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.
A kind of disclaimer on Violent Green entries...In writing about the band Violent Green, at this time I am not in contact with Jenny O'lay, so I am not directly getting input from her, and, one member is no longer alive. In the case of the former, out of respect to O'lay, I am compelled to keep personal details at a high level, and in terms of Drew Quinlan (RIP, Brother), I am not in touch with any of his family to get approval of what I write about concerning him, as I did with my previously passed bandmate, Pat Schmaljohn (and thus felt better in writing about Pat) but I do not have the same access to family in Drew's case, so for that reason, out of respect for Drew and his family, I will also keep details at a high level. I won't make it cold and unpersonal, don't misunderstand me. Our dynamic as people was a huge part of the band. I guess what I am getting at is there are details that will remain private, to meet with high standards I strive to meet on this blog, even more so in light of this lack of input from the former bandmates of which I write. I hope I have achieved these standards. This also brings up the point I always make, but it is important to reiterate; this is all from my perspective only, and of anyone whom I get input from.
Our odd relationships and their tensions were one with the music, and I think, actually I know, that was a good thing, a necessary ingredient of this band, a band that forever reshaped how I thought about music, both listening to it and making it. I owe that to Drew and Jenny's brilliance and imperfectness, which made me feel okay about my own imperfections, (only to a degree, as my inner, self-critical voice was still in full effect) and it helped me realize that even I held brilliance, in my own way, when I played with them, warts and all. One thing I can confidently say is; we gave a fuck about the music. And that was because this was a highly musical band (most of the people who got what we were doing were musicians themselves) and thus I will focus much of my energy in terms of the VG entries talking about that; the music, it's influences and forms, and how the three of us and what we brought to the band from previous projects and the music we each loved, created, eventually, a rich tapestry. It is worth digging into this world O'lay spun with this bizarre, dark, poppy, goth, folksy punk music from Mars ~ *
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My other blogs: Short Story Long - (Top of mind, conversational, formal essays, photo essays, etc.) Artwork, Poetry
From my Facebook post on the Violent Green entries, dated May 10th, 2017
"...Not everybody jibed with what we laid down, but I realized those who did, made up, consistently, about a third of anyone seeing us live or hearing records...
...And we were in our own musical cocoon in the midst of the music scene Nirvana's success had wrought in Seattle in the early to mid '90s. Still, we managed to find musical kin and hearths scattered within that scene and on the road, and just...do our thing, sort of like a jazz band..."
Back to Bass-ics
When I started jamming with Drew Quinlan and Jenny O'lay, I hadn't played bass in a band since the State of Confusion years, though I had dinked around on one at home and played bass on home recordings over the years while I was focused on drums. I felt far more confident on bass than on drums, and to this day I feel I am a far better bass player than a drummer, though I have gotten to be a pretty decent drummer as well. So I was getting back into the groove of bass playing and happy about it, as I had missed it. Jenny O'lay's songwriting was a bass-player's dream in that there was a lot of space in the songs for innovative playing, and a lot of open chords so I could play a part a number of different ways.
For a bass, I asked friends if they knew anyone selling one (my bass from the SOC days was out of commission). Steve Fisk's friend PS Oneil (a notable musician out of the Olympia/Evergreen scene) was selling a unique bass, a Kramer (which he got from the bass player of Meat Purveyor, Tony Cascioppo).
Kramers were no longer made. Kramer also made guitars. Their signature design was that the necks of the basses and guitars were mostly metal, ending in a two-pronged fork at the end. The bass I bought had a little bit of wood inlay in the metal neck. It has a trippy high-end sound to it, similar to how a Rickenbacker sounds (though not quite as deep or distorted).
Since I didn't have a bass amp anymore, I was also shopping for a bass rig (amp+speaker(s)). My downstairs neighbors were kind of goofy musicians who had a band they had been doing for a bit called Atom & Evil. The bass-player was selling a cabinet he had and I bought it, an SWR with one dynamic 18 inch speaker. At a music store in Pioneer Square devoted exclusively to bass-players, I found a great solid state/tube split Musicman HD 150 amp head to complete the combo. It is my bass rig to this day, and, it has a history of being on more records than I have while I have owned it, for instance, it is the bass rig used on the third Built to Spill LP, 'Perfect From Now On'.
I came across the Kramer bass when Fisk asked me to add some bass parts to a song on a second lp for a project that he was one half of, a groove-based funk/soul group called Pigeonhed, the other half of which was renowned Seattle singer/songwriter Shawn Smith (the record would be called 'The Full Sentence'). Pigeonhed had already released an excellent, self-titled debut LP (which proved to be a big influence on later Violent Green songs, and on me as a musician). Fisk just needed me to add some heavy chords with the Kramer on a sort of, driving, stalling, instrumental chorus of a song that was pretty interesting in terms of its origin. The main tracks were from a rejected song recorded by Soundgarden (I haven't confirmed, but I think they did release it later) and later Helios Creed (an innovative and widely respected godfather of what became known as industrial music, purveyed in his band Chrome) added feedback noises using only guitar pedals looped into each other, which he manipulated with the settings and nobs on the pedals. You can hear the Pigeonhed song, 'Phunpurephun', here: Phunpurphun
And here is a mention of Phunpurephun from the Boston weekly The Phoenix, by Brendan Joel Kelley, on indie rockers playing electronic music: "...Meanwhile, Fisk lays down thumps with Parliament-flavored synths, then overlays them with instrumental tracks by some of the duo's friends (Helios Creed from Chrome, Wayne Flower of the Treepeople). Smith's shimmering soul and Fisk's funk aptitude redefine what R&B has evolved into; Pigeonhed demonstrates just how diverse two white boys raised on punk rock can be..."
See entire article here: http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/music/indie-rockers-do-it-better-6422890
Pigeonhed's first LP, very The Full Sentence
influential on later
Violent Green songs
Over the years using this Kramer bass in a couple of bands, I learned the ups and downs of its design. The ups are that because of the metal neck, the sustain (the length of time a note or notes will vibrate) is insanely long, and, when you put it through pedals or any kind of distortion, it sounds like a weird, thick electric guitar. This bass has also been on more records that I have not been on (during the time I have owned it) notably, Brett Netson later used it for a kind of lead guitar track on the Caustic Resin tune on the incredible double-LP 'Fly Me To The Moon' called 'Station Wagon'. You can hear 'Station Wagon' here: Station Wagon
My Kramer bass, nicknamed 'The Kingpin' for its metal neck and crown-like ivory inlays bewteen the frets on the neck. Poor thing is missing a pick-up (the other is the original Kramer pick-up). It is a cool, weirdass bass, and became part of my 'signature' sound in early Violent Green and Halo Benders. I will own it until I die, as it is very unique sounding. Also, it has been on more records than I have during the time I have owned it.
Below is a link to a song from a Halo Benders show in 1995 where you get a glimpse of the bass head I describe, and can hear the unique sound of the bass itself in the song Blank Equation (from the album 'Don't Tell Me Now.')
The Halo Benders playing Blank Equation
As for the cons/downsides of the beast/bass, it went out of tune very easily, and was very sensitive in this regard when more and more people filed into a show as you were playing, thus warming the room with their body heat. Let's just say that I got very good at tuning while playing! At any rate, the sound of this bass became kind of a signature sound for me for a time (including on some of the early Halo Benders tunes and live shows) and I had chosen my amp specifically to counter the trebley sound it had (additionally, I used flat-wound strings for the same reason). As an unintended result, the amp combo I chose had a pretty killer sound all around, for any kind of bass. It still does! Ok, enough bass nerd stuff...
Dirty Hand Dance
Image retrieved from: http://www.scottbetty.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/smoking-psa-gunfighter-500x310.jpg
Jenny O'lay had attended film school for a number of years in Eugene prior to living in Seattle and her love of film strongly influenced her songwriting, at least to my mind, especially in the imagery that her lyrics evoked. I will discuss this more in detail over the next few entries. She played for a short time in the legendary Olympia band, Some Velvet Sidewalk (one of the most original bands ever) but on a tour she quit the band and stayed in New York City for a time, dropping from the tour while the band continued it without her. I don't know how long she lived in NYC, having adventures (some of which she recounted to me) but it wasn't very long.
The first name of our band Jenny came up with embodied the 'film-as-song' approach, in that it was about gunfighting, but ultimately didn't work, as the image in her head and what came across were very different. The name was, as eluded to by the title of this section, Dirty Hand Dance. I wasn't a fan of the name at the time for two reasons, one of which relates to the above; 1. To me, and many people I told the name to, it sounded like some sort of euphemism for masturbation, and 2. I didn't like the linked 'D's' of the words 'Hand' and 'Dance', as they kind of ran together; 'Handdance'. However, we had the name Dirty Hand Dance for about 6 months (best guess) before changing to Violent Green. More on the origin of the VG name later.
I may have mentioned this earlier in the blog, but the process of coming up with a name is grueling. You become obsessed with it, thinking of it all day, all day, trying to come up with a name. Drew and Jenny were stoked about a name they came up with; Heroine Kiss, and, as you can see by viewing the name, 'heroine' isn't 'heroin', but when you hear it, it is a whole different story. They thought it clever, I disagreed, and had just lost some friends to heroin, so, it was scrapped. I can see why they thought it was kind of cool, but at the time I was concerned that too many people would think we were glorifying heroin, and that wasn't what they meant by it at all. I came up with a long list of shitty names, as I remember it, which is unusual for me (my record, to this day, is pretty good on that front otherwise). I jumped ahead a bit here, and, I digress...
My impression of Jenny when I first got to know her was that she was; tiny, funny, magnetic, hyper-intelligent and kind of dark, I can't explain it better. I suppose, knowing her music intimately bespeaks the darkness part, so my view was through that lens. She came from a childhood that made her scrappy and tough, and her father Lionel O'lay was a writer (journalism and hard-boiled fiction) and close friends with Hunter S. Thompson, whom he wrote with as a colleague during his days at 'Stars and Stripes'. Thompson wrote O'lay's obituary when he died, and that ended up in Thompson's book 'The Great Shark Hunt'. I can't help but think that her father's life as an artist has a bit to do with who Jenny was/is as an intellectual. She herself never bragged about the Thompson connection, or wore it as any kind of social status, it was a mere fact of her life. It most surely means more to others, including myself, than to her.
Jenny's knowledge of film is encyclopedic. She introduced me to some of my favorite film makers like Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, Bergman and Herzog. The early songs were more influenced by western films, it seemed, possibly she was watching a lot of them at the time, and the music was rooted in folk and country, for the better part of each song, anyway, but then would drop into some sort of funky punk stuff (foreshadowing of what was to come) and the lyrics were like something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel (an author she admired and also introduced me to, and, the source of the Violent Green band name, more later). Songs kind of had choruses, but...not really. They progressed more how a conversation does than a song, sort of like, well, scenes and dialogue in a film. That is the best metaphor I can think of for her songs' structure. This trait remained throughout the time I was in the band, and, the short time after. There are, of course, exceptions to this, little pop gems, which she could whip out at will, but she did so very selectively.
Fliers from our 'Dirty Hand Dance' era, including our first show with legendary Portland, Oregon band Dead Moon.
~Artwork in background of top flier by Bill Sienkeiwicz from his unfinished comic series, Big Numbers
School
Rehearsals
As laid out above, there was some learning and getting to know each other musically that had to happen, let alone getting to know each other personally, at the beginning of the band, which brings up the point that this was the first band I had started in with people I didn't know well. I of course knew Drew, he being the only reason I was there, really, but I didn't know him well yet. We would quickly become good friends. With Jenny and I it was all business, for the most part, while she and Drew got along very well. All this was wrapped up in those first rehearsals. So it was slow going at first, but the first stage of songwriting, as mentioned above, was folksy and slightly dark and funky and weird, swaying between various moods and styles within the same song. We first practiced in Drew's house in the Central District, which he shared with a mutual good friend and her boyfriend, both of them being seminal figures in the Seattle hardcore punk scene; Paula Sen, bass player/co-singer/co-songwriter in Drew's band Whipped, and Glen Esary, singer in the band Christ on a Crutch (see earlier Seattle entries for more on both bands).
Drew set up a cube of carpeting over mattresses lining the walls in the basement room next to his room in which we wrote and practiced. Picture me, slightly stooped with hair in my face, a cross between Lurch and Cousin It, and Jenny, tiny and belting out a powerful voice, and Drew, built like a welterweight fighter, playing somehow powerfully yet delicately (a signature of his style, as mentioned above, kind of like a punk Elvin Jones). He had a 4 track tape machine on which we recorded our songs, the beginnings of a weird, chaotic but productive way of tracking what we were doing, a process that was later forced into being more organized with the introduction of sampling into the songwriting process. At this point, we had some good songs, a handful at least. Two of them made it on to our first 7 inch ('Waiting For June and 'You Make Me Wish I Had A Gun') put out by Chris Takino as the first release on his label Up! Records, after we had officially changed our name to Violent Green and after playing our first show in Olympia, Washington as Dirty Hand Dance with the legendary Portland, Oregon band Dead Moon. That is for next time.
Love to Folks and Critters,
Wayne ~*
