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.
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 band-mates 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 ~*
A silly Steve Fisk disclaimer: Steve Fisk is everywhere in this blog because, as you can/will see, we worked together a lot during this time, and we work together still. Deal with it! (Or, make it into a drinking game).
Recording Violent Green's second LP, From Cycles of Heat
My little Wallingford neighborhood apartment became my sanctuary, a place to lick my wounds from my breakup (though my ex and I did hook up there once for a brief interlude, which was sweet; No strings, friends with benefits territory). I have fond memories of living there, it was a pretty quiet neighborhood most of the time. I would live there for a year or so before moving into the larger apartment right next door.
One great thing about the Wallingford apartment was that it was walking distance from Avast! Recording Studio, which not only became one of my cleaning accounts, but also a studio I would spend a lot of time at with Violent Green recording our next two albums. It was also walking distance to the previously mentioned House of Wong where Faintly Macabre rehearsed (actually, HOW was right around the corner from Avast!). By happenstance, this neighborhood became the nexus of my music life, at least in the producing and recording of songs, if not the performing part of them.
The first of the Violent Green albums recorded at Avast! was the album that would become From Cycles of Heat, a pretty major departure from our previous album Eros. This session proved to be grueling in terms of how long the days were and some tensions within the band that erupted a bit. It was also kind of weird to have Avast! as a cleaning account and to come in during the mornings and clean up after my own band! But it was so nice to walk home in 5 minutes after a long day recording, to sit with my cats, smoke a little and drink a little whisky before drifting off to sleep and into weird dreams....
Nightmares; Doom and Sylvia Plath haunt my sleep
Poet Sylvia Plath, not at all happy with my posthumous crush on her
Part 1: Sylvia Plath's ghost chastises me
I
had a couple interesting nightmares when I would come home and pass out
after the recording sessions: One about Sylvia Plath, whose work I was
diving into at the time (along with that of Robinson Jeffers, so, ya
know, grim stuff!) and as well I was reading her published journals and a
biography I had purchased recently. I had developed a little crush on
her and I guess her ghost was pissed about it and yelled at me about
it terrifyingly in a nightmare ("You have no right to have a CRUSH ON ME! YOU DO NOT KNOW ME!!!")!
To add a fine point to this nightmare, I woke suddenly after this
berating to a murder of crows suddenly flying out of a small tree
outside my kitchen window, all at once, as if they heard her and were frightened of her
anger. Later I realized that in the dream, she was standing by my gas oven, which is what she used to end her life. About a year later wrote a poem called The Oven about this experience.
Screenshot from the mid '90s video game Doom
Part 2: Doom!
The other nightmare was related to the video game Doom, which was very popular at the time; A game of supernatural warfare and one of the earliest that people played online with other users all over the world, a novel thing at the time among the general populace. I wasn't and have never been a video game guy (I am old, my era was Asteroids and Defender and Tetras and Galaga) but, as in any recording session, there were other things besides bass that were being worked on, and thus long stretches of time to fill, so with ample time to kill, there sat the terminal, so I played Doom, because it was there. I remember I kept getting stuck at a part where you cross an internal foot bridge over waist deep water and I would fall into the water as the demons came at me to kill me. Sometimes I would fall in sideways so that my head was partly in the water. In this nightmare I kept seeing that scene, but it was the floor of the studio into which I sank; It was as if the game and reality had merged and it scared me, so I stopped playing it and never played those kinds of games again [That is to say, I never played violent games like that again - I did later play Tony Hawk and Spider-Man a couple years later (when the quality of these games had increased rapidly), but stopped right away at that point because I realized the very real potential of getting addicted to them].
The moments of great tension during the From Cycles of Heat sessions were in part from the pressure to make a record as good or better than our debut, Eros, while at the same time introducing limited numbers of fans and some high profile critics who were fans to a major change in direction musically.
At one point we tried to record some improvisational stuff to chop up
and use, trying to emulate the amazing jams we sometimes had in our
rehearsal space, and which would sometimes form into songs. But it was
too sterile in the studio to pull this off. I have all the recordings of
our attempts and it just didn't work, and it frustrated Jenny and I to
the point where we snipped at each other and I just wandered out the
door and went for a long walk without telling anyone. Poor Steve Fisk
often had to play referee or counselor during these sessions. The peaty
scotch and other imbibing plus the long days and little sleep also
contributed to this tension. But we soldiered on.
The emergence of trip hop and sampling in Violent Green
The Violent Green album From Cycles of Heat is the marker of a corner being turned for the band, that of one into the realm of sampling and trip hop becoming a major influence on the writing of the music due to Jenny and Drew's immersion into that world. Beyond the fact that the early to mid '90s were the salad days of hip hop and by extension trip hop (a more dreamy, surreal version of hip hop that focused as much on the sounds, samples and music as on the words, which were more often sung than rapped; hippie hip hop? Think Portishead or Massive Attack).
Jenny and Drew, as mentioned, had fallen in love with hip hop, and when they applied it to the 'trippy' music that Violent Green had been doing for a few years already, trip hop was the inevitable, if not necessarily intended, result. It's not like they said, "Hey...let's be a trip hop band!" It happened naturally. For them, anyway. At the time, also as mentioned, my love of hip hop was from the original days; Grand Master Flash, The Sugar Hill Gang, Run DMC, Public Enemy, Fab 5 Freddy and Beastie Boys. The only contemporary hip hop I was listening to at the time were poppier groups like Arrested Development and De La Soul (I wouldn't come to the amazing groups that were their contemporaries in the Spoken Tongues movement, like A Tribe Called Quest, until much later, though I wish I had!).
Early Roots, NWA, Early Outkast
Soon Jenny and Drew introduced me to great hip hop and rap like early Outkast, Wu Tang Clan (as mentioned previously, a HUGE influence on Jenny and Drew) The Roots (whom I saw a few years later and they blew my mind) and NWA, but I wasn't ready to start a hip hop group myself!
In fact I wasn't happy with this direction of the band then, in general. I loved that my friend and our producer Steve Fisk was more involved in helping us make the actual music as a result of this shift, as he was steeped in sampling music from working with Shawn Smith in the group Pigeonhed and working on his sampling masterpiece Prison in collaboration with Seattle poet Jesse Bernstein (both of which had a huge influence on the trip hop sampling style of Violent Green) and really, he had been using sampling since the '80s. But as a musician at the time, I was old school; I preferred writing live music that was easy to replicate on a stage, and to record all the instrumentation live, with mics and an engineer. For From Cycles of Heat I rehearsed some songs to a cassette tape of the sample beat beds. I wasn't a fan of that method. But I did it. I dug in. And I ended up rising to the challenge.
I even played stand up bass on the record, something I had never done, but somehow (and to this day I have no idea how I pulled this off) I became intimate with the stand up bass we borrowed from a friend. I would go into a room by myself, get used to the method needed to actually play it, which is a whole other world in terms of the finger strength required to press the strings down hard enough to even play a note, let alone figure out where the notes even were without any frets, and then remembering where they were in order to repeat a measure. My already great admiration for jazz players like my heroes Charles Mingus and Ron Carter was increased 100 fold. Once I had a basic understanding of the mechanics of it, I began to write parts to the songs I would play on and when I did the takes, I went into a kind of trance, as if I were channeling an old school jazz bass player, and I played some pretty amazing stuff. I don't know that I could ever repeat that.
Listen to me play stand up bass on the song We Lay
I also bowed the strings on
one tune, but that was near impossible to smoothly sustain a note, and
again my admiration increased for not only Mingus, who was a
master at bowing in his compositions, but for all the amazing classical
musicians who played on all the recordings of classical compositions I
listened to by composers like Robert Schumann, Wolfgang Mozart, Franz Schubert and Bach.
Fisk was able to salvage the bowing with a lot of effects, and the
strangeness of it somehow fit the odd tune. I also am proud of the other
playing I did on the sample tunes with a standard electric bass. I have
always been good at playing in the studio (and still am), and at
playing the appropriate part for anything thrown at me, and in a short
time being able to play it over and over the exact same way, as if I had
practiced it for a long time (a skill I also employed heavily on both drums & bass during
the on-the-fly Halo Benders sessions, and much later on drums during the 2014 smash-and-dash sessions with Commonauts). I would continue this ability even more on the next Violent Green record (Hangovers in the Ancient World), which would have no live drum tracks at all. And during these From Cycles of Heat sessions I would have to swallow my pride on the few tracks that were recorded that I didn't play on at all (that hurt at the time).
It was a whole new world, with computers and software like Protools being so involved in the music we were making, at a time when personal computers and computers used for creative projects were still fairly new in most everyone's lives, and to have a video game available during the session as part of the distraction needed during downtime.
But when all was said and done, we created a tapestry of our odd brand of rock, punk, jazz, folk and goth mixed with trip hop. It worked somehow, and at the time was still pretty unique. But it marked the beginning of the end of my time in the band, as more and more I rehearsed songs to tapes, and as we struggled to recreate some of the sampled songs on stage (no easy feat). I didn't know it at the time, but in two short years I would quit the band. One year after that, I would stop playing music semi professionally and get absorbed in a tech career. But alas, I am getting ahead of myself. So much more happened before that!
[Added after first publication] Here are some thoughts on the session from producer Steve Fisk:
"I was REALLY tired. I thought this would be a fun record. I brought nice whiskey...Communication was tricky [And at the time was particularly tricky with Jenny]...I remember trying to do a groove for Jenny with me playing drums and she didn’t understand that we wanted her to sing over it. She thought it was an instrumental or something...I also remember Drew really having his act together with the samples and that the tech was pretty painless. On a sample based record that is not always the case. Everybody played great. I consider it one of my best records but I’m ashamed of how badly I approached it and the mistakes I made...You and Drew seemed together and really positive in spite of all the miscommunication...[On Jenny and Drew borrowing his sampler and managing to damage some of the library]..It never worked right after I got it back. A small price I suppose considering how great the record was/is." ~ Steve Fisk, via email, 1/5/25 (edited by author).
~ Wayne R. Flower, 12/21/24
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