Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  Then again, Johnson may have had a motivation for performing as old as rock & roll itself. Mudhoney’s Steve Turner recalls a show his band played with Beat Happening, a college gig in Vancouver. “As we were loading our gear in,” Turner recalls, “Calvin came up to me, put his arm around my shoulders, and said something like, ‘Ah yes, a college show. You know what that means, don’t you? Lots of young girls in striped T-shirts and no bras.’ ”

  Johnson and Lunsford simply taught Lunsford’s girlfriend (later his wife), Denise Crowe, how to play drums. For transportation they hooked up with a company that hired people to drive cars across the country and hit the road for a string of all-ages dates, starting in Seattle and going straight to a coffeehouse in Columbus, Ohio. From there it was to places like New York’s underground punk shrine ABC No Rio, playing to a few dozen people.

  Johnson and Australian musician/critic David Nichols had begun corresponding in 1984 after Nichols read a review of the first Beat Happening cassette and Johnson read about Nichols’s fanzine in the same issue of Op. Nichols’s band the Cannanes had also released their first album on cassette, and when the two found they were kindred spirits, the connection was strong. The Cannanes were one of several bands (the Pastels and the Vaselines in Scotland and a few bands on New Zealand’s Flying Nun label were others) around the world who had independently adopted a musical approach like Beat Happening’s. Maybe it’s no coincidence that they all sounded similar—with severely limited technique, musical resemblances were inevitable—but the sensibility, the impulse behind the approach, was cause for serious bonding.

  In 1986 Nichols picked up several copies of Beat Happening’s album when he stopped off in Olympia on his way to England. At the time Johnson wasn’t feeling very upbeat—Beat Happening was still just an obscure regional band with two self-released cassettes, a single, and an album, none of which had sold particularly well. “It just was a very emotional time for me because I had put out this record,” said Johnson. “It was kind of not doing anything. Nobody had bought the record. I was trying to do K and nobody seemed to really care about it.”

  But shortly afterward the Snoopy phone rang and on the line was someone from Rough Trade Records, the home of so many of Johnson’s favorite records. One of the Beat Happening albums Nichols had picked up had found its way to the label; they wanted to release it in the United Kingdom that November. Johnson was ecstatic.

  Unfortunately, Rough Trade never accorded Beat Happening the first-class treatment enjoyed by their big bands, like the Smiths and the Go-Betweens, but the initial excitement irrevocably buoyed the band’s spirits. And through Rough Trade, like-minded U.K. bands like the Pastels, Teenage Fanclub, Heavenly, and the Vaselines all discovered Beat Happening. Soon the Pastels issued a couple of Beat Happening records on their label 53rd & 3rd, and K released a Cannanes cassette and records by Heavenly and Teenage Fanclub.

  Johnson’s childlike stick-figure rendering of a smiling kitty adorned virtually everything K made. In a funny way, it was a very punk rock gesture. “They drew pictures of bunnies and kitties while everybody else was trying to do these slick graphics or at least something that looked professional,” says Northwest underground mainstay Steve Fisk. “Independent rock was struggling to look professional—the Eighties had created this idea that good graphics were slick graphics. So Calvin drawing everything and Xeroxing it or doing really crude Macintosh art, that was just another way of being rude.”

  A CLASSIC BEAT HAPPENING SHOW POSTER FEATURING K’S SIGNATURE KITTY.

  DESIGN AND ILLUSTRATION: CALVIN JOHNSON

  And the kitty cat fulfilled another function, of taking punk rock ideas about inclusion seriously. “It’s very embracing,” Candice Pedersen explains. “You allow people to not be scared of something or feel like they have to pass some test to become a part of something.” The kitty became the universally recognized symbol of what Some Velvet Sidewalk’s Al Larsen jokingly dubbed “love rock.” The term stuck.

  Sure enough, the smiley-face approach attracted a following of outcasts—not the mohawked malcontents of years past, but the kind of people who were into the Smiths; a nerdier, more sensitive bunch who weren’t interested in perpetuating the malice and exclusion they had felt growing up. “People made me feel bad when I was a kid,” says Pedersen, “so why would I want to go out of my way to make people feel rotten, like somehow they don’t belong or they don’t cut the mustard?”

  The cutesiness extended to the way Beat Happening used only their first names in album credits. But even though K imagery and language were couched in naïveté and innocence, Johnson was just as savvy and calculating as his old friend Bruce Pavitt. “We’re both mythmakers,” Pavitt explains. “We just created a different myth.”

  Even in the midst of his most abandoned live performances, Johnson was fully aware of the shapes he was throwing. “He goes into this psycho dancer state of mind and is still really focused on what’s happening,” says Lunsford. “He’s kind of channeling things that are important to him and then giving them out in varying degrees of articulateness.” And there was no doubt that he was becoming an astute businessman.

  Johnson had a formidable charisma, too. “He’s one of those people who walks into a room,” says Lewis, “and people notice him.” The other two were quite happy to cede Johnson the limelight—that was the way they worked as friends, so why should it be any different as a band? Johnson took to the role gladly with his navel-baring performance style and dominance of lead vocal duties. In press photos he often partially hid behind a fellow band member or even a statue, coyly, cagily drawing attention to himself.

  In person Johnson could be haughty, brusque, and cutting, and would not take kindly to people who tried to move in on his turf, that is, Olympia. “A lot of people are really surprised when they meet him,” says Lunsford, “because they expect him to be Mr. Rogers and he’s not.”

  But plenty of people bought the cutesy, naive image, hook, line, and sinker, one writer even describing Johnson as “our personal Elvis (and Hello Kitty’s human counterpart).” But that didn’t do Johnson justice. Sure, Elvis had his hips and Johnson had his belly button, but Johnson had a bit of Colonel Parker in him, too. And as for the Hello Kitty part, forget about it—the man was no one’s toy.

  In the spring of ’87 Beat Happening promoted and played a series of shows in obscure towns around Puget Sound like Mount Vernon, Bellingham, and Anacortes, and down as far as Corvallis, Oregon, with Girl Trouble and Screaming Trees—“the Screaming Trouble Happening tour.” Such was the togetherness of the tiny Northwest underground scene at the time that Beat Happening and the rowdy, hard-drinking aggro-psychedelic Screaming Trees soon did an EP together.

  By 1988 Johnson, his brother Streator, and Lunsford had founded a nonprofit organization called Sound Out Northwest. The following summer they took Northwest punk bands out on tours of rural Washington—towns like Astoria, Aberdeen, Port Angeles, Port Townsend, Bellingham, Sequim, Ellensburg, and Everett. “And just say, ‘Hey, here’s what rock bands look like that aren’t cover bands,’ ” says Lunsford. “We tried to take our band feeling about what we should be doing politically into what can we do in the world we’re in, which is rock & roll and the Northwest and small towns around here, what can we be doing?… And let’s just go out and show some punk rock to these kids and see how they take it.”

  As it happened, the Beat Happening/Mudhoney/Mecca Normal show at the Eagles Hall in sleepy Anacortes created quite a stir. The conservative Eagles didn’t like funny-looking punk rockers invading their sanctum and refused to book a punk rock show again. Months later Lunsford tried to arrange a Beat Happening/McTells/Nation of Ulysses show in Anacortes. He booked the local railroad depot, put up posters all over town, and then was informed he couldn’t hold the show; he moved it to a nearby grange hall, but that was rejected, too. “Punk in small towns in ’88, ’89 was just too dangerous to the normal way of doing things,” Lunsford explains. “We found out how man
y walls there were in this free society that were blocking self-entertainment. Something as simple as being able to entertain yourself, if it wasn’t happening in a business that was either selling alcohol or a successful nightclub for all ages, which are usually short-lived, then it was suspect.”

  They wound up having the show in the backyard of a friend’s house in the woods and passed a hat so the bands could get paid.

  After a stint in the legendary West Coast instrumental combo Pell Mell, Johnson’s old KAOS crony Steve Fisk became the house engineer at Albright Productions, a small studio in Ellensburg, some hundred miles from Olympia in the cow-friendly flatlands of eastern Washington. Screaming Trees had already done some excellent recordings at Albright with Fisk, and it was there that Beat Happening recorded Jamboree. Released in early 1988, it’s widely considered their best album.

  Everyone sings and plays with far more confidence; on “In Between” the guitars are strummed so hard they go out of tune halfway through the song. The ultra-spare arrangements (three songs are basically just vocals) suggest far more than what is on the track; the songwriting sharpened immeasurably, the melodies are even more affecting.

  As ever, Johnson’s lyrics lean heavily on the terminology of late Fifties/early Sixties teen pop, given an extra childlike frisson with a nearly constant mention of sweets: hot chocolate, baked Alaska, apple pie, honey, cider, sugar cubes, bananas, molasses, etc. All of this would lead a lot of listeners to take them at face value, but Johnson’s world also encompassed death, transgression, jealousy, and lust.

  While Johnson’s darker Jamboree songs sound like elemental variations on the Munsters theme, Lewis’s two tunes are more sweet: she ponders mortality with an uncommunicative boyfriend in “In Between” and tries to engage another silent Sam on the live a cappella “Ask Me”: “And oh hey, well OK / Aren’t you going to ask me what I did today?” she sings in a plaintive, girlish singsong that audibly gathers confidence over the song’s one-minute duration.

  But the album’s classic is Johnson’s supremely wistful “Indian Summer,” a song that was covered several times over the next few years. In a nifty feat of minimalist composition, the vocal melody sounds all the changes against the subtle alternation of two guitar chords. It’s seemingly a tale of innocent rural romance, of picnicking in a graveyard, although naturally Johnson works in some sexual double entendre (“Boy tasting wild cherry…”) and the whole food/sex/death scenario is a Freudian field day. On the chorus the couple vows, “We’ll come back for Indian summer / And go our separate ways,” but the song’s melancholy says otherwise; the couple’s teen idyll is lost forever.

  Jamboree’s finale is the electrifying “The This Many Boyfriends Club,” recorded live in a hall in Ellensburg. In yet another Johnsonian tale of outcast love, the narrator comforts a girlfriend who’s been mocked by classmates. “It makes me mad / When I see them make you sad,” Johnson sings, with both the sincere, off-key cadence of a five-year-old singing to himself and alternating currents of very adult love and rage, all echoed by the caterwauling guitar feedback that is the song’s only accompaniment (aside from the hysterical screaming of a couple of female fans in the audience). It is a positively astonishing performance.

  Writing in his Conflict fanzine, Gerard Cosloy called Jamboree “the most sexually charged rock LP since some Bauhaus disc I forgot the name of…. The secret to Beat Happening’s complete domination of rock lies not in the music’s simplicity, nor what some fuckheads see as feigned innocence or eccentricity; Calvin, Heather and Bret take on situations and ideas, not ’cause they think it’s funny or strange to feel the way they do—Beat Happening truly live in the world they convey… it’s not a sense of wonder they convey, it’s the truest sense of abandon anyone’s created in way too long.”

  The band did their first proper U.S. tour, this time with Lewis back in the lineup, in the spring of ’88, traveling around the country in a compact car for three and a half weeks. On their next tour they lived it up and rented a Lincoln Town Car; for another tour they landed cheap airfares to New York, played a few lucrative college shows there, and then came right back.

  In the several years since Lewis had last been on the road, the indie circuit had literally changed its tune. “It just seemed like there were more bands that were—not necessarily like us—but they weren’t like hardcore bands,” Lewis says. “It was more melodic music.”

  But some things remained the same. There were still extremely few women on the indie circuit, and even though she was traveling with two of her best friends, Lewis felt a bit lonely. “It was also comfortable, too,” says Lewis, “because it was what it was—I wasn’t expecting there to be girls out there.”

  Thanks to all their international connections, they were able to put together a European tour in the summer of ’88, visiting England, Holland, Germany, and Scotland. They played the Scottish dates with the Pastels and the English dates with the Vaselines; the London shows were met with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but even the least enthusiastic crowds were more polite than anything they’d encountered in the States outside of their hometown.

  Unfortunately one English journalist pounced on the band and said some nasty things about Lewis’s appearance. “It was some asshole,” says Lunsford, “someone that was out to personally attack somebody who they thought was vulnerable.” Johnson’s reaction was to call up the writer and, pretending he hadn’t seen the review, ask him if he was interested in profiling the band. They wound up doing a cordial interview.

  And there was some good press, too. Melody Maker’s influential Simon Reynolds reviewed a sparsely attended club show that July in Brixton. On the hyperextended “whyyyyyyy” in “Our Secret,” Reynolds noted, “The lack of fluency in Calvin’s voice, his callow, chesty drone is infinitely more affecting than the deftly frantic signification of emotion practised by ‘accomplished’ singers.

  “In search of ‘purity,’ Beat Happening reduce rock to its barest rudiments, chord changes almost mystically asinine,” Reynolds continued. “Beat Happening know that the deep moments in our lives don’t extract profundities from us; rather, it is clichés that are the endless, involuntary spew of the lover’s discourse.”

  BEAT HAPPENING AT THE INTERNATIONAL POP UNDERGROUND CONVENTION IN OLYMPIA, AUGUST 1991. LEFT TO RIGHT: CALVIN JOHNSON, HEATHER LEWIS, BRET LUNSFORD.

  CHARLES PETERSON

  After graduating in ’88, Lunsford worked in the fish-packing industry around Anacortes, then began working at a bookstore. After graduating in ’85, Lewis made her living cooking in restaurants or painting the occasional house; Johnson eked out a living from K, albeit helped along by the occasional check from Mom.

  K was now distributing releases by Sub Pop; Ellensburg, Washington’s Velvetone; England’s Bi-Joopiter Expressions; Eugene, Oregon’s Dunghill; Scotland’s 53rd & 3rd and Beatkit. The label had released records by White Zombie, Half Japanese, and Shonen Knife on singles and a series of compilations called Let’s Together, Let’s Kiss, and Let’s Sea. The international labels and bands gave K an extra cachet, while carrying the smaller, struggling labels earned K much respect and gratitude. The label also released records by future indie starlets like Girl Trouble, the Flatmates, Some Velvet Sidewalk, Mecca Normal, the Pastels, and Unrest, among many others, as part of its long-running International Pop Underground series of singles, which debuted in early 1987.

  Despite its international signings, the label’s core bands came from such unknown, unfashionable Washington towns as Montesano, Anacortes, Ellensburg, and Tacoma. Johnson was fascinated by these bands—“They are so isolated, they can’t help but develop their own sound,” he told Pavitt in a Seattle Rocket “Sub Pop” column. K recordings, Johnson felt, were “folk music, music made by peasants.” The label had turned out exactly as Johnson had hoped.

  Right in line with that grassroots sensibility, K releases tended to be recorded on old tube equipment, partly because that was all they could afford and partly becaus
e the label and its bands didn’t think pristine corporate productions were actually an improvement. The K bands and Beat Happening in particular got identified with “lo-fi,” an approach whose foremost exponent was Lou Barlow’s Sebadoh. Ironically, only Beat Happening’s first album actually had low audio fidelity; the term referred to wobbly performances as much as sonic imperfections. But at any rate, the indie underground had once again turned a liability into a virtue—“lo-fi” signified authenticity.

  Mecca Normal, a Vancouver, B.C., guitar-and-voice duo that melded poetry and performance art with six-string pyrotechnics, debuted on K in 1988 as did Olympia’s own Some Velvet Sidewalk. Girl Trouble’s record sold about fifteen hundred copies—a big success—and the Beat Happening record sold a bit more than that. The indie world was still small enough that critics weren’t overwhelmed by the sheer number of releases and would actually notice what was happening on even a tiny outfit like K, and the label began attracting some attention from a small group of critics, chief among them Cosloy and Ira Robbins.

  At the same time, a small following formed around the label, mostly college kids. “Back then you kept coming across the same names all the time—everyone knew who everyone was through the mail order,” says Pedersen. “And you’d write back and they’d write back and you’d have a correspondence—and they were kept very regularly back then.”

  The label couldn’t afford to send out many promo copies, which meant that even indie big-wigs had to fork over money for K releases. “I remember thinking, ‘Thurston Moore is buying records and he’s ordering them just like everybody else?’ ” says Pedersen. “But that’s what people did if they wanted to get anything.”