Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [49]
I thought it was amazing. I remember having heard Beat Happening on the radio and thinking, These guys can’t even play their instruments! But then I understood it.
GARY LEE CONNER You know the scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas, where they’re all dancing and Schroeder’s playing the piano? That’s what the Olympia scene was like. It was really innocent, and it wasn’t about anything except having fun and playing music.
MEGAN JASPER (Sub Pop Records receptionist-turned–vice president; Dickless singer) If you watched Bruce dance, he always did Calvin-esque kind of moves. You could tell they were close. It was like this weird Olympia thing. They would do almost like disco moves, but then they would freeze and stay frozen for 20 beats or so, and then start moving again. They’d be shaking their arms around. It was just a really funny, unique style of dancing. It was also really fun to imitate.
MARK PICKEREL We thought it was unusual that Calvin took such an interest in the Screaming Trees. He talked about us being his favorite band. And his actions backed that up—I mean, he was booking little tours with us and distributing our cassette right away, and he wrote a really great review of our music in a publication.
But musically, it didn’t seem like we had anything in common. I was surprised when Beat Happening wanted to collaborate on an EP with us and it turned out pretty good. It was a little bit awkward just because none of those guys knew how to play their instruments the way we did. Not that we were super-accomplished.
ALICE WHEELER In Olympia, the cool thing was to sit around and talk about ideas and the meaning of life. Less so in Seattle, where people were like, “I wanna be cool.” Kurt lived in Olympia—that was the place he moved after he left Aberdeen—and that’s why Nirvana was so political. He lived with his girlfriend, Tracy Marander, in Olympia, and then got his own apartment there without Tracy. And he was really good friends with Kathleen Hanna, the woman who started Riot Grrrl.
BLAG DAHLIA (singer for San Francisco’s Dwarves) The grunge scene eventually came to have a P.C. cast to it, and I think a lot of that has to do with that Olympia influence, which kind of turned into that Riot Grrrl thing, a movement that had almost no music attached to it but had a lot of instructions for how you’re supposed to live your life. Whereas the not-famous Kurt Cobain might’ve chuckled at the Dwarves album cover with naked girls covered in blood, the famous Kurt Cobain felt he had to make a stand against those kind of things.
BRUCE PAVITT I moved to Seattle in 1983, and for five years wrote a monthly column called Sub Pop that was in The Rocket. Like Duff, I’d made a break for the big city. A lot of my philosophy was you should be able to make a scene happen where you are, so for me to actually leave Olympia for the big city of Seattle was seen as a hypocritical gesture by Calvin and other such luminaries from the region. But it wasn’t like I was moving to New York or L.A.
MAIRE MASCO Bruce Pavitt, we were involved for a while romantically. When I met him, he was a stoner from Evergreen. He had just moved up from Olympia, and I think I met him at the Metropolis. He definitely had a great ear. He was very creative, he knew a lot of people, though not really in Seattle. There’s the old story of how he started Sub Pop with my Rolodex. I certainly gave him a lot of contacts. And then he got back together with his old girlfriend from Evergreen and dumped me! (Laughs.)
JONATHAN PONEMAN (Sub Pop Records cofounder) I’d met Bruce informally at Bombshelter, a record store he had owned, but he wouldn’t remember it because I was kind of “anonymous guy” then. Bruce gave one of my bands, the Treeclimbers, a tip of the hat in his Sub Pop column in The Rocket. But the first time I’d had an extended conversation with him was when Sub Pop 100 came out and he went on Audioasis, the program I hosted on KCMU,