THIS WEEK’S MISC. starts out with warm congrats to the Chubby and Tubby hardware/variety stores on their 50th anniversary. Starting as a war-surplus outlet inside a war-surplus Quonset hut on Rainier Ave., the three-outlet chain has adhered strongly to its tradition of common-sense goods at common-sense prices for common-sense people. It eschews every modern retail principle–its aisles are anything but spacious, its ads are bereft of pretty imagery, it makes no pretensions to snob appeal, and (except for some of its athletic shoes) its merchandise ignores ephemeral fads or fashions. And the place is loved for it, by me and three generations of shoppers.
AFTER THE GOLD RUSH: Spent three hours the other day being interviewed by an Amsterdam magazine writer. She wanted to know how much everybody here loved the “Seattle Scene” hype of a few years back, how grateful everybody was that it had ended, whether everything had now “returned to normal,” whether it all could’ve ended up differently, and what’ll happen here next. My replies:
(1) Actually, different people here had different takes on the mania. Nearly everyone wanted a music scene that’d be bigger than it’d been in ’89, with just a couple of tiny clubs and near-nonexistent opportunities for recording or touring. But a lot of folks were (and some still are) adamant about the indie-rock ideology and didn’t like the forces of Corporate Rock barging in, strip-mining the better bands, and abandoning the remaining refuse.
(2) Many musicians who didn’t get signed by the majors in ’91-’93 were disappointed the A&R reps stopped showing up in droves. But others were grateful for the perceived chance to promote their work outside the media glare–like all those bands who’d spent so much effort explaining how they weren’t “grunge,” they didn’t get around to letting people know what they were.
(3) Thankfully, things aren’t all back to the sorry state they’d been in. The mania left us with, as World’s Fair promoters like to say, a “permanent legacy”–an infrastructure of clubs, labels, studios, producers, promoters, and (perhaps more important) the idea that you can indeed make your own music and art and it can be good and it doesn’t have to conform to outside dictates. (I wish this lesson could be learned by the local dance-music community, which has gotten more progressive than it had been but is still too content to follow styles dictated from elsewhere, too afraid to attempt its own thangs.)
(4) The interviewer thought we’d have had more of a legacy had bands here been more willing participants in the music-industry game. She seemed to think if Eddie Vedder had been more willing to make videos and tour with Ticketmaster, the industry wouldn’t have bothered with the likes of Blur or Stone Temple Pilots. I’m not sure. By insisting on doing things their way (Mix-A-Lot not going “gangsta;” Mudhoney staying out of big record-company debt; Bikini Kill staying out of big record companies altogether), the bands might or might not have had a bigger hit or two, but they stayed truer to their own visions, which’ll probably prove best for their art and their careers.
(5) Five years ago, the world saw Seattle as a teeming pool of youthful angst against restricted economic opportunities and stifling social conservatism. Today, the world sees Seattle as a fortress of imperial capitalists out to smother the world under cookie-cutter coffee shops and mediocre software. Neither vision’s very accurate, but that’s beside the point. Seattle is, however, a generally more prosprous place today, at least for the white middle-class segments most music people come from. With relative prosperity comes a different angst, the feeling that everything “real” is threatened by upscale-bland yuckiness. That will create a different notion of rebellion. Maybe we’ll see some artistic results of that notion next year.
‘TIL THEN, you’ve one more chance to nominate rising and declining people, places, and things for the annual Misc. In/Out list, a start-of-the-year tradition almost as old as the Bud Bowl. Send yours to clark@speakeasy.org.
