In the early spring of 1987, Matt Lukin left the Melvins when Buzz decided to quit drinking momentarily and that Melvins should become a ‘dry’ band. Matt was like, “No way.” Buzz then used th
e excuse of a move down to California to say the band was breaking up. (They weren’t.)
Kurt also began to fall out with his flatmate. Matters came to a head when he laid masking tape down the centre of the house, and informed Matt that he was forbidden to cross the line. It was too bad the bathroom was on Kurt’s side. Lukin moved out, and Dylan Carlson moved in. Carlson was a self-taught genius with wild, unkempt hair, a messy beard and strong views on life. Kurt tried to find him a job, laying carpets – it didn’t work out, the boss at Kurt’s workplace in the Ocean Shores hotel was too drunk to open the door to them. The pair became best friends.
“I first met Dylan in ’85,” recalls Rich Jensen. “He must have been 13 or 14. He was a dark kid. He was like – if William S. Burroughs is an icon of darkness – a little William S. Burroughs kid. I had a sense he came from a rural, gun-toting family. He was kind of fun, but he had this very dark character. I knew kids in high school who were into carburettors in cars and amps and computers or whatever. Guns and heavy metal and weird religions were Dylan’s categories.”
“Dylan was fucking nuts, God bless him,” remarks Seattle musician Kelly Canary fondly. “Once I asked him what he’d been doing. He was like, ‘Oh, I realised I didn’t know anything about teeth so I went to the library and learned about teeth.’ That was Dylan. He didn’t know anything about teeth, so he spent five hours in the library learning about teeth.”
“One time Dylan was passed out,” Slim Moon – also a former member of Earth – recalls, “and nobody else was home. Krist was banging on the door, but it was locked. So he crawled up the back of the house to a second storey window, when suddenly he saw a double-barrelled shotgun right in his face. Dylan always kept a gun under his bed. Dylan used to talk about how he wanted to kill people and how if he didn’t make it as a rock star, he’d have to become a serial killer. He had this dog that he found on the beach that was burnt. He set it up as an altar near his bed. It was this burnt dog with candles and rosaries and this other pseudo-religious iconography.”