Part 51: He's A (Music) Whore; Adventures in Playing As Much Music As Possible and Scenes Within a Scene

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 regular 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 in Violent Green and the tensions present 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).

Wayne R. Flower - Music Whore

I came to refer to myself as a 'music whore' after I began to play music with anyone I could (I had some discretion, of course; I didn't play with people whose music I didn't like or with people I just didn't like). I didn't exactly seek these temporary projects out. I was just 'there' when people needed a drummer or bass player, mostly to fill in for when they were searching for one or the other in their bands. Over the years I was always branching out beyond the bands I was in, even though I was already fortunate to be in a few great bands. It is somewhat analogous to an 'addiction,' though a pretty benevolent one. I just loved (and still love) playing music so much that I wanted to do it as much as I possibly could. I would also say that it only helped me as a musician to play different kinds of music and have these experiences, plus listening to as much different kinds of music as I could, informed my playing and my increasing songwriting exercises, which led me to the musician I am today and to (as I am now comfortable calling myself) the songwriter I am today.

When I refer to 'branching out,' I mean the actual deliberate choices to form other bands for fun (as opposed to the above substitute whoredom, which I will get to). These came in the forms of short lived projects: Wonder Twin Powers, which consisted of myself on bass and a couple amazing musicians from the excellent '90s Seattle hardcore punk band in Seattle called Last Gasp, with Chris Tretton on drums and Fred Speakman on guitar. I played bass and sang, or was going to sing, once I had some lyrics!

What we started was barely a band, we only rehearsed a few times and never played a show, which is a shame, as what was beginning to form was pretty awesome and both of these guys were/are stellar players. The good news is I would later go on to play in different projects with each of them separately at different times (one of which was a reunited group that had inspired me to play in bands in the first place in the early '80s, more on all that later.)

Another band that only lasted for few rehearsal sessions was a punk/metal band with Doug Pack from Whipped and Decrepit on guitar and someone else on drums who I can't remember (to whom I apologize, it was so short lived, and I smoked a lot of 'tea' at the time) called 6 Feet Underwear. It's regretful that neither of these bands went anywhere, I think they would have been well received. I will also point out that I came up with both band names, and I consider them among the best/funnest I have come up with.  

A band/music project I was part of I already wrote about in a previous entry, Wayne Payne, a duo of myself and the husband at the time of my band-mate Kellie in Faintly Macabre. It was a unique idea in that it was just drums and vocals; Me on drums and Holden Payne on vocals. It was barely coming together when we pulled the plug on it as we were both too busy (I had 3 jobs, and his job was as my boss at the Egyptian Theater that I worked at then, plus, I was already in 3 bands, and Holden had two other bands himself, both included Kellie: The Wedgewood Bombers and Holden Payne and the Agonies) but I think it would have been rad.

The bands I substituted for until they found new members were: I played bass for a short time for the band 4 Hour Romona, so named after a long standing dry-cleaner in the neighborhood I lived in, Wallingford. 4 Hour Romona was fronted by the excellent musician and writer Vanessa Vaselka (also of Bell and The Pinkos - interestingly, her Wiki page doesn't mention 4 Hour Romona!) I have no memory of how I was asked to play in the band, but it was, as I have mentioned, intentionally short-lived, as I was just filling in until they found a permanent bass player. 

On drums was a former member of a beloved Seattle folk rock band that I dug called the Walkabouts, one Terri Moeller, who I came to be friends with for a time (and I write 'for a time' only as we fell out of touch in that natural way that happens in life). In retrospect, my busy bass playing style may not have been the best fit for the band, even though I toned it down quite a bit to try and adapt. Terri is a stellar drummer and person and Vanessa a good songwriter and performer and an impressive person in general, so no matter what, it was fun, and an honor. I played maybe 2 or 3 shows with them.

And, in the late '90s (so jumping ahead a bit, as I do) I also played drums in an alternative country band that was impressive called Cyclone Killers, again filling in until they could find a new drummer after their previous drummer quit the band.

This band was made up of some great musicians and people (one of whom was the partner of a coworker of my girlfriend's at the Art Institute of Seattle, Matt Cowgill, a very talented guitar player in his own right, that was how I even came to know these folks) David Dressel, Keith Lovik (who sang, wrote and switched around on instruments). The singer of Cyclone Killers, Lisa Duncan, had/has an amazing, powerful voice, and all the members were also good singers on backups. It was really fun to challenge myself and play a style of music that was very different than what I normally played.   

The 'Pine Street corridor' on Capitol Hill

The previously mentioned Egyptian Theater that I worked at was on Pine Street on Capitol Hill, a street my ex and I lived right off of not long before this period I am writing about. Between Boren Ave. and 12th Ave on Pine Street was a corridor that was coming alive after a hip burrito joint and bar called Bimbos Bitchin' Burritos and a hipster bar called Linda's were opened right near each other. 

Just one block further South and a block East was the Pike Street corridor on which there were a number of cool bars and coffee houses that people hung out and and played music at (and was where Violent Green's rehearsal space, The Chophouse, was located) and a lesbian bar called The Easy (where Drew's then girlfriend worked for a short time) so that corridor also fed the Pine St. corridor with people spilling over to go hang out over there as well. 

On the Pike corridor was the infamous bar The Comet Tavern (itself one door South of The Easy) and across the street was a bar and music venue called Moe's, now Nuemos (so clever, these hip kids!) which it still is at this writing (we played there on the 2018 Treepople reunion tour, see a song from that show here) and a bit further East was a two floor coffee house that sometimes had live music called Cafe Paradiso (it is still a coffee house at this writing called Cafe Vita) where I first saw the skinny, scrappy young up and coming band, Modest Mouse for the first time on the recommendation of Chris Takino, and I never doubted his recommendations, he never let me down, and he didn't this time, either).

Bimbo's Bitchin' Burritos became somewhat of a hangout for the folks who played in the same band 'cohort' I did and many of them ended up working there (including Kellie from one of the bands I was in, Faintly Macabre). It was a pretty cool setup, one side was the burrito restaurant and the other was a bar. Linda's was one good sized room divided in two by a half wall, with a pool table on one side. As mentioned in a recent entry, Kellie Payne and I shot pool here regularly. In fact, it was probably the bar I went to most during this time as The Egyptian Theater was right up the street, where she also worked with me. 

The famous Squid Row tavern (not far from Linda's) where Treepeople and so many other bands cut their teeth in the Seattle music scene was also on the Pine Street corridor (really it can be said it all started here for Treepeople, or at least it was where we started playing in front of the 'right people' and thus got us in in the door for better shows and reviews in magazines, etc. for Treepeople at Squid Row) but around the late '90s [incorrectly I listed it as during the late '80s; Typo!) it became a gay bar called Kincora's that didn't have live music. Up Records was located right across the street from Squid Row/Kincora's as well. 

Just down the street to the West a cool coffee house called Bauhaus (and is still there to this day). Right across the street from that place was a cool-short lived punk rock club that also opened in the late '90s called Uncle Rocky's.

As you can see, the Pine Street corridor became a bit of a hub for us all, in a way few other areas did, even though many of us no longer lived on Capitol Hill. 

It wasn't long after this that a pretty happening annual block party that started in the Pike corridor just off Broadway near The Comet that has continued. So it goes without saying (but I guess it goes without writing ; ) that this little patch of Capitol Hill in the mid to late '90s was thriving in terms of the overall music scene. 

The city of Seattle was filled with areas that were home to various music scenes or just pockets of venues and many more popped up in the mid '90s, post the Nirvana boom (and I think it is important to point this out, that while people outside the Seattle music scene think of/thought of it, understandably, as whole, it was in fact, like most city music scenes, made up of smaller, interlocking scenes); But Nirvana didn't define the Seattle music scene then; It never did in the minds of those of us bands who worked our asses of in that scene, and truth be told, Treepeople's defining album, Guilt, Regret, Embarassment, came out before Nirvana's defining album Nevermind, I feel compelled to point out. I had been playing in bands in the Northwest since 1983, over a decade before, and already I had been playing in bands in Seattle for 9 years, while all my band mates had their own histories stretching as far or near as far back in that city and the surrounding areas.

Wayne Goes to Film, art, Literature and Music School (of Life)

During this time, as I have mentioned, Jenny O'lay from Violent Green introduced me to great film makers, so I rented DVDs of the films of John Cassavettes, Andre Tarkovsky, and went back to the films of Orson Welles, including a restored version of the amazing film Touch of Evil on the big screen of one of the art house theaters that I worked at, which blew my mind, Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, among a number of others. I had always loved film, but now I was diving into films of the best of the best, and realizing how film itself incorporated all of the forms of art I not only enjoyed, but practiced myself often and frankly, well: music, writing and visual art. It was a renewed love affair that will last until I part this mortal coil.  

Chris Takino remained an influence in all of these areas as well until just before his untimely death that loomed around the corner; In a few short years, he would be gone by the same cancer that took my mother (Yeah, spoiler alert) after we fell out of touch, which of course bummed me out; It seemed to be a theme in my life, as previously mentioned; Losing people to death only a few years after getting to know them. 

As I well know, Death is an integral part of Life, but it seems to really have a thing for taking a lot of people from me in particular, including both my parents when I was a young man, and so many friends. It could also be said that ending up in the Seattle music scene in the '90s didn't help that, where even the people who became rock stars who died were close with my close friends. It was mentally and emotionally challenging, and often it was band mates who passed (all after I was in bands with them, by chance) another theme in my life. I miss them all terribly and learned so much from them all. 

This is a good place to stop in this entry. If you got this far, I thank you. 

Be well, be swell and give 'em hell.

Wayne Ray "Rhino" Flower II, 4/12/26 (Last updated 6/28/26)

Part 49: Violent Green records their 2nd album, From Cycles of Heat

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, Defender, Tetris 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 with nothing to do, 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 stopped playing violent games like that again; I did 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].

Tensions surface...

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 attempted 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 after one such conflict 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 Native 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 it 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 stand up bass players in jazz 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 Violent Green song We Lay on the album From Cycles of Heat

I also bowed the strings on one tune, but it was near impossible to smoothly sustain a note, and again my admiration increased for not only Mingus and Carter, who had mastered bowing in their 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 had 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. All of these things were novel then.

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 Part 49 entry's publication] Here are some thoughts on the From Cycles of Heat 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 (minimally edited by author).

~ Wayne R. Flower, 12/21/24

Part 48: Social time, Halo Benders record Don't Tell Me Now and Tour

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).

Social life, home life

I have often thought about how if I never became a musician, my social life would have most likely been pretty minimal. Looking back at the most social time in my life would be to look back on this time of which I write now, a time when I was most active as a musician, so this fits.

Kellie Payne, the singer, songwriter and guitarist of the band Faintly Macabre, one of the bands I was playing drums in, became a good friend and we bonded. She was and is a phenomenal pool player, so we spent a fair amount of off time hitting local bars with pool tables. I played as well, but I wasn't very good. As mentioned, Kellie is small and pretty and this was the mid '90s so a common fashion in the 'alt/indie' world for women and trans folks was cool, vintage baby-doll dresses. So when she put herself on the list of a bunch of dudes playing a table at any given bar, many of them would see her walk up to the table and immediately get an attitude and be fools. And then she would humiliate them. I loved it. I really enjoyed watching her kick some big macho dude's butt who scoffed at the fact that she even played pool, and she would then take the table for hours until she got bored and give it away. I play a lot of pool these days, and I'm much better! Thankfully the idea of a guy assuming a woman can't play pool very well in present times (2024), I am happy to report, seems strange (most of the time - it's much better we will say).

We started out any given night playing pool most often in a bar called Linda's on Pine Street on Capitol Hill (more on this particular corridor of the Hill, which became a hub of the music scene, later) where many of the aforementioned macho assholes played, and then we would head to other bars that had tables. 

A memorable night was when we hit the dive bar The Terry Tavern on Pill Hill, an area that was pretty sketchy at the time, especially at night. It is called Pill Hill because most of the hospitals and drug rehab places are concentrated there. There was a lot of crime in the area and mentally disturbed addicts walking around (I don't know if it is still like that, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is, or is worse, like crime is generally in Seattle since I lived there until 2003). The Terry Tavern is (was?) a pretty tiny establishment, with a small bar in the front and a small main room with tables and chairs to the left with a pool table that took up most of the room. 

Right when we walked in the door there was a scrawny, sketchy white man on the payphone attached to the wall to the left and he was clearly upset, from what we overheard it sounded like he wasn't getting the drugs he wanted to buy, and he exploded in fury, grabbed a glass ashtray near him and threw it at the cement floor, smashing it to pieces. The bartender, a big, badass looking white woman, without missing a beat, grabbed a sawed off pool cue she kept behind the bar for just such occasions, leapt over the bar, charging at the man, who swiftly ran around us, almost knocking me over, and out the exit. The bartender chased him up the street a bit, then came back and served us as if nothing unusual had happened, because at that place, that actually wasn't unusual.

The pool table was being dominated by a tall Native American woman who beat every man that challenged her, holding the table. She seemed bored as hell. Kellie put herself on the list and soon she was up. The game was fierce, some of the best pool I have seen. In the end, Kellie won. The woman was impressed and shook her hand, nodding approval.

The rest of my social life at this time revolved around gigs; At house parties, bars and halls. Sometimes I was playing them in one of the 3 bands I was in, sometimes attending a show a friend's band or a band I wanted to see was playing. At home I did art and wrote poetry, and occasionally wrote and recorded simple songs on a Fostex cassette 4 track recording deck, the home recording device of choice then.

Home is where the cats are...It's name then was Wallingford.

I was digging my apartment in the Wallingford neighborhood, a somewhat suburban neighborhood, though one that was considered suburban a couple generations prior, when Seattle was still growing, so that by the time I lived there, it was more like an outer town which had it's own infrastructure, stores, shops, etc., that was absorbed by the greater metropolitan area. It was a mellow place to live, and just a few miles Northwest of the hub of Seattle. It became my home base. For a short time I got a job at a small hummus and dip company about 5 blocks away started by a couple out of their house that had grown to the point where they turned their garage into a walk in refrigerator and distributed their hummus, black bean and curry lentil dips to small and major stores all over Washington. 

My apartment was tiny, as mentioned, but really charming and well laid out. It was in a small U shape, located at the back corner of a large apartment house with about 10 apartments in it. You walked into a small front room, which was the base of the U shape. One side of the U was the small bathroom to the right, and the other was the kitchen, the window of which overlooked a large yard and garden where one year I even grew some things: squash, tomatoes and cucumbers; I once made chili using all the above and a few different kinds of tomatoes from my neighbor's garden, I used no recipe, just winged it, and it was the best chili I had ever tasted, but alas, I didn't write anything down, so that it was, to quote the sax player of a band I was in in Boston about excellent jams we would forget to record, "to the wind." 

My neighbors were all pretty mellow young people, one of whom was the apartment manager who lived across the hall. He was super chill, he worked at an electric vehicle company (at the time, the idea of an electric car was fairly novel, as there was near zero infrastructure to support them). He had a badass red cat named Fellini (so named after the great Italian filmmaker).

Noose and Horce, RIP

At the time I had inherited two awesome cats from the breakup; Horce and Noose (Horce was named after a weird used record my ex and I bought, a thrift store purchase, by a family country band, one of the songwriters listed was named 'Horace Whitley,' but they misspelled it as 'Horce' (we pronounced it like 'horse') and Noose was so named as when I picked him out at a friend's house, he was playing with a toy noose. Horce was a 20 lb Mainecoone and Noose was a medium sized black cat. Horce was a lover but with other cats he was always dominant in all the neighborhoods I/we lived in. My apartment manager had built an incredible ramp for Fellini (the only cat Horce ever bowed to, he stayed out of his way) from his window to the wooden stairs behind the house. I followed suit with a long plank and just left my window open all the time, whether I was there or not, when the weather allowed it, so Horce could come and go as he pleased. He was in heaven. Noose, who was kind of a scaredy cat, had tried hanging outside but didn't like it and chose to stay inside wherever we ended up living for the rest of what would be his long 18 year life. 

 

"Heaven sent/With halo bent..." Recording the Halo Benders album Don't Tell Me Now and touring

I am jumping back in time here a bit to 1995 as I missed it in that entry. The Halo Benders, as mentioned, had become an active band of sorts, though one in which we all participated in when we could, being that we were all very busy with other bands, projects: running a label, touring, producing records, etc, respectively. As a result, in the interest of best using our limited time, we were very productive and efficient when we did get together. 

This second Halo Benders album, which would come to be named Don't Tell Me Now (so named by Calvin, he named all the HB records) was recorded at Calvin's house, his inherited childhood home in Olympia, Washington. We had recorded the first record God Don't Make No Junk there as well, but that was tracked entirely in the basement. This time we tracked in different places all over the house, mostly in the front rooms on the main level, and this gave it a decidedly different live sound; More open, with more natural, warm reverb from wood floors and sheet-rock walls in the rooms. 

The songs were sort of thrown together as I remember it, rather than written as an album, though truthfully because of the aforementioned nature of how and when we got together, that makes a certain kind of sense generally with this band; It wasn't a traditional band in that we didn't all live in the same city, and this band wasn't our primary focus as musicians. On the other hand, compared to God Don't Make No Junk, we were certainly more of a cohesive unit by this point, in that the experimental 'project' nature of the first record had morphed into a group who recorded regularly and toured as a band (more on that below). 

Calvin Johnson feels similarly, per a response on my prompt for his thoughts about this recording session: "Since the first album by The Halo Benders (God Don't Make no Junk [KLP029]) [Can you tell he is a record label owner? ; ) ] was recorded by Doug and I experimenting with song ideas, it was all recorded piecemeal. Songs were put together with pieces we had, augmented by Wayne or Ralf playing rhythm parts to give the songs more body. There was never a recording with everyone at the same time. Recording Don't Tell Me Now [KLP046] we wanted more of a band experience, recording the songs with everyone playing together. After putting together the Dub Narcotic Studio in the basement (1993) and recording several records down there (God Don't Make no Junk [KLP029] was one of the first), we soon started experimenting with recording in other parts of the house.This worked well for The Halo Benders "band" approach. We set up bass drums guitars in the living room. Solid action. The back-up singers also recorded upstairs, more elbow room. When Steve Fisk came to add his keyboards, he played in the basement, though. Having the band off in their own space was crucial to getting a good band vibe, it was more Fisk's style to be there at the heart of it all as he improvised his contributions to the songs." 

Fisk remembers his contribution a bit differently; He remembers that by the time he showed up to lay down keys, Doug had already played and recorded many of the parts. Part of the problem for him at this stage of the Halo Benders was that he was in one of the busiest periods of his producing career and with projects he worked on as a musician (like Pigeonhed with the beloved Seattle songwriter Shawn Smith, RIP) and had little time to dedicate to anything else. But as Calvin mentions, the parts he did lay down added just what the record needed and was often what kept some songs cohesive, and as well he added some fun stuff as flavor, which became an important part of the signature of a lot of what we did, to my mind. "It's a great record....I was always so proud of my time working with the Halo Benders," Fisk told me recently. And as you can tell by now if you have read the last few entries, I feel the same way!

Ralf Youtz shared some thoughts with me on Don't Tell Me Now (in a document he sent me titled, 'Don't Tell Ralf Now'); "...We sound more like a band here to me, less like Calvin's and Doug's studio project..." Ralf's take on some songs; "[Bomb Shelter Part 1]...This is my favorite one of Halo Benders basement punk songs...[Bomb Shelter Part 2] This song is the song I'm most proud of as a Halo Bender. Calvin's anti-patriotic lyrics are perfect. Doug's lyrics amplify the feeling without being too nihilistic. And the music captures Doug's, Wayne's, and my playing together at it's best...the dubby, echo-soaked mix rules. Steve Fisk, was that you? Wow. Good one....[Volume Mode] I brought this guitar part to the band. I'm wildly pleased with how well Doug, Wayne, and Calvin made it into this unique song...Magic Carpet Rider I had a couple ideas on guitar for this song which Wayne, Doug, and Calvin developed into something special. I even still play this one at my rare solo shows..."

Don't Tell Me Now has great moments, like Bomb-shelter parts 1 and 2, part 1 of which featured a group of friends who stopped by one of the sessions to sing backups, including my then partner and also my previously mentioned band-mate Kellie Wohlrab-Payne (who sang the line "Think about all the time you've wasted, workin' on your...(group sings) BOMB-SHEL-TER!") which lyrically is a statement about the paranoia from the Cold War which led private citizens in the US to build personal bombshelters ("...A civil defense waste of time...") and part 2 of which features an amazing diatribe by Calvin that Ralf mentions above, about creative draft dodging (ie, actually registering, but hundreds of times as a form of protest to jam the system; "Ain't no law ag'in it", he says in a folksy drawl). Listen to Bombshelter Part 1 and Bombshelter Part 2.

I would say it is definitely the most punk influenced Halo Benders album, with fast paced and loose songs like the opener, Phantom Power and the punk/sort of metal tune Crankenstein. It was the most fun album to record, without a doubt, and the mood was mellow and even festive, with friends dropping by, barbecues, and just a general good vibe. But the whole time of the Halo Benders had that vibe, for me at least. At the time my involvement making music with these guys was a fun break from all the "serious" music I was making with Violent Green and Faintly Macabre in Seattle (which was dear to me, but every artist needs a break once in awhile from doing the same types of creative projects). Phil Ek (who had just made a name for himself for his production of Built to Spill's excellent breakout album There's Nothing Wrong With Love - which, incidentally, Built to Spill are currently, at this writing, doing a tour of, playing the entire record as a set to commemorate the anniversary) did a great job of making all the songs sound cohesive in his mixes.

The photos below are photos of hard copies (we didn't have no fancy smart phones then) so this is all I got! I tried to enhance some of them but it didn't translate well, sometimes I am lazy, so I give up! I don't remember who took these, I probably took the ones that I am not in. If the photographer happens to be reading this, reach out and let me know at waynerayflower@gmail.com (also, the Blogger software is sometimes wonky & limited when it comes to aligning things, so I did my best on the text and photo alignment).

 

The Halo Benders boys minus Calvin Johnson, who was in the basement at the time (he spoke to us through a talk-back mic). Note Dug is playing bass here (my Kramer). We were most likely tracking the song 'Volume Mode.'

 

 

Dave Schneider of Lync and other bands, Ralf Youtz, myself, Doug Martsch, doing some silly posing for the camera.

 

 

Ralf Youtz and Wayne Flower, the rotating rhythm section of Halo Benders

 

  

Ralf Youtz

   

Doug Martsch, Ralf Youtz & (some of) Calvin's vinyl    

The Halo Benders hit the road

Halo Benders also toured this same year in the Northwest and Southwest, including LA. Notable things happened, but I will summarize them here. To get it out of the way, yes, I was driving when we were pulled over in Utah by a state trooper with a Real Stories of the Highway Patrol film crew in the car (RSOTHP was a popular exploitative reality cop show at the time, modeled after the even more popular show Cops) and I was arrested for a tiny amount of marijuana on me, and yes, they aired it because I was from Seattle and a musician, and the music scene in Seattle attracted a lot of press in the mid-'90s. I was pulled over for 'camping in the left lane' (on a desert road, with no other cars around for miles) but I think it is safe to say it was because we were obviously a band. They held me long enough for me to pay bail, then let me go, trial by phone pending at a later date. The episode was edited in a way that cut out all the challenging questions we asked them about this disreputable sham and abuse of 'law enforcement,' and of filming people, to which neither the police or the camera crew had any real answers to (in the case of the camera crew, they said nothing). That is all I have to write about it, sorry. People think it is so cool for some reason, but for us, not cool at all, and a low point of all the tours we did. I will, however, write about the show that happened after this incident in Salt Lake City, as it is an example of how some US states are little police states. 

 

Rookie Cop Pepper Sprays Harmless Nerds, News at 11

My personal history with Salt Lake City in terms of playing music there and having musician friends from there up to that point had been a positive one. The hardcore punk band State of Confusion which I played bass in in the '80s (and which morphed into the band Treepeople, as you have read in this blog if you have read the whole thing, and if not, what the fuck are you waiting for?) played Salt Lake City a lot, usually much bigger and better shows than we played in our home city of Boise, Idaho. The oppressive aspects of a city run by rich, conservative Mormons (and by way of the implication of that statement, yes, there are liberal Mormons, such as my old friend and eventual band mate in Commonauts and seminal figure in both the Boise and Seattle music scenes, Jon Hale, RIP, no blame to them) were familiar to us, as the same folks had founded Boise, and it inevitably created a backlash in SLC in the form of a huge punk scene in the '80s and '90s. We loved playing there, and Salt Lake City loved SOC.

But that was in the '80s. By the mid '90s the cops were cracking down on the punk scene in SLC. Halo Benders played, or rather, was to play, a show in a house that some young folks had rented in order to hold indie rock and punk shows. We were setting up our equipment when a cop car pulled up outside. A lone young cop entered the house and immediately started harassing the kids who were putting it on. These kids were just nerdy, mild mannered indie dorks; Built to Spill fans, fans of Calvin's record label K Records. And this cop was yelling at them like they were rioting, drug-crazed punks. They gathered around him, trying to calm him down. He felt threatened (and at this point it became clear he was a rookie) and broke out some pepper spray and sprayed many of them in the face! He got on his radio and called in back up! I had just been arrested, mind you, so I was livid. I started angrily loading my drums back into the van, yelling and ranting (I also hadn't had much sleep, I was a bit delirious). 4 cop cars pulled up and the cops swarmed the harmless nerd party, breaking it up.

As we drove to the house we were staying at, a whole caravan of cars followed us as Calvin had invited the indie nerds to come buy some records. On the way, I ranted a bit more, then passed out in the back of the van. Behind us, the nerds in cars followed, and behind them, a few cop cars also followed, in a bizarre sort of caravan.

We arrived at the house we were staying at, the cops drove on, and the young ones gathered at the back of the van, where Calvin sold them cool records for cheap. All's well that ends well, I guess! But let's just say when Violent Green toured not long after this and drove through Utah, I was anxious to get the hell out of that state.

 

Couch surfing at Beck's place on tour

Calvin was friends with Beck and had recorded a record for him called One Foot in the Grave at Dub Narcotic Studio (the same house studio we were recording/had recorded at) and in fact, after the first album Calvin recorded there, our first record God Don't Make No Junk, One Foot in the Grave was the second full album had ever recorded there. This album was actually recorded before Beck's breakout album Mellow Gold, but was released after. It's a wonderful record that represents his acoustic, folk and blues open mic days in LA and New York City (and as another odd 6th degree of separation, my next partner said when she lived in LA, Beck used to couch surf at her and her roommates' apartment and eat all their food and drink all their beer, so they were never fans!) and features Olympia musicians from the awesome band Lync and others. It is easily my favorite Beck record and a unique gem that stands out among all of his work. 

I mention all this 'Beckness' as when Halo Benders played in LA (at the wonderful, gone but not forgotten coffee shop/music venue Jabber Jaw) we stayed at Beck's apartment for a few days. At the time, he was rehearsing with a band he had assembled that was about to tour Japan. Mellow Gold's hit Loser that put Beck on the map had just blown up and he was on the way to fame. I didn't talk to him much, I slept on the couch in the living room and I saw him in the mornings when he was on the way to rehearsals, we chatted as he made coffee and then said our goodbye each day. He also had a wonderful party when we stayed there, attended by a wide range of memorable characters from the film and music industries and/or the neighborhood who were great fun. Calvin also had a friend who worked at Universal Studios and got us some passes for the theme park. We went on some of the rides, kinda fun, but the lines we had to wait in for each ride were way too long.

 

Halo Benders play Jabberjaw, Los Angles, California, 1995 (photographer unknown)

In general, this tour and indeed all following Halo Benders tours went well. Audiences got into our sets, and really it was kind of easy as there was already a large contingent of fans built in for Doug and Built to Spill and Calvin and K Records and all the cool bands and music projects he had done (Beat Happening, Dub Narcotic Sound System, and his solo work, among other collaborations). After all, people weren't coming to see Ralf and I! But we were more than happy to be along for the ride.

Playing to Reedies in Portland with Love as Laughter and Miranda July

 

 

Sam Jayne, 1995-ish (RIP, Brother, miss you) on the left

Miranda July, on the right

Another show of note around this same time that we played was at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Reed was and is an infamously prestigious, liberal, non-traditional, ivy league status college (and at present my roommate is a chef there, and we live walking distance from the college). We played in a common room in one of the dorm buildings with Sam Jayne (RIP), an Olympia scene musician who performed under the name Love as Laughter, which later became a wonderful full band (Sam had also previously fronted the aforementioned band Lync). LAL as a solo project was pretty cool, Sam's songwriting was unique and slightly bizarre in the best of ways. The solo version of LAL opened a couple of other great shows in Seattle at the record store Cellophane Square and the University of Washington Hub Ballroom for us around the same time (See links to video footage of these shows below). 

At the Reed show we were also joined by Steve Fisk for the live set, who also played the Seattle shows with us later; A rare treat. Also playing at this show in the middle slot was Calvin's then partner performance artist Miranda July (who would later go on to some fame for her film Me and You and Everyone We Know in 2005, which won the Caméra d'Or award at that year's Cannes Film Festival) [Calvin recently told me that they actually started dating after this time - WRF, 2025]. Her set as I remember it was wildly mesmerizing, cool and different, featuring singing, minor instrumentation and spoken word. We played a great set to an intimate Reed crowd of maybe 75 people, a memorable, special show.

Originally in working on this entry I had a whole other section here about Violent Green recording our second album From Cycles of Heat but it made the entry way too long overall, so I moved it to Part 49. The good news is, that means half of that part is already written so hopefully it won't be so damn long between entries. Included below are some links th Halo Benders live around the time I write of here.

Halo Benders live - 1995/96

1995 at the Capitol Theater, Olympia, WA ~ Footage shot by Jonathan Brogger 

Halo Benders Live at Capitol Theater - Inbred Heart

Halo Benders Live at Capitol Theater - Don't Touch My Bikini

Halo Benders Live at Capitol Theater - Blank Equation

Halo Benders Live at Capitol Theater - Bombshelter Pt 1 & Pt 2

1996 at Cellophane Square Records, Seattle, WA (note that there are also videos of the performance the same day as the Cellophane Square show at the UW Hub Ball Room, but the quality is not great so they are not included - you can find them on You tube if you must see them!)

Halo Benders Live at Cellophane Square Records - Part 1

Halo Benders Live at Cellophane Square Records - Part 2 

Halo Benders Live at Cellophane Square Records - Part 3

Be well,                                                            

Wayne R. Flower II, 10/30/24

Music History Part 47: A suddenly busy music career, starting a business and a new chapter in life

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>>>

The romantic relationship ends...

I had recently had a conversation with my partner, an argument that ended up as a conversation, more truthfully, in which she casually commented, not even in any meaningful way, more like how when someone says, "Well, maybe all humanity is doomed!!" or, "Maybe no one is honest," but what she happened to say, inspired by our circular conversation about how we may not actually be suited to each other, was, "Well, maybe people weren't meant to be monogamous."

At this point in my life, as I previously covered, I was a bit overwhelmed with anxiety. To make matters worse, I was managing the café at this point (so I am going a bit back in time here) and at work any given day I would drink coffee in the morning, Coca-Cola through the day and black tea at home at night, all of which, along with other toxins ingested, ramped up my anxiety as bad as if I were doing speed, and distorted all of the other things going through my head about issues at work, issues with bands and the pressures of performing and recording and touring while being alternately exhausted and amped. I was a jangle of nerves and I rarely thought clearly or coherently, but I presented very differently most of the time.

So when I heard my partner say that maybe people weren't meant to be monogamous, my fucked up brain translated it as, "Oh, she is saying it is ok for me to sleep with other people." Oh, Wayne, you self-deceiving fool. This was of course not what she was saying, but, I ended up having a short affair while she was working hard on a degree and living an hour and a half away. This was after she had been there for me through all the long rehearsal hours, touring, recording and playing shows. Then I ended the affair and told my partner about it, wracked with guilt. I had never done this, it had always been done to me and she would never have done it to me. In retrospect, as I covered last entry, I wanted out of the relationship but didn't have the guts to just end it. As an older (hopefully wiser) person, I see the obvious; this was a terrible, cowardly way out.

We tried to mend it, couples therapy, you name it, but it was not to be. While we did become friends and hang out some more after we broke up (and it was actually nice as there were no stakes hanging over things, no strings and all that jazz) we drifted apart and didn't remain friends. This was one of the biggest fuck ups in my life and I would never do it again, but I will regret forever that it was at her expense which I learned this lesson. After we broke up I moved into a tiny, charming apartment in the Wallingford neighborhood and started a new chapter in my life.

Life gets even busier, and, working for the CIA

Within a matter of a couple years, my life as a musician got very busy. I was suddenly (or it felt like it was suddenly) playing in 3 bands: Violent Green, Faintly Macabre, and the Halo Benders. The latter didn't take up as much time as the other two bands, as we all lived in different places, so we got together whenever all of our schedules allowed, which was once or twice a year, but when we did get together, it was a flurry of activity, and my rehearsal and performance schedules became challenging to manage. But I was loving it, despite some added stress.

To pay the bills I was working at the caterer, as mentioned, and around 1996 I got a job working for Seven Gables Theaters (and Holden Payne was my boss at one of them) a chain of cool art-house theaters. I worked concessions at various locations, and eventually cleaned some of the theaters late at night.

After working at the caterer for a while, I got an idea to ask them if they would pay me to clean their office and kitchen weekly, starting it as a side gig to make extra money. This would lead to a cleaning business which I named Clean It All office cleaning (I didn't plan it but the abbreviation was 'CIA', thus the section title above...got your attention, didn't it?) that I would eventually make a living on. I acquired more and more accounts, starting with an office furniture sales company next door to the caterer, and for a short time I cleaned an architect's office in the same building.

Then I got the idea to pitch to cleaning recording studios I had recorded at, since I knew the people who owned them, and I knew what not to touch in a studio. I added Avast! Recording and Jon and Stu's (formerly Reciprocal) and eventually post production studios (that record commercial advertisements) as cleaning accounts. I specifically cleaned offices & studios only, I avoided cleaning houses because I didn't like the idea of going into people's personal space and lives. By the end of my time having this cleaning business in the late '90s, I had 9 accounts total, all of which I cleaned myself (with help from my partner sometimes - a different partner, of course, who will enter in the tale soon, but not in detail as she is very private - and a very brief stint with a few employees).

I was/am very proud of this business, and of the fact that I quickly expanded it enough to be able to live on it and be my own boss. I am grateful to the caterer I worked for and the surrounding businesses adjacent to them for helping me get my start, and to the studios who helped me as well. It was a huge shift in perspective in my life, to one in which I realized that I wasn't totally dependent on some restaurant or company for my livelihood, and that if I put my head into it, I could be my own boss. 

Of course, in this particular line of work, my body didn't always agree that it was a good way to make a living, and ultimately this aspect of it was also the death of it, but I am getting a bit ahead of myself (as I do). It would take a couple years yet to develop this business and gain more accounts. At this point in life, my only cleaning accounts were the caterer I worked for and the office furniture business next door. Doing deliveries for the caterer was still my main source of income for a time (and I should add that doing deliveries in the Seattle/Puget Sound area using only a printed Thomas Guide, as even MapQuest didn't exist then, and certainly not smart phones, in a city that had tons of lakes and nonsensical street layouts and was in a huge spurt of growth and change in the mid '90s...was stressful) but by the time I was working for the theater, I stopped working at the caterer doing deliveries; they became my cleaning client only. Music was still costing more than it took in, at least in terms of sheer monetary measure. But in terms of a life goal fulfilled, I was thriving.

Drew the Producer and Sample Master

Another development at this time was that Drew Quinlan, the drummer in Violent Green, had expanded his interest in creating beats on samplers to also include being involved in the Seattle hip hop community. There was a great hip hop group called Born 2 Create (AKA B2C - a name I have always been fond of, as it also described me) with whom he began to work. Drew would hold court in his small room, often when I came by he would be in session with 3 or 4 young Black hip hop artists, laying a bed of beats for them to rap over. I still have tapes of B2C and it all still sounds pretty cool, though a little crude production-wise, as Drew was just starting out as an amateur producer. Were he still among the living, he would laugh at me calling him that; "Producer?" he would say, "I'm just laying beats, dude," and then laugh that stoner laugh and flash that handsome, easy-going smile (god I miss that guy).

Drew also worked on his own stuff (often under the name Stereo Taxi) a lot of which was really cool, and on which I would occasionally collaborate with him, adding odd poetry or improvisational spoken word or bass or guitar. Ajax (of Last Gasp, LISAP Opera, Crisis Rebirth and other bands) or any musician or non-musician who happened to be hanging out would also join in and add some insane stuff over the beats. It was always an open, inviting artistic lab, and everyone who knew Drew loved him and was happy to contribute to whatever he had going on. These sessions are among my fondest musical memories.

Sometimes he would add instrumentation, and as raw or out of tune as it could be at times, it still sounded unique, and very him. He spent countless hours working on all kinds of stuff, and over time he became a master of sampling things and building beats, taking a huge tip from the warbly, uneven sounds of the Wu Tang Clan (who had by this time established a non-traditional, original method of sampling beats and music) and of course from the sampling art created by our musical mentor and producer, Steve Fisk, who became an important 'partner in crime' on the later, more sample based  approach, which quickly became a key part of Violent Green's songwriting as Jenny was also experimenting with sampling, often of her own voice or guitar parts from various recordings; unused studio cut ups, four track recordings and home recordings (Drew crafted some of his beats from similar cloth), which became a staple of the process in the studio and made what we did with beats and samples quite unique.

The work continues...

         First Faintly Macabre' demo tape (note there was no song called 'The Drawing', this was a typo; the song is called The Drowning                         

Faintly Macabre' was still plugging away during this time. The pace of this band suited all of the members, as we were all busy with other projects, Kellie Payne, the singer songwriter, played drums in a band called Wedgewood Bombers (Wedgewood was a neighborhood in Seattle where she lived in a house with various other musicians) a band she did with her husband, the aforementioned artist Holden Payne, with whom I would also form a short-lived project that never made it to tape or the stage called Wayne Payne, which consisted of me on drums and him on vocals, but this was a little later than the period of which I am writing here.

Kellie had also played guitar and sang in the NW band of note Bell Jar, a member of which, Paulie Johnson, would later join another Seattle band of note, 764 Hero, fronted by John Atkins (who also formed Hush Harbor), and other bands.

Bell Jar 7 inch record

The truth is, as I have mentioned, Kellie was/is one of those musicians who can deftly play any instrument well, and she ended up being, over time, before she moved to Austin, Texas in 1999 for a short period, in 18 different bands, often 3 at a time. Adam Grendon, bass player for Faintly Macabre' also as mentioned, played in the awesome Seattle band The Kent 3, which was very active at this time. So Faintly Macabre' played when we could, which was surprisingly often, mostly small bar shows, and we managed to record a demo tape and a 7 inch record (with Holden Payne's art adorning the cover) at Electric Eel, the studio that the bass player of the great band The Purdins ran.

Also, The Halo Benders began work on our second record, Don't Tell Me Now at Calvin Johnson's house, more on that later. The amazing thing was that all of the music projects I was involved in remained compartmentalized, each with its own influences, members and associated scenes, with some overlap of course, as was the case with all 'alternative' scenes in Seattle and the greater Northwest at the time. I was able to live comfortably in all of these musical worlds, and traverse easily between them.

The Seattle music scene grows some peach fuzz...

While all this was going on, the Seattle music scene was entering a sort of adolescent phase of development. Nirvana had for sure put the town on the map for music in the early '90s, but they had benefited from everything before them that I have written of in the Seattle portion of this blog; the mid '70s punk scene (and some of the '60s rock bands before that, like The Sonics) that predated the Sex Pistols debut, the Punk, art rock and hardcore scenes that grew out of that, and the pre-Grunge (for lack of a better term) bands like Green River, Mother Love Bone, Alice in Chains, U-Men, our old friend Tad Doyle of Tad & H-Hour, and we of course can't forget the mighty Melvins. Kurt Cobain did give kudos to all of the above. But what came after he left the stage of life was the scene I found myself in, one influenced by all of these bands and scenes as well, but also by new kinds of indie rock that were emerging which mixed genres in more sophisticated ways than their predecessors (for instance, I was in Violent Green, a band that mixed Punk, folk, jazz, goth, rock, and trip hop). 

Despite all that, record labels were still hungry for 'the next Nirvana.' So there were lots of label reps still lurking (an MCA Records rep even sniffed at Violent Green for a minute, but then they were fired and that was the end of that) and lots of small indie labels were starting up. Sub Pop remained the game in town to shoot for in terms of the height of Seattle success, but the potential for bands getting on bigger labels was also very real then. 

It was in this environment in 1994 that Chris Takino would help guide Doug Martsch in getting Built to Spill signed with Warner Brothers. Sub Pop began to branch out in terms of the styles of bands they signed. Chris Takino's Up Records was a big reason for the branching out, I feel. He had shown Sub Pop by example that they were overlooking some great bands that were right under their noses (let's face it, two of those bands were Treepeople and Built to Spill! however they also graciously distributed Treepeople records - credit where it's due, and, many years later, Built to Spill is now on Sub Pop!). Of course, Sub Pop (along with his previous employer, SST Records) had provided a template for Chris to start a label with, and, Sub Pop had also helped Takino get the label up and running (for a short period in the beginning, Up Records even had offices in the same building as Sub Pop, the Terminal Sales Building) and in their own way they supported this filling of the void that Takino and Up provided.  

Up Records gave a home to bands and artists that didn't fit the 'Grunge' label, like Modest Mouse, Combustible Edison, Hush Harbor, 764 Hero, Satisfact, Mike Johnson, Rick Sabo, our crazy little brother band Caustic Resin, the wonderful band Juned, and so many more, including of course the very first Up band, our weird trio Violent Green, which couldn't seem to attract the attention of anyone except other musicians, who loved us. Everyone else was scratching their heads. We never would have gotten a record deal with any other label, of this I am certain. Thank you forever, Chris (wherever in the cosmos you may be).

Professional, semi-professional, or just having fun; Choose your adventure!

My attitude toward playing music at this point, or at least my expectation of what I wanted to get out of it, was shaped by my previous experience with Treepeople; I just wanted to play music I loved, and if I could make even part of my living at it, I was happy.  

 

Violent Green gets on the Map on Up! Records

Violent Green and Up Record's first 7 inch release

Violent Green would never provide even that (tough Halo Benders would soon) but I was fine with it. And I believe, in retrospect, that Jenny and Drew felt differently. I feel like they wanted some of that pie offered by the sniffing labels. And truthfully, they should have gotten it, but I just don't think they recognized their own naiveté about the music business, despite their immense talent. This is no dis to them; it's more of a dis to the music biz. And the truth is, most of the Seattle scene was filled with bands who fit that bill; We were all young and just wanted to be heard. We weren't business savvy folks, and most musicians aren't.

Every artist wants a piece of, if not fame, then at least making a living for all the hard work, time, sacrifice and money they give to the muse. But the people with the money, especially at that time, want a sure thing, and if you ain't that, then all the money they front you (including in the form of your own records) has to be paid back, and suddenly you are just indentured servants (the fate of so many signed bands I knew then). They seek talent by basing what they desire on recent successes and miss what is right in front of them (as I have more than once mentioned, some truths bear repeating) because their motivation is not about serving art; It is all about serving Capitalist Gods. 

 

I was just having breakfast with an old friend and his family recently in Portland, one of the guitarists from the amazing Seattle band Imij (a band who will be entering my tale soon) Chris Omowale, and he mentioned how in the old days, we were broke but creating all the time; art, music - we gave everything to it, and despite our self-imposed poverty, we were mostly happy. Happy because we were focusing all of our energy on our creative impulses, and to doing it our way, even if it wasn't serving up food for the Capitalist Gods (this was very much Imij's story). And who wants to be eaten and shit out, anyway?

Wayne Ray "Rhino" Flower II, 7/2/23