I Found My Friends (6 page)

TY WILLMAN,
Inspector Luv and the Ride Me Babies:
Squid Row, that's going way back. It was the first club you'd play in Seattle, or one of the first, when you came to town. Very small place on Capitol Hill. They just opened up to letting a lot of bands play there even though it was only there a short space of time. The OK Hotel was the best all-ages venue.

BEAU FREDERICKS,
Saucer:
There were a lot of house parties, and all-ages venues would come and go. The Show Off Gallery (all-ages) and the Up & Up Tavern (over-21) were the main places at the time. They were very friendly places, and all you needed to do was say you were in a band and they would give you a show …

SCOTT VANDERPOOL:
All-ages shows were big early in the punk/alternative days in Seattle, largely because all the established local bar venues (a) didn't think they could sell any beer to bands with a young audience and (b) fucking hated the music. (Still the case when I got a gig running sound at the Fabulous Rainbow Tavern in the U-District; the guy who owned the PA didn't want to be anywhere near the place when Jon Poneman–booked bands played!)

A number of all-ages events shuffled out of the city into neighboring towns—the Community World Theater being one example of the opportunities that arose.

SLIM MOON:
It did mean more big shows in Tacoma and Bremerton, but Olympia is too far away from Seattle. In fact, it probably hurt Oly because it meant that some bands decided to skip the Northwest entirely if they couldn't get a show in Seattle. Olympia did have a better all-ages scene than Seattle, which might be partially attributed to the Teen Dance Ordinance. But I should point out that I lived and went to shows in Seattle in 1983 to 1985, and also drove from Oly to Seattle to see shows from 1986 to 2006, and even though the TDO existed, there was never a time that all-age shows weren't happening in Seattle. People either found ways to get around it, or they ignored it and took their chances of getting busted …

GLEN LOGAN,
Bible Stud:
These all-ages fans were/are incredibly dedicated and supportive. Years earlier the Lake Hills Roller Rink shows filled this gap on the east side. There were/are unique challenges faced by bands and promoters who wanted to play to the all-ages crowd and for the all-ages crowd who wanted to attend these shows. For example, a bar owner who doesn't mind what band's fans he or she sells booze to may be more open to having bands at their club. The bands are the honey that attract the bees who buy the booze. There is potentially more monetary risk where the built-in liquor sales are absent. This can lead to less all-ages opportunities for bands and fans alike.

NATHAN HILL,
King Krab:
Ellensburg was small and boring, so the only entertainment was music, crime, and drugs … Highway 18 to Olympia was a nightmare and was also a three-hour drive … Calvin Johnson went to elementary school here with Mark Lanegan. Through that connection I met the band Dangermouse, Slim Moon, and Dylan Carlson … Slim Moon's Lush had played in Ellensburg earlier and I thought they were great. I called him to book another show and they couldn't play so he suggested I call his friend Kurt Cobain. I did: they showed up and blew us all away. Well, all twenty of us … The Hal Holmes Center was the only place we could put on shows ourselves, and it sucked. Me and another guy put on all the shows because we wanted our bands to play somewhere, anywhere. We would try to bring in an out-of-town band, but we couldn't pay anything more than gas money. It was very punk-rock, and I remember it fondly … We always let the out-of-town band headline unless they didn't want to. We thought any band was better than we were! They were loud and heavy and blew us away. None of us realized that we could be that way—they were inspiring and a really nice bunch of guys …

Nirvana's relatively strong focus on younger fans, on college audiences, was in part an outgrowth of the scene's firm ideological commitment to all-ages shows.

SCOTT VANDERPOOL:
All-ages shows were almost required to be cool in Olympia, Calvin Johnson would flat-out refuse to play to a 21-plus for years. The Tropicana wouldn't have dreamed of getting a liquor license …

GEORGE SMITH:
Again, the Tropicana, it was an incredibly important place in Olympia music—it was always in danger of getting shut down. All-ages clubs over here are always living week-to-week in danger of getting shut down because they attract a weird-looking bunch of people and I think it makes people nervous. To be sure, there are attendant minor crimes—vandalism, empties littering the street—I don't think that it's necessarily worse than other sorts of venues, but they get targeted. The Tropicana was always getting shut down and having flare-ups with the law. Reko/Muse was another club that was in town a year or two after GESSCO—another all-ages venue that had a short run. It was definitely one of the places to play, one of the short-lived places … We didn't really consider taverns to be the same—the lifeblood of the scene was all-ages shows. A badge of honor was to keep playing all-ages rather than bar shows so that the kids could go. When you're twenty-two, twenty-three, you still remember it was so lame there had been good shows you couldn't go to. It was nice not to arbitrarily omit 50 percent of the audience. By twenty-four, twenty-five I guess you start to feel it's nice not having all these kids running around!

By the time they started playing Seattle, Cobain and Novoselic were twenty-one and twenty-two, respectively, but had to be discreet regarding the youngster who would soon join them on drums: Chad Channing.

DAMON ROMERO:
The laws in Washington State are really tricky. To play in a bar under the age of twenty-one is a real hassle. I did it, but you can't just go in the club, not until it's time to play, or you had to stay in a really dingy area in the corner of the bar—it wasn't much fun. You were just relegated to some little corner at the side of the stage or had to stay outside. There were a couple of actual punk-rock venues in Seattle, one was an old cinema that had been converted—well, the seats were ripped out, so it was basically a concrete box—that was Gorilla Gardens Rock Theater. There was another place called the Gray Door … Unfortunately, as teenagers, we never made it down to the Tropicana—but we spoke about it, just never made the trip.

While these difficulties didn't limit the ability to get shows, it restricted the free movement of band members and made it harder to draw enthusiastic teens. Sub Pop would work to ensure Nirvana played all-ages shows. For example, they secured Nirvana a December 1 slot below two punk legends.

PETER LITWIN:
Jonathan Poneman actually called me and asked me if I could get them onto the gig. We had a fairly well established all-ages following at this point and Jonathan thought they needed to do more all-ages shows … I should mention that Jonathan gave Coffin Break our first bar show in Seattle—he was always supportive of us, so I was more than happy to do him a favor. Plus, I loved Nirvana … I never knew Kurt was a big Coffin Break fan till many years later.

JOE KEITHLEY,
D.O.A.:
Seattle was one of the worst places to find an all-ages show—the city councilors were absolutely draconian and puritan about not wanting kids near alcohol … In L.A. what they would do is check your ID and if you didn't have ID then they'd take a sharpie and put a big
X
on your left and then your right hand, so if you were trying to reach for a beer the bartender would see your
X
 … in the Northwest they just wouldn't let you in unless you had these completely separate shows with no alcohol. The promoter invited us down either at the end of a tour back from California or maybe just for the weekend, but the singer from Coffin Break said we needed to go do some fliers, so we walked to Kinko's and when we got back Nirvana had finished and were taking the cymbals off the stand so I had no clue who they were.

The generational divide was written indelibly into the emerging music.

CHRIS BLACK:
I recall that Bliss and the other bands were slow and sludgy, and that they had long hair.

ROD MOODY,
Swallow:
We were the fourth band on the official label … all featured big, loud, ugly guitars, screaming vocals, and relentless rhythm sections. None were very subtle but all had their distinct personalities and influences. Green River had Stooges and (later) glam. Soundgarden had psych elements mixed into their Sabbath/Zep foundation. Blood Circus was straight-up biker rock, and Swallow brought in some pop elements. We were all a little different musically, but we had a common ground as well. That was the heavy. And we all had long hair.

Punk spat at its counterculture precursors by dispensing with hippie/rock-god hair, then hardcore took it to the extreme with Marine Corps–esque skinheads. A few more years and the next wave of youngsters again wanted to stand out alongside their immediate elders, which they did by re-embracing hard rock and long hair.

MIKE MORASKY,
Steel Pole Bath Tub:
Funny, of all things, I do remember Nirvana's long hair and thinking that it was cool, like they were a heavy Southern rock band or something. Even though we were referencing some of the same music sources, they were coming at the heaviness from a very different direction … we were art punks and players; they were a pop band.

Of course, the mainstream believed that unwashed natural “grunge” hair was just a reaction to hair metal's bouffant hairdos; most people missed entirely that it was also a reaction to the dominant hairstyles of the punk scene too.

TIM KERR,
Bad Mutha Goose:
You have to realize that up until the early '90s, the majority of the rest of the US looked at all of this like we were from Mars. It was this little uprising that they had no idea what was going on … You would have the random knuckleheads come in to “fuck with the weirdo faggots.” Same thing happened with skating. In Austin it was the frats, kickers, or jocks that came in to shows looking to fight.

The “Seattle look” was so prominent that as early as 1989 it was worth parodying.

SHAMBIE SINGER,
Lonely Moans:
All those dudes—all the Sub Pop bands—had longer hair than us, which shook around a lot more than our shorter hair. That made an impression … we did a photo shoot for Sub Pop promo stuff at one point. A woman named Paula Huston took the photos. And we borrowed long-hair wigs from the Hampshire College Theatre Department for the photo shoot. I think Paula got the wigs for us through a friend. I recall we thought it was kinda funny to do that. Sorta mocking all the long-haired head wagging that was going on in Seattle at the time. But also sorta interested to fit in aesthetically.

The Northwest accepted both punk and the hard rock their precursors had lashed out at.

DANIEL RIDDLE,
Hitting Birth:
When the same kids that spat on us in school yelling, “Whip it good, Devo” and “Fucking punk faggot” were now showing up to our little punk-rock shows, slam dancing with the same violence and disrespect shown to us punks in the schoolyards and on the streets, with no respect for the culture [or] the etiquette of the punk-rock dance, no respect for women, the venues, or the musicians … we all knew it was
over
. Punk bands were now fucking weightlifters, Nazis, military strategists, and preachers. Kids like us needed to go deeper underground. The total
un
-coolness of '70s rock and long hair was perfect camouflage … Coopting the discarded, dismissed sounds and styles of the '70s that had already been trashed and labeled worthless was one of many suitable social responses for our desire to continue our rebellion.

DAVID WHITING:
We tended to be perceived as “has-beens” and “old-schools” when we perhaps perceived these newer rock hybrids as even more so the “has-beens,” emulating styles, fashion, and sounds from an even earlier bygone time.

JOE KEITHLEY:
Punk rock really weakened after about 1986—it wasn't the same movement it had been, although there were still a lot of good people and good bands, but it didn't have the same impact it had had on society between 1977 and 1983. It started to wane, it got tougher to go to shows, there was more violence with skinheads … Things need to move along, or we'd still be dressing in greaser jackets and singing doo-wop songs.

This generation had an issue with the '80s manifestation of hard rock, not the '70s originals.

SLIM MOON:
The Pacific Northwest was a weird place where a rock influence was always there in the punk and indie music … At a time when, in most of the country, punk bands were very against hard rock, Seattle punk bands still loved AC/DC and Kiss and Aerosmith. All over the country, punk was giving way to all kinds of indie sounds—the rise of college radio had a lot to do with this—but the Northwest particularly contributed with “heavy” sounds, partially because the Northwest underground had never fully rejected hard rock the way much of the underground had.

While straddling the generational lines, Nirvana simultaneously stood with their feet on either side of a geographic divide.

SLIM MOON:
In the period from the late '80s to the early '90s, the Seattle scene and the Olympia scene wasn't really very friendly; there was a lot of competition, and if you were in Seattle you heard a lot of jokes at Olympia's expense, and if you were in Olympia, we told jokes about Seattle bands. Seattle thought Oly bands couldn't play our instruments and were naïve. Olympia thought Seattle bands were drunks and heroin addicts without any convictions or creativity.