by Spitz, Marc
Every Portland, Brooklyn, or L.A. food truck, owned and run by a person and not a conglomerate, cooking with sourceable ingredients, is, for all the mockery and kvetching about the occasionally higher prices or exclusivity, a Punk rock enterprise. As Twee as the presentation becomes or as precious or proud the operators may seem about their product, they are, at heart, rebels.
This was commonplace in the Pacific Northwest when most New York Punks were still subsisting on dirty-water hot dogs, potato chips, and drugs. The back-to-the-earth hippies got run through the “Punk filter,” as Paul Morley described. Maybe growing a wonderful tomato was a natural offshoot of figuring out ways to concoct the best strain of hydroponic bud. It’s all gardening. To this day, the area is a bastion of “correct” living, eating, and rocking, with a rigidity that polarizes but, with collectives and food banks continuing to thrive, aligns some of its key figures—and has for decades now—with the Twee-food movement.
The whole of the Pacific Northwest’s nascent Twee culture reminds me a little bit of Crockett Johnson’s classic children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon, published in 1955. You’ve got Harold, and he’s just young enough to look at the world around him and say, “Fuck this.” And he’s got this crayon that enables him to draw and create whatever he imagines, and it becomes real (purple, but real). There’s no moon in the sky, and he thinks a moon would be nice, so he creates one. There’s no forest on a blank white patch of land, so he makes one. The forest is decidedly small. It’s really just one quaint little tree that he sits and admires. And once the tree bears fruit, Harold realizes it’s an apple tree. “The apples would be very tasty, Harold thought, when they got red,” the author writes. But Harold gets worried. What if people come around and try to mess with his tiny tree with its prized fruit? And so Harold creates a dragon to protect it. But the dragon is so frightening that it scares Harold off as well. What good is growing the best, most organic apples if they are unattainable, unmarketable, and incapable of being simply enjoyed? Such is the dilemma of “cred,” and in the 1980s, as the Smiths, R.E.M., and their contemporaries in film, literature, and TV slowly ceded their cred, others operated on an almost ascetic level and made peace with the dragon.
“There’s no morality involved. It just makes sense if I like local farmers, I should support them with my dollars—so they will continue to make a living and offer me their tomatoes, because I want tomatoes grown within ten miles of me,” says Calvin Johnson, a central figure for one of the most sustainable—and Twee—DIY scenes in America, centered around the label he cofounded, K Records.
Today Whole Foods, the expensive and politically polarizing emporium founded by conservative John Mackey, is about as close as we will get to is about as close as we will get to the conscious and, most crucially, intimate or interpersonal food shopping that is so common to the Pacific Northwest. As a nation, we will probably never turn en masse to the street markets with their buckets and crates, wildflowers, canned jams, and compost collection anytime soon. The air-conditioned supermarket and the obese shopper are still the norm, but increasingly the idea of an alternative is getting around, and people are gradually coming around to the notion that farm-to-table consumption is not something elitist. Some teenage Punks have been all over it, intent on eliminating the middlemen and profiteers since the 1970s.
In 1977, a fifteen-year-old Calvin Johnson began shifting as a disc jockey on KAOS out of Olympia, Washington, southwest of Seattle. KAOS, founded four years earlier at Evergreen State College, a small liberal-arts university surrounded by a small section of bars and stores, was intended as a community station for local students and residents. You couldn’t see Punk bands in Olympia in ’77.
“There weren’t any bands that were identifying as Punk and New Wave that were active in town,” Johnson says of the time period. Punk and early New Wave music was broadcast through the woods, the rain, and the cold via the Indie airwaves. The station’s call letters were in tribute to the evil organization in Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s 1960s spy farce Get Smart, then in syndicated reruns. DJs like Johnson and KAOS founder Dean Katz, as well as local figures like John Foster (who started the highly regarded zine OP, launched to give a forum to Indie musicians in Washington State and beyond), were, like Maxwell Smart and Agent 99, aligned against an evil empire. Johnson saw the major labels of the 1970s as merely an arm of a conglomerate of conscience-free fat cats and decided that it was as good a place as any to begin an insurgency. KAOS had already implemented a guideline that at least 80 percent of its playlist would be sourced from independent labels. “John Foster and some of the other people that were involved at the time, they thought it was a logical extension of the concept of community radio,” says Johnson, “to apply the same ideas to the music programming. A lot of what community radio is about is reaching out to disenfranchised groups. People underserved by traditional radio and traditional media. So by extending that to the music programming, they said, ‘We should play local music, and we should play music that doesn’t get airplay on other stations.’” Johnson didn’t shop at chain stores for music or food. He was eating locally farmed tomatoes before it became commonplace, and conducted himself with a monklike sense of clarity with regard to what could and could not be done to further the “cause.” It would become part of his personal myth, and before long, the Punk rock community that was slowly growing in Olympia made it a go-to destination for Pacific Northwest bands.
“KAOS was one of the first, if not the first college radio station in the country, to declare ‘no major label music’—stationwide. Nothing but Indie music was the policy,” remembers Slim Moon, an Evergreen student who would later found Kill Rock Stars, one of the most important American Indie labels, which would sign Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith, the Decemberists, and the Gossip, among many others. “By the time I got there in ’86, Olympia had been an early, early flag bearer,” says Moon.
Johnson had what Leonard Cohen called “the gift of a golden voice.” Like Cohen’s or Sinatra’s, it was deep and rich and made for radio. Over the airwaves it took on a performer’s sense of nuance and humor, although Johnson kept his self-consciousness in check as he played his Jam and X-Ray Spex singles on his Friday-night radio show, which he called Boy Meets Girl. “I always operated under the assumption that no one was listening,” he says. “If someone was listening, that was gravy.”
In 1982, with his teenage years now behind him, Johnson cofounded a label, K Records, as an extension of his DJ show and general Indie philosophy. To him it was an art project, no more or less creative than painting a canvas. The first band to sign to K was Supreme Cool Beings, featuring Heather Lewis, an Evergreen student, on drums and vocals and Doug Monaghan and Gary Allen on guitars. Their Survival of the Coolest album, recorded during an in-the-studio performance on Boy Meets Girl, was released as a mail-order cassette only.
“I started K to be a part of the decentralizing [of corporate labels],” Johnson now says. “That’s what my life is all about since I was fifteen. The idea of battling with corporate control of our lives overall—food, music, movies—it’s not just culture, it’s about everyday life. One of the ideas of Punk was you could control your own media. You could do a fanzine, you could have a radio show, you could put on shows, you can have a label—when Punk started, that was part of it all. All those things were the same thing as being in a band. They were all on equal levels.”
Despite his unique voice, Johnson was never in the school choir, did not grow up singing, and had no ambition to be a front man. He found himself a lead singer as a sort of logical extension of his activity at KAOS, and now as a label head inspired by the artists he was supporting. “I feel like the music was visionary,” he says. “Whatever genre, the theme of K was that the artist had a very personal vision that they were trying to achieve. It wasn’t about any particular style of music or graphic design—just the artist going over their own ideal.”
Lewis joined Johnson’s band along with Laura
Carter, another Olympia musician, and for a short while they were known simply as Laura, Heather and Calvin. Soon they became Beat Happening. Before they even rehearsed, Beat Happening was playing college parties. “We didn’t really want to have anything to be too worked out,” says Johnson. “We were relying on a good deal of improvisation.” There was quite a bit of feedback, some pounding, primal drums, and Johnson’s basso profundo trading lead vocals with Lewis’s flat, girly phrasing. It was as elemental as rock and roll got. “I always felt if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it—the music I liked was very simple, and I aspired to create music as beautiful.”
“Beat Happening had no bass player,” says Moon. “[Future K signees] Mecca Normal had no drums. The outside world’s perception of Olympia was that no band in Olympia was really a rock band. They never had the classic lineup of two guitar players, a bass player, and a drummer. When Olympia bands would go play in Seattle, the audience would boo them. That felt revolutionary.”
Like Jonathan Richman and Andy Kaufman, Beat Happening was deadly serious about their stance, even if to some outsiders it might have appeared a prank. Those waiting for the wink never got one. Here was a great band, but one that was certainly an acquired taste, and those who got it became fans and probably still are. Those who came to the shows to heckle or looky-loo were given what would come to be something of a community-wide glare.
“That scene had a really high standard,” says Moon. “It expected you to be productive. And we were kind of mean if people just wanted to show up and consume. We thought, We can do it all and make much more meaningful music and much more meaningful community than what was being given to us by MTV.”
K’s slogan said it all: “Exploding the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre since ’82.”
This pose wasn’t faux naïveté but rather a fierce, almost harsh, dragonlike guardianship of the Indie ethic that everyone knew was under assault. They were fighting against the shoulder-pads-and-coke 1980s zeitgeist.
Still, as the legend of Beat Happening and K Records grew, the question arose again and again, especially about Calvin Johnson: “Can anyone be that pure?”
“There was a built-in backlash to Olympia in Seattle,” says Sean Nelson, future front man for Harvey Danger and now a writer, actor, and solo artist. “That Olympia world was hipster in the old sense. People dressed in a combination of Mod vintage suits and pajamas and had an inherent sense of judgment. There was a high-art element to it, not knowing how to play your instruments. In Seattle people felt like [Olympia] was really moralistic.”
“It took me five years to figure out that Calvin wasn’t pulling my leg,” Moon says. “It’s a total devotion to a worldview. A lot have trouble [believing] that he really is the guy he is appearing to be, but he is.”
By the mid-’80s, the purity-via-simplicity ethos was something of a shared and international cause. One of Beat Happening’s first major acts as a band was to travel across the Pacific to perform a series of shows in Tokyo, where a few dozen Indie-rock hubs had been established. There Japanese teenagers read imported British music weeklies and derived their own aesthetic too, just as the teenagers in Glasgow or Morrissey in Manchester had. They looked great and had a hunger for basic, unadorned, no-synths, no-drum-machines rock and roll. Some were entrenched in the burgeoning “cutie” or Kawaii culture, most famously exemplified by Sanrio’s series of Disney-like characters, Hello Kitty the most iconic of them all. With no mouth, a blank expression, and a bow in her hair, Kitty was a sort of postmodern Mickey Mouse figure onto which any emotion could be projected. By the 1990s, that face would be the very emblem of postmodernism, a Warholian blankness staring out from coffee cups and guitars, jet airplanes and candy tins. It would also spark a social argument that would reemerge in the early 2010s: feminists argued that the strange cat character and “cutie” culture in general inspired women to remain permanently girlish and immature, while others simply appreciated the kitsch value. There were even those who saw Hello Kitty as a vital response to the increasingly modern and cold world. “Surrounding yourself with cute things could offset that a little,” Ken Belson and Brian Bremner write in their history of Sanrio and its empire, now worth billions, “bringing some whimsy and comfort into one’s life, lending a subjective quality to otherwise sterilized products like a vacuum cleaner, microwave ovens or rice cookers.” In this way, Hello Kitty was rebellious, Punk rock even.
“It seemed like a new frontier,” Johnson says of 1980s Tokyo. “No one we knew had anything to do with Japan. No bands even thought about going to Japan.”
Despite their limitations, intentional or not, Beat Happening were beginning to write incredible songs and develop a sort of hybrid style of a piece with tough but funny predecessors like the Cramps. The most powerful songs of their oeuvre combine an elemental, Punk rock arrangement with lyrics about wearing pajamas, going on picnics, climbing trees, and having crushes.
Beat Happening’s willful childlike stance—or antimacho pose—remained ridiculously Twee to some, but like a secret weapon against the soul-sucking ’80s to others.
The DIY movement had like-minded souls all over America and in Europe as well as the Far East. In the pre-Internet age, cassette-sharing culture and zine trading held these factions together and fortified what seemed like a shared cause.
“Fanzines fed off each other,” says Clare Wadd, who started the Bristol, England–based zine Kvatch. “I see massive parallels with the blogosphere and all of social media of today—that desire to reach out and connect with other people with similar interests, particularly for teenagers and young people who can feel quite isolated, maybe in small towns or whatever, and to build your own virtual community rather than just deal with the one you live in.”
Fanzine productions separated the men from the boys (and the women from the girls). It was hard work: you had to really be committed, so if you had one, you were given the benefit of the doubt by your potential allies, a sort of instant respect, since they too knew what went into the creation. “I guess one of the hardest things to get across to people who’ve grown up in the era of the Internet and computer design is the sheer physical effort involved in producing an actual solid object, and then trying to market and distribute it . . . not to mention the cost,” says Matt Haynes, who wrote the zine Are You Scared to Get Happy?, also out of Bristol. “But at least, in theory, that meant anyone who produced a fanzine was totally committed and had a vested interest in actually selling the finished product, otherwise they’d lose money.”
Wadd recalls the arduous step-by-step. “We had to make paste-ups, with the text and pictures glued onto them and the edges held down with white poster paint so you didn’t get shadow lines on your printing,” she says. “Then you would get your fanzine back from the printers and have to collate them and staple them and fold them. And then you would have the whole mail-order side, and sending them off to other fanzines to review.”
The impassioned zine hawker was quickly becoming a familiar sight at Indie-rock shows. “We’d sell them at gigs,” Haynes recalls, “not at a stall—just by walking up to people and saying, ‘Do you want to buy a fanzine?’ Getting drunk and belligerent helped. But you picked your gigs carefully, and there were often two or three fanzine sellers doing the same thing, so people were used to this.”
Copies were also given out to Indie record stores in hopes that customers would get hooked and become regular readers. The most organized zine writers included an address and instructions on where and how to subscribe, the best way to tape coins to a piece of cardboard to cover postage costs, et cetera. It was such a detail-oriented operation that, after a point, it didn’t seem that much of a stretch to run a record label.
Sub Pop, which grew out of music writer and DJ Bruce Pavitt’s KAOS radio show, Subterranean Pop, was such a zine-to-label phenomenon. Pavitt and Johnson were friends, and when Johnson briefly moved to the D.C. area (which had its own organic and somewhat rigid Pun
k scene, centered on Dischord Records and the Bad Brains), Pavitt took over Johnson’s Boy Meets Girl slot. Pavitt later moved to Seattle and continued the brand, now shortened to Sub Pop, as both a zine and a monthly column in the city’s local paper The Rocket.
Many zines, like the soon-to-explode Sub Pop and Touch and Go, out of East Lansing, Michigan, occasionally included a flexi disc, thus making their evolution into actual labels that much more natural. The better fanzines, ones that offered these song giveaways, had little trouble gaining the respect of record distributors. Soon UK zinesters Matt Haynes and Clare Wadd were teaming up and launching a label called Sarah Records.
Once a young writer, music fan, and politically sound zine publisher became an actual label head, he or she usually established a series of ground rules so as to avoid being corrupted by Calvin Johnson’s “corporate ogre.” These weren’t manifestos à la Riot Grrrl, but were usually the product of a careful conversation. “The rules were pretty much that we both had to really like the record, the songs—not just the band, but the actual songs that we were releasing. We had to love it or it didn’t come out,” says Wadd.
Often there was a political agenda too. Zines were started to telegraph what you loved. Labels had the power to tear down what you hated. “These were quite militant times,” says Phil Johnson of the June Brides, one of this period’s biggest cult bands. “Several of the major labels had such a wide spread on investments and subcompanies that many people would not want to get involved with them for political reasons, us included. The independent labels offered a place where you could go and maintain your self-righteousness.”
In the wake of Band Aid, Live Aid, and Farm Aid, pop stars were obliged to become political on a grand scale, making statements and recording saccharine anthems (while of course meaning well), then resuming a lifestyle that did nothing to support anything ecological or ideological. It was puffery orchestrated by major-label publicists, and it made the Indie scene seem like worker ants by comparison—but also a lot more admirable. Theirs was a lifestyle, not a statement; a ceaseless rebellion against greed, sexism, the screwing of artists, and the callous rescinding of social programs, not to mention the ravaging of the planet.
