Disclaimer: Memory is a funny thing, and an elusive one. Meaning; I might have some of this wrong, as 1. My memory is not always accurate, like anyone and 2. It is from my perspective only. Any friends who were there, feel free to correct me or add things I have missed. It helps! Also, no gossip on anyone here, it ain't about that. Personal details are on a surface level, and friends, girlfriends and others are re-named to respect their privacy. People in bands generally put their names out there on albums and in interviews anyway, and are not in the habit of staying anonymous, and therefore are named here. That said, anyone who is in the blog that wishes me not to use their name has only to ask.
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, not to mention the 12 years I played music following that, 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. Also, 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>>>
Bremerton Rock City
Bremerton, Washington - Image retrieved from: ß
Upon arriving as a band into the Seattle music scene in 1989-90, Treepeople already had a group of dedicated fans in a small navy town across from Puget Sound called Bremerton (today the population is at around 40,000, not sure what it was in 1990). Our demo cassette, 'No Mouth Pipetting', had been purchased, in large part, by kids from this town, at the aforementioned Fallout Records in Seattle. Among our very first gigs after our arrival were some memorable shows in Bremerton, which were unlike any we were to experience again.
The scene in Bremerton at the time was made up mostly of hippy-ish punk kids who were straightedge (i.e., no drugs or alcohol) but not in the Washington, DC punk scene sense of the word. They weren't preachy, they were just sweet, and huge music enthusiasts. We played some parties, the first of which was in the basement of a house, and if I remember correctly, it was someone's parents' house and the parents were out of town. Every single party we had played prior to this, especially of the 'parents-out-of-town' variety, involved people engaging in 'sex, drugs and rock n' roll'. Not this one!
We had never played a party show in a basement where our lungs were not filled with cigarette smoke. At this show, the air was clear and clean, and filled with singing by the crowd, for they had all memorized every single word of our demo songs. They sang and politely bumped each other while sort of dance-skanking and grinning ear-to-ear. It was insane. And sweet.
Doug Marsch described this party and the Bremerton scene and its importance to the beginnings of Treepeople in Seattle in a 2007 interview with Boise Weekly, "...We played a house party in Bremerton...and there were all these kind of straight-edge punk rock kids, 50 or 60 of them, and they were actually singing along to the words on our demo tape," Martsch says. "That was a big thing. They were really involved in putting on shows, so we ended up getting a lot of them. We played in a few different scenes, with punk rock bands and hardcore bands, and through that, we all made certain connections..."
I am officially thanking anyone who was part of this sweet little Bremerton scene at the time. You all gave us an incredible welcome and boosted our confidence in what we were doing in new and unfamiliar territory.
I also remember playing a great show at a large hall in Bremerton with an excellent punk band called The Daves.
Good times!
Early shows
Beyond the Bremerton shows, we dove into many more shows in town, more than I could list here. I can scrape my brain and come up with some memorable ones. We played a great show with The Melvins (the influential dirge rock/metal band who had inspired/influenced bands like Nirvana and TAD) and Blood Circus (our jam-space roommates) on January 13th, 1990, at the then popular Central Tavern, where we had recently been blown away by Pure Joy, TAD and Dinosaur (see Part 20 in this blog).
Buzz Osborne of the band The Melvins, 1990
Photo retrieved from: http://www.eastportlandblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Melvins-300x283.jpg
The Melvins, 1990 promo photo
Image retrieved from: http://www.premierguitar.com/articles/19878-melvins-buzz-osborne-tonal-triage?page=5
I remember loading in at the alley door in back and that it was unlike any alley load-in door I had ever seen (or so I thought...read on to see what I mean) as it was about 4 and a half feet off of the ground (when normally they were, at most, a couple feet up). There were stairs one had to walk up to get to the equipment you had just shoved up onto the loading dock in front of the door. Many years later, I made a connection between this loading area and a dream I had years prior to moving to Seattle, in which I played drums for the band Journey, and we played a show at a club with a load in identical to this club, years before I would ever see it, or ever play drums. That makes the dream a total trip, of course. But I have to ask...Journey? WTF? Who knows. The mind is mysterious...Don't stop believin'.
Flyer for Treepeople show with Blood Circus and The Melvins
Flyer retrieved from:
http://www.themelvins.net/wiki/index.php?title=January_13,_1990
Flyer retrieved from:
http://www.themelvins.net/wiki/index.php?title=January_13,_1990
In 1990, I was just becoming familiar with The Melvins, but I already admired them on many levels. They were incredible, unique musicians who played whatever the fuck they wanted. They didn't try and fall into some popular sound, or some sound their peers were playing, and they quite simply kicked serious ass, and still do to this day. They embodied crunchy, thick and heavy grooves within chord combinations echoing metal, but this music was/is its own creature entirely. They were a three piece at that time. Guitarist/songwriter/singer Buzz Osborne (AKA 'King Buzzo') had/has wild hair and a fierce, heavy guitar style that drives through his thick, angular songwriting. Over his songs, Buzz lays down impassioned singing, with much of the tone and delivery of metal singing, but sounding nothing at all like it.
On drums is the impressive Dale Crover (in recent years another drummer has been added in addition to Dale) whose drumming is like precise, deep and booming hammers, or a passionate, controlled earthquake. In my mind, no other drummer could be as perfect as Dale for Buzz's songwriting. There was a rotating cast of bass-players for many years. At the time of the Central show I recount here, I believe the bass player was Joe Preston (later of the amazing Thrones, a one man band like no other...GO SEE THRONES).
Around this time we also played some shows with the amazing pop-punk-rock-n'-roll band The Purdins, who lived above the rehearsal space we practiced in (as mentioned in Part 23 of this blog). As previously mentioned, The Purdins put on an amazing show, and wrote great, catchy pop punk tunes with great lyrics about daily angst and modern woe. Treepeople would play many excellent shows with The Purdins. Sadly, The Purdins were never really given their due. Why? My theory is that they never really toured or tried to get signed to an indie label or any of the things that many of the bands aspired to in those days. And though I can't speak for the members, my guess is they didn't really care about that. They just wanted to play local shows in Seattle and Washington state, run their studio and hang out. Nothing wrong with that! And they released an excellent CD, which is not only one of my favorite CDs to come out of the Seattle scene, but of all time.
The Purdins at the Crocodile Cafe, 1993
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypy2cJcHcRA
An excellently edited video montage of the Purdins playing various shows over-layed with a tune of theirs{
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtS2cJMlT-M
An excellently edited video montage of the Purdins playing various shows over-layed with a tune of theirs{
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtS2cJMlT-M
The location of the Squid Row Tavern (pictured here post Squid Row, as a bar called Kincora) on Pine and Belmont. Many a memorable night later not remembered happened here...
Photo retrieved from: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Seattle_Kincora_01.jpg
Nirvana playing on the tiny stage at Squid Row, around '89 or '90. The front entrance (mentioned above) is just to Kurt's left. Nirvana played here often, mostly opening for other, more established Seattle bands.
Image retrieved from: http://s1138.photobucket.com/user/madwentmad/media/nirvana/1-50.jpg.html
The first SR show I went to was to see the band Love Battery, directly after a doomed date that I had just escaped from. It was a great show. The space itself, though small, was an excellent place to see bands, it was very intimate, and there was a nice big bar and surprisingly, lots of tables and places to sit. You had to yell most of the time to have conversations as there was nowhere to escape the rock!
One night I was at a Gorilla show (more on this band in later entries) sitting at the bar, nursing a beer, as I was broke. Gorilla was, as usual, rocking the hell out of that place at full, drunken volume. A woman sat next to me; white, maybe in her thirties, completely lit out of her mind. She struck up a conversation with me between songs, which got around to me saying I was a musician. "I've always wanted to learn how to play the guitar," she yelled into my ear through my long hair. I informed her I was a drummer. "I've always wanted to learn to play the drums," she then said. Okay, Lady! At this point it became clear she was attempting to pick up on me, which I was not interested in, so I ignored her.
Later, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see the woman I was just talking to. The band was blaring and she yelled into my ear, "MY NOSE RING IS IN YOUR HAIR!!" "???" She repeated this, then explained that her nose ring must have gotten caught in my hair when she was yelling in my ear. I sifted my fingers through my hair but did not find it, shrugged at her. She got on her hands and knees behind the bar stools and looked for it on the ground, finally gave up and stumbled out the door, past a Native American woman who had wandered into the bar and was dancing to Gorilla.
A show at Squid Row featuring Skin Yard around 1990. Note that Nirvana was opening.
Image retrieved from: http://nirvananews.tumblr.com/post/26243800112/7-30-88-squid-row-tavern-seattle-wa
I remember an early Squid Row show with the band Crypt Kicker 5, featuring the man who had produced our 7 inch record, Jack Endino, on drums, who, to our delight, was wearing a Treepeople shirt while playing. Other shows we played at SR included shows with Hammerbox and the The Gits.
Here is an interesting take on Squid Row from various people's perspectives: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=449526
When most rock journalists talk about Squid Row, as so often happens when anyone writes about the Seattle music scene in the '90s, they write about Nirvana playing there. And they did play there a lot, but so did pretty much every band in the scene, because it was relatively easy to get on a bill there, you could charge cheap cover, and the beer and booze was cheap. It is worth noting that Nirvana mostly opened for bands at SR, before they were famous (as the above flyer shows). I will stop here about SR, since I have decided, as I did regarding the Boise club The Crazy Horse, to devote an entire entry in this blog to Squid Row. I am currently collecting any SR stories. Email any you may have to waynerayflower@gmail.com.
Seattle Punk
Treepeople was also tied into the punk scene in Seattle, being from hardcore punk roots ourselves, and played some great shows with our good friends' bands mentioned in previous entries; Whipped, and Christ on a Crutch among many other bands (please send me any other shows you remember!). This scene was largely ignored by the music press and the whole hype-fest that exploded just before the whole Seattle scene did, and I will also devote an entire entry to it. There were so many excellent bands, and they deserve their due. For now, though, I will stop here. The '90s Seattle scene is proving to be a major challenge to write about!
Songs from Whipped's LP, 'Cleanliness is Next to Godliness' and various 7 inches
Up Next? Oh hell, I don't know yet! Sorting through it all....
