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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My other blogs: Short Story Long - (Top of mind, conversational, formal essays, photo essays, etc.) Artwork, Poetry
The Treepeople lp 'Guilt, Regret, Embarassment' - Artwork by the amazing Mike Scheer (http://www.mikescheer.com/)
Image retrieved from: http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_500/MI0000/198/MI0000198690.jpg?partner=allrovi.com
Guilt, Regret, Embarrassment, AKA 'GRE'; An album, and the beginning of an ending...
I have decided to devote an entire entry (which has evolved to three entries since this writing) to the Treepeople album 'Guilt, Regret, Embarassment', which was recorded at Avast! Studios in Seattle in 1990, engineered/co-produced by Stuart Hallerman [incorrectly listed as John Goodmanson previously] and produced by Steve Fisk. Why devote an entire entry to one album? I think the short answer is that I think it was important. This is through my lens, in that I think it was important to me; as a musician, as a person, as a young man part of a project of self-expression with other young men. At the risk of seeming vain, I can honestly say that I think that 'Guilt, Regret, Embarrassment' (hereafter referred to as 'GRE', pronounced 'Gree', as we came to do at the time) was/is also important to other people, as many people have told me this. As to why, you would of course have to ask each person. Based on what folks have told me, I will try and find common language to express it, after first expressing why it was/is important to me. Fair enough?
Working with Steve Fisk on the aforementioned single with the songs 'Neil's Down' and 'Cartoon Brew' at Egg Studios in Seattle proved to be a good experience personally. From a technical perspective, I don't think it was the right studio for us to work together in. For one, it was small, and for another, it just didn't have the right sound to capture what we were doing sonically. [Fisk has since clarified in a comment, the following (see full comment at the end of this entry below) "...the problem at the Egg session was my own learning curve. Its a great studio. I just wasn't used to changing work environments back then..."]. This is most certainly no diss to Conrad Uno's wonderful studio. Some amazing records were recorded there, and the sounds were perfect for those styles of music. Uno knows what he is doing. It just wasn't quite the right fit for Treepeople. At any rate, we liked working with Fisk, and had always intended to work with him on an album, as far as I remember.
Fisk was a good fit for more reasons than just his skill and unique approach as a producer. His background that led him to live and work in Seattle was also part of this, to my mind (and let's face it, the perspective of my mind is what you get coming to my blog!). He studied in Ellensburg, Washington and came into his own as a producer working with another tree band, Screaming Trees, producing the excellent era and genre-straddling album 'Even If and Especially When' (a record that was a big influence on me as a drummer). Screaming Trees were completely different in many ways from Treepeople, but we shared some similarities; we were young men from remote desert towns making our own brand of music that was a mixing of musical eras and styles that influenced us, and, the sound of each band relied heavily on guitar gymnastics and had a solid, 'hippy beat' rhythm base.
Steve Fisk also went to Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington in the '70s, his classmates being the creative force behind so much popular art in America later, from Disney to K Records, co-founded by Evergreen alumni Calvin Johnson (whom Fisk and Doug and I later played in a band with). The owner of Avast! Studios, Stuart Hallerman, was also an Evergreen alum, as was John Goodmanson. In fact, Goodmanson was the first person to record a scrappy young band called Nirvana (or some name like that...; )
The Geographical Triad of Indie Rock n' Roll in the '90s
Seattle, Boise and Olympia as towns had their own specific alternative rock cultures, but they shared more in common than they didn't. The rings left in water by the stone dropped into the musical pond shortly after 1990 had expanded outward from the epicenter of the Northwest region of the US; Washington, Oregon and Idaho. TAD was from Idaho. Hell, Paul Revere was from there, and could also be a branch further down on the musical tree, as The Sonics were for Seattle music (Hey, buddy is it a pond or a tree? Make up your mind already! Writing that just made me feel like Jim Gaffigan). The Three Swimmers originated in Idaho, as well. So, a good fit Fisk and the Treepeople, and this analysis is fresh, I'll have you know, as I have never really dissected why we were a good fit with Steve Fisk, I never had the need to, I just took it for granted that we were. I can't speak for other Treefolk, but I know they were all pleased with the end result.
Avast! Studios was a fast 'up and coming' studio in Seattle. It was owned and operated by a golden human being named Stuart Hallerman. Am I being baised in writing that statement? Fuck yes. And I challenge you to find a human being on the planet who has met him to say otherwise. They just don't exist. When there are folks like that I prefer to just call it as it is and was extant. So here we are. And uh...where were we? So his studio was in the Wallingford neighborhood (a neighborhood I ended up living in not long after this, a five minute walk away, which was handy for Violent Green's Avast! recording sessions, but, that is time machine stuff at this point). The tracking room (room where the live elements, like drums, rhythm guitar tracks and bass tracks are recorded in) was a good sized cinder block walled room that had this unique natural reverb, and as many of the best NW indie rock records were recorded here in the late '80s and through the '90s, it became a big part of the sound of that particular scene in terms of recorded material, and most certainly for a good deal of the Up! Records albums. It was one of my favorite studios and rooms to record live tracks in.
Stuart had been a live sound engineer for Soundgarden prior to owning Avast! In fact, when we were tracking GRE, they were rehearsing there. There was a wall of bass and guitar amps forever there, and that was the presence of SG. And in fact, the majority of the band (minus Chris Cornell, essentially) stopped by to talk to Stuart while we were tracking the instrumental/loop song on 'GRE', 'Trailer Park'. Stuart said they liked what they heard. We weren't huge SG fans then (I came to really appreciate and dig them later) but it was a compliment. We had, after all, started our career as Treepeople playing a Soundgarden cover, the song 'Hunted Down'. In a weird way, things were coming full circle, or at least full oval, in a way that would continue as a pattern for some of us, that of crossing paths with our musical heroes, or at the very least, as in this case, people who held our respect.
Hear Trailer Park here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BsJ9oyXjy8
The Forest Gump of Indie Rock?
Image retrieved from:
If you have followed this blog, you have seen how this path crossing had already happened to me many times by this point in the tale; Interviewing DOA, being Brothers with Posion Idea, coming up in a scene partially (mostly, really) started by Pushead, hanging out and having a long conversation with Glenn Danzig at a party in Salt Lake in the mid '80s, being asked to play bass in The Descendents, and other path crossings. One tale I forgot was a random day spent in Boise with Jello Biafra, but I will save that for a 'missed bits' entry where I add stuff I forgot. I have joked that I am the Forest Gump of indie rock, and as you continue to read this blog, you will see why. Specifically, crossing paths with known people is what I am discussing here, not deep friendships. Interesting parts of the tale, let's say. I am hyper-conscious of not coming off as name-dropping on here. The truth is that I have always felt uncomfortable [in retrospect, the wrong word, I guess I just mean it is an inevitable weirdness that just is, an entity of its own; fame, the creature that must be fed] around well-known people because that vibe surrounds them, that of people losing their shit when in their presence, it exists through no fault of their own, it just is. I never want to ask the one million questions, as I always knew that they had been asked one million times already. I wanted them to be able to relax. That was always my first concern. I didn't want to cause them stress. But I have MAJORLY digressed here, now haven't I?
A screenshot of a Google image search, keywords: '1990 in one picture'
It was a long time ago that we recorded 'GRE' (and now I can't help but hear Gilbert Gottfried's joke, '...You know, 400 years ago, people were walking around saying, 'THIS IS A LONG TIME AGO!' ~ from memory) so I don't remember a lot of details. I remember that being in a studio like Avast! felt 'professional' and serious. We had arrived and we were going to record our first album. We had no label lined up, but we had saved and made it happen, on the hopes that a local label like Sub Pop (who had distributed records for us and had been very helpful to us) or CZ (run by former Sub Pop employee & Skin Yard bass player Daniel House) would pick it up.
By this point in Treepeople's career, we were incredibly tight as a band. We practiced 3 to 4 times a week, played shows nearly every weekend for years, went back to Boise and played shows there in the midst of little Northwest tour jaunts. So we had our material down. It was part of us by then.
A shift began to happen in Pat, at least to my mind, in that he became very serious about the business end of what we were doing, and he truly wanted to make the dream of earning a living on our music come true, for himself at the very least, if not for all of us. I wish I could say this was inspiring to me at the time, in retrospect I see that it should have been, but I was young and naive, and still clinging to the punk rock ethos a bit too much; 'It isn't about that, it's about the music, about the message,' and all that jazz. But I now know with the benefit of the lens of time passed that after you do this a while, after you sacrifice so much time and money and hard work, it is only fair to be able to pay the bills. Needless to say, the ethic did rub off on us a bit, inevitably, especially on Doug, who up to that point had been content to mostly write songs and clock practice, studio and tour hours. He of course would later go on to be very successful at the business end of things (getting lots of help from Chris Takino in the beginning) with his band Built to Spill. It is a delicate balance that must be met in order find the line between taking care of business and having fun. The other side of this is that I also know that when it stops being fun, it is time to move on to something else. And this, my friends, is why I am happy where I am as a musician right now. It will always be work to produce 'The Work', but these days (said the old man) it is mostly about fun. Suffice it to say that to me, the most important thing in 1990 was the music. But that didn't mean I sneezed at the prospect of making a living at it. By then, many of our friends were already doing that. Why not us? And of course in a couple short years, everyone wanted to do that, and, the waters became crowded.
War
We in Treepeople were happy to spend long days in the studio, as opposed to doing this, in Kuwait. We prayed for no draft to be reinstated - Image retrieved from: http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/First-Gulf-War-Timeline-3.jpg
This blog exists in a bit of a bubble, insulated from world events, a bubble written round the music scene in Seattle and the Northwest, but obviously things like war become a factor in every aspect of your life, even in a country such as the US, that is so far removed from war that it views it as a video game or a sporting event. We were horrified to see glossy magazines put out by all the major news publications like Time, in which they salivated shamelessly about the advanced weaponry. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead. The major broadcast news media organizations were all in lockstep with Bush Sr. and the military. As Bill Hicks put it about the term coined by the White House for Iraqi forces, 'Elite Republican Guard', "...After not one reaction [to the US carpet bombing] at ALL...They went from being the 'Elite Republican Guard, to the 'Republican Guard' to...the republicans made this shit up about there being guards out there...I hope you enjoyed your fireworks show...'
The Immortal Bill Hicks. He was our Lenny Bruce, speaking truth to power, and one of the very few voices of sanity in a time of manufactured war and a re-branded ancient way to oppress people presented in glossy magazines slobbering over the machinery of war. At the time of recording GRE, these things were heavy on our minds.
When we were in the studio the ramp up to an attack in response to Iraq invading Kuwait was in full swing and we were dismayed. The war was of great concern to young men like Doug, who were of prime draft age, and I was only 24 myself, so it wouldn't be long, if they reinstated it, before they may have come for me, too. We held our breath. The tension of it was palpable, and you can hear it in the music, among the firmly established personal tension. An unavoidable fact of rock n' roll; Tension = good music.
The 'GRE' session was the first recording session where we spent 10 plus hours a day on tracking and editing and mixing, it felt like a job, not one that was a drag, trying and tiring, sure, but doing creative work, work that would mark a time in people's lives, ours and others' lives, a statement, a serious document, there we were, making it real, and it felt great.
And here we are at around 2,000 words, a stopping point, a reflective point. Next I will start with the second part of why GRE was important to others...As soon as I gather some quotes, and I know most readers of this blog are not the type to comment on them, but feel free to share why it is important to you if it is, or whatever, why you hate it. Or if you prefer to comment anonymously, just send me a private message to: waynerayflower@gmail.com
Love to folks and critters,
Wayne - 9/3/16
