Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (11 page)

They were a small band with a small sound. And having existed for only three years – with only a single album to show for it – the Young Marble Giants barely registered a blip on the screen of pop music history. Somehow, though, they cast reverberations that are still heard today – in the simplicity of indie pop bands like
Beat Happening
, the evocative synths of Magnetic Fields, the beat minimalism of Luscious Jackson, and the spare folk of Frente! and Billy Bragg.

The Young Marble Giants formed in 1978, just as Britain’s indie punk movement had spread across the U.K. and reached their remote hometown of Cardiff, Wales. Empowered by the “do-it-yourself” ideas of post-punkers like
Swell Maps
and Desperate Bicycles, the trio of two brothers and their female friend helped put together a local music compilation,
Is the War over Yet?
, which featured two of their songs. One listen to the curvy melody of the Young Marble Giants’
Searching for Mr. Right
, though, and it was clear: They may have been D-I-Y, but they were closer to pop than punk. While they were miles away from the Bee Gees or anything else on the pop charts in 1979, they somehow possessed all the essential elements of pop: a steady and simple rhythm, a pure and beautiful melody. And like all the best pop, the Young Marble Giants’ music was easy to understand, right away. The elements were clearly defined and stripped to their bare essentials: Stuart Moxham’s muted guitar stabs or warbly organ, Philip Moxham’s tuneful bass, Alison Station’s lilting voice, and, at times, a pulsating electronic beat.

Tracy Thorn, Everything but the Girl:

[The Marine Girls, Thorn’s first band] didn’t know anyone who could play drums... so we decided to take our cue from the young Marble Giants and play minimalist quiet music.
Colossal Youth
was our favorite record. [from EBTG website]

Colossal Youth
, the group’s 1980 debut, sounded like nothing else before it. A hushed, ghostly shell of a record on the surface, it proved surprisingly deep on closer inspection. While remaining coolly restrained and consistent, the album covered a wide enough range that no songs sounded the same: from playful and fluid (
Colossal Youth
) to intense and abrupt (
Include Me out
), and from melancholic (
Salad Days
) to menacing (
Credit in the Straight World
, which was later covered by Hole). All 15 songs (written mostly by Stuart) are memorable, though none conformed in any way to accepted formulas.

Dean Wareham, Luna:

We used to do
Final Day
in Galaxie 500 [Wareham’& first band].
Colossal Youth
is a unique and special record, and there’s never been anything like it. The sounds, the instrumentation. It was really spare and quiet, but really powerful. Being in a trio, it showed you could get away with sparseness.

Colossal Youth
was not to have a follow-up. The Giants made the U.K.’s indie charts in 1981 with an instrumental EP called
Testcard
, but amicably disbanded that year, before another record was ever produced. Following the Giants’ break-up, Stuart and Philip Moxham formed the Gist, which released one album in 1983. Sporadically, Stuart also produced bands such as
Beat Happening
and the Marine Girls (which featured Tracey Thorn of Everything but the Girl). For most of the ‘80s, though, Stuart worked as an animator, contributing to films including Who Killed Roger Rabbit? In the ‘90s, Stuart, Philip, and a third Moxham brother formed the Original Artists and released three albums (the first containing Stuart’s duet with Alison of the Giants). A 1995 Stuart Moxham solo album featured acoustic guitar versions of older material, including some from
Colossal Youth
.

Alison Station continued singing, first with loungy jazz poppers and exotica revivalists Weekend, then as half of Devine & Station. In the ‘90s, she reunited with Weekend guitarist Spike as Alison Station & Spike, and released three albums in Japan. The duo’s final live recording featured Stuart and Philip in what essentially was a Young Marble Giants reunion.

DISCOGRAPHY

Colossal Youth
(Rough Trade, 1980; Crepuscule, 1994)
; the astounding first album, reissued with the instrumental EP and two other non-album songs.

Testcard
EP
(Rough Trade, 1981)
; originally an instrumental 7-inch, this record has been tacked onto the reissue of
Colossal Youth
.

The Peel Sessions
EP
(Strange Fruit, 1988)
.

BEAT HAPPENING

Doug Martsch, Built to Spill / Halo Benders:

I like Calvin’s outlook about music and life, he’s sort of a righteous person. He’s made up his mind about things he feels strongly about, even though it’s sometimes difficult. To me, it’s an affirming thing, like, “This is cool what we’re doing. It’s special, important.” And to be around people who actually realize that and make it that way is important.

Before Seattle was known for grunge, and before female bands from the Northwest were labeled riot grrrl, Calvin Johnson was doing his own thing up in Washington state. In fact, the example and support of Calvin’s label K Records helped encourage the formation of a self-sufficient punk feminist movement. And though Beat Happening’s skeletal ditties had little in common with Nirvana’s metallic roar, Kurt Cobain felt sufficiently inspired by Johnson’s do-it-yourself ethic to have the K Records logo tattooed on his body. From a home base in Olympia, the college town / state capitol 50 miles south of Seattle, Johnson did as much as anyone to ignite a regional music scene that would become the most recognized of the ‘90s.

The influence of Calvin, Beat Happening, and K, however, is not limited to the Northwest. Combining the childlike innocence of
Jonathan Richman
with the unschooled roughness of
Half Japanese
, Beat Happening is the progenitor of a style-known variously as cuddle-core, tin-can pop, or love-rock – that’s been adopted to varying degrees by everyone from L.A.’s That Dog to Louisville’s King Kong, and from D.C.’s Tsunami to Chicago’s Veruca Salt. In defining an indie-pop aesthetic that incorporates humor and melody with punk’s willful obscurity – and by forming alliances with like-minded acts such as Australia’s Cannanes, Japan’s Shonen Knife, and Scotland’s Vaselines – Beat Happening has landed at the heart of a worldwide network of subterranean music, dubbed (by Calvin) the International Pop Underground.

In the early ‘80s, Johnson got involved with Olympia’s community radio station KAOS and a related music zine called Op, which introduced him to the then-radical concept of independent music as an alternative to the entertainment/culture fed by major corporations. Soon he began collaborating with fellow DJ Bruce Pavitt on a new zine dedicated to the Northwest’s underground music scene called Subterranean Pop, which Pavitt later abbreviated to Sub Pop (their slogan – “We’re here to de-centralize pop culture”) and turned into the famed Seattle record label. Sub Pop began covering the local scene by releasing not only conventional fanzines but also “cassette” zines, compilation tapes that allowed readers to hear the music they’d been reading about.

Carrie Brownstein, Sleater-Kinney:

The first time I heard Beat Happening, I was just blown away. I was still in high school and I went to their show. It was the first time I saw a woman playing guitar up close. I would go to punk shows all the time, but I never really saw women. And they brought this kind of sexiness back to rock music. In terms of performance, it wasn’t about this kind of tense maleness. It was really fluid, feeling the music in a way that wasn’t about all this angst. In Olympia, and in general, they were really an important band.

“There was the general idea of taking control of the media,” Johnson remembers of the indie/punk scene at the time. “Put on your own shows, make up your own songs, do your own radio show, make your own magazines, start your own label, start your own club, those are all basically the same idea.” Greatly aiding their crusade were the two unsung heroes of indie culture: the cassette tape and the photocopier, which by the early ‘80s had become sufficiently high-quality, inexpensive, and easy to find that they presented a feasible way of producing and distributing music. “Cassette culture in the early ‘80s was oriented toward experimental and industrial music, not to rock music or underground pop,” Johnson recalls. “But cassettes provided an accessibility that just didn’t exist before. It was obvious to us.”

Branching out from Sub Pop in 1982, Calvin formed his K label and began releasing cassettes of mostly a cappella and folk music that stood in sharp contrast to the strictly defined hardcore that began to dominate the indie world. At the same time Calvin began playing in bands, first with the Cool Rays and 003 Legion, then with two friends as Laura, Heather and Calvin. When Laura dropped out of this last group, Calvin and Heather Lewis, whom he’d met at Olympia’s Evergreen State College, recruited Bret Lunsford and Beat Happening was born. In an Olympia tradition that continues today with groups such as Sleater-Kinney, Beat Happening had no bassist. Instead, the trio featured a singer, drummer, and guitarist; because none of them was particularly proficient at any one role, they alternated instruments and vocals between them from song to song.

With the
Wipers
’ Greg Sage producing, Beat Happening recorded and released two five-song cassettes in ‘83 and ‘84 (later collected on the
Beat Happening
and
1983-85
compilations). The music was spare and sloppy, and the singing – Calvin’s froggy baritone and Heather’s artless lilt – was often flat. There was plenty of low-fi production and punk attitude, but Beat Happening still had an innocence and melodicism in songs like
What’s Important
and
I Spy
that identified the group as pop. Beat Happening’s affinity for
Cramps
-style rootsy rock was clear, as was the group’s love for
Jonathan Richman
’s kiddy songs. Their colorful album covers, featuring stick figure drawings and hand-written liner notes, reinforced the warmth and charm of the music.

Jenny Teemey, Tsunami / Licorice:

People talk about them as the mothers and fathers of this sort of “shamble pop” style, which is like two chords, same melody over and over, lots of easy rhymes. And there’s a million bands that started making music like that because they were inspired by Beat Happening. I think were inspired by Beat Happening in the beginning – like
Ski Trip
or
Candy Man
random songs that used lots of objects, written really fast, and we also tried to have a dark side.

K continued to release compilations such as Let’s Together, Let’s Kiss, and Let’s Sea, which featured regional bands such as the Fastbacks, Mecca Normal, and the Melvins, as well as similarly-minded groups from around the world that Beat Happening befriended through the mail and while touring. The group also continued to record somewhat sporadically throughout the late ‘80s. A debut album in 1985 collected more recordings with Sage, and a 1988 EP grouped Beat Happening with their friends Screaming Trees for a four-song collaboration in the spirit of the
Black Flag
/
Minutemen
record, Minute Flag.

Van Conner, Screaming Trees:

They were kind of like the hub of the whole Northwest-do-it-yourself rock scene. There really wasn’t anything going on in Seattle at the time. Soundgarden and Green River [which evolved into Pearl Jam] were just starting. But Calvin was putting out all these tapes. They influenced a lot of people, just in how you go about it. They didn’t have a bass player, and they didn’t care. Their attitude was that you don’t have to wait around for some label to sign you, and you don’t have to be great musicians. Calvin actually booked Screaming Trees’ first paid show ever, in Olympia. The day before we went, my brother Lee [Conner, Trees guitarist] said, “I wonder if that’s the same Calvin Johnson I was in seventh grade with?” It was, and Lee remembered he was really weird. For his seventh grade science project, Calvin drew a picture of a flying saucer with an alien guy hanging out the top shooting laser beams at little stick people. We got the first Beat Happening record and Lee was like, “This looks like that type of drawing!”

In 1987, K began releasing a series of singles by their favorite indie bands, which they called the International Pop Underground. Like Beat Happening, I.P.U. bands were not necessarily pop, but rather groups inspired by pop music. Like punk rock, it was just another way for bands to define their own terms and express their independence. Through K, which held an I.P.U. convention in 1992, bands asserted their ability to be friendly and accessible without having to conform to mainstream ideas of what pop was.

Tim Gane, Stereolab:

When we did Duophonic [Stereolab’s record label], we definitely had something like K Records in mind. Someone who would do their own thing, their own singles, they controlled themselves.