While in Japan, Johnson, Lewis, and Lunsford recorded some songs on two boom boxes, making low-rent overdubs by singing into the second boom box while the first one played, titling the resulting cassette EP Three Tea Breakfast. “It seemed like, hey, if we record all these songs while we’re in Japan, we got a great gimmick for selling this cassette,” said Johnson. “We can come back and say, ‘Hey, recorded in Tokyo.’ ”
When the band came back and played a show in Anacortes, Johnson tried out his marketing gambit. “I went around and I tried to sell—‘Hey, recorded in Japan,’ ” said Johnson. “And people were like, ‘Oh yeah? Big deal.’ ”
Still, the Japanese trip was empowering—“We said, ‘If we can do this, we can do anything,’ ” said Lunsford—and confirmed that playing in a band was what Johnson, Lewis, and Lunsford wanted to do with their lives for the foreseeable future.
In November ’84 K released its first vinyl, Beat Happening’s “Our Secret”/”What’s Important” single, drawn from the original five-song cassette. A wistful one-chord singsong chant with primitive drumming, a bit of percussion, and one guitar, “Our Secret” is a simple tale, imbued with the disingenuous sexuality that would become a Johnson trademark. “She said that she liked me and we could be friends,” Johnson drones, “in our special secret way.” But her family doesn’t approve and the couple runs away together, inaugurating a forbidden love motif in Johnson’s lyrics that had roots at least as far back as doo-wop. With several chords this time, the flip, “What’s Important,” has a stiff, shuffling rhythm, like a bunch of twelve-year-olds approximating Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger.” Lewis sings in a high, girlish voice, “Sing me a song about the place you see / We can go there, just you and me.” It was a far cry from Black Flag, whose singer, Henry Rollins, was then howling, “Myyyy warrrrrr!”
In performance the band would switch instruments constantly and have lengthy onstage discussions about what to play next; their cheapo equipment would often break or go out of tune. By just getting up there and being normal, fallible people, they were ignoring some deeply entrenched notions. “We were very aware at the time that there was a dividing line between musicians and nonmusicians,” says Lunsford. “Part of what we were doing in that context was saying, ‘Well, we’re not musicians, but that doesn’t mean we can’t play music and can’t be performers and can’t enjoy ourselves and entertain an audience all at the same time.’ In fact, we could perhaps do it more effectively than something that’s heavy into technique and very light—if nonexistent—in action.”
But Lewis and Lunsford were indeed the sort of shy, retiring people who normally would never walk onto a stage. So the reality was that the band still required that hoariest of rock archetypes, the charismatic frontman. And Johnson, in his own quirky way, was up to the task. In concert he’d contort himself affectedly, like a four-year-old, reaching his hand back to his shoulder blades or clutching at his too-small T-shirt, grinding his hips, then pogo with fey abandon, now and then coyly flashing his chubby belly, much to the delight of his female fans. At most shows he’d launch into one of his semi-improvised a cappella numbers, gesticulating eccentrically, his eyes theatrically bulging out of his head as he extemporized rhyming couplets sung with little or no regard for Western tonality. Some called it rank exhibitionism; some considered it provocative and confrontational, a way of forcing the audience to grapple with their insecurities and prejudices (i.e., wanting to kill the prancing prat on the stage). It was probably both.
Digging Beat Happening took a leap of faith. “He wasn’t afraid of being laughed at—but he wasn’t being comical,” Lunsford says of Johnson. “It wasn’t uncommon for him, especially more in the early years, for him to be shedding tears while he was singing, at certain songs. That was just what the song did to him. That was pretty impressive to me. I knew it wasn’t fake.”
K Newsletter #1 (written by Johnson) proclaimed: “The new Beat Happening 7” 45 is one of the most important audio documents of today’s hip young teen subculture.” Even though Johnson, Lewis, and Lunsford were in their early twenties, the teen concept ran very deep in Olympia. Being a teen was a metaphorical state that could be prolonged indefinitely, a way of being in which one was unspoiled, blameless, enthusiastic, and sincere.
The straight edge (drugs, drink, and smoking, anyway) Johnson began by framing his vision of youth culture in quaint terms, casting his own little hipster utopia as a kind of punk rock Ozzie and Harriet, an even more wholesome variation on the D.C. scene. Who would hassle a sober, clean-cut kid in a cardigan?
To be sure, the straight-arrow Eisenhower/Kennedy-era style was partly a product of what was available in thrift stores at the time, but it dovetailed perfectly with the times, both embodying the nation’s prevailing air of nostalgic conservatism and countering its sleaze and greed by signifying an impeccable purity. It was also a reaction to Evergreen’s predominantly post-hippie culture—to the Olympia punks, hippies were sexist, ineffectual, drug-addled fools with bad taste in clothes and music; then there was the age-old town/gown conflict, which pitted the area’s large blue-collar population, aggrieved by the poor local economy, against the affluent left-wing Evergreen bohemians. The Olympia scenesters did everything to differentiate themselves from the mulleted, mustachioed redneck who would drive by them in his primer gray Camaro and yell, “Fuck you!”
In Olympia, following Johnson’s lead, the retro sensibility caught on in a big way. Much of the music had a kitschy streak a mile wide, while its romantic discourse was couched in terms of crushes and coy adolescent yearnings. People in their early twenties were having pajama parties and tea parties and Twister parties. The men dressed like extras in Dobie Gillis, and in their frumpy dresses, clunky bob hairdos, and old-lady glasses, the women looked like punk librarians. Johnson himself, with his vintage cardigans and short-back-and-sides haircut, even spoke in colloquialisms from an era gone by—asked why he missed an epochal Big Black show in Seattle, he replied, “I was washing my hair that night,” a corny old locution women used to use for turning down dates.
“You can tap into a lot of creativity if you step into that—there’s an innocence and a warmth and a sense of family—you can really tap into those feelings,” Bruce Pavitt explains. “So it’s a legitimate artistic point of view and it’s small town, baking pies, slumber parties, fetishizing this romantic, old world, small-town fifties culture. Instead of getting together for speedballs, you’d get together and make a pie or something.” (Despite the devotion to wholesome pastimes of bygone teen eras, there was also plenty of drinking and drugs in Olympia, not to mention a never-ending game of sexual musical chairs, all of which was kept strictly under wraps.) “It turned into this weird little Peyton Place utopia where everyone fucked one another and they had cakewalks and they’d put on shows in weird places like the steps of a building or in a hallway or in a back alley somewhere,” said Kurt Cobain in 1992.
A lot of it sprang from the nature of Olympia itself. “Not a whole lot happened there,” says Lewis, “so it was what you made of it.” Many people, when faced with such a situation, simply retreat to the mindless comforts of the Great American Tranquilizer: the couch, a beer, and the TV. “It made me shudder to think of that as a cultural alternative,” says Lunsford. “That was the road we were supposed to go down. The powers that be wanted us to do that, so we would be surrendering our revolutionary cause if that’s what we did.”
So the Olympians created a whole little world for themselves, which was relatively easy: Olympia is a tiny place—the downtown is about twelve square blocks and the entire underground music scene was housed in two or three small apartment buildings. Johnson was the lead instigator, the Pied Piper, of this cloistered mini-subculture. “He’d pull out a yo-yo and start playing with it and go, ‘Hey, we’re having a pie-baking party at my house tonight—bring your pajamas,’ ” Pavitt recalls. “Part of me has to wince, like, ‘Oh my god, will the affectations never end?’ But it’s performance art.”<
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Soon the charismatic Johnson attracted a following. “I’d like to call them Calvinists,” said Cobain. “All of a sudden, Calvin found himself the leader of these doe-eyed young kids who looked and talked like Calvin and were into the same music and tried to carry on the traditions of the Calvinist regime. They did it pretty well. They started up their own little planet. They had their own coffee shop and their own record store. They dominated the town. They basically just took over.”
In some ways it seemed Johnson’s role bordered on cult leader, with all the perks and quirks that position tends to entail. “Calvin had a lot of rules,” says Jensen. “Besides not smoking, not drinking, just drinking tea—no onions. That was one of the craziest rules—no onions. You’d go to somebody’s house and they’d make this wonderful dinner and obviously it would be pasta and obviously there would be onions in it, but he would be like, ‘I hate onions.’ There would be rules.” But Johnson’s affectations stood him in good stead. “He believed that would be a good strategy to promote his own significance and make an interesting life for himself,” says Jensen. “If he wants to talk to [important people like] Thurston Moore, they think he’s funny and they remember him.”
By 1984 Olympia was producing cool bands like Girl Trouble, the Wimps, and the Young Pioneers, all K Records artists. Yet the only all-ages venue in Olympia remained Gary May’s apartment. Beat Happening would have to organize shows in offbeat places, like the monthly “acoustic punk” shows in an alley behind the Martin Apartments.
The scene got a tremendous boost when the all-ages Tropicana club opened in March ’84 in a downtown Olympia storefront. Local punk rockers helped run the place, and the Tropicana quickly became known to touring underground bands as a friendly way station between Seattle and Portland run by like-minded folks and filled with kids who loved to dance; bands often found themselves at raging after-parties that were far wilder than the shows. But the Tropicana was constantly hassled by punkphobic jocks and rednecks who would drive by and heave rocks through the windows; when the town passed a strict antinoise ordinance seemingly targeted at the club, the Tropicana closed, in February of the following year.
Riding the same wave of enthusiasm that begat the Tropicana, Beat Happening enjoyed one of its most active years in 1984—they played in town over a dozen times, mostly at the Tropicana, where they opened for Black Flag in September. In retrospect it’s an extremely odd pairing, but in some ways the two bands weren’t so very far apart. “Back then, Calvin and Henry Rollins, or even Heather and Henry Rollins probably came from similar standpoints about how they felt about themselves and independence and freedom,” says Candice Pedersen, who was in the audience. “So then you could perform together because you were coming from the same places in your heart. You may not make the same music, but you feel about music the same way.”
But as Beat Happening played, at least one person on the bill didn’t feel any kinship with the band whatsoever. “You could see Rollins behind the stage looking increasingly incredulous,” wrote Lois Maffeo. “Was Johnson mocking Rollins’ macho stage presence by offering the exact opposite? Was Rollins being upstaged?”
Eventually Rollins planted himself in the front row and began heckling Johnson. But Johnson, already quite used to such treatment, simply ignored an increasingly frustrated Rollins. “Finally, in exasperation, Rollins reached up and placed his hand over Johnson’s crotch,” Maffeo recalled. “Johnson merely took a step back, looked Rollins in the eye, and said, ‘Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?’ ”
Johnson continued the show unmolested.
The ten tracks of Beat Happening’s first album came from several sources: most came from a second Greg Sage session, but there was one track from a live show in Portland and even a home boom box recording. Johnson did the cover art himself—a smiling stick-figure kitty flying by in a crudely drawn rocket ship, all against K’s trademark yellow background.
The songs have a studied air of innocence, but closer inspection reveals darker, deeper aspects. With its surfy guitar line and faux mysterioso vocals, Johnson’s “I Spy” seems merely a corny espionage spoof until the last line: “I wear Spanish boots and Brooks Brothers suits / And I don’t know how to cry,” Johnson rumbles, hurling a parting barb at machismo. Johnson’s latest rebel/forbidden love anthem “Bad Seeds” pointedly alluded to the Sixties counterculture: “The new generation for the teenage nation / This time, let’s do it right.”
On “Fourteen” Johnson juxtaposes childhood imagery with some seriously grown-up romantic alienation, while on “In Love with You Thing,” accompanied only by a distant maraca and what sounds like a drumstick hitting a cardboard box, he sings, “If I could touch those parted lips / Your swinging little hips just gotta be kissed.” It wasn’t just kid stuff.
Lewis’s four songs tended toward elemental tales of unrequited love and heartbreak, and the Buddy Hollyesque romp “Down at the Sea” celebrates a beach party thrown by “Mr. Fish” and “Mistress Lobster.”
“What we were doing wasn’t about being really good musicians,” Lewis says. “It always seemed to me it was about making a song. We’re just making a song.” By Lewis’s estimate they had rehearsed perhaps twenty times in their entire career by 1988. And not only did it not matter if you couldn’t play your instrument; it barely even mattered if you had an instrument at all. For much of their existence, the band didn’t own their own drum set and would simply borrow one from another band on the bill. And if no one wanted to lend their drums, it wasn’t a big deal. “Our attitude was if people don’t let us borrow drums then we can go grab a garbage can or a cardboard box and that will do,” says Lunsford. “And that was seriously our attitude. We were like, well, whatever, we can still make music.”
By borrowing drums and purposely avoiding mastery of their instruments, “we were, on some level, maybe just being obnoxious and presumptuous,” Lunsford admits, “but we were challenging the idea of how you were supposed to do things in a band.”
And Beat Happening was even challenging the idea of how you were supposed to do things in an underground band. Switching instruments tended to flummox soundpeople, who were also perplexed by the band’s lack of a bassist. “A lot of people just used it as another example of how we just didn’t get it,” says Lunsford. “ ‘Poor Beat Happening, they don’t know how to write songs, they don’t know how to play their instruments, and they don’t even have enough instruments.’ ”
Beat Happening refused to play the game on several other levels, too. “We were dismissed because we weren’t macho,” says Lunsford. “A lot of the success of indie bands was based on this kind of macho revolutionary stance or macho alcoholic stance or whatever. And we didn’t have that kind of presentation.”
In 1985 a sharp, articulate Evergreen junior named Candice Pedersen began interning at K, earning college credit at Evergreen and $20 a week. The first Beat Happening album was then in the pipeline. K corporate headquarters was a table in Johnson’s bedroom; business was transacted on a Snoopy telephone. Work consisted of filling about a half dozen (on a good day) mail orders, calling stores, doing accounting with a ledger and pencil, doing production work for upcoming releases.
Neither Johnson nor Pedersen had any business training, so they made it up as they went along, with occasional advice from other indie entrepreneurs from around the country such as Ian MacKaye, Bruce Pavitt, and Corey Rusk. Besides, Johnson and Pedersen could afford to be a little naive about finances since overhead was low (Johnson’s apartment was $140 a month), and they could turn a profit after selling only about 250 singles. “It would be like, ‘Wow, we need some money. We should make those phone calls we never made,’ ” says Pedersen.
Their business plan was simple: “Put out what you like, keep it cheap, and then put it back into the company,” says Pedersen, an approach the label has followed ever since. The idea behind K, as Johnson put it, was to strike “a good balance between running a business and helping people get their
thing done.” As he wrote in one of K’s catalogs, “There are many different ways to measure success besides with a calculator.”
At first K didn’t have a distributor, so they simply sold direct to stores. Back then that was possible because chains did not yet dominate the retail industry and mom-and-pop stores were still players. “There was just less money being thrown around, so you didn’t have to compete as much with everybody to get into a store,” Pedersen explains. “There were also fewer labels, so you could create a personal relationship—you might be one of only thirty-five things that aren’t on one of the big six labels.”
Taking the idea directly from Dischord, they established a fifty-fifty split after expenses for albums and a flat rate of thirty-five cents per single sold, generous even today. Low expenses and modest packaging meant the bands would see income that much sooner.
Just as they released their debut album in early ’85, Beat Happening decided to take some time off. Lewis had moved to Seattle and Lunsford to Anacortes, a three-hour drive from Olympia. So the band practiced rarely, getting together on infrequent weekends. And even then the priorities for these three good friends were making food and renting videos, with rehearsing a distant third. “It’s always been sort of like a tea party kind of thing,” Lewis explains.
The following year Johnson wanted to resuscitate Beat Happening and proposed a tour. Lunsford was up for it, but not Lewis. “It’s really hard for me to sing for people,” she explains. “Some people are natural performers. I’m not a natural performer.”
Where Johnson would often assume a persona in his songs, as in “Gravedigger” or “I Spy” or “Hangman,” Lewis’s lyrics always cut close to the bone (perhaps closer than even her bandmates imagined). “That’s why it was so hard for me to sing those songs,” says Lewis. “In a lot of his songs, Calvin could kind of be this thing. It’s not like he’s not himself, but I think in some of his songs he didn’t feel vulnerable, whereas I often did.”
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