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.
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My other blogs: Short Story Long - (Top of mind, conversational, formal essays, photo essays, etc.) Artwork, Poetry
Smells Like 'What the Fuck?'
In an earlier post, I talked about how I was a dishwasher at a restaurant on Capitol Hill in Seattle in '91, a really cool place called 'The Ritz', which was a meat and potatoes kind of joint frequented by mostly older, white, gay men, who, in terms of their tastes, were very much like most older, white straight men; they liked their prime rib and steak, booze, good wine, cigars, mahogany wood trim and red leather seats in the booths. I bonded with the Samoan, lesbian chef who ran the kitchen. I was treated well, she even made me an 'honorary lesbian', half-jokingly (I was honored). I got the job because Scott Schmaljohn had cleaned the restaurant after hours for extra cash for a while, heard they were hiring and told me about it.
Current business occupying the space where The Ritz Cafe' was in the '90s, now (if it is still there) called 'Coastal Kitchen'. Next door was a cool, old school book store you can still see the sign for in this photo. It's probably a Starbucks now ; )
Image retrieved from:
One night in 1992, I was in the kitchen doing food prep to help the cooks out and we were listening to the local commercial pop radio station called 'The Kube' when the Nirvana song 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' from their album 'Nevermind' came on. I was shocked. "Is this...is this Nirvana?" I asked my boss. She shrugged. "This is crazy," I remarked. And at the time, it really was. That barrier had never been breached by alternative bands. The unwritten rule was; 'Alternative bands = college radio play'. 'Commercial pop bands = commercial radio play'. But of course Nirvana had just been signed to the major label Geffen, who worked hard to push them into the mainstream with muscle they could leverage on radio stations. Also, my previous band had just played with Nirvana, (as covered last entry) and everyone bought all their merchandise in a flash and scurried to put on their Nirvana shirts right there at the show, so it wasn't a total surprise. But it was certainly unexpected.
Screenshot from Billboard archive at:
For musicians playing in the Seattle scene this caused quite a stir. This was an era where New Kids on the Block and Michael Bolton were still a force on pop radio, to give context. I won't bother going into the whole history of Nirvana's rise to fame, it is well documented everywhere (even in previous entries in this blog).
Whether members of the Seattle scene liked Nirvana or not, most musicians I knew felt a bit possessive of the band, and especially of Kurt Cobain. Since the days when Tad Doyle and his band TAD took Nirvana under his wing for Nirvana's first European tour in the late '80s, they (Nirvana) had become more and more popular, and we were proud of that, and of the fact that Kurt wasn't abandoning his punk rock roots (as I have mentioned a few times on this blog) and was a thorn in the side of the mainstream music industry, or maybe a rock in their shoe is a more appropriate metaphor. We considered him one of our own.
Kurt and Tad having some fun
Many of my friends were friends with Kurt (one of whom told me "None of us really knew Kurt", referring to the intentional shroud of bullshit that Kurt surrounded himself with, most of the legends you hear of came from this tale-spinning) so it felt personal to me, watching this all unfold, hearing unfiltered stories of how Kurt and the band were handling the shift. But no one foresaw how big they would become. We suddenly had to share Nirvana and Kurt with the world. It was kind of like we had this special brother who could tap into raw human emotion and release it through that incredible voice, and we were protective of him, even if some among us didn't know him, or even like his music. Nirvana's rise seemed to happen over night, it took us by surprise, and then, the sleepy little bubble of the Seattle music scene was about to burst, and many of us were not very happy about it, while at the same time being proud of the recognition, which was conflicting and confusing. This attitude, at least for me and most of my friends, was a hold-over from the punk rock ethos, and having the impossible expectation of being able to pick and choose who was worthy to listen to our music, or music that we found important. It seems to me that Kurt felt that way also.
'We were no slouches, but we had friends in the right places...'
Compared to a lot of bands (especially Seattle bands), Treepeople led a fairly charmed existence in some ways, I will admit, and realization of this came only after years and distance from those times. We just happened to be, by twists in fate, connected to some key people in the Seattle scene, especially Tad Doyle, Paula Sen and Chris Takino, who helped us out quite a bit. This is not in any way to discount our hard work or talent also being a major part of it, but I had some friends back in those days point this out and I kind of scoffed at them, I believe. I can understand their perspective more now.
That said, as I stated, it was just happenstance, in many ways, that the Seattle scene would blow up right after we moved there and that it had strong Boise roots to it, and that we got on a killer Dinosaur Jr./Nirvana show that just happened to be 6 months prior to Nirvana rocketing upward. Nobody could have predicted or arranged all that. It just happened.
Life After Treepeople
Artwork by Scott Schmaljohn from the Treepeople 7 inch record, 'Makin' the D' (Slightly altered by the author)
It was quite an adjustment for me to get used to not being in Treepeople, or in a band at all (for a short time, anyway, with no knowledge of what the future held). And Scott, Pat and Doug wasted no time in getting a replacement drummer, Tony Dallas Reed, a local Seattle musician who played in a band called Twelve Thirty Dreamtime. I believe he played guitar and sang in that band (currently he has a cool band called Mos Generator, check them out) but he was/is a very talented multi-instrumentalist and easily fit the drummer role in Treepeople. I will be publishing Tony Reed's perspective on joining the band next entry.
I have written in this blog about how being in a band is a lot like being in a relationship/marriage, and this fact became real when I realized that hearing Treepeople already had a replacement drummer for me about a month after I quit felt very much like how it felt when I had broken up with a woman and found out they were already seeing someone else.
I agreed to let the band use my PA system and my drum kit for a while. I think Pat was using my Peavey bass amp held over from when I played bass in State of Confusion as well, but now that I think about it, I am pretty sure he bought it from me outright when we started Treepeople. I have a vague memory that they bought my PA, and offered to buy my drums, but I declined; they were my babies (I still have them today). So I owned nearly half of the equipment they were using, which I felt a little weird about, but I didn't see the harm in them using it for a while (they used my drum kit on the first tour they did in '92). They needed it because they hit the ground running, but at the end of 1992, I wanted my drum kit back, and I had my brother come with me to Georgetown to pick it up as a safeguard, in case Pat and I got into it, or there was resistance. It was indeed awkward, but a 'peaceful transition', so to speak.
Part of 'hitting the ground running' was Treepeople recording a new ep with their new drummer and combining it with a remixed version of the 'Time Whore' ep we released in '90 (as covered in a previous entry, Fisk had to mix the 'Time Whore' ep again, as the pressing plant lost the master tape of the mix that had been produced by Jack Endino). The two eps were released together as a double, Steve FIsk produced ep/lp called 'Something Vicious For Tomorrow', which CZ Records released. I obtained a pre-release cassette copy of it from Doug, and I remember being very impressed with it, especially the songs 'It's Allright Now Ma' (one of the most punk Treepeople songs I had heard, at least since 'Transitional Devices' on the 'GRE' lp), in which the guitar playing, especially Scott's hammering metalish leads, floored me, and 'Funnelhead', which brought back memories of how we used to half-joke and ask the songwriter, "Is this song about me, Bro?" (covered in a previous entry) in that I assumed some of the lines were about me. I don't know if they are, I never asked, and most likely, they are not. The shift in lyrical content, to my ears, was toward more personal politics, and overall, the themes covered seemed more bitter in tone than the trademark melancholy of the work we had done up to that point, when I was in the band (even the title of the new ep was more bitter). I could only think, at the time, with everything that had just happened being so fresh, that this tension had something to do with our recent, tense parting. But my view of this is, of course, incredibly biased.
Mike Scheer's awesome and disturbing artwork for the double ep by Treepeople called 'Something Vicious For Tomorrow' which included a previously released ep, 'Time Whore' ~
Also included on the ep was the cover of The Smiths song 'Big Mouth Strikes Again' that we had been playing toward the end of my time in the band. As mentioned before, The Smiths were a big influence on Treepeople and especially on Doug, who helped me, Scott and Pat to understand how good their music was. We had really nailed this cover and made it our own while still being faithful to the original, as we had done with pretty much any of the limited covers we did, and the version on the new ep sounded great, too, I thought. Joseph Neff put it this way in his review of the record on The Vynil District: "...But most interestingly of all there’s the cover of The Smith’s “Big Mouth Strikes Again”, which succeeds with flying colors and against strong odds since in my estimation nearly all loud/heavy adaptations of Smith’s material trample the essence of the source material. Instead, the qualities of “Big Mouth…” points to Martsch’s later proclivity for indulging in wide ranging and unexpected cover material..." I would add that this was actually a Treepeople proclivity first!
See entire review here (better written than most reviews):
When your ex's new partner isn't the asshole you'd pictured...
I put aside any bitterness or weirdness about my recently leaving Treepeople and committed to sitting down during a time when I had the apartment to myself, and listened to 'Something Vicious For Tomorrow'. I of course was very focused on the drums at first. And I was, as I mentioned, impressed. T Dallas Reed (as he was known then) had a style that synced with Scott, Pat and Doug very well, and he kept true to my quirky way of drumming to the guitars. The music was fierce, but also embodied the trademark, aforementioned melancholy, as in the song 'Liquid Boy'. The title song, 'Something Viscous For Tomorrow,' is probably my least favorite song of Scott's, to be honest, but I can't deny that the timing of the record, the name of the song, how I felt when I first heard it, made me incredibly biased. That said, it has some pretty good, metalish hooks, and I should add that I held this song up, perhaps unfairly, next to Scott's excellent songwriting on 'GRE'. The truth is, no songwriter continually cranks out excellent songs. Scott had many great TP songs to come, and his current songwriting in his band The Hand is outstanding.
So this part was, to continue the earlier, 'band as romantic relationship' metaphor, the part after the breakup where you run into your ex with his/her new partner, and you really want to hate the new person, but you can't because they are in actuality pretty cool. And this is confusing and frustrating at first. But you get over it. And I did, mainly because I never regretted my decision, also like how when you break up with someone whom you actually loved, so the separation is painful, but also right, because you weren't happy in the relationship, and also you truly wish the best for your ex.
A New Job, a New Band
I nursed my wounds for a year or less, got a job working at a bagel joint with a great reputation, called Spot Bagel, (originally started in the Wallingford neighborhood) after my job at The Ritz fizzled when the new owner tried to make the menu healthy and banned smoking (this was well before the sweeping change when states/cities began outlawing smoking in certain areas) and effectively killed the business (if he would have waited a decade, he would have done well!). Spot Bagel was a beloved Seattle business, low key and hippy dippy, an ultra left style business, as many small businesses were in the Pacific Northwest then. But they were under new executive management, which would prove to be a bad thing in a very short time, but I had no way of knowing that. I was glad to not be a dishwasher, which was the only type of job (outside of my failed stint in construction) I had been able to get in Seattle up to that point. I was hired for the new location that was about to open, located inside a mini mall area in a new condo (the Newmark Building, still there) built right next-door to the famous Pike Place Market, where I had worked only a few years prior at the Soundview Cafe'. As with most of my jobs in Seattle at the time, it too would end in utter chaos. More on that later.
Right around this time, Drew Quinlan, the drummer of the hardcore band Whipped, (see previous entries) said that he had been jamming with a local songwriter, a woman named Jenny O'lay, who had played for a brief time in the legendary, unique Olympia band, Some Velvet Sidewalk, and he wondered if I wanted to try playing bass with them and see how it went, and maybe we could form a band. I am sure I said "Yes!" before he even finished asking. Thus began my time playing with the band that would eventually be named Violent Green.
I have no memory of our first rehearsals specifically, but I remember instantly liking Jenny's unique songwriting and guitar playing styles, which were kind of folksy at the time, and her incredible, emotional voice, easily on par with Kurt Cobain's in terms of intensity and rawness when she screamed, but she could also sing in a straightforward, folk style. We began rehearsing regularly, right away. My post Treepeople journey had begun, and my life as a musician would never be the same.
