Interviewing Cap’n Mystery

Chris Hanzsek, aka Cap’n Mystery, is one of Seattle music’s unsung heroes.  He opened Reciprocal Recording (twice), the studio that gave us Green River, Mudhoney, TAD, Nirvana, Soundgarden, and many others.  Chris discovered Green River…and he put together the first “grunge” compilation (Deep Six), in 1986 on his C/Z label.

Chris and I have some geography in common.  He grew up in Upper Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and I grew up in Lower Bucks (Upper is better, trust me.)  We both went to Penn State (ugh…this fucking scandal)  “My last years at Penn State were the exciting ones,” Chris remembers.  “I got involved with radio….I got to do what they called the “New Wave Show.”  Or, I thought of it as the “Punk Rock Show.”

“[We] did a radio show at Penn State called “Too Much Too Soon”….and he called himself Stu Dent.  Did he tell you who I was?  I was Poli Dent,” says his then girlfriend, Tina Casale.

Upon graduation, in 1980, Chris and Tina ventured to Boston.  “Then I found [a] job in Boston, kind of working in a warehouse that was just completely stocked full of musicians,” Chris recalls.  “And I think that’s where I got the idea I was gonna go in to the recording business ’cause there’s all these people sittin’ around talking about music, fightin’ over the stereo.  And quite a number of them were….going into studios and making recordings, and I just looked at that and went, ‘Oh man, that’s just too much fun.  How can I get involved?’

“So I just decided to start saving my money, my minimum wage money, whatever I was making, and I just started buying recording gear, and then trying to weasel my way into helping some of these developing bands with their demos and stuff.”

“And Boston at the time was just full of bands, utterly absolutely full of ’em….what convinced me to move there was I think the very first show I went to…we just wandered into the Ratt in Kenmore Square.  And opening that night was Mission of Burma and then the headliner was Gang of Four, playing their second show in the U.S.  I was just utterly impacted, very stunned.  It was just amazing for me to see this music happen.”

Chris remained in Boston for two years, immersing himself in the vibrant music scene there.  He found himself starting to struggle financially, however, as the cost of living began to outpace his earnings.  He then began to consider another place, perhaps cheaper, that also afforded an opportunity to record bands.  Some of his friends were living in Seattle and they suggested he move there.  “I just came out here [Seattle] and stayed in somebody’s basement for about, I think about two months or so, while I was looking for a job,” he says, “eventually found some pathetic job that would keep me afloat out here.  And then I stayed.

“I think my [day] job…was cleaning Xerox machines, and making paper tablets out of scrap paper for this little print shop.  So, it was sort of a go-nowhere, dead-end job.  But that kind of thing really fuels your dreams.  You really are motivated to try to do something with your life when what you have is a dead-end street staring you in the face.  So, I borrowed a little money from my mom…bought an 8-track recorder, and then the studio started…”

“[Chris] started buying all this equipment and then at one point he needed a place to put it all,” says Tina. “So he rented this place down…by the train tracks and he started Reciprocal Recording.  And then through meeting all these bands coming in and going out and seeing bands, like we saw the first time Soundgarden play.  And I remember Chris, we were looking at each other saying, ‘These guys are really great.’”

“I think we were 10 bucks an hour at first,” says Chris, “slowly moved up to $12.50 an hour.”  Competing studios were charging as much as $75 per hour.

_____________________________________________________________________

Reciprocal Recording offers high quality 8-track recording services at incomparable prices.  We’ve got good equipment and a versatile space.  Check us out for your next demo or LP project.  $12.50/hr, $10/hr block rate.

—Ad for Reciprocal Recording, the Rocket, July 1984.

_____________________________________________________________________

“…Seattle only had about four or five actual working studios that people could go to, and some of them weren’t really approachable,” he continues.  “So, there was a lack of inexpensive musician-friendly, independent-friendly studios and I quickly became one of them.

“Seattle was pretty fertile ground for that because it hadn’t been done that way before.  The studios that were here were more of your traditional, bigger studios that were a little too expensive for people on their own money to do things in.”

Chris soon crossed paths with Green River, and the band recorded its first demo at Reciprocal in the Spring of 1984.  Even in those early days, Green River was kind of an unstable compound, especially after Stone Gossard joined the band.  Stone and Jeff Ament would begin to push Green River in a hard rock direction, while Mark Arm and Steve Turner would steadfastly stick to their punk roots.  By 1987, the split had become irreconciliable.  Mark and Steve would form Mudhoney, while Stone and Jeff would eventually form Pearl Jam.  “I thought [Jeff and Stone] were being far too studious and serious about it,” says Chris.  “But, I guess time has proven that their efforts were valid as well.  I mean, they got their wish.  I don’t know if being in Pearl Jam hurts you any–but probably not.”

In the late summer of 1985, Chris and Tina formed a partnership called C/Z Records.  The label’s first offering would become a landmark compilation album.  “…I forget exactly who had the idea,” says Chris, “but someone said, ‘Why don’t we have a compilation record and put some of these great bands on a compilation?’….And I said, ‘Well, that’s a great idea.  Let’s go do it.’  I got my girlfriend [Casale] to bankroll the thing.  That was the spawning of the idea of having the Deep Six compilation.”

Deep Six featured Green River, Malfunkshun, the Melvins, Skin Yard, Soundgarden, and the U-Men.  Chris, Mark Arm, and Jeff Ament selected the bands…although no one is quite sure who and how they made the final determination (and I asked Chris, Mark, Jeff, Stone, and Jack Endino…it remains the mystery question of life.) “I think that it was just the…bands that were just kind of well-known around town,” says Green River’s Alex Shumway.  “Everybody went to a Melvins show.  Everybody went to go see a U-Men show.  God knows, you wouldn’t miss them.  Everybody went to go see a Malfunkshun show.  Jesus Christ, you’d never want to miss a Malfunkshun show.  Green River, because we were just the fucking greatest thing on Earth, right?…Soundgarden…we were just all the bands right around the area that were the really popular bands.  That’s the only way I could figure that one out.”

“I remember, I was there, and there was Mark Arm and probably a couple of the Melvins, and Malfunkshun, and everybody,” Jack Endino recalls.  “[Chris] said, ‘Hey, I want to put out this record.  We’re probably not going to make any money on it, but I’ll pay for the studio time.  And if we make any money on it, you can all share in it.’  And everybody signed a little two-page contract.  Yeah, he basically never made any money on it.  In fact, he lost a lot of money on it.”

A year later, Chris re-opened Reciprocal (initially with Jack as co-owner) in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood.  The studio became the center of all things grunge by the late ’80s.

Since then, Chris has worked on a number of projects, and continues to do mastering out of his home.  He has contributed a hidden, but important legacy to Seattle music.  “If [people] ask me what I want to take credit for,” says Chris, ”it’s just that when I came to town, I had a little bit of a vision, and a little bit more confidence, and I just wanted to push people and say, ‘Let’s go.  Let’s do it.  Let’s do it.’  And working with Green River was sort of a keystone for me, because all the guys in that band were enthusiastic.”

Interviewing Nirvana’s Chad Channing

I saw Chad play drums with his band Lamar back in 2007 (and he was impressive, by the way.)  I shook his hand afterwards, mumbling something brilliant like, “Good set.”  I looked him up after I got home and did the interview by phone a couple of months later.

Talking with Chad can be kind of touchy, given his dismissal from Nirvana prior to the band going nuclear.  Thus, broaching the subject of Kurt Cobain would require some deft handling.  As a result, I framed the interview in terms of “Chad growing up,” “Chad’s influences,” “Meeting Kurt and Krist,” and “Nirvana in Seattle.”

I was surprised to learn Chad had seen a number of Seattle shows years before he joined Nirvana.  He went to the notorious Gorilla Gardens.  He saw the Melvins.  He saw Soundgarden.  He even saw the U-Men play at a private party.

We spent most of the Nirvana time talking about 1988, the first year the band appeared in Seattle.  We chatted about early gigs at the Vogue and the Central, about Nirvana’s early sparsely attended shows, and about how the music community eventually embraced the band.  I also asked Chad about music that influenced Nirvana.  He acknowledged poppier groups like the Vasolines, that Kurt brought with him from Olympia, as well as his own background in speed metal.  Ultimately, though, Chad viewed Nirvana as a clean slate for all of its members.  “It was very fresh,” he recalls, “I think [more] influence might have [come] off of one another.”

That mindset, in Chad’s mind, went into the band’s songwriting approach as well.  “Kurt would be jammin’ on some kind of a riff,” Chad says, ”maybe like when we’re doing a soundcheck or something like that, start playing some riff.  I’d go, ’Oh, that’s kind of cool.’  And I’ll start playing a sort of beat to it.  Krist would play around and we’d totally like get into it.  Just kind of make something of it.”

In 1989, following in Mudhoney’s footsteps, Nirvana and TAD toured Europe together.  Unlike most of the other musicians, Chad would take in the entire European experience, often arising early to walk the streets of a town to enjoy its charms.  “When you’re touring, sightseeing is not exactly something you have a whole lot of time to do,” he says.  “It’s just wherever you happen to have a day off.  It’s like, any chance I got, I’d try to get up early…and just spend a little time roaming around, just kind of checking stuff out.  And I really enjoyed that.

“It was sort of like a challenge to see if I could get up in the morning and order a cup of coffee and a pastry, in whatever [country] I was.”

We also talked about his role as a percussionist, which ended up in my blog piece called “Sympathy for the (Seattle) Drummer.”  Since Nirvana, Chad has played guitar and sang in his band Before Cars.  He thus has a unique perspective on the challenges confronting the drummer.  “Any guitar player should really spend at least some amount of time playing drums,” he offers, “even if they’ve never played before, or they’re not good.  Just take some time and try to learn a beat or something.  Just dabble into it a little bit.  You might even find you like it and end up becoming a fairly decent drummer by doing it, or at least, maybe get some idea of how difficult that job can be.”

Interviewing the Fellows’/R.E.M’s Scott McCaughey

Scott, like Mark Arm, took a little while to get ahold of.  While he is not a household name, Scott has indeed attained prominence with R.E.M. and other projects, and has played on Letterman and other national stages.  More importantly, though, I had to talk to a member of the Young Fresh Fellows, a band that changed everything for the Seattle music scene.  Up until my interview with Scott, my only contact with the Fellows’ was their defacto manager/producer/record label guy Conrad Uno.

Back in 1984, Seattle music appeared to be dead in the water.  A once vibrant all-ages scene had closed down, and musicians who desired success left town for perceived greener pastures.  For those who stayed, making music became its own end.  With few club opportunities, the music scene moved underground–literally–into University District basements.  It was during this time that new creative forces became unleashed such as the U-Men (then at their peak), Room Nine, the Green Pajamas, the Walkabouts, the Ones, Soundgarden, Green River, and the Young Fresh Fellows.

The Fellows were not grunge, but they inspired a whole generation of grunge musicians.  Back in ’84, the band did something that seemed impossible for an independent Seattle act.  They released a record!  Not a single, not a couple of tracks on a compilation, not an EP, but a full length record.  And it was good.  Further, McCaughey and his brethren were one of the few Seattle bands to focus on lyrics…and they were fucking funny!  “[It was] just an effort to entertain the other guys in the band, really,” says McCaughey.  “It was a very insular thing.  I wasn’t thinking about whether other people would think it was funny.  I think that we developed this sense of humor within the band and I wanted to crack them up.”

Listen to such Fellows’ tunes as “Amy Grant,” about the Christian singer turned pop star, and “Searchin’ USA,” to get an idea.

The band’s live show was unsurpassed.  “In their heyday, I would defy anybody to try to follow the Young Fresh Fellows,” argues the Posies’ Jon Auer.

Further, the Fellows kept acoustic guitars in the mix, which was not the norm for the ’80s Seattle scene.  “We also, [in] those early first couple years,” says McCaughey, “often had a Farfisa organ also, which we used quite a bit until it got too much beer poured in it.”

Then, in 1986, something amazing happened…the Fellows second record, Topsy Turvy, received a favorable review in Rolling Stone.  “Everybody in Seattle thought we were a really big deal because we got a review in Rolling Stone,” says McCaughey, “….Everybody I think thought that we just completely made it.  They didn’t know—as far as we were concerned, we were still going on playing shitty shows for $150.”

The Fellows never actually broke up, and you can catch them on December 3 at Seattle’s Triple Door.

Interviewing Mudhoney’s Mark Arm

Mark Arm was, what one might call, a difficult “get.”  It took three years in fact, but I had to talk to him.  Mark played a significant role in three bands I wrote about in my book: Mudhoney, the Thrown Ups, and Mr. Epp and the Calculations.  In addition,  he was all over the music scene throughout the ’80s, as you can see in the book’s photos.  And despite being a suburban kid, Mark, along with Steve Turner and Bruce Pavitt, became a tastemaker within the urban grunge scene.  Due to many interview requests over the years, however, he had become less accessible than he once was.

I had tried various methods to contact him for an interview, all without success.  In November of 2007, I ventured up to Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ with a friend to check out a Mudhoney show.  We showed up early, and I noticed band members milling about the bar.  I chatted with the affable Dan Peters outside, but Mark proved elusive.

Two years later, I messaged Dan on Facebook about Mark, and he forwarded along my request.  Finally, Mark and I would chat by phone in December of 2009 and fortunately, the wait was worth it.

Mark is incredibly bright, well-spoken, and scathingly witty.  We talked a lot about his early influences, about Mr. Epp (the fake band that became real), the improvisational and out-of-control Thrown Ups, and the beginnings of Mudhoney.  I also got his take as a fan of the U-Men, the band I wrote most about.

I conducted most of the interview on Skype, using freeware to record the conversation on mp3.  Sounds great, except sometimes Skype cuts out mid-interview, and in this case it did so–twice.  Fortunately, Mark was more than patient, even during the last part when I gave up on Skype and took about ten minutes to hook up my old tape recorder to the phone.

A lot of great quotes came of this interview, of course, but one of my favorites relates to the legendary “Lexicon of Grunge” hoax foisted upon the New York Times by Megan Jasper.  Jasper made up grunge words such as “lamestain” for loser, and “swingin’ on the flippity flop” for hanging out.  Mark’s band Mudhoney took the joke a step further.  “When we heard about that,” Mark told me, “[for] our next round of interviews we threw out as many of those terms as often as possible.”

Interviewing Green River’s Alex Shumway

I had some great interviews…I had some average ones…and then there was Alex.  I found him at his old Myspace site (remember when there was a social network before Facebook?) and chatted by phone back in October of 2007.  If I could award a Funniest Interview prize, the top 5 would go to Rob Morgan, Leighton Beezer, the late Ben McMillan, Mark Arm, and Alex.  He was, in a word, hysterical.

During his Green River days, he went by “Alex Vincent,” using his father’s middle name in place of his surname.  Why, you might ask?  Well, people typically mispronounced Alex’s last name, sometimes confusing it with “Chumley” from Tennessee Tuxedo.

Some of the interview highlights…  Alex talked about Green River’s reception in Japan (where he went to school after the band broke up).  For some reason, even though most Americans had barely heard of Green River (as opposed to their successors Mudhoney and Pearl Jam), Japan viewed Alex as a rock star.  His description of the reaction, in fluent Japanese, was hilarious.

Green River was arguably the first grunge band, the first band to mix punk rock with metal and what we now call classic rock.  “I was at the first Green River show and they sounded a lot like Mudhoney,” says the Thrown Ups’ Leighton Beezer.  “If you can imagine hearing that in ’84– the way I describe it is being blown to the back of the room.  It was loud.…and these guys were dressed like preppies, you know, with their Oxford shirts and the tails out and their short haircuts, and this was their new shtick.  They had previously been Mr. Epp or Deranged Diction, both sort of fitting into a known genre.  But these were like prep kids sneaking out of school and turning their amplifiers up way too high.  I thought it was hysterical and musically really compelling.  It was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.  I went out of there changed.  And so, to me that was really where it all started.”

Alex described a key 1985 Green River show, where the band performed at the notorious CBGB’s, the Manhattan club that launched the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Blondie.  The legend was that Green River took the stage after midnight, playing to a handful of Japanese businessmen:

“I don’t quite remember [the Japanese businessmen,]” says Shumway.  “I do remember some jocks.  It was almost like a bachelor party kind of thing….They came in, ‘Hey, where are you guys from?’  These guys are all dressed up in tuxes.  ‘Oh, we’re from Seattle.’  ‘Alright!  Where’s that?’  ‘Seattle, Washington.’  ‘Oh, like by D.C.?  Around in Virginia?’ ‘No, ALL the way across the country…all the way across the United States.’ “Oh, cool! Ehhh…’”

“The first band was this band called Les Techno.  And the singer looked like an even dorkier version of [Talking Heads’] David Byrne….We were all sittin’ there in the back, and these guys came out, they started up and the bass player’s like clapping his hands in the air going, ‘Les Techno!  Les Techno!  Les Techno!  Les Techno!  Okay, we’re not gonna get going until we hear you all clap your hands and say Les Techno! Les Techno! Les Techno!’  And nobody did shit.”

“The second band got ready to play–set up all their stuff, and we waited for them for about 45 minutes until they eventually figured out that their drummer’s not showing up.  So they took all their stuff down and we eventually set up and I think we played around midnight.”

“And we just ripped the place apart….got paid nothing, but the only people [that] were there to see us I believe were probably the same Japanese businessmen and the staff.  And the staff thought that we were great, so they gave us all the free beer we wanted.  ‘Hey, you guys are great.  Here.  You’re not getting paid shit, but you can have beer.’”

I also asked Alex about Green River’s break-up.  It was around the time of the release of Soundgarden’s “Hunted Down” single, and word had leaked out that Chris Cornell had been taking voice lessons.  Green River’s Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard suggested such training for singer Mark Arm. “Chris Cornell learned how to sing…overnight,” says Gossard.  “He took the magic singing pill.”

“Because Chris Cornell was taking singing lessons,” says Shumway, “and everybody knows how well Chris can sing….Chris Cornell was being taught how to sing.  And so they [said that] Mark should learn how to sing.  There wasn’t really so much pressure put on that, but I know it pissed Mark off to no end.”

It was the fall of 1987, and Green River was about to split.  Dan Trager caught the last band’s Seattle show.  “You could see right away that there was a conflict,” says Trager, “between some of the members [Ament and Gossard] of the band wanting more to–ironically or not–dress up like in a classic Aerosmith style of rock star: you know, with scarves, and bandanas and things like that.  And [Arm had] more of a strident underground anti-rock star posing element going on there.”

“Halloween Day, 1987,” Shumway remembers.  “Mark and I are downstairs in the practice pad waiting to start practice.  Stone, Jeff, and Bruce [Fairweather] walk in: ‘Yeah, well, we’re gonna quit the band.’  Mark’s just, ‘Okay.’  I’m like, ‘Ohhh…life shall not go on.  Whatever shall I do?’  And about three days later, I was like, ‘Aww, fuck it!  Okay, whatever.’”

Interviewing TAD’s Kurt Danielson

I interviewed Kurt Danielson back in 2007.  He was living in Paris then, a full six hours ahead of U.S. eastern time.  I called him at noon his time, which meant I had to quickly down my coffee since I had been out of bed for maybe fifteen minutes.  The interview lasted four hours, but I never found it boring.  Kurt, having studied English and possessing a vast vocabulary, spoke in a beautifully poetic cadence.

We chatted about his childhood in Stanwood, a small town about an hour and a half north of Seattle.  We also talked about Kurt’s major bands: Bundle of Hiss and TAD.  I will share two of his stories, the first of which did not make the book.

As a teenager, a hungover Kurt and friend had been hanging out in his bedroom one morning.  At the time, the pair was undergoing a “punk conversion,” which then meant abandoning arena rock heroes.  As a part of that, they had been smashing record albums of their former idols, when suddenly…

“A drunken pheasant exploded through the window,” Danielson recalls.  “Yes, there was a drunk pheasant out there…this pheasant apparently had eaten too many berries of some kind that fermented and gotten very, very drunk and he just exploded through the window somehow, shattering two different panes.

“He ended up on my bed,” he continues.  “There was glass everywhere.  And [I] took him outside and…he flew away, of course.  He was fine—but drunk.  And, I was hungover then, too….so you have smashing records, you have exploding windows, you have a drunk pheasant, and you have a drunk friend.  And, what are you gonna do?”

The other story did make the book, but I have to re-tell it—at least in summarized form—because it so exemplifies the Seattle music attitude.

By 1989, Kurt was in TAD with Tad Doyle, Gary Thorstensen, and Steve Wied.  The four-piece had completed their first record for Sub Pop but had struggled to come up with a title.  Just prior to the sessions, Kurt and Tad attended a bachelor party for former Bundle of Hiss-mate Jamie Lane and had screened some low-rent porno.  One of those movies was called God’s Balls, and featured a priest having oral sex with a nun.  “And whenever he was getting a blow job in the film,” says Danielson, “he was always screaming out ‘God’s balls!  Gods’s ballllsss!!!  God’s balls, that feels good!’ in a really cheesy deliberate and awkward way—horrible acting.  He himself was no stud.  And even the chicks were raunchy in this one.  But it was pure poetry to my ears.”

TAD, in the studio with producer Jack Endino, joked about naming their first record after the movie.  Endino gave it his ringing endorsement.

Titling one’s album God’s Balls could create offense for sure, but that wasn’t the point.  Unlike today’s reality stars, or movies like Jackass, Seattle musicians didn’t behave repulsively to get attention.  TAD was simply being who they were.  It was if they were saying, ‘It’s really no big deal.  Take offense to it if you’d like, ignore us, join us—but ultimately we don’t care.’  That’s Seattle.

Three years later, I discussed the record with Endino, mentioning how the title was “so Seattle.”  Not missing a beat, Endino quipped, “Well, yeah.”  Yep, so Seattle.

Seattle Musicians Get Punk’d

As part of the interview process, I had Northwest people walk me through their musical influences…and since we’re dealing mostly with children of the ’60s, many of them grew up with classic rock and metal:

“Someone introduced me to some of the classic Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys type stuff,” Beat Happening’s (and K Records founder) Calvin Johnson remembers.  “….That led me to this interest in early rock n roll–you know, Buddy Holly, and Chuck Berry, and that kind of stuff, Elvis Presley.”

“Ever since I was eleven or twelve, I’ve been buying records and looking at them,” recalls the Fastbacks’ Kurt Bloch, “and wondering about the different record companies…even looking at the records and the different kinds of plastic they were pressed on.  ‘Wow, how come this record sounds this way, and how come this record sounds that way?  How come the grooves on this one look this way?’  We didn’t have too much to do back then.”

“I learned a lot from listening to Beatles records over and over again,” says producer Steve Fisk.  “Learned a lot from listening to one side, and then the other side, even playing it backwards with my finger…. because John Lennon had put hints in there about how he’d killed Paul….This is all the stuff that’s on Abbey Road and The White Album.  At the end of “Here Comes the Sun,” Ringo actually comes on and says ‘I buried Paul,’ but it has more to do with an overdub….It has nothing to do with burying him or anything.  But it’s there.”

“…I think [Pink Floyd’s] Wish You Were Here came out while I was in high school,” says producer Jack Endino.  “At least two Zeppelin albums came out while I was in high school.  Two or three Sabbath records came out while I was in high school.  Most of the best Kiss albums came out while I was in high school.  Basically, all that ’70s so-called heavy metal, that now we just call hard rock, because it wasn’t terribly heavy in retrospect compared with what people call heavy metal now.  Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin were considered heavy metal bands at the time, and now we just call them ’70s hard rock, for the most part, or riff rock.”

Then along came punk rock:

“In reading other people’s history,” says Calvin Johnson, “that was the natural trajectory I think, for a lot of people who got involved in punk rock, is that they felt like, ‘Well, the music now [’70s] is just really boring.  How come rock n roll isn’t exciting?’”

“I went to a Rush concert.  I went to Blue Oyster Cult at the [Seattle] Coliseum, and all that.  And for the most part, they fuckin’ bored the shit out of me,” says photographer Charles Peterson.  “….You’re in this big coliseum and somebody’s throwing up in the seat next to you and [the band is] way down there on the stage.  It didn’t speak to me.

“Like I picked up the first Clash album,” Peterson continues, “and there [were] song titles like “White Riot” and “I’m So Bored with the USA,” Peterson says.  “…and I’m just like, ‘Wow, this is great!  This is gonna like piss off my parents.’  My parents listened to fuckin’ Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, you know?  I wanted to be different.”

“Then all of a sudden you had the Sex Pistols, and the Damned, and the Clash,” says Bloch  “….We’re like, ‘Wow…that sounds really great!’” says Bloch.  “A radio station in Seattle that had on Sunday nights, listeners would come in and play records….somebody played “New Rose” by the Damned and “Anarchy in the UK” and “I Wanna Be Me” by the Sex Pistols…and some other punk rock 45s that had just come out.  And I remember listening to the Sex Pistols, just like thinking, ‘Wow, this is the…hardest, [most] annoying, blasting, loud music I have ever heard!  That’s just unbelievable!’”

“When I was about 19,” recalls Chris Pugh of the Young Pioneers and Swallow, “I started my first punk rock band, influenced by the Clash and the Buzzcocks, I would say, mostly.  For me…I liked how simple it was.  I liked that I could play it.  I liked that it was catchy, pop songs….I liked that it was just kind of snotty and rebellious in nature.  So, I liked the whole attitude of it, really, and the sound of it.”

By the late ’70s/early ’80s, though, that initial punk wave became stale, as corporate new wave and disco flooded the airwaves.  Seattle people began to venture toward the next thing, and for some that next thing turned out to be British postpunk including bands like Gang of Four and Joy Division.

“[Post-punk] really blew my mind,” Kurt Danielson of Bundle of Hiss and TAD says. “…When these more refined post-punk records came out–records by punk bands that had sort of evolved a bit or were influenced by a slightly more refined aesthetic….When they came on the scene, it really took that original punk rock primal energy that I first experienced with the Stooges and Hendrix and the Kinks–but veiled, and coming from a different era and a different source.  When I felt this new surge, being filtered through this new aesthetic, it was like a key that fit the lock and opened the door even wider.  So the mansion that was dark was illuminated.  And suddenly, my head was a living theater.”

“I’d never heard Joy Division before until Kurt [Danielson] and Russ [Bartlett of Bundle of Hiss] gave me a tape,” BOH’s Jamie Lane remembers.

“It had that sort of punk attitude,” Lane continues, “but it was really melodic.  It was very sparse, haunted by a simple guitar melody.”

By the mid-’80s, the melancholy postpunk became tiresome, and the locals began paying attention to the vibrant American independent music scene which included a myriad of influential bands like Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Scratch Acid, and the Meat Puppets.

“I’ve seen a lot of rock bands,” says punk graphic artist Art Chantry.  “I mean, the very first rock band I ever saw was Jimi Hendrix.  That’s how far back I go.

“The best rock bands I have ever seen in my life,” Chantry continues, “were those bands that were crisscrossing the country [in the 1980s.]  Every medium to big-size city–not the real big cities, but the medium to big-size cities–all produced at least one great punk band.  And they hopped in vans and crisscrossed and toured on this network.  And it was bands like Big Black and Black Flag and Butthole Surfers and Sonic Youth and Live Skull and Husker Du….You saw these amazing bands– by far the best bands I have ever witnessed in my life.  And…nobody was aware of it.  It was just American underground alternative punk [fans that were] aware of it.”

“[Scratch Acid] was the band that kinda introduced me to trying to play heavy,” says guitarist James Burdyshaw  of 64 Spiders and Cat Butt.  “’Cause the U-Men were heavy, but they were also kinda groovy and ’60s, and they had that…beat/jazz kind of sound going on.

“But Scratch Acid,” Burdyshaw continues, “when I first got turned on to them, which was ’85.  I remember [U-Men drummer] Charley Ryan–I was in Fallout Records, and Charley Ryan was in there–and he told me to buy [Scratch Acid’s “Cannibal”].  And so I listened to him.  I just bought it….It was like if the U-Men all the sudden turned into Led Zeppelin, this is what they would sound like, ’cause they had that kind of groovy, Birthday Party sound, but they were playing it like it was [Led Zeppelin’s] Page and Bonham playing it.”

Some of the Seattle folks combined all these influences–classic rock and metal, punk, postpunk, American alternative rock–into this thing that Bruce Pavitt began calling grunge.  But that is a story for another time.

Interviewing Projection Man Michael Laton

Sunday, August 26, 2007: the second day of “Geezerfest” at Seattle’s Crocodile Café.  The concert capped my second trip to town for research, and I got to enjoy artists like Coffin Break, Love Battery, Down With People, Robert Roth, Capping Day, Lamar, and others.  The venue was somewhat empty as compared to the previous day, allowing an opportunity to chat with a number of people whom I would later interview.

Michael Laton was one of those folks.  Laton handled lighting and projections for Down With People (which featured the same line-up as Room Nine, Seattle’s mid-’80s psyche progenitors.)

Michael, an elder gentleman with a gruff voice, approached me when he found out about my book project.  We chatted for a bit about his experience doing projections for Room Nine back in the ’80s.  I took his phone number and gave him a call after I returned home.

Sometimes we don’t realize what surrounds us.  I had no idea who Michael was…turns out he also played a part in San Francisco’s music scene of the ’60s.  (He is even a minor character in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.)   He did projections for everyone from the Grateful Dead to Janis Joplin to the Doors.  So he actively participated in music scenes influential to two generations.

Michael grew up in Southern California. “Most of the people I befriended [in San Francisco] had grown up in Southern California–we all rushed to San Francisco because that’s where it was happening,” Laton says.  “I went to do graduate work up at the San Francisco State College, along with a bunch of other people.  Of course, at that moment in time, everything was way more interesting than the classroom, so some of us–myself included–we just stopped going to classes, ’cause it just wasn’t important anymore.  I mean, there was just way more interesting stuff going on.

“I was a theater person, and we wanted to put on European theater,” Laton continues, “….Somebody suggested, ‘Well, why don’t you hire these local bands, and you can pay for your theater,’ and we said, ‘Cool.  What a great idea.’  All the bands were the bands, you know–Big Brother & the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead, Country Joe & the Fish–all of that.  Their theater was way more interesting than ours.”

Laton orchestrated light shows for a number of San Francisco bands.  He quickly gained a reputation for creating a psychedelic atmosphere by using projected images and colors along with the music.  After the San Francisco scene dried up, he moved up to Ashland, Oregon and continued his shows at all-ages clubs.  By the late ’70s, Laton’s images were displayed at punk rock shows.  He referred to his punk rock-accompanied projections as “dark shows” as opposed to the “light shows” he created in San Francisco.  “I had put together these visualizations with all the new music, and all these visuals in a kind of–I called them the ‘dark show’ because it was significantly not the Grateful Dead,” Laton recalls.

In 1980, Laton arrived in Seattle, where he believed a better environment existed for his art.  He began working with Red Masque, a Bauhaus-esque dark post-punk band, and then eventually became Room Nine’s personal lighting man.  Laton immediately recognized a sharp contrast between San Francisco psyche and Seattle’s version. “In relationship to San Francisco it was…the whole cowboy thing,” Laton says.  “You can look at the clothing that everybody was effecting in the ’60s and into the ’70s, whether you’re looking at Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young on the cover of Déjà Vu, where they’re all dressed as gunslingers, the whole Eagles thing, that whole– whatever.

“Up here [in Seattle],” Laton continues, “…it all looked like–and I was a Marvel Comic books reader, so maybe that had something to do with it–but it all had that Valhalla Viking warrior kind of thing.  It was a whole other kind of folklore in everybody’s head.  This was not ‘John Wayne Cowboy.’  This was not ‘Alternative Cowboy.’  This was not ‘Bob Dylan Alternative Folk Hero’ bullshit.  This was not about that.

“The mood up here is really different….It always seemed way more serious to me [than San Francisco.]  And whatever people do for partying in Seattle always struck me as being like having a good time had more to do with making things that I never quite understood go away.  I’m more interested in having a good time.  I don’t think I ever heard anyone talking about ‘Let’s have a good time,’ or ‘Let’s go out, and let’s go to the beach.’  You don’t hear that up here….Don’t misunderstand me.  I’m not trying to be glib or silly about it, but it’s very different here.”

Interviewing Producer Steve Fisk

Fifth and final installment of how I came to interview panelists who will appear at the musician/producer Q&A at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company (Wednesday, October 19, 7 pm.)  These blog entries appear here as follows: (Update: unfortunately, Steve had to cancel his panel appearance.)

Jack Endino: Friday, September 16

Rob Morgan: Saturday, September 17

Tom Price: Sunday, September 18

John Leighton Beezer: Monday September 19

Steve Fisk: Today

Each person on the Elliott Bay panel provides a different perspective, which is obviously what I was going for.  Jack Endino is the “grunge producer,” having recorded Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, etc.  He was also an integral actor in the music scene with his band Skin Yard.  Rob Morgan brings the old school Seattle punk ethic to the table, along with a view from outside that grunge circle.  Tom Price played in the U-Men, a hugely influential band, and was a participant in the pre-grunge all-ages punk scene.  John Leighton Beezer’s Thrown Ups symbolized the grunge aesthetic.

And then there’s Steve Fisk.  Like Jack, Steve enjoys prominence as a producer.  And, like Jack, he recorded Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Screaming Trees.  Steve, however, observed the music community from without…he was not a “scenester.”  He was a self-admitted “worker bee.”  Steve also brings a perspective none of the other panelists have: Olympia’s Evergreen State College.  Before he made his name in Seattle, Steve collaborated with such Evergreen notables as Bruce Pavitt, Calvin Johnson, and John Foster as part of Op magazine, a publication that connected Olympia to underground music scenes throughout the country.

I interviewed him twice, in November of 2006, and then again about a year later.  Our dialogue did not follow the typical interview format, that is, I completely ditched the script.  Basically, Steve ran the interview.  I found myself ruffling through my list of questions trying to figure out if I’d asked them or not.

In addition to production credits, Steve has played with Pell Mell, Pigeonhed, and as a solo act.  He also co-wrote the soundtrack for 2007’s About A Son, a Kurt Cobain documentary.  He has resided in Los Angeles, Olympia, Ellensburg (WA), and Seattle.

Before our first interview, I had read an article in Backlash, a grunge era fanzine, which traced Steve’s roots to Louisiana.  “Somebody was transcribing an interview,” he says, “…and I said I was from LA—and that turned into Louisiana.  I’m actually a corndog from Lakewood [California], which is sort of in the armpit of Long Beach.  It would be much cooler to be from Louisiana.”

After that, we bounced around various subjects, talking about his influences, his time in Olympia, producing Screaming Trees and Nirvana.  My favorite Steve quote relates to the latter band: “When Nirvana played Ellensburg, I walked out on them.  I thought they sucked….Different people would walk away from the same show going, ‘I thought they were great.  They destroyed everything!’ [or] ‘Yeah, it really sucked.  They destroyed everything!’”

I called Steve up about a year later, to get more detail about the Olympia scene, as part of my second chapter, “KAOS in Olympia.”  Steve walked me through his experience working with Bruce Pavitt, who had started a little fanzine called Sub/Pop.  Three of the fanzines were accompanied by music compilations, and Steve dubbed them onto cassette.  Bruce would later turn his fanzine into a full-time record label that would provide platforms for Nirvana and Soundgarden’s success.

So, there you have it…a little background on the Fab Five panelists.  I hope you can make it to the reading.  If you can’t, we’re going to film the event and hopefully I’ll get some clips up on the blog.

Interviewing the Thrown Ups’ John Leighton Beezer

Fourth in a series of how I came to interview panelists who will appear at the musician/producer Q&A at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company (Wednesday, October 19, 7 pm.)  These blog entries appear here as follows:

Jack Endino: Friday, September 16

Rob Morgan: Saturday, September 17

Tom Price: Sunday, September 18

John Leighton Beezer: Today

Steve Fisk: Tomorrow

Some people refer to him as John. I call him Leighton.  Let’s just get that out of the way.

Leighton’s Thrown Ups never became as prominent as some of his friends’ bands like Mudhoney and Pearl Jam.  But that was by design.  Regardless, the Thrown Ups were arguably the quintessential grunge ensemble.  They embodied the aesthetic of grunge more than anybody else in Seattle.  And I mean real grunge—the organic version that existed in Seattle in the late ’80s, not the mass-market phenomenon of the ’90s.

The Thrown Ups didn’t practice.  They didn’t even have songs.  Anything was possible when Leighton’s band took the stage.  The Thrown Ups began life in 1985 opening for Hüsker Du.  Concerned they might get booed off the stage, Leighton & Co. brought raw oysters ready to heave at the audience if necessary.  You’ll have to read the book to find out what happened next (is this pattern getting annoying yet?).

Leighton has a specific musical philosophy he’s stuck to all these years: enjoy yourself, and don’t practice.  He could never understand why people would miss a party because of a band rehearsal. “Get out.  Have fun,” he stated.  “Make contacts with people.  And so, the scene was much healthier. The bands weren’t all isolated and focused on their careers.  They were practicing maybe once a week, and they weren’t too uptight if they didn’t have it right.  And in fact everybody knew full well that a show that turned into a train wreck was probably better than one that didn’t.”

I interviewed Leighton for the first time in April of 2007.  He is–quite frankly–a quote machine.  Sometimes it’s tough to transcribe a conversation into a usable quote.  Not so with Leighton.   I pretty much could just use our dialogue as a narrative of Seattle’s punk rock history.

We’ve met twice, and our second meeting stands out in my mind…I think it was 2008.  He had a gig at a bar in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood.  You have to understand something about Leighton’s bands.  Similar to how he approaches his craft, Leighton’s musical collectives literally come together at the last minute.

We chatted over a beer for half an hour.  Then he went up to the hostess and asked, “Do you know who’s playing here tonight?”  She didn’t respond, save for a look of bewilderment.  “Because,” Leighton continued, “it might be me.”

A couple of musicians trickled in, but with just a few minutes before show time, Leighton wasn’t sure if he would have enough players.  Specifically, he was waiting on a bassist named “Five.”  A couple of minutes later, Five sauntered in, and the show was on.

Leighton’s band played for forty-five minutes—literally—without stopping.  No vocals, just an improvised piece of music.  The volume was tremendous, and the notes bounced off the walls.  It was–in a word–outstanding.

A year later, I hit a wall with my book project.  I had just finished a section on Seattle’s vibrant 1983/84 all-ages scene.  Then that string seemed to die out, and I had nowhere to go.  At the other end of that string, I had written about a club called the Gorilla Gardens, which opened in 1985.  I just couldn’t join the two strands.  So, I called up Leighton.

I told him about my dilemma, and he laughed, saying he had been thinking about that time as well.  In fact, he had been reconnecting with people from that era on Facebook.  Yeah, it was one of those cosmic vibe moments.

So, Leighton walked me through that “lost” era, a time I call “Interlude Underground” in the book.  That period was critical to the development of Seattle’s music scene, including of course grunge.  Since the all-ages community had died out, people had nothing left to do.  Nobody believed they could make money with their band, so they just created music for fun.  It was during Interlude Underground that Green River, Soundgarden, the Young Fresh Fellows, the Green Pajamas, and the Walkabouts emerged.

Needless to say, Leighton has been an invaluable asset to my book.

Another couple of years passed, and the publisher and I were kicking around potential book titles.  They finally decided on The Strangest Tribe, and at the time I had mixed feelings about it.  (Like I said before, it has grown on me quite a bit since.)  So, I called up a few people to get their thoughts including Leighton, Jack Endino, Rob Morgan, and Kurt Danielson.  Leighton laughed when I told him the title, suggesting we call it The Dumbest Club instead.  Did I mention he is a quote machine?