In the early years of Sleater-Kinney, we played at Seattle’s Crocodile Café. Elizabeth was at the show. By then, 7 Year Bitch had broken up. She came up to me, complimented my guitar playing, and told me she loved the band. Elizabeth didn’t recognize me as the girl who had gone over to her house that day or written her an overly earnest tell-all letter. I was relieved that music had done exactly what I had always wanted it to do, which was turn me into someone else.
—
Jana and I had mostly given up on finding bandmates via classified ads. One night the Breeders were playing in Olympia at the Capitol Theater, so Jana and I drove down. We stood in the orchestra pit, crammed up against other kids, giddy with anticipation, wrapped up in that collective swell of appreciation and adoration. In front of us stood a group of girls with baby bangs and barrettes, yellow or black or red hair, and vintage glasses. Jana and I were awkward. She was nearly six feet tall with shaggy curls that she habitually tucked behind her ears with a bashful shrug. I had Manic Panic magenta hair and big cheeks, a nose ring that was constantly on the verge of infection, a thrift-store T-shirt from the boys’ section paired with corduroys cut off at the bottom with scissors, no seam, frayed. We weren’t exactly cool. We started talking to these girls and found out they lived in Seattle—a boon for us since befriending a bunch of Olympia kids would mean yet another thing that was out of our reach. By the end of the night, after singing along and matching Kim and Kelley Deal grin for grin, we had the phone numbers of Polly, Gilly, and Rachel.
It was early 1993 and I was floundering. My telemarketing office was in the University District near another branch of Cellophane Square, the record store I loved, and a guitar shop I could gawk at. Most of my work conversations consisted of people bragging that a friend of a friend knew the drummer in the Pixies or had lived in the same town as the singer from Toad the Wet Sprocket. I offered to be in a band with a cute and hip-looking woman whom I admired for her ability to pull off overalls, but she wasn’t interested. I ate lunch in my car.
So meeting Polly, Gilly, and Rachel could not have come at a better time. It gave me a sense of purpose; it was inspiring, it was something to do, somewhere to go. Mostly Jana and I and the rest of the girls hung out at Polly’s. She was living with her mom in the Wedgwood neighborhood of Seattle. Their house was small, underlit, cozily cluttered. We’d hang out what seemed like every night, dye each other’s hair, put on makeup, listen to records, watch late-night music videos, get drunk, draw, lie around. It was languid, shapeless, and very sweet.
One night, after we’d all been hanging out for a few weeks, we were drinking some kind of saccharine liqueur, something you’d only drink if it were free—free as in stolen from one’s parents. The flavor made for a woozy, treacly buzz. Polly suggested that we pass the drink mouth-to-mouth. It started like that, our mouths merely conduits, containers. The feeling was warm but still perfunctory. But somewhere in the middle of this contrived routine, this newfound alcohol-dispensing technique, was an ersatz kiss, another mouth. Soon I was centering in on the sensation, of the place where the lips touched, to see whether it felt good. And then the alcohol became secondary to skin. And then there was just kissing. It lasted hours, an expedition. It didn’t feel revelatory, but it also didn’t feel strange.
I woke up the next morning in my childhood bed and called Jana. She felt sick, horrified. For her it had been an awakening, and she wanted to die. I was shut off from my body; I had barely thought about sexuality or longing. Up until this point, my sexual experiences had felt businesslike or even transactional. A trade agreement with a neighbor wherein I’d give him a blow job and then later get something in return. That “something” never happened, by the way, though I am certain I didn’t miss much. There was a party in high school where I spent the last hour essentially making out with the pimply back of a guy’s neck who was sitting in front of me on the floor. I was too afraid to ask for more, or even suggest that he turn around. With female friends I had cuddled at sleepovers but never touched or reached out in any sort of romantic way. I hadn’t been suppressing urges or denying my needs. I didn’t feel like I had any, not corporeal ones. My journal entries from that time speak to depression and feelings of isolation, fears that a friend would leave, a sense that I had been responsible for my mother’s departure and would therefore cause anyone I loved or needed to leave. I was still spending most of my time in my head. I was removed from my own feelings. Like so many aspects of my life up until that point, the only remarkable thing about that night was that it was a small version of letting go, which I sort of detested, and definitely feared.
The marathon makeout did bring to light that living with my dad and sister was proving problematic. In the brief time I had been in Bellingham, the two of them had somehow turned into bros more than anything resembling father and daughter. My sister’s room was decorated with European beer bottles, and a La-Z-Boy was now parked in front of the living room TV. Stacey was mysteriously allowed to throw parties, and my dad’s only social life seemed to revolve around her soccer games. I moved out of Redmond and into a cheap apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill.
Now with all of us in the city, the five of us formed a band that we called Conspiracy A Go-Go. We practiced in the basement and recorded a four-track cassette tape so we could get a handful of shows in small bars—okay, in the corner of small bars, on a carpeted floor, during the day. Also, “handful” might be an exaggeration. We weren’t very good. None of us could really sing, and the songwriting was rudimentary but not in a charming, purposely minimalist way. We didn’t care that we were the musical version of a stick figure—it was more about feeling like we were doing something. It was a way of being around one another. By now the band consisted of two pseudo couples and a fifth wheel, “pseudo” meaning none of us would really admit to what was happening. We were like Fleetwood Mac without the sex or drugs or hair or songs.
Polly was friends with Calvin Johnson of K Records, so we got a show opening up for the Sub Pop band Codeine down in Olympia. This excruciating experience was how I learned about onstage sound and audio. I think people take for granted that there is any sort of manual for playing live. On this night, the first time I got onstage—a real stage —I had never used a proper PA or had anything other than the vocals miked. There was a speaker in front of me—a monitor, it turned out—but I had no idea that I would need to ask to get specific instruments in there. And for that matter, I didn’t know what to even ask for, what would be important for me to hear to enable me to play the songs the way I knew them and to which I was accustomed. I had no idea that if I didn’t get certain instruments in the monitor, I wouldn’t be able to hear the other band members, that everything I knew about our songs would be dismantled and compartmentalized in a live setting. That depending on the shape of the venue and the stage, depending on the setup, I might only be able to hear myself. And that was the case. I couldn’t hear the vocals or kick drum or bass. We were five people playing a solo show simultaneously and not on purpose, not as a graduate school thesis or as an art project.
When people gripe about girls’ rock camps or schools of rock, saying music, especially popular forms, can’t be institutionalized or taught, maybe part of that is true, but I always think about that night. How if the process had been demystified, less of a private club or a secret code, we wouldn’t have sat in the dark theater after we played, watching Codeine deliver a taut, deliberate set while we felt undeserving of having ever been onstage, blaming one another and ourselves, mad and heartbroken.
CHAPTER 6
SCHOOLED
I finally made my move to Olympia, nominally to return to school, in the summer of 1993. I was eighteen years old. Through writing to Tobi Vail, Becca Albee, and other girls I’d met via fanzines and Riot Grrrl, I managed to set up a sublet at a place called “The Haunted House,” a.k.a. “The Punk House,” a.k.a. “The Blue House.” All the shared houses had names like that, often
descriptors of their aesthetic, their proximity to a landmark or store, or referring to some talisman contained therein. Most residents knew little of the origin of their house’s moniker. I was going to live in the room of Justin Trosper, who was heading out on tour with his band Unwound.
When I moved to Olympia I didn’t really think of myself as a musician. I don’t know if I would consider myself a musician now, not in the technical sense. I don’t know much theory, I play by instinct and feel, I could probably get schooled by an eight-year-old on tonics and inversions. But back then, the word “musician” had a professional characteristic to it that would have made it even more alienating and anathema. Back then, I was still just a fan of music. And to be a fan of music also meant to be a fan of cities, of places. Regionalism—and the creative scenes therein—played an important role in the identification and contextualization of a sound or aesthetic. Music felt married to place, and the notion of “somewhere” predated the Internet’s seeming invention of “everywhere” (which often ends up feeling like “nowhere”).
Technically, in order to save face with my father, I moved to Olympia to attend Evergreen. But Olympia itself was a university I wanted to attend. Everything coming out of that scene had started to define me, or at least I wanted it to: the labels K Records and Kill Rock Stars, the bands, the fanzines, the people, the remnants of Riot Grrrl, the clothes. It was a world I was desperate to be part of. I wanted a new family of outlaws, of queers and provocative punks, of wit and sexiness. I had one trajectory and that was to get out: of Redmond, of my childhood, of my head. But I needed a place to land. I needed a place to take me in. It was both a calculated move and an aimless one. I possessed the force of a bullet, albeit one shot from a very shoddy gun.
I showed up to Olympia a wanderer. I had about two months until school started. I spent the first few weeks walking around downtown stopping in at the State Theater or thrift stores or the Martin apartments, places I knew people I wanted to be friends with worked or hung out. I lingered and muttered, I waited around. I was desperate to insert myself into situations, to learn, to observe. I was an archaeologist of sorts but I wanted to be a participant, to be connected and engaged. I was shy, which didn’t help. Underneath that nervousness, however, I had a cunningness and intentionality, or at least a cluelessness that was intrepid enough to get the job done. I cared too much about what people thought but also not enough. I didn’t mind that I was just hanging around. I didn’t want to be discovered, I wanted to be part of the discovery.
I knew who all the players were, as if I were joining a sorority. I wanted to meet everyone. These musicians in punk bands, whom I’d read about in fanzines or seen mentioned in a record label newsletter, in Maximum RocknRoll or Punk Planet, were idols to me, larger than life. All my early school years vying for attention and status, a game I’d given up years before, I rechanneled and traded in for a different currency, a punk and indie rock currency, a marketplace of art and ideas. Here we dealt in arcane musical knowledge, in being completists, archivists, contrarians. We would go out on tours and come back with evidence from other scenes. It felt like reconnaissance in that way, like we were explorers and spies, an army.
I was scared my first summer in Olympia, flailing but strangely bold. I biked around town and rode skateboards in the Capitol parking lot. I drank too much malt liquor and cried on basement floors while bands played. I had unrequited crushes on girls, on entire bands, but mostly dated boys. More often than not I woke up hungover in friends’ beds after a night of platonic spooning. I didn’t care about setting down roots or having anything consistent. I wanted to be everywhere, talk to everyone. I was fumbling and barely formed, insecure and baby-faced, in polyester highwaters from the thrift store and used men’s shoes with crummy soles and stretched, worn insides that my feet slid around in. I wore too-tight T-shirts and chunky belts, cut my own bangs uneven and jagged like an upside-down skyline, laughed too hard at everything, overshared.
A band called Huggy Bear from England descended upon our little town that summer. Afraid to fly, their guitarist, Jon Slade, stayed home. So Billy from Bikini Kill was the replacement. Huggy Bear were energetic, with a sophistication that not many of us in the Northwest had pulled off. They were cheeky—I don’t know if that word has ever been ascribed to someone not from the United Kingdom. They conveyed drollness in their music; it was coy, sexy, and serpentine. I saw every show they played in the region, following them up to Seattle, driving down to Portland. I was a puppy dog for punk, and for Jo, who was probably the first girl I both really wanted and wanted to be: sunglasses-wearing, aloof, mysterious, with catchy riffs, her treble boosted so that it hissed through the songs. I drank so I’d have the nerve to keep hanging out, well past when I should have gone home. I tagged along on a trip to the ocean. I felt like a drifter. My heart hurt and I hated it.
Most nights I spent at basement punk shows, where we’d drink beer out of paper bags and sway like grass. I saw Karp and Unwound, Mary Lou Lord, Elliott Smith, Rancid, Jawbreaker, Drive Like Jehu. It seemed a touring band came through Olympia every night. Bands that would never play small towns now stopped there to hang out and fraternize with their friends in the local scene. They dropped in to home recording studios to make a 7-inch, they partied, they crashed on floors and hooked up with their Oly girlfriends. Sometimes they’d play multiple nights. Bigger bands like Beck or Stereolab would play the backstage of the Capitol Theater, the stage set up so performers would have their backs to the seats and the balcony while the audience stood in what is usually everything behind the curtain. It sounded horrible, as most of the noise escaped up into the main room. But I didn’t think much at all about fidelity or professionalism, just about experience, about witnessing, about watching the way someone else danced or moved. All the music was still very much a mystery, how it all cohered. I discerned very little between good and bad bands, popular or obscure. Every band was good. Every player had a purpose, was standing his or her ground, contributing, making a sound. Any band was worth buying a single from, supporting, dancing along to. I could find appeal in the sway of a bass player or the cocky head bop of a drummer, in the musculature, in the posturing, in the daring hint of sexiness that you’d never witness offstage, in a glance or glare, in the reveal of a fang, in a singer’s spit in the act of screaming, in sweat forming on a chest or hairlines, in a dropped pick somehow reclaimed mid-song, in a smile between two band members. I saw merit and beauty in it all—and if not beauty, then purpose, or at least just a way of positing yourself in the world, standing in one spot and being heard, etching your name somewhere, even if it disappeared shortly after. But at the time it all felt permanent, the most permanent and concrete thing I’d ever felt, and I was surrounded. Mostly what I felt was that I wanted to do that, too.
—
But there was also, of course, the actual college. Olympia’s communal spirit possessed an almost utilitarian mind-set, where our worth was measured by the happiness and progress of the whole. Not coincidentally, almost all of us in the music scene had gone to the Evergreen State College. Founded in the late 1960s, Evergreen favors experiential learning. Grades are qualitative and it is unnecessary to declare a major. At the core of the Evergreen pedagogy is the seminar, wherein students and their professors engage in polemical discussion. The seminar doesn’t adhere to the more hierarchical lecture format; instead, it allows for a collective sharing, examination, and deconstruction of ideas.
I often suspected the Olympia music scene would not have existed outside of this influence. Though it mimicked other punk scenes in its anti-corporate stance, it was a community in dialogue with itself. The rhetoric surrounding and about the scene was tantamount in importance to the labels, the bands, the musicians. We operated as if in a constant seminar. Everything was mutable and vulnerable to critique; it was all a shared experience. Bands felt like collective entities, with everyone having a say in what the music meant, calling out each other
on wrong steps—an exhausting endeavor but one that built a special and sometimes frustrating insularity. Olympia was the quintessential “in” crowd versus “out” crowd. Visiting bands were either in awe or felt thoroughly snubbed. Though there was indeed a certain amount of snobbery, I think it was that our interactions had been codified, partly as an identifier, but also by necessity. The claustrophobia of small-town dynamics makes for new rules in terms of greetings and salutations; privacy and alone time were often only achieved by looking down as you walked along the streets. This mode of self-preservation and insularity can be off-putting to visitors.
Playing music seemed like the easiest way to communicate with my friends in Olympia. Everyone, it seemed, was not in one band, but in two or three. It would have been easier to count the people not in bands. And the music’s value wasn’t always based on technical acuity—there was a lot of deliberate underachieving and subversion. Bands like Witchypoo wore helmets and had transient members; they did spoken word over barely tuned guitars. The premium was not always on singing but on earnestness, sincerity croaked out or yelped, love songs made tart and less trite because they were voiced in a slant, slope, or scream. Angst compensated for everything. Some Velvet Sidewalk, Kicking Giant, Karp, duos and trios that sang as if every line was punctuated with an exclamation point. It was the sound of a magnified muttering, loud and distorted. Some bands possessed a purposeful clumsiness, while others couldn’t help teetering, but any inelegance masked something sharper. Scissors and knives.
I started playing with Becca Albee and CJ Phillips. We called our band Excuse 17. Becca was a writer and artist from Portland, Maine, who was going to school at Evergreen. She lived in the Martin apartments, which were the veritable Melrose Place of Olympia, a punk rock dormitory right in the center of town. Becca had been kind to me from the beginning. She seemed eager to forge a musical project with someone new in town, someone not already associated with another band. We both played guitar, and in typical Oly style, a bass player seemed an unnecessary addition. Becca had a good sense of melody and of creating character and story in songs, which there wasn’t a lot of in the first-person, sometimes stark narratives of the Riot Grrrl bands. She listened to Elvis Costello and Throwing Muses and had a slightly more sophisticated palate than I did. I was always seeking a kindred desperation in music, whereas Becca possessed a sturdiness that allowed her to appreciate the more refined. I was anxious to pour my guts out, and many of my songs with Excuse 17 are a sonic and lyrical purging, a caged animal who upon release heads straight to the recording studio. Fortunately, Becca’s intelligence tempered my screeches and squawks, and I managed to learn about cowriting, about arrangement, about restraint. Then there was CJ, who was from the Seattle suburb of Federal Way. He had an affect of sensitivity that was so common among the young men I knew as to be pro forma, this gentleness a phase many men entered or adopted as they tried to navigate the matrifocal environs of Olympia.
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl Page 7
