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...

Blow me!

yeah, yeah.

i was supposed to be writing about woelv, but i 'haven't absorbed that one yet.' i mean, fuck, it's really good, but it's darkly beautiful and subtle, and i just had some coffee and my leg's all twitchity and my mood is less inclined to over-analize quietude. so i'm writing about the blow instead. 

subtle too, the blow (currently, and relevant to this blog, comprised of khaela maricich (constant) and jona bechtolt (current side-man) is anything but quiet and subdued. at least on the only record* i have so far, 2006's 'paper television' (k records). kicking off with a jaunty drum sample, 'pt' is a distinctively pop-informed album, with more samples, staccato synthesizer tones, overdubs and a general sense that if one were in a sweaty club, with sexy kids writhing in drug-induced agonies, the record would feel just as natural as it did to me, sitting in my otherwise quiet studio, where i stymied my attempts to work with the record on by playing it. it grabs the attention unrelentingy with smart and deeply (and ambivalently) sensual lyrics, and in the urgency with which they are expressed. the songs struggle with the balance of sexy-cool assertiveness and a raw, heart-rending vulnerability, all the while keeping a beat that races on unrelentingly. i had to listen to it three times in a row at first. usually i only do that when john darnielle puts something new out.

musically, it's interesting to look at how the blow relates to the 'other' northwest music culture (contrasted with the macho-pathetic-druggie-flannel era of the early nineties), the more diy-informed strain that, with olympia's beat happening, among others, predated, ran concurrent to, survived and thrived past the notorious 'grunge' moment that launched an ill-prepared seattle onto the world stage (an attention that was partially responsible for a socio-econimic influx that decimated our infrastructure and anticipated the increasingly national trend towards a dissolving economic diversity). the oly' bands were loud in  a more dischordant way than the more academically punk-metal combine of bands like nirvana and mudhoney, whose thrasher heritage was evident in their long haired head-banging and rough, heroin-chic. the bands a little to the south tended to be more akin to east coast icons like the velvet underground, with minimalist tendencies and performances, but more importantly, with a focus on politics that flew in the face of their contemporaries, especially with regard to gender and sexuality. olympia was the cradle, if not the birthplace, of the riot grrrl bands, and homegrown label k records, founded by calvin johnson in 1982, tapped into the international underground tendency of bands and micro labels who were trying to truly do it themselves, and opened the door for west coast artists less interested in sales and mastering and stereo, and more focussed on their individualistic outputs. when i was in school in upstate new york in the mid-nineties, i heard more stuff from olympia than i had when i was going to high school in the early part of the decade in seattle itself. funny how that stuff happens.

khaela maricich is from seattle (queen anne, specifically) and moved around from seattle to olympia and portland, and her locality both informs the blow and is defied by it. the play between girlish rasp and the assertiveness female strength are contrasts that are characteristic of bands like sleater-kinney, bikini kill, le tigre and others. there are also echoes of miranda july, specifically the type of fluidly quotidian aesthetic she espouses in her multi-media works (it should be mentioned that maricich is also a multi-media artist), most clearly in her film 'me and you and everyone we know' (2005). maricich's lyrics are confident and desperate, with a certain gender neutrality that is also echoed in her androgynous physical appearance. 

i'm droning on.

khaela maricich makes juicy-sexy-poppy-scary-goddamniwannacry-goddamniwannafuck-jump!-jump!-lie-in-a-ball-on-the-floor love songs. sometimes they are in french.

i'm totally crushing on this record.

****

*when i say record, i do mean it. i've been getting on a selective vinyl kick lately (yeah, yeah, the hipsters have been espousing vinyl for decades (see: 'high fidelity' (the movie, not the book)), but i'm talking about something simpler, i suppose, that when i can, i prefer some bands on the medium of a scratchy vinyl record. everyone knows that vinyl carries a certain tonal richness that is difficult to reproduce on digital media (especially my least favorite, the mp3 format), but i would like to just say i'm not a snob about it. i just prefer the copy of 'strangeways here we come' that i bought with my newspaper route money (no fucking joke) in 1991 to the copy of it i have on cd. i always listened to side 2 first when i listened to that record (which was a lot), and it always sounds wrong to hear it right! then of course there's bands that i've written here about like the cannanes and boyracer and all that, whose output just sounds better when it's fucked up (i don't actually own a decent turntable--just a shitty record/tape stereo from the mid-eighties--and the tape deck hasn't worked since 1997).  recently got some beat happening on vinyl from k records, and listened to it for the first time on its natural environment, and that was kind of cool, kind of comforting (remember, not so much cd sales for indie acts in the eighties). anyway, to sum up: not a snob, but certainly appreciative of the options available...