Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  After returning from Europe, Beat Happening recorded their next album, Black Candy. Working once again with Steve Fisk, the band retained their signature “Hey, kids, let’s start a band!” allure while making much darker music than before. Lewis’s cover art features a stylized sketch of a hard candy wrapper against a black background; at the center is a vortex that suggests the record’s spectral pull.

  If the earlier stuff was what Steve Fisk affectionately calls “tom-tom I-love-you rock,” this was more sophisticated, from the opening “Other Side” with its vocal harmonies and honest-to-goodness middle eight to the closing “Ponytail,” which builds ever-spiraling drama on a layered guitar sound as expansive as the eastern Washington plains.

  Besides scarecrows, bonfires, and crowns of barbed wire, Johnson’s lyrics are more sexual than ever—“Can’t live unless I have her sin dripping down my chin,” he sings on the title tune. Then there’s the (even) more direct approach—the singsong “Playhouse” sounds like a kids’ song, but it’s actually a direct sexual come-on: “We’ll just take off all our clothes,” Johnson sings, “In our playhouse, that’s how it goes.” Or how about “Let me rummy on your tummy / It shines yummy” on “Pajama Party in a Haunted Hive” amidst a chaotic swarm of distortion and feedback.

  Once again the band’s conceptual reach was long—the lighter-hearted songs like the catchy, lovestruck “Cast a Shadow” and Lewis’s “Knick-Knack” only serve as sunny exceptions that prove the album’s shadowy rule, and even those are cloaked in dank reverb. Right down to the forbidding title track, Black Candy is all of a piece.

  Black Candy’s 1989 release began to expand Beat Happening’s tiny but very devoted national following, but then came yet another period of inactivity. By now Lewis was pursuing a career as an artist, Lunsford was working up in Anacortes, and Johnson was busy with his informal side project the Go Team, not to mention running K.

  They did play a quartet of shows in Seattle that year, including the memorable “Nine for the 90’s” show, which featured nine area bands—including Alice in Chains—at Seattle’s landmark Paramount Theatre, the first chance most of the Seattle rock scene had gotten to see Beat Happening live. Seattle was not yet the trendy, prosperous hub it would later become and hence was a bit insecure about its place in the world—bands from the suburbs, much less a boondock town like Olympia, were massively uncool. Beat Happening had their work cut out for them.

  After a couple of staid performances, it was Beat Happening’s turn; Johnson immediately walked to the edge of the stage, looked straight into the crowd, and said, “We’re not like the other acts on this bill, we’re punk rock. So fuck you.”

  “Any doubts that my friends from Seattle had about the power of Beat Happening evaporated at that moment,” recalls Bruce Pavitt. “With one guitar and one minimal drum set, they rocked the house.”

  Near the end Lunsford’s amp conked out. Most bands would have stopped the show to deal with the problem, but Johnson and Lewis simply plowed through the remainder of the song, just voice and drums, as if nothing was wrong. “They weren’t about to stop and play with the amp for ten minutes and ruin the momentum of the show,” Pavitt says. “That lo-fi gesture of not giving a fuck about the guitar or the sound but being fully in the moment was true punk rock.”

  The show not only convinced the Seattle hipsters that Beat Happening was a band to be reckoned with, but it also helped cement the crucial division between their grassroots indie ethos and the slick rock careerism of “alternative” groups like Alice in Chains, a philosophical chasm that would widen dramatically in the coming years.

  Beat Happening started up yet again in 1990, recording the “Nancy Sin” single and playing a few shows, including a mini-tour with Fugazi and a handful of shows with Nation of Ulysses and the McTells. They played a show in Houston where virtually the entire audience left after the opening band. One person stayed. “And we played,” says Lunsford proudly. “We did the show for one person.”

  For such playful music, Beat Happening would make some people extremely angry. “A lot of times, we would play and people would just say, ‘Who the fuck are you? You suck!’ ” recalls Lewis. “We just didn’t have that sound that was easy for people to latch on to. Some people loved it, but a lot of people didn’t.”

  And Johnson, with his fey performance style, received the brunt of the abuse. “The hostility that he created so simply, so easily, was just amazing,” recalls Fugazi’s Joe Lally. “You’d be in the crowd and people next to you would just be like, ‘Fuck this guy!’ They’d be plotting how to kill him. How does he do it? He was getting them so angry—it was amazing to see. And the next thing you know, shit is flying at him.”

  Johnson knew just how provocative he was. “Calvin was prepared for the ugliness that people would throw at him,” says Lunsford. “He was aware that he was challenging people with his performance.” In fact, Johnson practically relished the abuse. “Calvin will always say the best shows were the weirdest ones,” says Lewis. “For me, those were always hard. It was hard to get spit on, it was hard to have these people yelling at you and throwing things at you. That was hard for me. It was easier for me if they liked us.”

  Despite the cutesy perception of the band, Beat Happening was one of the most confrontational groups on the indie circuit. “It wasn’t because we were clueless that we were going up onstage and playing songs that we might have been able to perform better if we really wanted to,” says Lunsford. “We knew we weren’t doing what people wanted to hear. We were forcing our music on them.”

  At no time was this more apparent than on a May ’90 West Coast mini-tour with Fugazi. “They were really interested in having us play with them because they recognized what we were doing as a subversion of macho straight edge,” Lunsford says. “And so [to] that element that was still coming to their shows expecting Minor Threat revisited, in a way, they were saying, ‘Get through this. Let’s see you get through this, and then you’ll be broken in a little bit to what we’re going to do that’s different from Minor Threat.’ ” Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye disputes this motive, but the effect was just as Lunsford describes.

  At a show in the Los Angeles suburb of Reseda, a certain segment of the audience did not like Beat Happening at all. At first they just heckled the band, then they started throwing paper wads and paper cups and wound up heaving the glass ashtrays that were placed on the tables. The band ignored all this and played on.

  Then at one point Lunsford glanced over and saw that Johnson had blood streaming down his face—he’d been struck on the nose by an ashtray. Lewis saw it, too, and wanted to stop the show and take Johnson to the hospital. “But he didn’t stop the song at all,” says Lunsford. “He didn’t miss a lyric.”

  After the last song of their set, Johnson threw the mike down and walked off the edge of the stage, straight through an awed audience that parted like the Red Sea, and right out the front door.

  “That was some courageous punk rock,” says Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto. “They were an unsettling band. People think of them as being fey and poppy and all this stuff, but they were really delivering some hard science on those tours. It was powerful, really inspirational for us.”

  “It really was amazing,” agrees Picciotto’s bandmate Brendan Canty. “You don’t have to sound like the Sex Pistols, all you have to be is different to provoke such animosity.”

  Beat Happening recorded a single with Sub Pop, “Red Head Walking,” in the summer of ’90, and thanks to Sub Pop’s huge notoriety at that moment, the record made more of an impact than any previous Beat Happening release. By the end of the year they were in the studio with Steve Fisk, recording their fourth album, Dreamy, also for Sub Pop.

  The move from K was surprising, but the band figured that they could sell more records with a larger label, and going with Sub Pop was an easy call since Bruce Pavitt was such an old friend. Sure enough, Dreamy, released in February ’91, enjoyed more public and critical acclaim than ever be
fore: Johnson has estimated it sold over ten thousand copies, their best seller ever.

  The songs were even more melodic and confidently played than ever, although no one would ever in a million years mistake Beat Happening for a slick bunch of L.A. studio hacks. Lewis’s “Fortune Cookie Prize” is sweet as pie, while, as ever, Johnson delves into dark sexuality, like the bondage imagery of “Me Untamed.” There is a Shonen Knife homage in “Hot Chocolate Boy,” doleful countryish pop in “Cry for a Shadow,” a Feelies homage in “Collide.”

  There was also an ominous song that seemed directly about the indie community. By 1990, with virtually every major label scouring the region for the next Soundgarden, much of the joy had been drained out of the scene. Shows had become ritualized macho-fests accompanied by grim, turgid music. “Five years ago we were intense,” Johnson intones on “Revolution Come and Gone.” “The rest have caught up, the world is a mess.”

  After touring the U.S. some more that year, they began making preparations for a very special event, one that would provide one last burst of the kind of excitement Johnson missed so acutely.

  Thanks to Johnson and Pedersen’s tireless networking, K had become the undisputed headquarters of what had become informally known as the International Pop Underground: a community of “naive pop” bands from around the globe, like Japan’s Shonen Knife, Germany’s Bartlebees, and their old friends the Pastels and the Cannanes. The bands of the I.P.U. had created their own movement simply by assiduously seeking each other out and pooling resources and information. K and Beat Happening had formalized the notion of proudly amateurish, shambling music as a way for independent-minded kids to escape the prefabricated, focus-group culture that confronted them from all sides. Somehow it seemed time to consolidate those massive gains.

  In July ’90 K threw a dance party at a local grange hall, inviting not only Olympia friends but friends from Tacoma and Seattle, too. “It was just a really fun party,” says Pedersen. “And then it seemed like, ‘Why don’t we have a party for everybody?’ ” Johnson liked the idea, too—they’d developed a far-flung network of phone and pen pals whom they’d never met in person. “I thought it would be neat,” Johnson said, “to have a place for them to get together and all hang out.”

  By the following January, they had set the dates—August 20–25, 1991. By March invitations were out, and it was already clear that this convocation, which had been dubbed the International Pop Underground Convention, was to be a major event.

  Using his customary quaint neo-beatnik locutions, Johnson’s manifesto for the convention invited “hangman hipsters, new mod rockers, sidestreet walkers, scooter-mounted dream girls, punks, teds, instigators of the Love Rock Explosion, editors of every angry grrrlzine, plotters of youth rebellion, Midwestern librarians, and Scottish ski instructors who live by night.” And, he was sure to add, “No lackies to the corporate ogre allowed.”

  Registrations numbered more than four hundred, with conventioneers arriving from not just all over the country, but all over the world. Eventually about nine hundred indie rockers flooded the tiny town. Writer Gina Arnold compared the atmosphere to “a cross between your high school cafeteria and CBGB’s.”

  Although big music conventions like the New Music Seminar and CMJ were touted as being “alternative,” they were hardly that—they were expensive to attend, dominated by major labels, and really not that much fun. The I.P.U. Convention couldn’t have been more different, being what Ira Robbins, covering the event for Rolling Stone, described as “rock & roll summer camp.” There was a peace vigil and a screening of all five Planet of the Apes movies; one of the more popular events was a series of disco dance nights at the Northshore Surf Club.

  Folks from bands pitched in with all aspects of the convention; Ian MacKaye took tickets for a couple of hours at Friday night’s show at the Capitol Theatre. “Ian MacKaye, to this day I don’t think I’ve ever seen him happier,” says Pedersen. Otherwise, most musicians just hung around and caught shows like everyone else.

  When the Melvins played a free outdoor show at Capitol Lake Park on Saturday, their parents and grandparents all showed up in Melvins T-shirts and took in the band’s pants-leg-rattling set. “Here you have this incredibly unpretentious environment where people are respectful of each other,” says attendee Bruce Pavitt, “bonding together in a way that was so different from these other seminars. The atmosphere, the feeling, the vibe, emphasized camaraderie and cooperation. And it was very special.”

  A majority of the groups in attendance weren’t on K; they were just people the K folks knew. The fifty-plus bands included the L7, Jad Fair, the Fastbacks, Beat Happening, Scrawl, Spinanes, Fugazi, Nation of Ulysses, Unwound, and Seaweed. There were five international bands: Scotland’s Pastels, England’s Thee Headcoats, and Canada’s Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Mecca Normal, and the Smugglers. Not bad for a tiny label in a tiny, out-of-the-way town.

  All the bands were on indie labels except L7 (who had just signed with Slash/Warner Brothers), and the convention dispensed with the usual panels, seminars, and booths. The only nod to commerce was a kiosk at the Capitol Theatre that sold records and T-shirts. Unlike major music biz conventions in New York, bands got paid for their performances. No free passes were given to the media. “It was not about business,” says Pedersen. “It was about really loving music.”

  Everything went smoothly, except for some substandard sound at the Northshore and Jarvis, the Capitol Theatre cat, peeing in a box of medium-size Beat Happening T-shirts. And the Sub Pop barbecue.

  That spring Bruce Pavitt had accepted his friend Johnson’s invitation to host a barbecue for two hundred people on the Evergreen campus; but in the intervening months, the convention more than doubled in size while Sub Pop slid to the edge of bankruptcy. “I thought I should have been given a trophy for providing free food for two hundred people when I could barely pay my own rent,” Pavitt says. Instead, Sub Pop got jeered in virtually every account of the convention. How the mighty had fallen.

  THE SCENE OUTSIDE THE CAPITOL THEATRE IN OLYMPIA AFTER FUGAZI CLOSED OUT THE INTERNATIONAL POP UNDERGROUND CONVENTION.

  CHARLES PETERSON

  The most memorable and influential show was the very first of the convention.

  A group of women from the indie community had been holding meetings to discuss feminist issues and ideas. Calling themselves riot grrrls, they had proposed the idea of a women-only night at the I.P.U., to be called “Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now.” But the hard line was soon dropped and they decided to allow males into the show after all. The evening featured a long list of female-centric bands—including Bratmobile, Seven Year Bitch, and Rose Melberg—playing brief sets. Heavens to Betsy, which included future Sleater-Kinney singer-guitarist Corin Tucker, played their first show ever; they had to play early because their parents were driving them home afterward. The event galvanized the riot grrrl community, which in turn spawned countless female-centric punk rock bands and fanzines all over the country.

  Beat Happening’s aesthetic loomed large—many bands had no bass player, musical technique was largely irrelevant, and naïveté was on proud display. It hardly mattered that for most bands that night the urge to rock apparently outstripped the ability to do so. Puncture writer Robert Zieger noted, “My friend Mark summed it up best; as we watched yet another ultra-minimalist band combine simple riffs, steady drumbeat, a heavy-handed affectation of child-like innocence, and half-formed stories of yummy food and being nervous around a really neat boy, he leaned toward my ear and groaned, ‘Beat Happening have a lot to answer for, don’t they?’ ”

  Gina Arnold rightly called the International Pop Underground Convention “the culmination of years of alternative fandom united,” but it was also the end of an era for the indie underground. As it happened, the convention couldn’t have been held at a more auspicious time: it was four weeks before Nevermind was released and the first Lollapalooza tour was well under way. Nineteen ninety-one, as one film d
ocumentary so quotably put it, was the Year That Punk Broke. Just as the indie community was reaching its highest expression, huge, irrevocable changes were just over the horizon.

  “You’re talking about a festival that was unconsciously somewhat of a culmination of all things Eighties, the independent scene in the Eighties,” says Brendan Canty, “which was inherently unselfconscious and unappreciated back then, so when it finally got to that point, it felt like a community. But it didn’t necessarily feel like it was going anywhere or that we were using it as a launching pad for the Nineties. It felt a lot more like a celebration of what people were doing in their town, independent of each other and yet somehow with each other’s help, too.”

  “It was the first time you got to be king—the freaks got to be king,” says Candice Pedersen. “And you could take that home with you.”

  But the I.P.U. was a one-shot deal—they’d made their point. “This is the International Pop Underground Convention,” Johnson told Rolling Stone, “and I don’t see that we need to have another one.” And there never was.

  By 1992’s You Turn Me On, Beat Happening had gone as far as they could go—they couldn’t play any fancier so they just extended the songs, firmed up the arrangements, and made cleaner recordings. Some tracks were recorded by Steve Fisk and some were recorded with Stuart Moxham, formerly of Young Marble Giants, one of the Rough Trade bands that had exerted such a tremendous influence on Johnson back when he was first DJing at KAOS. A lot of You Turn Me On, especially the Fisk tracks, was the result of laborious digital editing. But the album, all eloquent poetry and lambent guitar drones, is extraordinarily, heartbreakingly beautiful, as strong a valedictory as any band could hope for.

  As the years passed, Beat Happening’s audiences had gotten a little larger and more enthusiastic; the band, and Lunsford in particular, began to get more comfortable onstage. “It’s the rock cliché,” says Lunsford, “but you can feel the energy from the crowd, and it inspires you to give back, to become a musical conduit for that energy. That was intoxicating.”