Seattle Years Disclaimer: As I enter the Seattle years in this music blog, the above disclaimer goes double, because so much happened and there are so many details to cover in this 14 year period; so many shows, so many bands, so many friends and so much change in my life. As a result of this and the fact that the four of us who formed Treepeople found ourselves in the midst of a scene which blew up around us and attracted the eyes of the world just 2 years after our arrival, I am bound to, hell, I will forget something.
This means two things: I will be coming back to entries and adding things to them over the months following publication, and, that the part of the above disclaimer where I ask for help from people in keeping me honest and in remembering things is crucial to them. I thank anyone ahead of time who was there, and, those who weren't there who have access to valid info, for helping me to correct errors in dates or chronology. Yes, I have the Internet, but many bands, scenes and things I will cover did not receive the attention I feel that they deserved and thus I will recall them mostly from memory, or rather, memories; mine and those of friends. Friends who were in bands which I do not happen to mention, please don't take it personally, just remind me. I have created a monster in undertaking this blog, one which I am determined to ride until the end!
Lastly, as mentioned, this scene gained national attention, and thus, needless to say and as we all know, many bands/people became famous, became rock stars, were/are admired by millions, etc and etc...This makes another part of my original disclaimer even more important. This memoir is intended to tell my story, from my perspective. I have no intention of creating a place where people can seek gossip about famous people, nor is it about 'name-dropping'. I write of my impressions of people, bands, and the Seattle scene from the '90s into the early 2000s. I protect those who are my friends fiercely because a symptom of being known is frequent intrusion into their lives beyond a level that I feel is acceptable. Thank you for indulging me this disclaimer. Onward>>>
The big pond calls...Treepeople uproots and heads west to the city
The Treepeople move ta Seeee-attle! Photo retrieved from:
The way I remember it (which, if you have been following this blog at all, you know may very well be wrong) was that I wanted to move to Seattle. I mean, I know that much is true for sure. My parents were dead, I didn't really know my siblings very well except one, and I had just been through an incredibly ugly break-up with my girlfriend [upon reflection, I have realized this was after the decision to move, as she was to move with me].
Was I willing to move without the band? Yes, I was, though I struggled with that, so I approached the guys about moving to Seattle, as a band. As it turned out (and this is the 'how I remember it' part), the guys were on the same wavelength and had also been thinking about moving to Seattle and discussing it with their respective mates. I am sure that none of this was out of nowhere. Most likely what happened was that we had discussed it here and there over time as at first a remote possibility, one that became more clear as the best next step. Why? We felt that, as musicians, between all the bands we had been in collectively, we had done most everything we could do in Boise. As well, we had excellent connections in Seattle.
As I mentioned in a previous entry, being in Seattle, recording there and getting a feel for the scene, making friends, had given us a new fire, and new goals. We were young, talented and making music people seemed to respond to. We had already sold several of our demos at a local, Seattle punk rock record store called 'Fallout', where an old friend, Paula Sen worked (then known by many as 'Paula Fallout') whom we met when SOC played in Tri-Cities. She worked there with the rock legend Tom Price of U-Men and Gas Huffer. Paula was playing bass in an excellent hardcore band called 'Whipped'. I assume we also started selling our single there prior to moving, but I am not positive. We may not have had them made yet.
I had a 1976, green Volvo 245 wagon like this named 'The Green Turtle' which towed much of our stuff across the desert and mountains when we moved to Seattle (and for years it came through as a camper and was a band vehicle for various bands). Photo retrieved from:
Us moving felt right. And to this day, I think it was, for me. I ended up living in Seattle for 14 years, and it was of course a great step for the band, no doubt about it. But the city didn't jibe as well with the others, and eventually, years later, I was the only one left there. Pat moved back briefly after moving back to Boise in the mid '90s. More on that later (I need to start writing down all these 'More on that laters'). All of them ended up seeing the world, and some still do, touring and playing music. So I was there in the wet hills, and they were living the dream, but...I am waaay ahead of myself now...
I said goodbye to my little house on N. 28th street in Boise, Idaho (above is a Google streetview shot of how it looks currently - the garage wasn't there before and the yard was full of fruit trees). I was pretty sure I had a dead room mate when I lived in this house.
I loaded up a U-Haul trailer hooked to my '76 Volvo wagon ('The Green Turtle', tank that it was) and said goodbye to my odd little house, which by then I was certain was haunted (I wrote a novel based on experiences I had while living there, among other things).
As I packed up I saw my 80 year old neighbor, Chet. He waved me over and we chatted. He proceeded to tell me that a woman, a prostitute, had lived in the house I was moving out of with her son, and had murdered her boyfriend there. Well, that explained a lot. If he had told me when I was moving in, I would chalk everything I experienced in that house up to suggestion, but...that is all for another type of blog, or, you can read my novel, 'Voice of the Bone-fed Moon' if anyone ever publishes it (any takers??).
Pat and I made a trip up to Seattle to secure an apartment for all of us. And by 'all of us' I mean a total of 9 people; The band plus 3 girlfriends, another friend who latched on to us, and a friend who was going to help us move and then hang out in Seattle for a couple months (this was Brad, who was the former bass player in Dissident Militia - see previous entries for more on this band - and the original singer in SOC).
This trip that Pat and I took was a big step because normally, we bickered a lot, but on this trip we got along very well. We had our goal in front of us. Later on, in the midst of conflict, we would reminisce and refer to this trip as proof that we could actually get along.
Tad and his girlfriend graciously let us stay at their apartment while we looked at potential places to live. I wasn't keen on moving in with everyone all at once, but we didn't really have a choice. I had a good amount of money in the bank due to the inheritance, but I was very concerned about making it last as long as possible (this became a point of contention with Pat, justifiably, more on that later).
Saying yes to The Refuzor House
Pat and I were pretty smart guys, but we were products of our environment. We grew up in Boise, and our experience renting apartments was largely based on how it was in Boise. Pat had lived in Santa Barbara as a college student, so he had a little more experience than I at renting away from home. We were naive and possibly in a little bit too much of a rush. It is true we did have a limited amount of time, but in retrospect, we should have cast our net much wider and looked at more places.
We ended up going with the bottom floor of a dumpy house on Capitol Hill behind a QFC store on Broadway (this QFC was just north of where it is now) that a slimy slumlord convinced us to rent. He owned the house next door as well, it was divided into tiny cubicles. Poor immigrants were crammed into them like sardines. Our 'home' was then occupied by the slumlord's nephew, his nephew's wife, their infant, and 2 dogs. They were being kicked into the basement below us so we could have the place! A great way to make friends right off!
We headed home with the good news.
We, all 9 of us, made the long drive over the desert and mountains and arrived at our new home. There were only two bedrooms. A couple of the girlfriends were very smart, savvy and 'grown ups', and thus wisely secured their own apartments before arriving in Seattle, and thus never moved into the hellhole (Doug and Pat were the lucky ones whose partners were on top of it, I, the unlucky one with no wiser-half).
My first 'bed' in Seattle (except mine was an old wooden one)
I had no actual room, but an 'area' in the front room, in the curve of a bay window. I had a cot for a bed and a cardboard wall. Zero privacy. When I was sitting on the toilet, I could see cockroaches scattering into a hole in the wall. A family lived above us and the father was a weed dealer. People were constantly knocking at our door and asking for him. "Upstairs," we would repeat over and over. The weed dealer family upstairs had a dog, a huge pit bull. He circled the roof, barking at the dogs of the slumlord's nephew, who circled on the ground, barking back. It was chaos, 24/7 (the QFC was actually 24/7 as well), so there was all kinds of foot traffic. Ah, big city livin'! I constantly had transgender people bumming cigarettes from me. I am not sure why. I had an approachable look about me, and maybe I looked like a smoker, though I have never been a one. I had to sadly inform them of this fact.
Later, we noticed old blood stains on the floor here and there. It turned out that the house had been a 'shooting gallery', which is a house where junkies live and shoot up. The occupants during its 'heyday' as a shooting gallery were the members of a fairly well-known, old-school punk band called 'The Refuzors', so the house was known as 'The Refuzor House' (it has long since been torn down, and is probably a condo by now...or a Starbucks).
The Refuzors were a pretty decent punk band, I came to find out years later. Check out this tune (w/slideshow):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDm15xTlSYA
Also, see Mike Refuzor on a silly network TV news spot on 'Punk' in Seattle (around '81 or '82):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzMeJMhhkSI
Workin' men
During this time, Scott secured a job working as a grunt for a construction contractor that Johnny (the singer from H-Hour) worked for. I was having bad luck finding a job, so I ended up applying there and getting a job as well. Suddenly, I was getting up at the ass-crack of dawn and serving as a taxi service for Scott and a couple other friends who also got jobs working for the same contractor.
Scott soon got a better job delivering Subway sandwiches on a scooter. Doug and Pat scored jobs at the Kinkos on Broadway (now gone) and eventually Scott worked there too, after Pat quit and got a great job as an editor for a small local paper (these last details are a little further on in the tale).
I was terrible at the construction job. In the beginning I did some amazing things I had never done before, and would never want to do ever, like dig a huge-tired 4 wheeled crane out of the mud, chainsaw creosote logs off that had been pounded into the Earth for a building foundation, saw those logs into smaller pieces, and load them by hand into a tractor scoop (burning the skin on my arms)...pouring foundation cement in the rain, too broke for rain boots....jackhammering asphalt for 8 hours a day. Fun.
Once, they let me help nail down plywood to a wall frame on the ground. I used a nail gun, but when we raised the wall, I had hit everywhere but the stud; The nails weaved around it like nail art. One carpenter, truly a lovely guy, a Buddhist, said to me, "You have no center." I quit soon after.
I got a job washing dishes in an egg restaurant on Broadway called 'Egg-cetera' (I shit you not). It snowed that winter [for people not familiar with the weather in Seattle this sounds weird, but it rarely snows in winter there] and I remember looking at it fall from inside the warm kitchen with my hot coffee and free breakfast, having a new-found appreciation for an indoor job, and thinking about those poor suckers pouring foundations in the snow.
Scott and his girlfriend got an apartment in the same building as Pat and his girlfriend, also on Capitol Hill. It was time for me to figure out a different living situation.
Wayne gets a roomie...
A friend of many mutual friends (including my ex) was a Boise woman who had just moved to Seattle from Los Angeles. She and I had become friends in Boise just before I moved and she had called me from LA around that time. She hated LA and was trying to figure out what to do next, so I suggested Seattle, as she had friends from Boise who lived there. She moved in with them, not far from where we lived. I visited her and found she was in her own little hell there.
About 6 or 7 of her friends were packed into a dark, basement apartment, with a few cats that were riddled with fleas. You could see the fleas hopping up from the carpet and after only a few minutes, you could feel the bites mounting on your ankles and shins. My friend had sores all up her legs from bites. Add the constant smell of dirty cat litter and pee and poop to this scene. Between the two of us, we needed to escape, so we ended up as room mates, and eventually we became a couple, for 7 years...but that is for later and really not much to tell even then, as I am protecting her privacy.
The apartment building in which we lived was located in what was then a kind of shitty area, where lots of druggies lived in tenament housing up the street (Summit off of Pine). I often saw pissed off crack dealers walking down the street, yelling to themselves, or people completely whacked out on something wandering around like zombies. A couple nights I heard shots outside the window. Now that area is hipster heaven, of course.
The Summit Arms apartments, my first 'real' Seattle apartment for 6 months, where my roomie became my girlfriend, which reminds me of a joke: What do you call a musician without a girlfriend? 'Homeless'
The apartment itself was dim, the walls were painted gray, and though it was on the second floor, it felt like a basement apartment, as the kitchen and a nearby bedroom that had windows faced walls a couple feet away, and my bedroom windows and the windows in the living room faced a Mercedes dealer and repair shop parking lot. It was a depressing place, especially in the winter when it was as gray outside as the paint on the walls. We only lasted 6 months there, but I had a four track tape machine with only two working tracks, and I recorded some interesting songs on it (maybe I will digitize and post them here) and wrote some decent poems, and, made some pretty cool collage art during those 6 gray months. We later got a place on East Thomas next to an apartment that Doug and his girlfriend lived in, owned by the same company.
I adapted to city life very quickly. I am on the fence about reincarnation, but some things make me believe, one of them being that we have yearnings out of nowhere that seem based on deep memories, memories that should not be readily accessible from the time frames that we actually live in. I never felt totally at home in Boise, and at the time, something about the city had always attracted me, and when I lived in Seattle, I felt like I had come home, at least for awhile. Seattle became my second home town. But that is later. Even though I and others adapted pretty well, we were still Boise Boys in the Big City. We always used to repeat that old saying which applies to any town but sounds so great for us because of the alliteration; "You can take the boy out of Boise, but you can't take the Boise out of the boy." We still had a lot to learn.
Next: Bad press on our 7 inch in THE rock mag in Seattle (that later became good press, read on to find out how) a straight-edge teenage Treepeople fan club, and...Playing pop-punk in a retro '70s rock scene
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