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HEARD THE CLASH’S “Hitsville UK” on the Linda’s Tavern jukebox (now, alas, CD-based) the other day. The song, from the premier political-punk band’s 1980 Sandinista! magnum opus, was full of contradictions then and bears even more today.
First, it was a tribute to indie labels (and a scathing indictment of major-label marketing practices) that came out on a major. The song’s British 45 release acknowledged this with a sleeve depicting a score of minor-label logos in a “background” color shade; while the CBS Records logo on the record itself was in a brighter shade of the same color.
Second, the song’s title, lyrics, and booming-beat arrangement all invoked the Motown label (originally known as “Hitsville USA”) as an inspiration and a model for artist-centered, commerciality-be-damned music making.
Perhaps to a Brit, a Black-owned company making and selling Black music all on its own from outside the media capitals (albeit within the established music-biz infrastructure; its ’60s classics were distributed in Britain by EMI) could be seen as having blazed a trail leading to the initial punk/indie revolution, and from there perhaps toward the destruction of the major labels and their prepackaged pap. And, as historian Suzanne Smith has shown, many Black Americans saw similar hopes in the label’s original success.
But to some old R&B purists and modern-day indie idealogues, Motown was as ruthless and centralized as the majors. It was an assembly-line operation that produced one product (the “Motown Sound” hit single, an R&B subgenre engineered in every detail for white teenybopper consumption) in assorted models and upholstery schemes. Its stars had to fight for any degree of creative or career control (only Smokey and Stevie really succeeded).
When the Motown Sound had finally played itself out as a top-40 commodity, boss Barry Gordy shut down the factory and split Detroit for L.A., taking all his remaining stars out there with him. (Aretha Franklin, the one Detroit R&B legend who stayed, recorded for Atlantic.)
Still, “Hitsville UK” and its themes of empowerment and innocence regained struck a powerful point in 1980. Its (oversimplified?) depiction of art-loving, street-credible outfits like Factory and Rough Trade reclaiming music from the industry’s “mutants, freaks and musclemen” provided as much hope as a progressively-minded young adult could reasonably expect to have at that time of Reagan’s and Thatcher’s rise to power. Maybe we couldn’t stop the assaults on public education and the environment, the military buildups, or the revival of racism; but at least we could gain control of what was on our own turntables and in our own Walkmen.
Twenty years later, the song’s main message still reverberates. Music-making technology has become so democratized that almost anyone can put out a recording (and, if you look at the post-your-MP3 sites, it seems almost everyone has). Virtually every aspect of music production, performance, and marketing has been, or is being, demystified and popularized. The majors, meanwhile, are consolidating ever further, relying more heavily on rosters of ever blander and/or dumber superstar acts to justify their bloated organizations and their intellectual-property lawsuits.
If these dual trends continue, the whole Napster fracas may prove to have been the least of the majors’ problems.
The song’s proclamations might even come true: No slimy deals with smarmy eels, no consumer trials, no AOR, in the new Hitsville USA.
MONDAY: A pre-election rant of sorts.
ELSEWHERE:
The Rocket, the Bible of Northwest rock for 21 years, is apparently dead. Its 10/19 issue failed to get distributed, and the Midwesterner who bought it earlier this year has suddenly laid off its 18 staffers.
The paper (it liked to call itself a magazine, but it was still on tabloid-size newsprint) maintained a quite consistent aesthetic and attitude over its long existence. It always championed graphic excellence (many of its ex-art directors and freelance designers went on to careers at “real” magazines in NYC) and tight, if sometimes bullheaded, writing (its verbal alums include John Keister, Ann Powers, Robert Ferrigno, Scott McCaughey, Gillian Gaar, Evan Sult, Bruce Pavitt, and Robert McChesney).
It always championed the regional rock scene, though it also liked to consider itself a bit more sophisticated than its milieu. Its frequent lapses into Attitude-with-a-capital-A caused no end of predictable scorn from bands that thought it didn’t write enough about them, or that it wrote about them but in an insufficiently reverent manner.
It was never exclusively local (it would put out-of-town “alternative” stars on many covers, and even had a ’60s-oldies phase in the mid-’80s). But it gave a damn about Seattle rock bands years before any other prominent print organ did (remember, there wasn’t even a Stranger until late ’91, and the Weekly didn’t give a damn about post-sixties youth).
By treating local bands as worthy of criticism, rather than something that had to be “supported” like a needy child, it performed an invaluable part toward the scene becoming what it became.
And when it did champion local acts, it did so in a way that made its suburban and out-of-town readers believe there was a bigger, more powerful Seattle rock scene than there was at the time.
It was never a great moneymaker, despite its influence. For most of the ’80s it was a thin monthly (at a time when most other big US cities had at least one real alternative weekly), dependent upon ads from recording studios and instrument stores rather than end-consumer businesses. Like certain popular but marginal restaurants, it kept going by finding new owners hoping to turn it around. It went from once to twice a month; it added a Portland edition; it toyed with restaurant and movie coverage.
In the mid-’90s, it got bought up by BAM, a California chain of similar (but squarer) papers. Shortly after that, BAM shut down its other operations; leaving The Rocket as the last colonial outpost of a vanquished empire, a la Constantinople. Earlier this year, BAM finally gave up and sold The Rocket to a Midwesterner who either didn’t realize how badly BAM had mismanaged it or mistakenly thought he could bring it back.
In the end, The Rocket’s music specialization (and its odd fortnightly schedule) may prove to be what did it in. It couldn’t compete for general nightlife and lifestyle advertising with The Stranger and a newly youth-ified Weekly, which both came out often enough to include complete movie calendars. Tablet, a new fortnightly alterna-tabloid whose second issue came out the day The Rocket announced its end, is trying to take both a more topically general and geographically specific approach (only circulating within Seattle) than The Rocket did.
But despite these specific conceptual limitations, some will undoubtedly see The Rocket’s apparent end as another sign of the Northwest music scene fading back from former glories. Don’t believe it.
The paper’s failings were all its own, and were built into its basic concept. The music scene will continue without it, as a now-mature offspring that no longer needs to be prodded into striving for its full potential.
TOMORROW: How to improve Northwest Bookfest.
IN OTHER NEWS: Instead of trying to outlaw hiphop, maybe the “family values” goons should look at those violence-inspiring boy bands!
TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of Julie London, the former B-movie actress who was turned into the prototypical lounge singer by second husband Bobby Troup; then was hired, with Troup, by first husband Jack Webb to star in his TV show Emergency. We’re all crying a river over you, Julie.
MORE LITTLE ANECDOTES inspired by real estate. This time, memories of rock joints of the recent past.
Linda’s Tavern opened in early 1994 on the site of what had been the Ali Baba restaurant. Four years earlier, the Ali Baba had hosted some of the first freak-show performances by former pest-control salesman Jim Rose (advertised with word-heavy flyers headlined “He Is NOT A Geek”). Shortly after Linda’s opened, the Ali Baba sign became part of a shrine to Rose and his “sick circus.” The shrine wasn’t at Linda’s but at Moe’s Mo’Rockin’ Cafe, at the present site of ARO.Space.
The Kincora Pub is in one of those buildings that’s had umpteen different identites. In the ’70s and early ’80s it was Glynn’s Cove, one of Capitol Hill’s last true dive bars. Then it was the live-music club Squid Row, which (after a failed jazz-fusion format) emerged in 1987 as one of the few places to hear those loud, slow rock bands everybody in America would soon think was the only kind of rock band in Seattle. (Things got so loud iin there, the doors could only be opened between songs to appease the neighbors.) More recently it was Tugs Belmont, successor to the still fondly-remembered pioneering gay dance club Tugs Belltown.
The Vogue, dean of Seattle dance clubs, now resides within the DJ-circuit neighborhood on Capitol Hill anchored by ARO.Space. Its former site on First Avenue, seen here, still stands vacant after more than a year. It had first opened as a leather gay bar in the mid-’70s; then in late 1979 became Wrex, one of the first joints in town devoted to that new wave/punk/whatever-you-called-it music. It became the Vogue in 1983, pioneering a post-disco, not-exclusively-gay dance shtick (including the town’s longest running fetish night). It still hosted live acts on off nights, including Nirvana’s first Seattle gig in 1988.
The Hopvine Pub on 15th Ave. E. was once a somewhat more rough-hewn joint called the Five-O Tavern. The Five-O had hosted blisteringly-loud rock gigs in the mid-’80s. Even after noise complaints stopped those shows, it remained a hangout for young-adult heteros at a time when most other Capitol Hill bars were either gay or yuppie. It’s now a finely-appointed microbrew joint, but still attracts some of the ex-Five-O crowd, with singer-songwriter gigs by the likes of Pete Krebs and Marc Olsen.
TOMORROW: Secrets for making a magazine catch on.
IN CASE YOU’VE BEEN STUCK INSIDE all summer and haven’t heard the news, there’s this little software company called Napster.
It’s caused no end of whoop-de-do because its users can exchange recorded-music files online without the express written consent of the gargantuan record labels.
The gargantuan record labels are suing, trying to shut Napster down. They’re asking the judges, and the public at large, to forget all about five decades’ worth of label malfeasance and just plain theft from recording artists, and instead to see the labels as standing up for poor musicians’ right to earn a living from their art.
Support the labels, the labels’ claim goes, and you’re helping bass players stay in guitar picks and tour-van repairs.
Let Napster continue to exist, the labels allege, and no recording artist will ever see a CD royalty again.
Some Internet commentators, including
John Perry Barlow (who doesn’t always take sides against huge corporations, being pals with the Big Oil-funded Global Business Network), have retorted that argument. Instead, these guys claim musicians don’t need no stinkin’ major record labels. Heck, they don’t even need to sell records to earn a living.
For an example of a band that didn’t need to eternally assert its intellectual property rights, Barlow and co. always mention the same band–the Grateful Dead, for whom Barlow was once an associate (as, briefly, was Courtney Love’s dad).
The Dead, Barlow and pals assert, became rock’s number-one touring act partly because they let fans make and exchange their own recordings of their live shows. So, these writers claim, could any other act. Artists not only should let live-show tapes be freely traded, but studio CD tracks as well; it’d all just fan the flames of fandom, which would result in further CD and ticket sales.
Barlow and his cohorts conveniently forget to mention that the Dead released their records through major labels that routinely included the usual threats on the back cover about unauthorized duplication being a violation of applicable laws.
They also don’t mention that the Dead were quite the intellectual-property defenders in regard to the band’s assorted merchandising images and logos. At one point, the band’s attorneys even tried to sue individual Deadheads who sold handmade bear-mascot bongs in the caravan camps outside the band’s shows.
The larger issue in Barlow’s argument, however, lies in what made the Dead different from most rock bands before or since. They were a “jam band,” using long instrumental doodles to make each live show different (thus encouraging hardcore fans to see as many different gigs as possible)
Some current “jam bands” include Phish and Pearl Jam, which just released 25 (count ’em!) live CDs, billed as affordable alternatives to high-priced bootlegs.
Acts that hew closer to tighter performing and songwriting, or acts that have chosen not to tour much, might not get as much out of a freer show-taping and song-trading philosophy. And acts that don’t rely on tours and merchandising sales to pay the rent (many non-jam bands lose money on the road) might not like to hear that they’re now expected to give up record sales and rely on touring income.
Or so one might think.
The Offspring, whose skate-punk sound and terse songwriting are as about far from the Dead as one can get, (heart) Napster. Or, to quote from the band’s official website, “The Offspring view MP3 technology and programs such as Napster as being a vital and necessary means to promote music and foster better relationships with our fans.”
The band’s sold Napster-branded merchandising items at its shows (with proceeds earmarked for charity). And it wanted to put its entire next album online, as downloadable MP3 files, until the gargantuan record label that has the band under contract threatened to sue. The compromise: The band put up a single tune.
Other acts, particularly acts without big-label deals (voluntarily or otherwise), have posted lotsa songs for free download–even entire albums and live shows. Or they’ve let unofficial fan sites post them.
They’re convinced this will get them noticed, draw new fans, and turn those new fans into legit CD buyers.
Fifties rock songwriter Mike Stoller, meanwhile, wrote an NY Times op-ed essay last week. He claimed unfettered Net-downloading of music would put future songwriters out of business. Stoller neglects to mention that full-time songwriters were largely ousted from the rock milieu back in the ’60s. After the Beatles and Stones, most bands started writing their own material.
A big reason: The ASCAP- and BMI-regulated songwriting royalties were a much surer source of income than recording royalties, which were and are subject to all manner of record-label “creative accounting.” Non-performing songwriters either became nostalgia topics or moved into niche markets (country, teen-idol pop).
It’s the major-label business-as-usual that, at least indirectly, helped put the likes of Stoller out of business. It’s that kind of business-as-usual that Napster really threatens.
We close with a line cribbed from the late ’80s and early ’90s, when the gargantuan record labels were similarly up in arms over cassette trading. The labels would stick slogans on back covers, “Home taping is killing music. And it’s illegal.”
Members of the “international cassette underground” preferred to spread a revised slogan–“Home taping is killing the music industry. And it’s easy.”
TOMORROW: Imagining a new fictional persona for the column.
LAST FRIDAY AND YESTERDAY, I began a recollection of Seattle during the fall of 1975.
Today we continue by examining the arts scene in those pre-Bicentennial months; a scene newly flush with public funding and a lively, participatory spirit.
A thriving theater/performance-art milieu was neatly divided into two casts, with only a few performers crossing over between the two. You had the Rep and ACT (and the new Intiman) mounting “real” dramas (usually stuffed with NYC actors) for well-dressed audiences and major donors.
Then you had the funkier, smaller troupes. Some of these outfits in the 1974-84-or-so period included the Bathhouse, the Skid Road Show, Ze Whiz Kidz, the Pioneer Square Theater, the Conservatory Theater Co., and the Group. One company from this scene, the Empty Space, survives today. Another, the One Reel Vaudeville Show, morphed into a thriving events-production company.
These troupes shared a broadly defined aesthetic, influenced by varying degrees of late-hippie boistrousness, gay-camp outrageousness, avant-theater experimentation, National Lampoon-esque irreverence, post-collegiate volunteer enthusiasm, and conceptual-art pretensions. They created energetic and spunky (if inconsistent) shows, to a core audience that was willing to sit out the lesser efforts in hopes of catching something unexpectedly smashing.
And it worked, as long as the core audience stayed loyal and as long as scraps of arts funding helped subsidize the affordable ticket prices. But as the Reagan era dragged on, the arts funding (at least to non-“major” producing organizations) dried up, the corporate donors stayed loyal to the big theaters, the expenses (especially rents) crept up, the old audiences started staying home nights, and many of the performers and directors drifted off to NYC or to real careers. The spirit of these old theaters lives on in today’s Theater Schmeater, Annex, and Union Garage.
Visual arts here were looking for a new way. The “Northwest School” painters had died, retired, or moved away. The Seattle Art Museum was still in its old Volunteer Park mini-palace and paid little attention to living local artists. The Center on Contemporary Art was still five years away.
For traditional-style painters and sculptors (and for those newfangled glass-art craftspeople), there were the Pioneer Square galleries, which were just getting started. For artists with bigger ambitions (or the right connections), a One Percent For Art program funnelled a piece of every local government construction project into big, vaguely modernistic, but preferably non-controversial works. (Though many of the biggest One Percent commissions went to California big names, or to cronies of the art bureaucrats awarding them.)
The music scene was in a creative slump. Everything on the club circuit was segregated into formulaic genres. There were all-white blues bands in Pioneer Square, top-40 cover bands (including White Heart, which became Heart) in the meatmarket clubs, soft-rock balladeers in the U District, and, in a couple of dance clubs, this new thing called disco. It was, then, a celebratory, participatory scene in which no costume was too outlandish, no dance move too flamboyant. It was gay lib meeting black power meeting repressed suburban kids’ dreams of glamour and thrills. And, on a good night, it was a lot more fun and freewheeling than its stuck-up grandson, techno, can even hope to be.
TOMORROW: Struggling with the post-Vietnam economy.
LAST FRIDAY, I began a recollection of what Seattle was like in the fall of 1975, when I first came to the allegedly Big City after a childhood in much smaller burgs.
I’d already mentioned the only “alternative” paper at the time, The Seattle Sun; and its target audience niche, a Capitol Hill-centered clique of 25-to-35-ers who just wanted to settle down after doing whatever they’d done in The Sixties.
The mainstream media in town were also fairly tame at the time.
The Seattle Times, still an afternoon paper, was still as wide as the Wall Street Journal and as plain-looking as a cheap suburban tract house. It always ran a half-page photo on Page 3, which was almost always of a dog or Mount Rainier. Its features section, then called “View,” had many cute stories about somebody doing something important who was–gasp–a woman!
The P-I, meanwhile, was a feisty archrival to the Times in those pre-Joint-Operating-Agreement days (well, except for the editorials, which usually touted the same Chamber of Commerce party line). It still had some of that old Hearstian spunk in it; at least in the sports pages, which were then mostly about the Sonics, college sports, and out-of-town stuff. There were no Mariners or Seahawks yet; though the P-I’s lovable geezer Royal Brougham (who’d been at the paper since WWI) was already drumming up oldtime rah-rah support for our soon-to-be local heroes.
Local TV was a far different animal then than now. Newscasts were heavy on in-studio commentators and grainy 16mm film. Portable video cameras were just being introduced, and were largely used as gimmicks (as they mostly still are). That meant a lot of interviews, press conferences, and staged media events (held before 1 p.m. so the film could be edited by 5); interspersed with a few of the fires and police chases that now dominate local newscasts across the country.
And there was still a good deal of non-news local TV. J.P. Patches and Gertrude still ran a bizarre, funky kiddie show on KIRO, whose influence on the local theatrical and performance scenes lasted for decades. KING had morning and evening talk shows, providing endless interview slots to all the itinerant book-pluggers crisscrossing the nation. KOMO had a “religious program” called Strength for These Days, which ran at 5:45 a.m. weekdays and consisted entirely of the same film footage of ocean waves and windblown trees every day, accompanied by choir music.
Seattle radio was an even odder beast. For one thing, AM stations still dominated.
For the grownups, KVI’s dynamic eccentrics Bob Hardwick and Jack Morton engaged a spirited ratings battle against KOMO’s personable square Larry Nelson and KIRO’s fledgling news-talk format.
For the kids, KVI and KING-AM played an odd top-40 melange of anything that happened to be popular (Dolly Parton, Lynard Skynard, Helen Reddy, Barry White, Edgar Winter, Tony Orlando, Donny Osmond).
For the older kids, the FM band found KISW and KZOK blasting Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and their metal brethern out to Camaro-drivin’ teens from Spanaway to Stanwood.
The UW, meanwhile, had a little FM operation, KUOW, which played blocks of classical music (competing with the then-commercial KING-FM) and that newfangled network newscast with those really soft-talking announcers. (The U also ran a smaller operation, KCMU, as a laboratory for broadcast-communications students to play Grateful Dead songs and mumble their way through the weather report.)
And there was an honest-to-goodness radical community station, KRAB-FM. Its announcers often hemmed and hawed their way through a set list, but they played everything from Thai pop to big-band to political folk. It had talk blocks, too: Vietnamese children’s fables, classical lit, rambling speeches by already-aging hippie celebrities about why Those Kids Today had become too apathetic. KRAB stumbled through internal politics and mismanagement until 1984. Its frequency is now occupied by KNDD.)
TOMORROW: The Seattle arts scene at the time.
IN OTHER NEWS: Here’s a fun rumor for all you conspiracy theorists (which I’m not): Could OPEC countries be scheming to raise oil prices and engender U.S. voter restlessness against Gore/Lieberman? (found by Progressive Review)
‘TWAS A QUARTER-CENTURY AGO THIS MONTH that yr. humble reporter first settled in the Jet City, embarking upon adulthood after a forgettable adolescence in smaller places.
With all the hype these days about ’70s nostalgia (or was that already over by 1998?) and all the talk these days about the monstrously “World Class” burg Seattle’s become, it’s a good time to look back upon the Seattle of 1975.
Even then, the municipal cliches and cliques still plaguing us now were in force. There were the business boosters out to make us a Big League City (the Kingdome was under construction on the site of a disused railroad yard).
There were the grumblers who blamed Californian newcomers for ruining everything, who bitched at the “provincial” ways of the folk already here, or both. There were other grumblers who said Seattle was too much like Los Angeles, not enough like San Francisco, or both.
There were the folks still in their late ’20s who seemed to feel that their real lives had already ended with the end of “The Sixties,” and who saw the verdant Northwest as a place to live out their remaining years in smug contentment. There were young proto-punks who craved passion and excitement, and who naturally loathed their elders who demanded an entire city devoted to peace and quiet.
Downtown Seattle’s transformation had begun seven years before with the Seafirst Tower (now the 1000 4th Avenue Tower), and was well underway by ’75. Freeway Park and the first phase of the Convention Center had been built. But thre were still plenty of blocks of two- to six-story brick and terra-cotta buildings. The most stately of these, the White-Henry-Stuart building, was being demolished for the tapered-bottomed Rainier Bank Tower (now Rainier Squre).
Nordstrom had expanded from a shoe store into a half-block collection of boutiques, and had instituted its infamous sales-force-as-religious-cult motivational system (later imitated at Microsoft and Amazon.com). Frederick & Nelson was still the grand dame of local dept. stores; J.C. Penney still had its biggest-in-the-company store where the Newmark tower is now.
Also still downtown: Florsheim, Woolworth, the old Westlake Bartell Drugs (with a soda fountain), and a host of locally-owned little restaurants, some with dark little cocktail lounges in the back.
The “Foodie” revolution in the restaurant biz had begun, and Seattle was one of its strongest outposts. Because the Washington Liquor Board demanded that all cocktail lounges have a restaurant in front, and that those restaurant-lounges earn at least 40 percent of their revenue from food sales, operators were constantly scrambling for the latest foodie fad–French, fusion, Thai, penne pollo, nouvelle cuisine, pan-Asian, sushi, organic, and that “traditional Northwest cuisine” that was just being invented at the time (mostly by Californian chefs).
And in the U District, a little alleyway-entranced outfit called Cafe Allegro had just begun serving up espresso drinks to all-nighter exam-crammers; while Starbucks’ handful of coffee-bean stores had already been promoting European-style coffee to Caucasian office warriors. One of Starbucks’ founders, Gordon Bowker, would later help start Seattle Weekly and Redhook Ale.
There was no Weekly yet; but there was a small weekly opinion journal for movers-and-shakers called the Argus, which had just been sold by Olympic Stain mogul Philip Bailey to the Queen Anne News chain of neighborhood papers. There was also the Seattle Sun, a struggling little alterna-weekly which ran, between neighborhood-vs.-developer articles and reviews of the latest Bonnie Raitt LP, some of Lynda Barry’s first cartoons.
MONDAY: A little more of this; including the old sleaze district, the daily papers, the TV, the economy, entertainment, the arts, and politics.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some local Green Party candidates don’t get to share the stage at the big Ralph Nader rallies.
IT’S BEEN A FEW WEEKS since Seattle Mayor Paul Schell’s most recent total doofus action.
I’m a little less upset now, but still sore enough to call for his impeachment, or at least a concerted drive to find a progressive opponent in his ’01 re-election.
The All-Ages Music Task Force had spent the better part of two years in committees, forums, hearings, and compromise-filled strategy sessions, trying to once and for all kill the onerous Teen Dance Ordinance (which, since 1985, had essentially prevented all-ages music events in Seattle under the pretense of “regulating” them). They worked and worked and crafted a delicately-worded successor law that would allow all-ages shows, but still answer the concerns of cops and parents. It miraculously passed the Seattle City Council on a 7-1 vote (with one absention).
Schell promptly vetoed it, apparently without having fully read or studied what he was vetoing, and apparently under the heavy guidance of city attorney and gentrification-enforcer Mark Sidran.
As he proved with his utter mishandling of the WTO fiasco and his purposeless cancellation of public New Year’s celebrations, Schell is totally, hopelessly out of touch with anyone who’s not an upscale Rainier Clubber such as himself.
He apparently believes (as does his chief media apologist, P-I columnist Susan Paynter) that the only people who want all-ages music are people too young to vote, or perhaps just old enough but too apathetic to vote; while a “bold” move to Protect Our Children (the same rationalization politicians elsewhere use to crack down on gay rights) would score popularity points with the concerned mommies and daddies.
Schell (like his predecessor Norman Rice) seems to have not heard that there’s been this thing called a Seattle music scene. (Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if Schell even knows the name of a single post-sixties recording artist.) There are a lot of people (and not just commercial music promoters) who believe live music (particularly the indie-rock, underground-dance, and prosocial-hiphop types) are good for teenagers.
Remember: The parents of teenagers today aren’t likely to be Schell’s own pushing-60 crowd. They’re more likely to have come of age during the early punk years. Even if most of them weren’t hardcore punks themselves, they may still have stayed up to watch the B-52s on Saturday Night Live or saved up to see David Bowie at the Tacoma Dome.
Also remember: The indie music scene leaders these days, especially the all-ages activists, are no lowlife crusters. Many of them are anti-drug and anti-drink. Some, such as the promoters of the Paradox Theater in the U District, are born-again Christians. They all believe in creating a supportive, empowering environment for the under-21s.
When done properly (i.e., by promoters other than those of Woodstock ’99), all-ages shows can be safer than going to football games, more wholesome and less noisy than Gameworks, and less peer-pressure-prone than hanging out at Northgate.
Indeed, participation in indie music (as a spectator, reviewer, promoter, or performer) can help turn a young person into a free-thinking, independent-spirited, culturally and politically aware citizen.
Which, perhaps, is what Schell and Sidran just might really be afraid of.
TOMORROW: Beyond the environment-vs.-jobs dichotomy.
IN OTHER NEWS: The lawyers are circling the dot-coms like vultures.
THE MAJOR-PARTY APOLOGISTS, especially the Democrats, are pleading with voters not to jump on any Nader bandwagon. They’re insisting there really is a difference between Gore and Bush, enough of a difference that you’ve gotta choose only one of those two–lest the nation be stuck with the other of those two.
Yet the Gore supporters’ claims of difference (which seem to involve such secondary issues as how quickly Social Security funds can be fed into the control of Wall Street speculators) continue to be contradicted by the increasingly-apparent similarities.
Both love “free” trade and the rule of global financiers. Both want to turn up the federal $ spigot to big weapons contractors. Both would keep up the dumb ol’ “war on drugs,” and pay as little lip service as possible to campaign-finance reform. Both claim today’s is the best of all possible economic worlds; even though real-world wage and earning-power equations get decreasingly rosy the further you stray from the top-20 income percentile.
And both camps have said, or at least implied, that Something Must Be Done against all the sexy, threatening, violent, or just plain icky material out there in our pop-culture landscape these days.
They’re not saying it loudly or direclty enough to threaten the media conglomerates the candidates depend upon for hype pieces (er, “news coverage”) and, in the case of Gore, for big campaign bucks.
But they are saying it. Particularly Al Gore’s pal, and Tipper Gore’s sometime aide in crusades against musical free speech, Veep candidate Joe Lieberman.
The Lieb’s basic stump speech invokes two main themes:
Lieberman and Gore have avoided, as far as I can tell, bashing NEA-supported art shows or college English classes. The Bush campaign, eager to put the GOP’s legacy of past priggishness behind it, has also been relatively muted in this regard–thus far. But the prigs still have a degree of power in the GOP trenches, and I predict it won’t be long before Bush starts trying to appeal to them.
So should we worry about these comparatively mild, but bipartisan, rants?
Yes.
If these rants become enforced public policy in the next administration, you probably won’t see direct government attempts to fully ban anything (except strip clubs).
You’re more likely to see, both within the next administration and from private groups operating under the next administration’s endorsement, targeted actions against specific “offensive” entertainments:
As usual, you needn’t fret for the big campaign-contributing media giants that have made zillions on raunch in commercial entertainment.
As we’ve seen with the conglomerates’ Napster-bashing, freedom and open expression aren’t among their highest priorities.
And as we’ve seen with the Napster phenom, such attempts to prop up the plutocracy of Big Media these days end up getting ever more desperate and blatant. They might not succeed in the long run, but can do a lot of damage in the attempt.
TOMORROW: Further adventures with the Razor scooter.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some 200 gay activists and supporters massed on Capitol Hill this past Saturday evening and Sunday morning, to counter-demonstrate against a series of antigay “rallies” by seven (count ’em!) supporters of a virulently bigoted Kansas preacher. Except at the end of the Saturday protests (when one counter-protester tried to approach one of the bigots, only to get shoved onto a car hood by the cops who were keeping the two camps apart), I’ve never seen so many loud and colorfully-dressed people get so worked up about a handful of inauspicious whitebreads since the last Presidential nominating conventions.
IT’S QUITE EASY to bash the Bumbershoot arts festival these days.
There’s the admission ($16 per person per day, if you don’t get advance tix, which are only available at Starbucks, that nonsupporter of alternative voices).
There’s all the corporate logos and sponsorships (radio stations “presenting” musical artists they’ll never play on the air in a million years; the auditoria labeled in all official and unofficial schedules with company names they never hold the other 51.5 weeks a year; and everywhere dot-coms, dot-coms, dot-coms).
There’s the big lines at the food booths where you get to pay $4-$7 for hastily mass-prepared fast food entrees.
There’s the annual whining by the promoters that even with all this revenue, the thing still barely breaks even, because of all the money they spend for big-name stars to attract mass audiences and all the logistics needed to handle these same mass audiences.
There’s those mass audiences themselves (who’s more troublesome: the fundamentalist Christians or the fundamentalist vegans?) and the complications they create (the lines, the difficulty in getting between venues on the Seattle Center grounds, the lines, the lack of seats or sitting room, the lines).
There’s the annoying rules (I missed all but the last 15 minutes of Big Star’s gig because I couldn’t bring my Razor scooter into KeyArena and had noplace to put it).
Then there’s the whole underlying implicit demand that You Better Start Having Fun NOW, Mister.
But there’s still a lot to like about the festival, Seattle’s annual big unofficial-end-of-summer party.
Principally: It’s a big Vegas-style lunch buffet of art. Those high admission prices give you all the culture you can eat. You can sample some “controversial” nude paintings, a slam poet or two, a couple of comedians, some of that electronic DJ music the kids are into these days, an ethnic folk ensemble or two, an hour of short art-films, and (particularly prevalent this year) late-’80s and early-’90s rock singers rechristened in “unplugged” form.
(Indeed, this year’s lineup included a whole lot of acts aimed squarely at aging college-radio listeners such as myself–the aforementioned Big Star, Tracy Chapman, Ani DiFranco, Modest Mouse, Sleater-Kinney, Ben Harper, Pete Krebs, the Posies, Quasi, Kristen Hirsch, etc. etc.
For its first two decades, Bumbershoot was programmed clearly for relics from the ’60s. Now, despite promoters’ claims to be after a youth market, it’s programmed clearly for relics from the ’80s and ’90s. Mind you, I’m not personally complaining about this at all. I like all these above-listed acts quite a bit.)
Some genres don’t work in the buffet-table concept. Classical music’s pretty much been written out of the festival in recent years; as have feature-length films, full-length plays, ballet, cabaret acts, and panel discussions. Performance art, modern dance, literary readings, and avant-improv music are still around, but in reduced quantities as organizers try to stuff as many crowd-pleasers onto the bill as they can afford.
Other genres have been shied away from, especially in the festival’s past, for skewing too young or too nonwhite. (I’m currently at home listening to the streaming webcast of DJ Donald Glaude mixing it up on the festival’s closing night; not many years ago, Bumbershoot would never have booked an African-American male whose act wasn’t aimed at making Big Chill Caucasians feel good about themselves.)
But all in all, the concept works. It’s a great big populist spectacle, a four-day long Ed Sullivan Show, a vaudeville spread out over 74 acres.
There are, of course, things I’d do with it. I’d try to figure a way to charge less money, even if that means booking fewer touring musical stars. I’d try to figure a re-entrance for classical, and bring back the “Wild Stage” program of the more offbeat performance stuff.
But, largely, Bumbershoot has turned 30 by actually gaining vitality, getting younger.
(Or maybe it’s really been 30 all along; changing fashions to keep up with its intended age like Betty and Veronica.)
(P.S.: The Bumbershoot organizers booked Never Mind Nirvana novelist Mark Lindquist at the same time and 500 feet away from the rock band whose singer’s real-life legal troubles are believed to have been roman a clef-ed for Lindquist’s story. But an attendee at the festival insisted to me that, despite what I’d written about the novel, Lindquist insisted he’d thought up his plot over a year before the real-life legal case, which occurred while he was trying to sell his manuscript to a publisher.)
TOMORROW: Riding the Mariners’ playoff roller coaster.
LAST FRIDAY AND YESTERDAY, we discussed the growing ’80s nostalgia fetishism.
Today, we continue an itemized explanation of how ’80s nostalgia differs from the real time:
By the latter part of the decade there were the centrally-controlled Prodigy and AOL, with their sloooow graphics and censored chatrooms.
Now, there are at least enough jobs to go around for college graduates (i.e., those who could still get into college after the ’80s decimation of student aid), for nice suburban scions who haven’t gotten stuck into manufacturing or farm labor.
All you had to do to proclaim your radicalness was to distribute posters of U.S. politicians with Hitler moustaches. You didn’t have to organize any coalitions, propose any agendas beyond protesting, or reach out to any constituency beyond your own drinking buddies.
Indeed, you could boast that you were “too political” to get involved in anything as morally impure as politics.
Eighties radicalism wasn’t about getting anything done. It was just about proving your own superiority over all those know-nothing squares out there in the Real America. Today’s way-new left appears to be getting beyond this tired nonsense, thankfully.
It also helped forge a vague unity-of-purpose among a vast assortment of subcultures, from drag queens and performance artists to sex-yoga teachers and health-food elitists. With the years, many of these groups drifted apart from one another, or just plain drifted apart.
In fact, there’s a lot I miss about the ’80s Seattle I hated then. The money-mania was not quite so pronounced; there were more low-rent spaces; there seemed to be more non-life-controlling jobs around; downtown stil had Penney’s and didn’t have penne.
But do I want the ’80s back? Hell no! I’d rather be forced to listen to nonstop Linda Ronstadt ballads for eternity (which, circa 1982, was what I was doing in office-drone jobs).
TOMORROW: Nostalgia for the Bell System.
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed the re-emergence of interest in early-’80s skate punks.
But that’s just part of a growing ’80s nostalgia fetishism.
Just about every place you look, the music, the clothes, the video games, and even the polarized politics of what some of us used to call “Reagan’s AmeriKKKa” are back.
With one difference.
A good number of us who were around the first time HATED the ’80s.
We couldn’t wait to get beyond all the doo-doo that was going down then, which we’re still not fully beyond.
Herewith, an itemized explanation of how ’80s nostalgia differs from the real time:
Actually, at least around here, this stuff was almost totally blacked out from local radio and clubs. There were seldom more than two tiny bars where you could hear anything more innovative than white blues bands.
This gave its fans a sense of shared martyrdom, then a sense of community, then a sense of DIY movement-building which got a little sidetracked during those 1992 gold-rush days (when everybody in town felt they had to insist loudly that they were Not Grunge Dammit.)
But there was also a blossoming of innovative, artistic, and really weird stuff: Love and Rockets, Eightball, Tales of the Beanworld, Dirty Plotte, RAW, etc. etc. etc.
Still, there were some true classics, and several more entries that weren’t really all that great but struck a chord with audiences who still recall them as coming-O-age keystones.
Some of those early cable shows were real hoots of blooper-filled, low-budget cheese (Loves Me Loves Me Not, A New Day In Eden, New Wave Theater, Financial News Network). Few predicted these hokey attempts would ever pose a real threat to the status quo of Blossom and Knots Landing.
(In the crevices and interstices of all this, meanwhile, came such deservedly-remembered novelties as Max Headroom, The New Twilight Zone, Remote Control,The Tracey Ullman Show, and David Letterman’s wild, pre-celeb-fawning era.)
TOMORROW: The last of this for now.
TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to Tomata du Plenty, 52, who’d cofounded Ze Whiz Kidz (a gay-camp theater troupe that pretty much established the funky-but-chic tone of Seattle nonprofit theater) and the Tupperwares (a drag vocal trio that included the man who inherited and closed the Dog House restaurant), before heading off to be an L.A. punk rocker, a Miami painter, and assorted other roles in assorted other towns.
LAST SATURDAY, those wacky petrifiers of ephemeral art forms at the Experience Music Project held a museum-piece tribute to that one musical/subcultural genre one would never expect to ever see turned into a museum piece, the skate punks.
Those late-’70s-early-’80s skater boyz had been vilified by many “intellectual punks” at the time. In this scenario, the Black Flag/TSOL/Germs gang had singlehandedly turned punk rock in L.A. (and by 1981 in the U.S. as a whole) from an attempted populist musical revolution into an exclusive, often violent, “hardcore” clique dominated by white male suburbanites of questionable intelligence and serious drinking-drugging-fighting proclivities.
But that young white male suburban demographic was just what ad agencies craved a decade later.
Skate punk’s somewhat more respectable next generation, and the overlapping snowboarding and “beach sports” scenes, became favorite iconographies for the selling of everything from soda pop to cereal.
Skate punk has become the illegitimate parent of “good” and “evil” twins–the clean-cut, corporate “rebellion” of the ESPN X Games and the Hollywood-promoter-contrived, white-trash trash talk of the “aggro” music scene.
And the skater doodz were from L.A., which is always a geopolitical plus to the marketing biz. TV networks, record labels, and ad agencies forever want impressionable teens across the globe to believe their own lives are empty; that you’re not a true “rebel” unless you look, talk, and behave just like someone in N.Y./L.A./S.F. is doing; and that the only way to keep up with these style dictates is to keep buying what you’re told to buy.
(But on the flip side: While many U.K. and N.Y. punk bands got released on major labels, L.A. skate punkers had to rely on feisty indie outfits like Tommy Boy (now selling ESPN soundtrack CDs), Frontier, and Slash. These supposedly nihilistic self-destructors turned out to have helped jump-start the whole indie rock phenomenon, from within the shadows of the Hollywood entertainment oligopoly.)
Hence, skate punk really is a topic deserving of museum-piece recollection.
And, yeah, there’s irony up to the armpits in those no-future crusters not only turning 40 but becoming idols to hundreds of fresh-faced young ‘uns at the municipal skate park across from EMP.
And a few looks at those old punkers, especially their hands and their kneecaps, gave me a revelation. I may be “sex-positive,” but I can still find certain body parts to be completely icky.
MONDAY: The larger ’80s nostalgia problem.
IN OTHER NEWS: Speaking of being stuck in the past, Mayor Schell has vetoed the Seattle City Council’s repeal of the onerous, censorious 1985 Teen Dance Ordinance; making his own re-election next year even more doubtful.
NOW LET US PRAISE the greatest Northwest pop-cult book ever written (other than Loser, of course.)
I speak of Wet and Wired: A Pop Culture Encyclopedia of the Pacific Northwest, by Randy Hodgins and Steve McLellan.
The two Olympians have previously written a history of Seattle-set movies, published a short-lived print and web zine called True Northwest, and produced a comedy radio show. This modestly-produced, large-size trade paperback is their masterwork.
Its 226 pages cover over 500 of the most famous and/or influential people, places, and things in the Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver metro areas (plus a few side trips to Tacoma and Spokane). Mixing and matching the region’s three big cities means even the best expert about any one town won’t already know everything in the book (though I, natch, was familiar with at least most of the topics).
In short, easily digestible tidbits of prose (curiously laid out at odd angles), you get–
…and lots, lots more.
The book’s only sins, aside from a handful of misspelled names, are those of omission:
But these are relatively minor quibbles that can (and, I hope, will) be rectified in a second edition. What Wet and Wired does have is well-written, accurate (as far as I’m able to tell), and a great mosaic of glimpes into our rather peculiar section of the planet.
TOMORROW: Cirque du Soleil pitches its tent in Renton’s Lazy B country.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Tacoma News Tribune, 8/21): “Giant Salmon a Scary Prospect.” I can see the horror movie ad campaigns now….
IN OTHER NEWS: Sometimes justice does occur!
SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with a defense of a long-maligned political institution.
BRING ON THE SOUSA MARCHES: No, I don’t think major-party political conventions are a relic needing abolition. Those who so loudly proclaim the conventions’ obsolescence appear largely to be media people, frustrated that the Presidential nomination process is no longer a dragged-out drama leading to a climactic point of decision in a big arena with live TV cameras.
Yet these same critics use, as their main argument, the claim that the conventions have devolved into “a made-for-TV event.”
There have been many, many conventions, before and during the TV era (and will be in any post-TV era) in which the party’s ticket was known weeks in advance. The conventions all went on anyway. They gave the party faithful a, well, a party to reward their hard work and a big pep rally to inspire further efforts.
Today, conventions serve these purposes and a couple more.
They give the party, and by extension its candidate, an opportunity to prove its organizational skills. (George McGovern once told C-SPAN he knew his candidacy was doomed when he couldn’t get his acceptance speech started before 1 a.m. Eastern.)
And they provide a “long-form” forum for a candidate’s platform.
Yeah, call it an “informercial” if you like. But also call it a tool for unmediated communication with the populace.
The Presidential nomination process is broken, but it’s broken in its foresection–the primaries and the ultra-big-money fundraising. The conventions, largely, aren’t broken (though an equivalent mechanism for independent candidates still needs to be thought up).
GRAFFITO OF THE WEEK (in the Six Arms men’s room): “This town is a youth culture retirement home.”
THROWAWAY GAG OF THE WEEK: Was passing the Paramount Theater when a woman walking toward the theater’s touring production of Fosse told a friend she’d last been to the place “to see Lord of the Rings,–I mean Lord of the Dance.” Of course, I had to barge in; “It’s amazing how high Frodo can kick.”
DROPPING THE POKEBALL: Apparently, the Pokemon phenomenon has passed its peak, at least in North America. Apparently, kids turning 10 are, like kids turning 10 oft do, renouncing the recreational fads associated with those immature 9-year-olds. Merchandising products with the 151 superpowered cute cartoon animals and their human pals are stagnating. The second theatrical movie faced disappointing box-office results. Sales of Pokemon gaming cards have reportedly plummeted. (If the latter’s the case, then Wizards of the Coast, the local outfit that made the U.S. version of the gaming cards, sold out to Hasbro just in time.)
TOMORROW: Monorail madness and its meaning.
