Rich Jensen met Johnson in the fall of ’81 at Evergreen and was immediately fascinated by Johnson’s provocative nature—Johnson was “a Nietzschean personality,” says Jensen, “who constantly tested everyone around him to engage their intelligence to the point of neurosis—just right there—and then back down a little bit. And then go at them again later.”
The Lost Music Network and Olympia’s food co-op made a big impression on Johnson. “Those are institutions that are about decentralizing the economy, decentralizing the modes of production and… localizing your spending habits,” he explained in a 1998 interview. “They are about people creating something for themselves and for their own community. And those were both big models for me. About how you could create your own culture, how to voice your opinions or communicate with people.”
“Calvin,” Jensen summarizes, “had purified the social ideas of the Sixties revolution but had tossed out a lot of self-luxuriant and decadent aspects.” Given all this, coupled with his love of punk rock, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world was to start an independent label. It would be a sort of Dischord West, a label that would document bands from Olympia, an even more unlikely music town than D.C.
Noting the success of Pavitt’s Sub Pop cassettes, Johnson decided to use the cassette format as well. For one thing, cassettes were easy to manufacture and could be made in small batches, as opposed to records, which had to be ordered at least a thousand at a time. They’re a very egalitarian format, too—with the cassette, musicians didn’t need any technicians to mediate between them and their recordings—“If you’ve got something to say, you can go for it,” says Jensen. “Turn the cassette on and do it.” Cassettes supported the idea that culture could be easily produced and didn’t have to be made by unreal “stars” and served up by faceless, faraway corporate entities. “The origins of a lot of the things that came out of Olympia,” Johnson said, “had to do with demystifying the tools of media so access was not restricted due to fear.”
Johnson named his label K Records. Johnson has said the “K” stands for “knowledge”; others note that “K” is at the other end of the alphabetical LMN (Lost Music Network) and Op sequence started by John Foster. The label’s logo, Johnson’s own crayon rendering of a “K” inside a shield, is said to come from the insignia of the KB movie theater in Washington, D.C., where Johnson worked as an usher one summer.
Quiet and shy, Heather Lewis came from the affluent New York suburb of Westchester County to attend Evergreen (second choice: Yale) in 1980. Before that Lewis had never considered being in a band. “When I was in high school, a girl growing up in the suburbs didn’t think about being in a band,” she says. “When I got to college, I started going to shows and seeing people that I knew playing music and playing their own songs—that was a completely new thing to me.”
During the summer of ’82, Olympia scenester Gary May turned his downtown apartment into a popular rehearsal/party space. One day Lewis dropped by and started goofing around on the drums. May suggested that she join a band—his band, in fact, and together with Doug Monaghan, they formed a sax, guitar, and drums trio called the Supreme Cool Beings, which attracted a hipster party crowd.
K’s first release was the Supreme Cool Beings’ 1982 Survival of the Coolest cassette. The recording had been made during a live KAOS broadcast hosted by Johnson, but the tape had gotten mangled so Johnson simply used a cassette a friend had made off the air on his home deck. He tried selling Survival of the Coolest by mail order, but nobody ordered it. He tried selling it through distributors, but no distributors wanted it. But he also sold it to local stores on consignment and managed to move about a hundred copies that way. “It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in my life,” Johnson said.
In 1983 K released its second tape, Danger Is Their Business, a compilation of a cappella tracks sung by just regular folks around town, people who didn’t normally perform music. The title was an oblique reference to the fact that Olympia rednecks would hassle punk rockers in the street. A cappella singing, the reasoning went, was as dangerous—and as punk rock—as walking down the street with one’s hair dyed purple. “We had this idea that it was actually dangerous not to conform, not to go along with consumer culture,” says Jensen, who compiled the collection with Johnson. And using local nonmusicians made another point: “It’s not just consumption; it’s [a] process of involvement. We’re not just buying somebody’s ideas,” Gary May said in a 1982 Sub Pop interview. “We write songs about ourselves, and people who know us have a shot at understanding what we’re talking about.” The label later issued a 1985 sequel called Dangerous Business International. “If the point of punk was to let it all out and be yourself,” as a K bio put it, “the logical extension of that was to break it down to the extreme bare essentials, a person and their voice.”
According to Jensen, issuing cassette compilations of a cappella singing was part of “the idea of propagating a resistance to the technically mediated way of consuming your lifetime, from going to school to doing your job and dying, to buying that house to being suburban to studying how appropriately you should play music, how you should entertain yourself and in fact, just leave it to some experts, leave it to some people who have the means to take care of some very expensive equipment who need to know what they’re doing, the idea of instead coming up with a strategy by which you might, through an act of bravery—demonstrable, jaw-dropping, minimalist bravery—provoke people to see that there was a behavioral barrier, not a technical or financial barrier, to being up onstage and making the culture happen right now with you and everybody else in the room.”
By early ’81, Johnson had begun fronting the Cool Rays, who appeared on one of Pavitt’s Sub Pop compilations. “The two main features of the Cool Rays,” wrote Geoff Kirk in Op, “were a weird tension (caused by the fact that one was never sure if the rhythm section would make it through the song) and Calvin’s unique brand of personal magnetism.” Even then, around Olympia, Johnson was a star—a fearless performer who liked to show off the lower ranges of his uncertain baritone like a teenager whose voice had just changed.
Johnson started another band called Jungle Action, then played rudimentary guitar in a duo called 003 Legion—a “neo-beat, minimalist, rhythm/poetry act,” wrote Geoff Kirk—which featured artist Stella Marrs, who played the drums with a pair of high heel shoes. “The way she worked was by not remembering things,” Johnson recalled. “She would play it when it was happening; then it was out of her mind. So all we could plan ahead was the tempos. Like, the first song we’ll play fast, then slow, then fast again; on the second, just slow. It ended up we never performed anything we practiced and we never practiced anything we performed.
“After that,” Johnson added, “I thought the next step would be to work with someone who remembers.”
In January ’83 Johnson hooked up with Heather Lewis and Laura Carter to form Laura, Heather and Calvin. The trio played three shows before they even rehearsed, preferring to wed music and lyrics on the fly.
A couple of hundred people showed up when Laura, Heather and Calvin opened for regional favorites the Wipers at a storefront space Johnson had rented for the night in downtown Olympia in early spring of ’83, one of the first punk shows in town. It was a key development, since punk shows usually happened at Evergreen, which turned over its entire student population every four years. If a scene could develop downtown, punk would gain a permanent foothold in Olympia, which was important to Johnson, who was from there and intended to stay.
Later that spring they played a show at the Smithfield Cafe, a small café/performance space/gallery in downtown Olympia. In the audience was Bret Lunsford. The bright, soft-spoken Lunsford grew up in Anacortes, a remote fishing, lumber, and refinery town in northern Washington. He was the second youngest of eight children; his oldest siblings were ten and fifteen years older and had been full-fledged hippies. “They showed by example that there were alternatives to staying
in town and working at a fish cannery or working on a fishing boat or lumber mill or something like that,” Lunsford says.
In 1982 Lunsford traveled around the country after graduating from high school, winding up in Tucson, where he was visited by Lois Maffeo and Calvin Johnson, who were friends of his Evergreen girlfriend. Johnson brought some issues of Sub Pop, and Pavitt’s and Johnson’s writings struck a deep chord in Lunsford. “What they were saying there really resonated with what I was thinking about punk rock as an alternative,” he says, “a real attempt to change the social order of the world.”
Lunsford eventually decided to go to Evergreen and arrived just in time for Laura, Heather and Calvin’s show at the Smithfield. “I said, ‘Man, this band strikes a spiritual chord in me,’ ” Lunsford recalled. “I just knew something was brewing.” Lunsford had seen amazing bands like Minor Threat, Hüsker Dü, and Black Flag, but this was very different. “That performance was so riveting,” says Lunsford. “It was amazing how naked the band let themselves be and yet normal at the same time—as much as you can say that Calvin onstage is normal.”
Laura Carter moved away to Seattle that summer; that fall Johnson, Lunsford, and some friends played a couple of songs at a show at a former railroad depot in Anacortes; Lunsford played drums and guitar. It was basically a messy jam, but there was a spark. Johnson invited Lunsford to join a band he was starting with Lewis.
Lunsford was a novice guitarist at best, but that mattered little to Johnson—he just wanted to play with Lunsford. “You should be in this band,” Johnson declared. “We should call it Beat Happening and we should go to Japan.” Japan, Johnson reckoned, was “the last place on earth where it’s still cool to be American.” He figured all they had to do was move there, play in a rock & roll band, “and we’d become teen idols overnight.”
The mild-mannered Lunsford’s first reaction was that he just didn’t think of himself as a guy who played in a rock group. “My experience of it,” says Lunsford, “was having a feeling like there are people who are destined to be rock & roll stars and those are the people that make the music. It’s a special breed that feels it in them to scale the stage and climb up to be with the gods. I didn’t feel like I was capable of that.
“But he asked me,” says Lunsford, “so I just thought, ‘Well, I’ll play along with this.’ ”
The band name was strongly reminiscent of early Sixties teen pop combos; Johnson probably got the name from a student film Lois Maffeo had been planning called Beatnik Happening. Although they found its rampant sexism repugnant, the Olympia crew found a lot to like about the Beat movement. “There’s a lot of really great ideas about exploring and unpeeling the structure of the way things have to be—or ought to be—based on larger society’s views,” says Lunsford. “That’s a constant inspiration.”
The trio started rehearsing at Lunsford’s apartment that September. True to their macaroni-and-cheese lifestyle, their drum kit was usually a couple of yogurt containers; they played on a thrift-store electric guitar with no amplifier. They’d all switch between guitar and drums, although only Lewis and Johnson sang. “I was very much afraid of [singing],” says Lunsford. “It was a big enough accomplishment for me to be onstage and still be able to move enough to play guitar or drums. And a lot of that I credit to Calvin’s ability to capture the biggest percentage of attention so I could just be off to the side, in the shadows.”
TWO 1992 PUBLICITY PHOTOS OF BEAT HAPPENING. TOP PHOTO LEFT TO RIGHT: CALVIN JOHNSON, BRET LUNSFORD, HEATHER LEWIS.
BRET LUNSFORD
The first Beat Happening show was in somebody’s kitchen in Olympia later that fall. “It hit me immediately as one of the greatest artistic spectacles of my lifetime,” says Bruce Pavitt. “Calvin was magnetic and the lyrics were so inspired. I recall Calvin jumping to the top of the kitchen table, bending to his knees, and rocking to ‘I Spy.’ It was minimal, it was lo-fi, and it was genius.”
Soon Johnson proposed making a record. Lewis, for one, was a little incredulous. “Calvin definitely was the one who felt, ‘If you make a song, you record it and you release it,’ ” Lewis says. “Whereas I was thinking, ‘Can you do that? Are we allowed to do that?’ ”
One mid-December Sunday afternoon, they set up in a band practice room in a former Evergreen campus firehouse; Rich Jensen had borrowed a reel-to-reel four-track and some microphones. Nobody quite knew how to use the equipment, but luckily Wipers leader Greg Sage had agreed to stop by and wound up engineering the recording. The band had never really been able to play a song correctly all the way through, but by doing it piecemeal with multitracking they were able to conquer their lack of technique.
Sage quickly mixed down the four-song tape and played it back to the band. “We were like, ‘Oh wow, that sounds really good!’ ” says Lunsford. “I was seriously shocked and amazed. And proud. It was like, ‘Oh man, we might really have something here!’ ”
A lot of the credit, Lunsford feels, goes to Sage. “He just had a magical ear,” Lunsford says. “We were not aware of what we were doing. We couldn’t hear ourselves, but he heard it.”
But after hearing the tape, some of their friends and supporters felt Beat Happening was now going in a slicker direction that wasn’t as interesting. “But friends of ours who were more musically adept were happy for us,” says Lunsford. “ ‘Oh man, you managed to play through a song without flubbing it!’ ”
The first thing that struck most listeners about Beat Happening’s music was that the band could barely sing or play their instruments, which was quite a statement back in the days when hardcore and speed metal were taking the punk motto “loud fast rules” to new extremes. The music couldn’t have been more different from what was going on in the underground at the time. The vocals sounded like someone singing with their Walkman on; the often out-of-tune guitars could have been played by a ten-year-old; the drums were shaky, even on the utterly bone-simple beats. And since there was no bass guitar, it all sounded just plain… dinky.
But the songs were good—great melodies propelled by early Sixties surf music guitar-drum rhythms that induced almost involuntary frugging and swimming. Johnson played up the ominousness of his baritone in a B-movie kind of way while Lewis, with her girlish singsong, took a far more straightforward, unguarded approach.
One role model was clearly the original straight edge naive pop-punker, former Modern Lovers leader Jonathan Richman, the man with the head-cold voice who wrote deceptively amateurish ditties with titles like “I’m a Little Dinosaur,” “Hey There Little Insect,” and “I’m a Little Aeroplane” and was known to record in bathrooms and tour by Greyhound bus.
Elsewhere Beat Happening copped the skeletal horrorbilly sound of the Cramps, while Johnson’s wayward baritone recalled Lee Hazlewood and Johnny Cash; their sparse, lightweight tunes also had roots in the songs Maureen Tucker sang with the Velvet Underground and, way back, the earnest, spartan pop of Buddy Holly. With the campy swingin’ beach party vibe, bare-bones arrangements, and male baritone alternating with female singer, the early B-52’s also came to mind; so did the playful, inchoate noise of bands like Half Japanese and the Shaggs.
With their less-than-rudimentary musicianship, Beat Happening might have been making a conceptual point, but it was also the best they could manage. The way the music harked back to sounds from throughout the rock & roll timeline said much more about the inherent characteristics of rock music than it did about the breadth of the band’s record collection. They had simply tapped into something classic.
The band’s first release, a self-titled cassette, featured four songs from the Sage session and one recorded live on KAOS later that same night. The initial hundred-copy pressing sold out early the following year. “Things were really starting to happen in Olympia,” said Johnson. “More people were into it than just enough to fill up a party.”
To Lunsford, Johnson’s Japan scheme “sounded like one of those crazy things you wouldn’t ever really do, but you wait t
o see who backs down first,” said Lunsford. But nobody backed down. So in March ’84 they found themselves setting out for a two-month visit to Japan. After wandering around Tokyo for the first month, checking out clubs and soaking up the exotic streets, they eventually played a high school and a few clubs with names like Rock Maker and Rock House Explosion. According to Johnson, at one club a Japanese musician approached him and said, “You radical band-o! Your guitar need tune-ah!!” It was pretty apparent that Japanese teen idolhood was not imminent.
Not only was Johnson getting college credit for the trip (studying how the Japanese managed their energy use), he was on assignment for Op to write about Japanese underground music. But he’d been there for weeks and hadn’t managed to find any. Then one day, in the music section of a department store, he found a bin labeled “Power Station.” Power Station, it turned out, was a Japanese label specializing in punk and new wave. Johnson bought a bunch of their records and sent letters to the label and the bands.
One of the bands was the Osaka pop-punk trio Shonen Knife. The three women in the band worked as secretaries by day and had to keep their band a secret from their families and employers, since it was considered unseemly in Japan for women to play rock music. Perhaps because of that kind of repression, Shonen Knife’s music radiated a joyful sense of release. K eventually released the band’s first album, Burning Farm, on cassette in the U.S. the following year, and Shonen Knife’s unsullied pop joy was to become a major part of what K Records was all about. The band actually became a kind of shibboleth in the indie community—if you got them, you were in.
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