still happening

when i was a kid, my parents listened to judy collins and abba and john denver.
i remember feeling pretty fucking cool in 1987 or so when i discovered this amazing band called the beatles.
there were only a few radio stations that i could get--on my brand-new magnavox am/fmradio/doubletapedeck/recordplayer stereo--in the room that i finally had to myself, away from my little brothers. one of them was not kcmu, the college radio station that was broadcast from less than ten miles away, but which was overridden by larger in-city frequencies. at least in my neighborhood.
i got the king fm, the classical public radio station, and kbsg, the oldies station, at first (technically, when i was twelve i listened to top-forty shit to try to understand girls in my class at school; in retrospect it was not worth it, and it didn't work anyways). but it was these two stations i actually listened to a lot. especially the oldies, because it was actual rock'n'roll, which mysteriously drew me in. i knew all those old songs by heart, buddy holly, herman's hermits, ritchie vallens, tommy james & the shondells, all sorts of stuff. as the eighties waned, more songs from the seventies started creeping into the playlists, but at school i was getting hooked up with period music that didn't fit into the suited and boted conformity of '60s pop product. late beatles, like "obladi-oblada" and the acid-trip psychedelia were tantalizing and taboo and i flew through generations every couple months or so.
then two things happened when i was maybe sixteen or so. 1). a friend gave me they might be giants and violent femmes tapes, and 2). the slot on fm 107.7 became kndd the end, which started playing home-grown "grunge" bands in a mix with band like iggy and the stooges, david bowie and talking heads: bands that were already either venerable or deceased elsewhere, but still raw and vibrant on seattle's shitty commercial radio, and therefore, to its young listeners. i remember being blown away by elastica without knowing how deeply they werein debt to wire and the fall. i heard L7 and thought they were the meanest sexiest things on earth.i was scared my parents would hear this degenerate noise and take my stereo away from me.
you could not see (good) live music in seattle in 1993 if you were under 21 and you were me. obviously some kids got away with it, but i was way too timid to even think about getting a fake id. i didn't even start drinking until i was twenty.
finding new and interesting music became a game for my friends and i. we felt triumphant to have discovered the pixies, so raw and smart, from exotic new england. we swooned over belly's tanya donnely, and we were amongst those fooled into thinking urge overkill was worthwhile. along the way we learned about the vaselines from kurt cobain, realized that pearl jam was less relevent than superchunk (though if you'd asked us why, we would have had a hard time answering). we were beginning to catch up with those more savvy than we, but while most of us were thrilled to have a label like subpop operating in our own downtown, only the edgiest of us (of which i was not one) knew that the real shit was happening, and had been since the early eighties just down the interstate in olympia where calvin johnson's k empire was one of the hippest enclaves outside of the bowery.
i began getting a hint about this activity on my self-imposed exile to upstate new york for my one inglorious year of college. my new jersey roommate was listening to bands from olympia, and my reaction was nothing short of shock. really? this was going on under my nose? my high school cohort barry was also getting awoken to the rest of the world, and he sent periodic mixtapes from home off to me on the east coast. so did my friend jay. things were opening up and i think we all felt like we'd been blindsided a little. or maybe it was just sheltered me...

anyway, i don't remember exactly when i first heard beat happening, but it was not1983, when they first started recording songs like "our secret" and "down at the sea." it was not even 1992, when you turn me on was released.
i often wonder how different my brain would've processed things if i had heard beat happening earlier: would i have started making music before my thirties? as it was, i first started listening to calvin, heather and bret in my mid-twenties, and they were a revelation then, years after plunging into the musical deep end head-first.
beat happening still stuns me.
the wry disregard for polishand studio tricks; the offhand lyrics, ripe with poetic import but too playful for the arty-farty folks, and far too hip to be dismissed as gimmicky; the utter contempt for anything other than emotive immediacy where recording and production were concerned; all these things make bh's music unique.
the very name is romantically hip, summoning images of some musical lovechild of the two great counterculture allens, kaprow and ginsberg.
one sees old photos of the band, heather lewis' big glasses and roni horn-haircut, calvin johnson's slouchily sensual pout, and bret lunsford's impenetrable veneer or cool quietude. a litany of borrowed drums and guitars, that sexy old archtop, the crappy sears silvertone (sadly stolen recently from bret's protegée karl blau), all these brutally yet sweetly coerced into providing the minimal support for heather or calvin's plaintive voices.

when i listen to beat happening now they summon a nostalgia that i am not entitled too, but which should have been mine.
i had the ratty sweaters, and the yearning for something simple and beautiful: rimbaud with a snare.
bat happening could have helped to fill the void that haunted me back then.
but i didn't know they were there and as happy as i am to have them now, i wish i had them then...