Beat Happening's Beat Happening 9781628929270, 9781501305153, 9781628929287

Table of contents :
FC
Praise for the series:
Forthcoming in the series:
Title
Copyright
Track Listing
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Deconstructing a Cupcake
A is for Action
B is for Bret
C is for Calvin
D is for DIY
E is for Evergreen
F is for Firehouse
G is for Girl City
H is for Heather
I is for International
J is for Japan
K is for KAOS
L is for Love Rock
M is for Martin Apartments
N is for Negative Space
O is for Olympia
P is for Punk
Q is for Question
R is for Regionalism
S is for Subterranean Pop
T is for Tropicana
U is for Unfinished
V is for Vinyl
W is for Washington
X is for X-Rated
Y is for Yoyo Studio
Z is for Zooming Rocket Ship
Notes
Bibliography
Also available in the series

Citation preview

BEAT HAPPENING

Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Forthcoming in the series: Metallica by David Masciotra A Live One by Walter Holland Bitches Brew by George Grella Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts Psychocandy by Paula Mejia Hi, How Are You by Benjamin Shapiro Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic´ Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork Donny Hathaway Live by Emily Lordi The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod and many more…

Beat Happening

Bryan C. Parker

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Bryan C. Parker, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-6289-2927-0 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2928-7 ePub: 978-1-6289-2929-4 Series: 33 13 , volume 107 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk, NR21 8NN

Track Listing

Beat Happening (1985, K Records) Side A: 1. Foggy Eyes 2. Bad Seeds 3. I Let Him Get to Me 4. I Spy 5. Run Down the Stairs Side B: 1. In Love with You Thing 2. I Love You 3. Down at the Sea 4. fourteen 5. Bad Seeds (live)

Beat Happening (1986, Rough Trade) Side A: 1. Foggy Eyes 2. Bad Seeds 3. I Let Him Get to Me

BEAT HA PPENING

4. I Spy 5. Run Down the Stairs Side B: 1. In Love with You Thing 2. I Love You 3. Down at the Sea 4. Our Secret 5. What’s Important 6. fourteen 7. Bad Seeds (live)

Beat Happening (1996, K Records) Side A: 1. Our Secret 2. What’s Important 3. Down at the Sea 4. I Love You 5. fourteen (Recorded at the Ray Apartments) 6. Run Down the Stairs (Recorded on KAOS-FM) 7. Bad Seeds (live) 8. In My Memory 9. Honey Pot 10. The Fall 11. Youth 12. Don’t Mix the Colors Side B: 1. Foggy Eyes 2. Bad Seeds  vi •

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T rack L isting

3. I Let Him Get to Me 4. I Spy 5. Run Down The Stairs 6. Christmas 7. fourteen (Recorded at Evergreen Recital Hall) 8. Let’s Kiss 9. 1, 2, 3 10. In Love with You Thing 11. Look Around Some songs on the expanded 1996 re-issue are taken from the following releases as well as the early K Records compilations Let’s Together, Let’s Sea, and Let’s Kiss.

Beat Happening (1984 cassette version, K Records) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Down at the Sea I Love You Run Down the Stairs Our Secret What’s Important

Three Tea Breakfast (1984, K Records) 1. In My Memory 2. Honey Pot 3. The Fall 4. Youth 5. Don’t Mix the Colors

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Contents

Acknowledgments xi Foreword xii Deconstructing a Cupcake A is for Action B is for Bret C is for Calvin D is for DIY E is for Evergreen F is for Firehouse G is for Girl City H is for Heather I is for International J is for Japan K is for KAOS L is for Love Rock M is for Martin Apartments N is for Negative Space O is for Olympia  ix •

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1 11 18 24 30 40 47 54 61 67 74 79 86 90 93 97

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P is for Punk Q is for Question R is for Regionalism S is for Subterranean Pop T is for Tropicana U is for Unfinished V is for Vinyl W is for Washington X is for X-Rated Y is for Yoyo Studio Z is for Zooming Rocket Ship

112 119 121 124 128 132 134 137 142 145 150

Notes 154 Bibliography 157 Also available in the series 159

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Acknowledgments

Thank you, first and foremost, Calvin, Bret, and Heather for making an album that fully endorses following one’s heart. Without it, I would not have the courage to write. Thank you, Ally Jane Grossan and Bloomsbury for believing in me and in the value of music. Thank you, everyone who spoke with me for this book. Thank you, Phil Elverum for contributing words and ideas to the foreword for this book. Thank you, Robert Matthews for being my sounding board. Thank you, Mark Baumgarten for your diligent work with this same story and your generous donations of time and encouragement. Thank you, Stephanie Gordon; Ian Shuler; Mariella Luz; Tom, Vickie, and Brandon Parker. Thank you to Cherrywood Coffeehouse in Austin, Texas, where a substantial portion of this book was written, for the makeshift office, breakfast tacos, and warm coffee. Thank you to my wife, Holly Griffin, for your continuing love and all you do.  xi •

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Foreword by Phil Elverum

I am just some kid from the swamps outside Anacortes.  Through luck and proximity I have lived through the slow and thrilling transition from spectator to participant in what I consider to be a magical world, impossible to convey unless you were there, the world of people making weird and unpopular music for each other, specifically in Olympia, Washington, during the late pre-internet era. My high school friends and I discovered that the guitarist for Beat Happening (who we heard about because Nirvana was underway, thus an actual celebrity) ran our local record store. Instantly a thousand mental barriers shattered. Bret encouraged us to start a band, start a zine, work at the store, start a studio there, run a label, etc., gradually floating us into participation in this previously impenetrable world without realizing we had gone through any portal. We were just doing our thing, naturally. The basic assumption that one is allowed to do whatever was taken for granted, and this certainty defines  xii •

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by P hil E lverum

the feeling of Beat Happening for me, especially the first album. Listening to the recordings, it’s easy to imagine that at no point was the legitimacy of the project questioned by the artists. For music that sounds so extremely raw this assumption seems almost insane. This big certainty works as a permission slip to everyone that hears it, or at least a young me. I absorbed everything I could find. Bret stocked the shelves with weird shit: K releases and K-distributed releases, as well as other NW underground labels. The landscape unfolded. Calvin came to town playing bass in a pirate-themed surf band called Walk The Plank and laser glared at everyone in the audience at the tiny store, playing the legendary persona. Eventually I traveled to Olympia with D+ to record in Calvin’s basement and the world expanded exponentially further. I quietly left tapes of my own recording experiments in places they might be found and heard accidentally, too shy to ask for attention. Of course, I ended up living in Olympia after high school for five years of indescribable productivity and transformation. It was right before everyone started blogging their existences so there is very little proof that all the legitimately magical things really did happen daily. I was not in Olympia during 1983–88, the core of Beat Happening’s time, but I had my own five years there, 1997–2002. During that time, I lived downtown in various cheap rooms and never did anything but work on art and music. Nobody I knew had a TV, let alone the internet. I literally sprinted from place to place because there was so much to do, so much excitement, so many possibilities. Every meal was communal. I had the only car. There were no laws. We drank soup from jars and •

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slept in yards and on roofs. The recording studio doors were open and a choir of friends was always available. It sounds disgustingly utopian but it is true. There is, apparently, a mist of dreamy communality that descends in five-year chunks over downtown Olympia. Because of my own time there I feel that I can now hear Beat Happening’s insane and raw-sounding first album as a document of a time and place, just fragments from a much larger picture involving lakes and pies and no rules (and maybe Japan somehow?), no longer as just some bewildering “crazy” people playing non-instruments. One of the inside photos from the album is a live shot from, I think, the Smithfield Cafe. Heather plays guitar and sits on a stool, and because there is no mic stand Rich Jensen is manually holding the mic for her to sing into. It is absurd, and simple, and hilarious looking, and for some reason it is, for me, exactly the feeling.

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Deconstructing a Cupcake

The first time I met Calvin Johnson was just like a Beat Happening song. After I interviewed the punk rocker and K Records founder at a neighborhood bakery, some of his tour-mates wandered off to a natural swimming hole while the two of us visited a local record store, flipped through vinyl, and danced unabashedly in our own little worlds, ears encased in headphones connected to turntables. Though Beat Happening would come to mean much more to me in the ensuing years, my initial fascination derived from their penchant for singing about all things adorable—picnics, lake swimming, and beach parties with personified sea life. When he arrived for that interview with me in 2007, Calvin emerged from the tour van into Austin’s merciless summer heat wearing jean cutoffs that fell just above mid-thigh and pink flip-flops. Sitting opposite him at a patio table outside a bakery, I came to our meeting not only as an interviewer but also as an exuberant fan expecting an equally exuberant and playful Calvin Johnson, so much so that I overlooked his more austere elements—the black t-shirt, cropped haircut, and distanced, observational demeanor. Beat  1 •

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Happening’s softer side clouded my mind and shaded my questions. I opened with, “Who makes the best cupcakes in Olympia?” Calvin hesitated with ambiguous emotion, glancing left and right. Was it disinterest? Annoyance? Consideration? Whatever the case, his pause was disconcerting for an amateur music writer. Then, his deep, baritone voice droned, “Well, you see, I’m from an era when the cupcake was frowned upon.” I looked down at my notes. My first three questions were all about cupcakes. “But then again,” he added nonchalantly, “a cupcake doesn’t have to be something that’s bad for you.” It would be years before this statement would truly resonate with me. I later realized that contained within such an innocuous and direct observation was everything Beat Happening ever did—and it only took Calvin one question to get there. In the discourse of seminal bands, the word redefine gets tossed around a lot. For example, around the same time Beat Happening took form and Calvin established his label K Records, Sonic Youth redefined rock music with noisy avant-garde soundscapes in an era when most bands got lost in slick production. But when I listen to Beat Happening, the word redefine never works for me. With tracks cut in abandoned buildings and apartments rather than a studio, hand-drawn cover art of kitties in rocket ships, and rebellious but juvenile songs, Beat Happening didn’t redefine the processes of recording and releasing music or the sound of punk so much as they undefined it. Not undefined—an adjective that means without fixed limits—but to undefine, a verb, an action.  2 •

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D econstructing a C upcake

Appropriately, when I tried looking up the word, finding a definition for this particular usage proved difficult. Maybe even the words used to describe Beat Happening require inventing. After substantial digging around, I came across a dictionary entry referencing a 1913 edition of Webster’s, which provided an applicable definition: “to make indefinite; to obliterate or confuse the definition or limitations of.” With their do-it-yourself approach and unprecedented methods of writing, recording, and performing music, Beat Happening obliterated and confused the definitions, limitations, and regulations for releasing an album, being in a band, and performing on stage. Rather than saying, “We have a new definition,” the band says, “We don’t have any definitions at all,” or better still, “What’s a definition?” Nothing gets taken for granted. Thirty years from Beat Happening’s origin in 1983, Calvin still instinctively falls into the pattern of undefining the space around him. A performance of Calvin’s I saw in July of 2012 at the Anacortes Unknown Music Series on an island off the coast of far northern Washington, stands out as an example. I sat in a peaceful city park where three microphones on stands were positioned at the ready—cords, amplifiers, and monitors in place. Calvin showed up a few minutes late to the arranged performance space and wasted no time before totally dismantling the setup, pushing all the equipment out of the way. I watched him grab the mic stands one by one and carry them a few feet away, placing them aside. At this point in the set, he was performing already, but I’m not sure how many people in the crowd saw it that way. Instead of using any of the gear, he belted out lyrics  3 •

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BEAT HA PPENING

unaided and danced in flowing, free-form movements, shook a pink tambourine, crooned odd, undulating songs in his booming voice, and strummed an unplugged nylon-string guitar. To this day, his ability to shake up expectations remains utterly intact. Everything about the band’s 1985 debut album, Beat Happening, reflects this challenging, deconstructionist approach—the sound and content of the songs, the recording process and locations, the album’s release and distribution, and the band members who made it. Each song is a microcosm of the band members’ mental processes. The collection of songs selected for Beat Happening also represents an unorthodox decision; rather than assemble the most complementary songs and record them in the most cohesive way possible, the album draws from recordings done in five separate locations by four different people over a number of months. Twenty seconds into their official debut on lead track “Foggy Eyes,” Beat Happening clearly delineate their practice of challenging conventions and reevaluating the world, as Heather Lewis sings, “Open up your eyes and speak your mind.” Calvin confirms this sentiment on the next track, “Bad Seeds,” claiming, “We just see this world in a different way / We’re bad seeds.” The band has never been shy about verbalizing their intent to question standards. Beat Happening can’t claim to be the first band to see or do things differently. However, they provided a whole different way to do things differently. Even bands like the Ramones or Minor Threat that broke rules did so by playing with the rules, stepping over the lines, pushing them outward, drawing them in new ways. Beat Happening simply pretended there were no lines at all.  4 •

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D econstructing a C upcake

More so than anyone I’ve encountered, Calvin Johnson undefines the world around him. He looks at a cupcake, sees the ingredients, and invents a new recipe. Peering past the cupcake’s recognizable sprinkled frosting and seeing the raw ingredients imperceptible to most, he acts as the baker—playing and experimenting with the balance of new and old ingredients to transform this familiar object from the inside out. The refreshing result defies expectation, with each bite a new experience. This visionary intuition coupled with Calvin’s foresight and industriousness allowed him to recruit to the K Records roster other free-spirited artists like Beck, Modest Mouse, and Built to Spill long before they gained widespread acclaim. Beneath the banner of Calvin’s welcoming modes of operation, K enabled artists and served as a launch pad for a wide range of weirdos—some important in the mythos of K, some important to culture as a whole. Modest Mouse has delivered albums that regularly land on popular music charts, and Beck won a Grammy; K first accepted and encouraged these artists’ strange, bold visions. However, celebrity has never been K’s mission, and the artists who have found it exemplify outliers on the label’s roster of alumni. Many K artists found, and still find, fulfillment in the community of back yard shows and undocumented gatherings and happenings. Most have found their own individual niche with K or with other small like-minded labels like Marriage Records or Kill Rock Stars. A few, such as Mirah and Karl Blau, have echoed Calvin’s methods of self-releasing material, but none represent this so aptly as Phil Elverum, who records music under the monikers The Microphones and Mount Eerie. The  5 •

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Microphones released some of K’s most lauded records in the early 2000s before Phil moved back to his hometown of Anacortes, Washington, where he established his label P. W. Elverum and Sun. Phil’s recollection of his time working with K embodies one of the label’s defining attributes of supporting its artists: “It enables growth,” he says. “It provides resources, and that’s what it did for me. Calvin gave me a key to his studio, no questions asked. That made my life what it is for sure. I asked for an apprenticeship, and he gave me a key.” The notoriety and style of the artists on K’s roster varies significantly, but the label has remained an incubator for creativity and for artists entirely committed to a vision. On this steadfastness, K has prospered. Succeeding in the music industry often requires compromising one’s ideals and dreams, but K Records has thrived for thirty years not in spite of Calvin’s unflinching resolve to remain true to himself, but because of it. Initially tapping into the available means of the cassette tape, K’s slogan promised its revolution was “exploding the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre.” While that may sound like overzealous, idealistic rhetoric, the label has remained remarkably true to their mission and principles. Created in the formative years of the K quest, Beat Happening marks a point of departure. A flag planted firmly in the soil of free expression. It is a record of ideas that surpasses its mere contents. A lighthouse beacon for ships manned with cultural voyagers of all kinds. Teaming up first with Heather Lewis and soon after recruiting Bret Lunsford, Calvin found a crew of participants willing to undertake an incredible journey. Each  6 •

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D econstructing a C upcake

member contributed to the band’s unique dynamic, but both Heather and Bret consider Calvin the band’s navigational overseer. This trio came into being during a time ripe for creation in a town whose cultural currents moved them in the right direction. Undoubtedly, they benefited not only from opportune circumstances but also the wisdom and help of a number of guiding hands. Calvin’s ability to see the world in new ways must be partly innate, but mentor and like-minded luminary John Foster shares some responsibility for instilling Calvin’s remarkable talent for dismantling and reinventing cultural components. Foster was a DJ at KAOS, the college radio station at the Evergreen State College in freethinking Olympia, Washington, where Johnson interned. Foster molded and informed Johnson’s mentality by creating policies such as dedicating 80 percent of all airtime to independent label music. To extend his work supporting underground music as a DJ, Foster created Op Magazine to document and comment upon the ever-growing independent arts community. The first issue contained stories on subjects and artists beginning with the letter A, the second issue with B, and so on. In Heather Rose Dominic’s 2000 documentary The Shield Around the K, a title that references the label’s hand-drawn logo of the solitary letter surrounded by a crude shield, Foster says of Op’s structure, “It was a way a brain like mine could deal with just the sheer volume of information coming in.”1 In the same documentary, biographer and music journalist Michael Azerrad comments, “John Foster was clearly very hung up on the alphabet.” Foster also founded an organization called the Lost Music Network  7 •

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(LMN), a group of people committed to playing independent records on the radio and supporting underground music. The acronyms for the Lost Music Network and Op Magazine account for the alphabetic sequence LMNOP. One theory, of a great many, about the naming of K Records says Johnson followed suit, utilizing the letter preceding the letters of Foster’s contributions: K. Undoubtedly, these men possess a rare ability to visualize individual components, whether they are instruments for making an album, the roles and responsibilities of a record label, the ingredients of a cupcake, or the letters of the alphabet. Taking a cue from Foster and Johnson’s methodical approach to deconstruction and simplicity, as well as Beat Happening’s affinity for youthful innocence, the following is an alphabet book of words inextricable from the spirit of Beat Happening and the album that bears the band’s name. As three significantly different versions of Beat Happening exist, delineating these now bears importance. In 1985, Beat Happening issued their eponymous debut containing ten songs on member Calvin Johnson’s own K Records. Almost exactly a year later, UK label Rough Trade released the album and added two songs. In 1996, K reissued the album and expanded it greatly to include a variety of early recordings totaling twenty-three songs. The following pages discuss all three versions of the album, track lists for which are located at the beginning of this book. Beat Happening serves as a guidebook for self-actualization. For this particular cast of individuals, that meant starting a band without knowing how to play an  8 •

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D econstructing a C upcake

instrument and creating a method of disseminating their art within a self-created network of like minds. But the story of Beat Happening transcends music and resonates with humanity at large. Where some saw laughably inexperienced musicians, others detected power within their unadulterated, rebellious, and youthful spirit. We could all use a little naïveté. Sometimes we need to forget there’s a way to do things. It’s the only way to make progress possible. This book is an instruction manual for chasing dreams, resisting the oppressive social mores of culture, and unapologetically following one’s own inner voice. If I’ve done it right, these alphabetic ingredients constitute a recipe book for feeding your creative spirit.

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A is for Action

As many traits as Calvin Johnson possesses—and he possesses many—that allowed him to build an extensive and lasting independent music network based in the northwest corner of the United States, none are more integral than his ability to take action. The necessity of industriousness seems obvious, but the ability to take the first step must precede the hard work. After all, many have dreamed big about being in a band, touring the world, releasing a record, facilitating friends doing the same, yet that which separates those who have and those who haven’t achieved these ends lies not only within the observable products but also—more importantly—within the first step. Action exists as a binary function, a circuit so to speak, and the electricity only flows when that circuit is complete. While the total sum of all action represents a complex and nuanced reality, one rich in layers and textures, the individual actions that comprise our realities are simple circuits—on/off switches. You can have the •

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cake in the oven, but unless it’s on, you’re not cookin’. In the case of Beat Happening, the members weren’t dreaming of starting a band, thinking about playing a show, or hoping to release a record, they were just doing it. Just making it happen. Calvin describes Beat Happening’s methods in just this way: “We’re gonna just go to Japan. We’re just gonna put out a cassette. We’re just gonna do it.” Although taking that first step proves difficult for many, Calvin undertakes it without problem. “Sometimes it’s hard to turn the TV off,” Calvin jokes, “but once you make that step, it’s not that different than making dinner.” Undoubtedly, Calvin saw this mentality in the community members and artists surrounding him, but he also drew influences from larger cultural icons. “Another big influence for me was Andy Warhol, because he was an interdisciplinary artist,” says Calvin. The K Records industry echoes the work of Warhol, and the veritable beehive of artists working in Olympia mirrors the participants of Warhol’s Factory. “He worked in all these different mediums,” Calvin says of Warhol. “He worked in film; he worked in painting; he worked in silk screening; he worked with photography and drawing. He was like, ‘I’m a creative person, and I want to express myself in all these mediums.’ He didn’t say, ‘I’m a painter.’ That was exciting to me. When I was a teenager, I read several books about him. I also read books by him. That was influential that you don’t have to be just a painter. You could be a writer, and you could be a filmmaker, and you could be all these other things. I could produce a record. He applied the interdisciplinary model to real life.” Within Warhol’s diversification in the arts, Calvin •

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A is for A ction

discerned the importance of action: “He was like, ‘I want to do this. I’m going to do this. I did it.’ It was like, ‘Oh you can just do that? Let’s do it.’” Warhol’s decades-earlier undoing of art’s rules parallels Calvin’s contributions to music. Beat Happening’s work applies the same simple steps to accomplish grandiose goals and strip away industry precepts. “Before punk there were all these rules about what a band was,” Calvin points out. “You had to learn your instrument, and practice a lot. Then, punk came along and said, ‘No, you just get four people together and just start bashing away. Make up some songs. You don’t need to practice for a year before you can play your show. You don’t even need to practice.’ That’s what we did—we just played. I think that borrows more from the improvisational scene [in] Olympia than it does from punk rock in a way.” True, improvisational music created in Olympia by experimental musicians like Steve Peters and Steve Fisk inspired Calvin, but he saw a different way to embrace the concepts. He believed “experimental” should not define a genre of music but a process of creating music, a process that could be applied to any genre. “I like this idea that music just comes out of you, but why can’t it be within the context of pop music? Why does improvisational music mean that it has to be music no one wants to listen to? I was just trying to apply that idea to the pop music format.” Here, again, is Calvin at his most natural—deconstructing, rearranging. Taking action carries with it inherent vulnerabilities, of which Calvin possesses a keen awareness, but they never worry him. “The thing about improvisation is that you’re taking a risk,” Calvin acknowledges, “and it can •

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totally bomb. It doesn’t mean that every Beat Happening performance was amazing or great. We were probably really bad sometimes, because it just didn’t work. It’s like improv comedy. Sometimes it’s brilliant, and sometimes it’s really embarrassing. And I’m sure we were riding that line a lot. Or maybe we were both at the same time.” Calvin effortlessly applies this improvisational spirit to the concept of physical space. Back in my 2007 interview with Calvin, he discussed DIY (do-it-yourself) touring and what gear is needed for playing in unusual venues like art spaces or community centers. I mentioned bringing your own PA. “Why would you even need a PA?” he queried without hesitation, shrugging nonchalantly. These actions of playing in a band, releasing records, and DIY touring begin with even smaller actions; perhaps they can be reduced to a single note or percussive beat, evidenced by some of the band’s improvisational tendencies on record. Consider “In Love with You Thing,” the first track on the B-side of Beat Happening. “I know I’m too shyyyyy,” Calvin sings, “I know you can’t read my miiiiind.” The last syllables are drawn out, as they might be when one is cooking up the next line, the next rhyme. Eleven seconds into the song, a shaker joins Calvin’s vocals, as if someone just found one lying around on the floor and wanted to join in. Then, at twenty-two seconds, the first, muted percussive thud. It might not even be a drum. What’s in the room? A cardboard box maybe. At first there is nothing. Then, suddenly, there is a beat happening. The band’s name asserts the present and the ongoing. The whole thing lasts only a minute and eleven seconds: a brief moment of spontaneous fun. It’s a song •

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about the restlessness of love and the pain of heartbreak. Imbued with impulsivity, it captures the recklessness of young love. It does not matter if the song is or is not truly improvised; it feels impromptu and leaves listeners with a spirit of spontaneity. The lasting impression endorses taking action and creating without a plan or a roadmap. The song’s energy moves in the listener; you want to get up and dance or, better yet, get up and create your own song. Beat Happening fan Julie Fay, who also helped to create and participated in Olympia’s active arts community of the time, remembers being at one of the band’s early shows in Portland, Oregon. “I heard some people in the audience saying, ‘Oh my God! I could do that!’” she recalls. She refers to herself as a “dogged fan,” and as such, she felt defensive of her friends. “How dare they?!” she thought. After the show, she said something to Calvin about it. Perhaps expecting some degree of disappointment, she instead remembers Calvin saying, “That’s awesome! That’s exactly what they should be thinking.” Recalling Calvin’s rethinking of the cupcake and his ability to visualize the bigger picture, one sees the vital link between the ability to take action and the ability to deconstruct norms and question conventions. Accepting the standards and rules as they exist breeds inaction, while seeing something in a new way and challenging it allows one to act. Action is the flour, the ingredient that binds and gives structure to all the other ingredients. It’s how the band began, how they wrote songs, how they readily included women in creative circles (unlike the music scenes in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, •

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which largely didn’t), and how they got to Japan. Action is a process, a way of being that defines everything Beat Happening accomplished and enabled. Even if you can’t make a song by the prescribed industry standards, you can make a song in your own way with whatever means exist. These small yet inherently rebellious decisions work to whittle away at prevailing trends, resulting in new ideas that eventually reshape those trends. Bret explains the dynamic of the music industry prior to the massive changes that occurred during the 80s and 90s: “If I like music, I’m going to a stadium to watch the megaband, and if you’re not a musician, you need to have some sort of gift from above or apprenticeship to have these qualifications to call yourself a musician, and then you can be part of that world.” However, Bret grew up seeing examples of bands that challenged these hierarchical structures. “That was the breath of fresh air of punk,” he says. “When I was in high school and going down to Seattle to see shows—seeing bands like The Fartz, The Accused—it was literally revolutionary that these people who didn’t have the credentials to be onstage in one sense had stolen the stage and said, ‘We can be on this stage, we can do this, and we can sing about whatever the fuck we want. And we can call our band The Fartz.” Making it up as they went along defined Beat Happening from the band’s earliest days, and their roots stretch deep into the soil of improvisation. From January of 1983 until the spring of that year, Calvin and Heather had been making music with a woman named Laura Carter in a band aptly dubbed Laura, Heather and Calvin. When Laura moved away from Olympia, she left •

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a hole in the band just as they were slated to perform a show in Anacortes at a railroad depot with local band The Spoiled and fellow Olympians The Young Pioneers. Undeterred, the group played a loosely conceived set for which Calvin and Heather operated as primary actors supported by a rotating cast of extraneous people, including another individual capable of embracing the established duo’s fearless action—a guy named Bret Lunsford.

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B is for Bret

After Bret Lunsford graduated high school in 1981, he left Anacortes, Washington, where he was born and raised, to travel the U.S. and Mexico. He landed in Tucson, Arizona, where he befriended Lee Joseph, who owned a record store called Roads to Moscow near the University of Arizona. Bret frequented punk shows at the town’s primary all-ages venue The Backstage, where he not only saw nationally relevant punk bands Hüsker Dü, Circle Jerks, Social Distortion, and Minor Threat but also found himself impressed with some of the local talent such as Yard Trauma and The Seldoms. Bret points out that during this era many record stores tied into families of artists. For example, record-store owner Lee Joseph also played in the band Yard Trauma. Rather than compartmentalized sections of industry, the underground consisted of vertically integrated individuals fighting the revolution on all fronts—creation, distribution, and retail marketplace all at once. Bret developed an increasing interest in DIY culture, decentralization, •

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and punk rock from observations during his time in Tucson as well as through reading issues of the Sub/Pop fanzine Calvin had mailed to him. The two met a couple of years earlier when Bret’s girlfriend Krista Forsyth lived with Olympia community fixture Lois Maffeo, who had recently befriended Calvin. As members of the same social circle, Bret and Calvin ran into each other occasionally and spent time together when Bret drove Lois, Krista, and Calvin to Vancouver to see British punk band The Jam. Bret and Calvin furthered their bond when Calvin made the trip up to Anacortes the next year to see local punk band The Spoiled perform at a Grange Hall, an experience that inspired Calvin to think openmindedly about the role of community centers in art and music. Shortly after a visit from Calvin and Lois in the spring of 1983, Bret Lunsford prepared to leave Tucson and return to the Pacific Northwest. Upon his return, he saw Laura, Heather and Calvin play a show at Olympia’s Smithfield Café, a small coffee shop hangout that served as a venue on occasion. Only a few weeks before, Bret had seen Minor Threat in Tucson. After the Laura, Heather and Calvin show, he thought, “These are two great shows and so different. This is what punk means to me. You can have both of these things on the same page. They both resonated with me.” The band resonated enough with Bret that he wanted to organize a show for Laura, Heather and Calvin in his hometown of Anacortes. With the help of his brother Jonn, Bret arranged a show at the city’s railroad depot. By that time, Laura had left the band, and Bret found himself as one participant in a lineup of stand-ins. Held •

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on August 26, 1983 and billed as Karen, Heather, and Calvin, the band’s performance that night utilized a rotating cast of players trying to keep it together. Also on that bill were legendary Seattle band The U-Men; Olympia mainstays Gary Allan May and Rich Jensen; and Bret’s brother Jonn Lunsford’s high school band Public Service. Accounts differ on whether Bret was asked to join the band just before or just after the show, but certainly, the depot show marks the first time the three members of Beat Happening shared a stage. “I did play a couple songs,” Bret recalls, “and my sense of it was: ‘This is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.’ I went up there hyper-casual. My memory is that I needed to put more effort into paying respect to the songs because I really cared about the songs. That performance was much too improvisational.” Even as a fierce believer in improvisation, Calvin shares a similar memory of the depot show, feeling that the event lacked enough structure to be functional. “That really didn’t work,” Calvin says directly, “It was just a mess. It was like, this is ridiculous; this isn’t working.” After that, Calvin sought to define the band with a core group of people, a task hindered and helped by Heather moving to Seattle and Bret moving to Olympia in September of 1983. One thing on which everyone agrees is the driving force that solidified Beat Happening: a trip to Japan. Calvin felt that, as Americans abroad, the trio likely possessed inherent coolness. Plus, for a band as adventurous as Beat Happening, traveling to a country on the other side of the planet fit completely. When Calvin asked Bret to join Beat Happening, his request was •

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coupled with a promise that if Bret joined, the group would go to Japan, a mission that bound the three together. While an endeavor of this magnitude would excite most young people, Bret possessed a mindset that made him even riper to accept such an offer. Just weeks before Calvin asked him to join Beat Happening, Bret spent part of the spring and early summer of 1983 on a fishing expedition with his family in Alaska’s Bristol Bay. “When a crew goes to Alaska, they’re stuck there for months,” Bret explains. He continues to detail the process of such an expedition: “I have this boat. I’m going to rig it with this fishing gear. We’re going get a crew together. We’re going to finance the groceries whenever we need to stock it. And we’re going to take it through the inside passage to Alaska, and we’re gonna fish for the summer. We’re going to catch fish, sell it to the cannery, come back and have a bunch of money.” Incidentally, that summer Bristol Bay yielded its largest haul of Sockeye Salmon of any year of the decade, 96,029 metric tons of fish.2 Even more important than finding success on the seas is the immeasurable effect on one’s understanding of the world. As Bret saw it, “That kind of adventure and departure was a part of the culture.” Bret comes from a family of Croatian immigrants and his grandparents had moved from the island of Vela Luka to Anacortes, Washington, on Fidalgo Island in 1906. Bret says, “That independence that comes from being on a crew of a fishing boat affects a mindset different from say a mining town or agricultural community.” The same might be said for inhabitants of an island, a landmass detached from the mainland. Bret grew up intimately familiar with the geography of independence. Anacortes •

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sits at 48°30´N, 122°37´W, which is less than one degree latitude (less than 60 miles) from the contiguous states’ northernmost point—Lake in the Woods, Minnesota— and just over two degrees longitude (around 100 miles) from the contiguous states’ westernmost point— Washington’s Bodelteh Islands. The variety of folks who made it as far as Anacortes had the hearts of true explorers. Bear in mind that large numbers of immigrants were content to arrive on the country’s Eastern coast and stay put. These defining archetypes inherited by Bret have always occupied his thoughts. He has conducted extensive research on family lineages during his work at the Anacortes Historical Museum and edited the book Croatian Fishing Families of Anacortes. The adventure of Beat Happening’s music and the band’s cultural quest to challenge conventions made sense to Bret; it was in his blood. “It was so exploratory,” he says. “That was as important to me as the music, and I loved the music and believed in it.” In fact, Bret’s willingness to commit to the mission of the Beat Happening crew held enormous value. Of Bret, Calvin states, “He was committed. That’s all that mattered. It didn’t really matter if he knew how to play; he was just in the spirit of it.” Although later Bret would come into a larger role in Beat Happening, helping to write songs and create music, his early contributions undergirded work that Calvin and Heather had already undertaken. All of the songs on the band’s debut album had been written beforehand, and Bret worked to learn the songs for the record and the shows during the period surrounding it. “My role in Beat Happening was supportive of Calvin and Heather’s songwriting and performance,” says Bret, •

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“being willing to commit my involvement in support of what they were doing, going to Japan or going on tour.” Calvin’s fervent encouragement complemented Bret’s willingness. “I don’t think I would have overcome my own obstacles toward getting onstage,” Bret insists, “if Calvin hadn’t said to me, ‘Well, you should be in this band.’” But Bret never saw himself as anything less than significant to the project, explaining, “From the time I was invited by Calvin to be a participant in the band, I considered myself to be an integral part of our activities.” He admits that Calvin operated as the driving force but unequivocally states, “We were co-participants.” Bret isn’t the lone recipient of Calvin’s encouragement. Evidenced by the massive number of albums K Records has released, more than 300 as of January 2015, and the impressive roster of artists with which he’s worked, Calvin works well at the helm. He is the band’s undeniable driving force, but part of his talent lies in choosing a responsive, diligent team. Beat Happening fan Julie Fay corroborates Bret’s statement about the power of Calvin’s encouragement, telling me, “Calvin is great at fostering talent.” His insistent confidence encouraged the people around him, including Bret as well as Heather. Regarding the adventurousness of making music and setting out on tour, Heather says, “I don’t think I have that spirit. I think I could only do it because of Calvin.” This sentiment prevails in Olympia, and stories of the scene here frequently depict Calvin as the center that holds together this world. While much of Calvin’s magnetic personality remains inscrutable, the details of his young life and stories of his off-kilter charm yield some understanding of his allure. •

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On the first day of November in 1962, Calvin Johnson was born in Olympia, Washington, to parents Calvin and Evelyn. Their third child, Calvin followed a daughter, Wendes, born in 1960, and another son, Streator, born in 1958. The family would later adopt another daughter, Kirsten, giving them a balanced two boys and two girls. All three of Evelyn’s biological children were born via natural childbirth, a right for which she had to fight, as the topic, closely associated with second-wave feminist politics, remained controversial at the time. In fact, according to Streator, this was not merely a personal matter, and Evelyn stayed active in the natural childbirth movement. Calvin’s dad believed in organic gardening and fought to have an orchard where he could grow organic fruit. In Streator’s estimation, their parents “were both born very poor and were considered traditional Blue Collar Democrats, but they took it further.” Calvin’s DNA appears predetermined for subverting dominant paradigms through a natural curiosity for •

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exploring alternatives. However, nature can’t take all the credit, as an array of vital experiences informed Calvin’s early life. Streator says, “Both my mother and father just did things. My dad could do whatever it took to do it, whatever it was. He didn’t wait for someone else to do it; he did it himself. I think Calvin picked up on that.” Indeed, Calvin’s father frequently changed jobs, seeking out whatever exciting opportunity arose, mostly within politics and media, which resulted in the family moving regularly. After working as a news writer for the Associated Press in New York, he served as press secretary to Washington State Governor Albert Rosellini and later as an administrative assistant to Washington State Congresswoman Julia Butler Hansen.3 In 1973, he took a position as an associate professor of journalism at Central Washington State College in Ellensburg.* Since the school had begun as a normal school—a school that serves to train teachers—its roots in progressive thinking on education resulted in the opening of an experimental elementary school connected to the college. The elementary school, paid for by federal dollars as part of the New Deal, was named after the director of the college’s teacher training school between 1924 and 1956, Amanda Hebeler.4 With his father teaching at the college, Calvin attended the affiliated Hebeler Elementary School where  Originally The Washington State Normal School (WSNS), the establishment underwent several changes in nomenclature, first becoming Central Washington College of Education in 1937, then Central Washington State College in 1961, and lastly Central Washington University in 1977. *

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he experienced forward-thinking approaches to learning at a young age. “In retrospect,” he says, “I think they had the interdisciplinary idea, which I experienced more fully at Evergreen, where they put you together learning various disciplines together, as they interact with each other. Rather than ‘here’s math,’ you’re using math to do this project that also involves history.” Unfortunately, a short time after becoming a professor at CWSC, Calvin Sr. suffered a sudden heart attack and died soon after in the hospital, making his mother the central force in Calvin’s life from that point forward.5 Clues to Calvin’s character traits emerge not only in looking at his family history but also at those who surrounded him as a young man, such as KAOS radio DJ John Foster. However, friends and family still insist that something inexplicable defines Calvin. Foster says, “When Calvin came to KAOS for training he was 15; he was already a very cool kid. He was way too cool for his school and the town. He had to end up at KAOS because there was nothing else for him at the time.” Foster even insists that Evergreen had little effect on Calvin, that his defining characteristics already existed. The idea that everybody stands on the shoulders of giants doesn’t apply here, according to John. “Everybody except Calvin,” John says. “He was born a little giant. He was always just Calvin,” Foster continues flatly. “He could not be anything else. That had nothing to do with Evergreen; that was just Calvin.” Foster, as well as his wife, artist Dana Squires, and longtime friend Dave Rauh, all speak with a warm, almost parental affection for Calvin. This group, along with former KAOS station manager Toni Holm, represents an older generation of •

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Olympia’s free thinkers, the earliest pioneers of the city’s cultural awakening. These folks sought to create art in a town that previously thrived on local government, working class citizens, and quaint family lifestyles. Invariably, Calvin inspires excited recounting of local lore when he comes up in conversation, and John, Dana, and Dave laugh heartily, remembering anecdotes of Calvin as a young man. They aren’t the only three to recount such tales; Calvin stories serve as a local pastime. Even thirty years later, as people tell these stories, they still seem unsure of what to make of the enigmatic artist. “Opaque” is a word you hear frequently. “He wasn’t easy to understand or connect with. But I think I did, and I think I just never felt confident about it because he wasn’t effusive,” says friend and Yoyo Studio owner Pat Maley, who recorded some of Beat Happening’s earliest material. Heather Lewis agrees that people felt challenged by Calvin and says people constantly asked her to explain his behavior. “People didn’t get him,” she says, adding, “It seemed like guys were irritated by him more than girls. Men were like, ‘I don’t know what the fuck is up with that guy.’ He played on that.” Julie Fay remembers one of her earliest experiences with Calvin. “Calvin would always push people’s boundaries,” she begins, “and one of the ways he would do it is go into people’s houses or dorm rooms and take a shower. You’d be like, ‘Who is the person I’ve never met before taking a shower at my house?’ That was really early on— he came to my dorm room and took a shower.” Julie was not happy about this, but then she had a dream in which she and Calvin were friends. Soon after, she ran into him on Evergreen’s campus and told him about the dream. •

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“Was I good?” Calvin asked with a raised eyebrow. As a response, Julie says, “I bought him lunch, and we’ve been friends ever since.” Julie explains all this by saying, “I feel like he’s testing them or challenging them—like testing people’s mettle. If you come up on somebody, it’s almost startling and you can see a genuine reaction. They show some of their true self if you make them uncomfortable.” In this comment, Julie hits on a key point connecting Calvin’s mannerisms to his creative work. Just as the art created by Beat Happening served to stir the waters of music’s idea pool, Calvin’s perplexing mannerisms encouraged people to rethink their conceptions about social exchange and interaction, encapsulated by another of Julie’s recollections. She hung around with many of the community’s most lauded young musicians and visual artists, like Stella Marrs, Donna Dresch, and the members of both The Young Pioneers and Beat Happening, but Julie considers baking to be her primary talent. One day, she got the idea to host a cakewalk under the gazebo of Olympia’s Sylvester Park. She and some friends made hats out of corrugated cardboard to give away as prizes and asked friends to bring cakes. Someone brought a cake made to look like the nearby Tacoma Dome, Heather brought a cake bearing the likeness of Barry White, and Julie made a cake resembling a diamond ring with yellow and white frosting. Calvin made a garlic cake. Here is a test designed by Calvin to see what sort of reaction he can elicit. I can imagine someone biting into the cake and exclaiming, “What the hell? This is full of garlic!” I can hear Calvin responding, “Well, you said bring a cake.” Some might spit it out, repulsed, and •

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regard the experimental baker with confused disdain. But the person who hesitates, says, “Well, let me try it again,” and takes another bite—that’s a Beat Happening fan. Some of the tension that manifests around Calvin might be simply innocuous. As Heather points out, “What some people care about, he just doesn’t care about. That’s hard for people to understand.” But if you ask Calvin about music, particularly obscure or lost music from a specific time period, he can talk all day. Some of his favorite bands—The Cramps, The Gories, The Sonics, and The Beatles—are almost certain to make an appearance in the course of the conversation. “He’s really smart,” Heather says, “and he’s really knowledgeable about music. It’s kind of amazing to me what he knows.” Pat Maley corroborates Calvin’s long-standing and deep knowledge of music with a memory from the early days of his Yoyo Studio. After opening the space, Pat had the idea to teach an audio recording class there as a way to make some extra money. One of the earliest registrants was Calvin. At the beginning of the class, Pat gave a questionnaire about audio history to find out what people knew. One of the questions was “Who is George Martin?” Pat remembers, “Calvin wrote all this stuff about how he [Martin] had worked with Peter Sellers, all this pre-Beatles stuff. I thought, ‘He’s really smart. He knows his history. He knows about music.’” Calvin possesses an acute and focused determination that served his mission well over the years. His knowledge of music’s past coupled with his vision for its future led him to adopt the philosophy that he could move culture forward by ignoring official channels and taking matters into his own hands. •

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Artists and musicians in Olympia adopted the DIY ideology in part out of necessity, but the act of doing it yourself had deeper implications and constituted political and social statements about decentralization. Beat Happening came to exist only by virtue of many self-directed maneuvers—patchwork recording sessions in unlikely locations and directly interfacing with companies to master and press the vinyl. Even after the band finally had the record in hand, they still had plenty of work to do on their own. The initial excitement generated by Beat Happening’s first LP allowed the band to move about 300 of the 700 copies printed by selling to friends and family in the immediate community. Calvin’s brother Streator remembers buying an armful of copies and forcing all his friends to purchase them. After exhausting that market and without a line into entrenched modes of national distribution, Calvin had over half of the records sitting in boxes. He certainly wasn’t going to allow this obstacle •

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to prevent him from selling records, so he decided to take matters into his own hands and make the most out of a trip east to Maryland to visit his mother for the Christmas of 1985. The drive served as an opportunity to stop at stores along the way, where Calvin would offer a chance for them to purchase the newly released LP. Along for the ride were his brother Streator and friend Julie Fay. “We just stopped at every record store and tried to sell records,” Calvin says. “Some places bought, some didn’t.” Calvin found that “mostly people were receptive. I went to all these stores, and none of them had it. There were a few that had heard of Beat Happening because of the single, but a lot of them were very open to it. Some might want to listen to it first, but mostly they just bought it, and that was pretty cool.” His unassuming approach to explaining the situation echoes Calvin’s typical mindset. A popular line of explanation he employs goes, “We’re just doing our thing.” Johnson does remember some of the stores trying to convince him to sell it on consignment, meaning that if he wanted to get paid, he’d have to keep tabs on the store and come back for reimbursement if the albums sold. “No way,” Calvin would say in these instances. He’d tell them he was only here for the one day, take or leave it. As one might imagine, his stance paid off in varying degrees, but at least he was doing business on his own terms. The bulk of these sales pitches occurred in January of 1986 on the drive back to Olympia from the East Coast. Streator stayed behind, meaning that just Calvin and Julie undertook the drive home. Julie remembers that the pair stopped not only at record stores but also •

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radio stations, magazines, venues, and the homes of folks who ran their own fanzines. In the mid-1980s, the connectivity supplied by the internet had yet to unite underground artists around the world, and Calvin and Julie had only analog maps for navigational tools. Undertaken in the earliest days of DIY touring, this trip typifies the audacity Calvin has exhibited since youth. Despite the infancy of independent music infrastructure, Calvin and Julie found burgeoning communities teeming with excitement and creativity. Cleveland must have been booming in early 1986, because the city stands out clearly in both Julie’s and Calvin’s memories. “Cleveland seemed like it was really thriving,” Julie says. “We stayed with these people, and they took us on this really cool nighttime tour down by the river, and they showed us the burning slag piles. It’s so industrial.” Calvin recalls that Cleveland had a shocking five or six independent record stores who were interested in carrying Beat Happening—evidence that 1986 falls in the early years of a multi-decade tidal wave of independent music outlets permeating American culture. Not only was Julie along to make the trip less lonely, she had her own way of contributing to the adventure, one that exemplifies the DIY culture of the era. “I was doing these postcards,” she says, a project created by artist and scene godmother Stella Marrs along with a woman named Kathy Doherty. “They cut up these [issues of] National Geographic and glued an index card on them with rubber cement and then cut around the edges with scalping scissors. They had traveled across the country by making these in packs of hundreds and then selling them •

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to record stores or gift shops or whatever.” For Julie, “It was sort of a currency. You could just go to Goodwill and get a huge stack of old National Geographic and invest in some scalping scissors, and as you were traveling around, you could make a stack of postcards. People would buy them for, like, $20. It seemed like a lot of money at the time.” Here’s a community of people that have taken personal ownership of conceiving, recording, releasing, and distributing albums of convention-defying pop songs; circumventing the monetary system by defining a new currency seems appropriate. For Julie, events personal and public, joyous and tragic, punctuate and define the trip. She remembers being out on New Year’s Eve in D.C., listening to James Brown, and the Love postal stamp for that year being unveiled. Julie remembers that when the pair stopped in San Francisco on their way home, the Challenger space shuttle exploded over the Atlantic off Florida’s coast, a national tragedy cemented in the mind of any conscious American. Visiting Calvin’s friend Lois Maffeo and her roommate Courtney Love, who were living in Portland, stands out as a happy and playful moment that came only a few days later. As evidenced by both Calvin’s drive to release a record and Julie’s approach to earning cash, many of the revolutionary occurrences of the era arrived from necessity. In the earliest days of Olympia’s punk rock scene, shows happened at one of a few places: restaurant The Gnu Deli, the Smithfield Café, or an alley behind the Martin Apartments. Shows at the latter location featured acoustic instruments played by candlelight and represent the community’s DIY spirit and determination •

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to make music happen against all odds. But when revered punk band the Wipers wanted to play a show in Olympia, the community found themselves practically unable to oblige. That didn’t stop Young Pioneers’ member Bradley Sweek, who had been asked to set up the show by the Wipers’ Greg Sage. With nothing to lose, Brad called the number on the sign in the window of one of the many abandoned storefronts in downtown Olympia and asked the voice on the other end if he could rent the space for a night. The woman on the line said she was just around the corner at the Christian Science Reading Room, so Brad walked over to meet her. She said that would be just fine, and charged Brad a hundred dollars or so. When he got the go-ahead, the rest of Olympia could hardly believe it, but the show was set nonetheless. In addition to Young Pioneers and the Wipers, the bill also featured Laura, Heather and Calvin. Only after the group of musicians procured the space did they realize the room needed a stage. Steadfast in their quest, everyone headed down to Safeway and grabbed a bunch of milk crates. They stacked them up and topped them with plywood and carpet. Soon after, the small room filled to capacity for a successful, sold-out night. Brad was able to make the show happen by virtue of not recognizing any official channels when faced with an obstacle, whereas many young people in town thought, “What?! You can do that?” Beat Happening’s members found themselves in a similar state of need when they decided to undertake a tour in the fall of 1986. Faced with the expenses and logistical difficulties of getting from point A to point Z without owning a car, the band •

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devised an alternative plan. “We did that tour in driveaway cars,” says Bret. “You go to a drive-away place. You have to have everyone who is a driver be 21 and over. You’re delivering a car from one location to another, and you have so many days to do that. So, if you do a lot of driving frontloaded, you have time to stay the night and play a show. Because they can only require you to drive 8 hours a day.” For that tour, the band faced another significant challenge; Heather had moved to L.A. for a brief time, leaving the band without a touring drummer. Stella Marrs suggested that Bret’s then-girlfriend, now-wife Denise Crowe should play drums in Heather’s place. Denise had to overcome one problem—the same problem that all the members of Beat Happening had once faced—she didn’t know how to play the instrument. In true DIY fashion, Bret and Denise spent the summer of 1986 holed up in a cabin on nearby Guemes Island practicing enough so that Denise could hold down drum responsibilities for a short tour that crossed the entire nation. Beat Happening played the first show of the tour at the newly opened Velvetone Studio in Ellensburg. From there, the band headed east for stops in Columbus, Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, D.C. With miles of road to cover each day, Denise says, “Every bathroom stop from Ellensburg to Ohio was questioned.” She also recalls that the return trip featured a car that leaked oil. And yet, the band made a successful trek all the way to the East Coast and back. In repeated instances, Beat Happening succeeded because they didn’t know they weren’t supposed to. However, innocence alone doesn’t yield the cultural impact achieved by Beat Happening. •

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Naïveté joined with tenacity and the rhetoric of rebellion ignited a fire that engulfed the expanding network of underground artists and musicians. As the band traveled the country, Bret noticed some important regional differences. He remembers thinking, “Wow, the Northwest does have something going on that these places don’t.” Regarding Olympia and Seattle, Bret explains, “They were developing this infrastructure, between fanzine to weekly entertainment magazine to radio show to label to club—all these things tied together in a way. Things started happening because of it. People helped you make connections to get to the next step much more easily than in places where they didn’t have that infrastructure.” The underground solidified as these tools of creation and distribution improved. In the 1980s, fanzines functioned as outlets and sources of information for the subculture; today, the internet—from music blogs to average fans connecting across social media—satisfies that role, but mainstream culture has remained strangely unchanged with widely available television, radio, and film still fairly homogenized, same as it ever was. A greater quantity and diversity of material in these spheres exists, but independent work still struggles because the cultural access points remain protected. The maturation of the initial DIY tools about which early cultural revolutionaries dreamed—a complex network of local communities, immediate methods of sharing art, and the ability to make studio-caliber music at one’s fingertips—now exist. Unfortunately, it seems many often regard these capabilities as enablers for capturing the attention of larger industry players rather than tools for constructing a robust local community. •

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These capabilities shouldn’t be exploited as a ladder to ascend but instead should be traversed as a bridge laid across the chasm between independent artists and wider audiences. An ever-present if not widening gap between struggling and excessively wealthy artists mirrors the national class divide at large, but DIY methodologies subvert mainstream establishments and undermine classism. A dominant line of thought within the institutions of art and literature maintains that one must know the rules before breaking them, a paradigm that ensures only sanctioned members of an insider vanguard have the power to reshape these mediums. However, Beat Happening proves that transgression carries value regardless of one’s knowledge. After all, one need not know all the rules to consciously undertake a culturally oppositional action and know it can carry weight and shift the balance of power. Beat Happening’s populist approach to music empowers nascent artists—garage bands and bedroom recording projects—and, in a larger sense, conjures dreams of cultural egalitarianism. In this way, the DIY ethos goes hand in hand with punk, infiltrating all aspects of culture. “Punk came along and said let’s take over the media,” Calvin says. “We’re going to make our own fanzines. We’re going to have our own radio shows. We’re going to make our own record labels. You’re taking control of the media for yourself.” This thought process drove the mentality behind K’s cassette revolution. Anyone could record an album with the use of a boom box and begin sharing their original music with friends without delay. Through the cassette’s accessible format, the means were available to all. •

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This rhetoric accounts for the channels of distribution and means of being heard, but Calvin saw this line of thinking as relevant to making music, too. “Punk rock said it was easy to be in a band; it’s easy to make up songs,” explains Calvin. “It’s as easy to make your own songs as it is to learn other people’s.” When asked if inexperience worked as an asset for Beat Happening, Calvin says, “Certainly,” without a second of hesitation. He expands by explaining his personal history with the rules of music: “I didn’t know what music theory was. When I was a kid in the band at school playing clarinet, I didn’t understand what reading music was or what it meant. I didn’t realize there was this thing called reading music you were supposed to learn.” Like so many kids who bump up against the confines of a decided system of constraints, Calvin quit the band. “Later when I found out there was this thing called music theory, I noticed that people into rock music were into terrible music like all this prog rock,” Calvin says. When he loved a song, Calvin found that these gatekeepers of music would dismiss it, “Oh that’s just three chords.” Calvin’s perspective said, “But isn’t that the beauty of it? That you can do something so epic with only three chords? To me that seemed a reason to put it on a pedestal, not to dismiss it. It seemed magic to me; something so simple that only takes three chords could sound so complex, have so much emotional depth.” Calvin told himself he didn’t want to be like that, instead determining, “I don’t want to know enough to be able to dismiss things that are so beautiful. I don’t want to know why three chords is bad. I just want to know the three chords and create something out of it. I consciously did •

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not want to know about music so that I would become jaded or dismissive or have the magic ruined by knowing. To me it’s still magic. In that sense, music is still exciting. It’s still a mystery to me.” The magic of not knowing the proper methods of creation served the aims of Calvin and K Records. Where others saw no roads to achieve their goals, Calvin visualized undeveloped territory as trails waiting to be blazed, begging that empowering question: what are you waiting for?

•

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E is for Evergreen

The founding of K Records and the opening of several live music venues in downtown Olympia gave the town’s arts culture substantial presence off campus, but everything traces back to the life force of the Evergreen State College. Like any liberal arts college, the school housed creative, progressive young people who met, coalesced, and dreamed big. Besides all three members of Beat Happening, the list of alumni includes independent music notables Tobi Vail, Kathleen Hanna, and Kathi Wilcox of Bikini Kill; Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney; Olympia musician and community fixture Lois Maffeo; and producer Steve Fisk, not to mention grads accomplished in other fields like Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening and artists Nikki McClure and Charles Burns. Julie Fay moved to Olympia in January of 1983 to attend Evergreen and remembers, “I lived in B dorm, where I met all kinds of people: Bryan Learned, Scott Vanderpool, Bradley Sweek, and Chris Pugh,” all •

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members of Young Pioneers, all people with whom Julie still has close, genuine friendships. While this sounds typical of college life, Evergreen’s culture transcended the usual advantages of learning institutions. For starters, the school has no grading system, which allows Greeners, as they are called, to focus less on some arbitrary ranking system and more on experimentation and the intrinsic value of learning. Julie says, “Ambition was different. The kind of ambitions people had [were] more about learning. There was this fearlessness of following interests without shame.” This freedom, along with the kinds of technology resources that college often affords, created an environment ripe for making art. “There was a lot of access to equipment that if you were a student you could borrow,” Julie explains. “There was space for practice rooms on the campus. It was collaborative. As people were learning how to record, it would evolve, and they would teach each other.” The free-form arrangement of the school eliminated cultural pressures by actively encouraging students to participate in systems without rules or expectations, opening the door for students to truly support one another. Of the mindset in and around Evergreen, Julie Fay says, “There’s this spirit of generosity and acceptance and support and encouraging of trying.” Julie illuminates an important deviation from the norm also present in Beat Happening’s work, saying, “You can have a sense of I’m doing this because I want to make money or because I want to be famous or more about ego, and I just felt this was much more about community—much more about people liking to interact with each other and connect with each other, having true connection.” •

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Calvin’s family moved across the country to Maryland for his senior year of high school, but he found a way back to Olympia to attend Evergreen. Considering Calvin’s adventurous spirit, his prompt return to a place he so recently departed deserves consideration. Calvin says, “In my family there was always the idea you were going to go away to college.” Returning to Olympia presented a way to benefit from a familiar network and accomplish a departure from his home life. Back in Olympia, he had already established methods for gaining information about the music and culture he loved. “I knew KAOS was this great station,” Calvin says, “and I knew people going to school [in Olympia], but I was still going away to college.” The opportunity proved too alluring. Calvin says, “I knew I wanted to be involved in underground music, and KAOS was a really good source for learning about that—and Op magazine, too.” These two components would become vital pieces in Beat Happening’s formation. It’s hard to say if Evergreen furthered Calvin’s inventive and divergent thinking or if he just fit naturally into the environment. After all, he had already seen experimental educational settings at a young age. Certainly, the school presented the opportunity to interface with like minds. Evergreen alum Pat Maley remembers one of his first encounters with Calvin at a film series in one of the lecture halls on campus. Calvin, serving as the presenter for the series, had planned “some Italian film,” says Pat. The crowd of students had congregated, awaiting the start of the film, leaving Calvin an opportunity for a memorable entrance. “He wore these big, muddy boots, because he was in the ecological agriculture class, so he •

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was learning to farm,” Pat explains. “Just before the film is supposed to start, people are talking, and he stomps … slowly … down … the steps … to the bottom … big loud clomps … gets to the bottom, says, ‘Tonight’s film isn’t very good, but it has a cool soundtrack.’ Then, he stomps back up the stairs.” In November of 1984, Pat utilized a recital hall on Evergreen’s campus to record “fourteen,” the penultimate track on Beat Happening both sequentially on the album and chronologically in terms of their recording date. Pat reserved the room, checked out some equipment from media loan, loaded it into a cart, and made the trek from the library over to the communications building. Pat recalls some of the mics available for the session, “AKG 414s, Nuemann U-87’s,” and one of his favorite mics, “an AKG 224E, a dual diaphragm mic, which gave it enough sensitivity that it had the detail of a condenser with the warmth of a dynamic.” As Pat describes the recital hall, his voice becomes giddy and buoyant in that recognizable way of any audiophile speaking about the qualities of a room or equipment or a session. “The recital hall was this beautiful, small theater that had this nice wooden shell on the stage. It was designed so that anywhere in the audience you could hear what was going on onstage unamplified,” remembers Pat. At the back of the hall above the rows of seats was a wall of floor to ceiling glass, from which the sound engineer could look down on the room, according to Pat. He remembers that the sound booth contained an audio board where one could patch into dual plate reverb tanks under the floor. Pat explains the plates had “one transducer and two pick ups. Out of those you could get •

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stereo. You could send a stereo signal to the two plates and get stereo returns off of each of the plates.” Pat finishes by saying, “Just a really beautiful physical sound to the plate reverb,” with an edge of sentimentality in his voice. The session was recorded to quarter-inch tape on a reel-to-reel four-track, “like a big Ampex machine,” Pat says. When the session ended, Pat mixed it down and made a cassette of the song. But before he gave the tracks a proper edit, he lost the reel-to-reel, four-track master. Without being able to mix it any further, he did some simple EQ-balancing on the cassette copy, but the version that ended up on Beat Happening comes from the cassette created that day in the recital hall. Like many Beat Happening artifacts, the session and song reflect ideas and concepts larger than the recording itself, making it revealing and intriguing. The drums register too low in the mix, the guitars a little too thin, and the vocals sound disjointed from the rhythm of the song. The listener hears the soundtrack of audacious experimentation, inexperienced students in the process of working out how to play and record a song. Unabashedly sharing such a recording makes a statement on its own. But even as Beat Happening pushes against the social need for recordings as perfect little morsels, the song charms and delights with innocent lyricism and captivating prosody. Listeners might find themselves recoiling in confusion right before they take to dancing and hopping around the room chanting along. “We were lookin’ at your rabbits; we were feedin’ them some cabbage,” intones Johnson in the song’s opening lines. The bouncing cadence of the song feels right at home •

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on a playground, a rhyme sung while schoolchildren jump rope. Absolutely, this brand of playfulness garners detractors, but the appeal is easy to understand. Another version of “fourteen” with just drums, guitar, and vocals was recorded on a boom box in the Ray Apartments, where Calvin lived in 1983, and released on the expanded 1996 edition of the album. However, the recital hall version features another instrument—the tambura, a steel-stringed instrument in the same family as the sitar, played by Pat Maley. “The tambura is actually the time-keeping instrument,” Pat explains. “The thing that keeps time is the phase-shift sound in the tambura—that sort of wave has a certain timeframe that’s very accurate. I had come from being interested in psychedelic music, so I suggested we put that on.” The instrument appears an odd choice, but indicates the band’s willingness to let music unfold organically. Pat’s interest in the tambura also informs an important but inconspicuous divide between Olympia’s youth in the early 80s. College students in the second half of the 1980s were of the right age to have had parents involved in the Beat movement, or older siblings who were hippies. Even in 1984, plenty of freethinking Greeners still identified with the hippie ideology, as the chic austerity of punk and new wave had yet to take hold, especially in a cultural outpost like Olympia. Calvin’s growing clique of punk rockers in Olympia represented a new regime. “There was a difference between hippies and punks,” says Pat, explaining, “Hippies drank coffee at the Asterisk on the West side and Punks drank coffee at the Smithfield downtown.” Communicating •

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the social divide in Olympia by citing simple geographic demarcations, this universally understood trope stretches back through recorded history. Although Pat realizes, “Eventually it all kind of blended,” he also remembers feeling a distinct dichotomy and an awareness of his flared jeans and long hair, differences from many of the friends he began to hang around. He recalls Lois Maffeo as one of the first people to approach him with warmth and kindness. “Lois was smart and friendly and funny,” Pat says. “She has great manners. She has always been direct and accepting of people.” Eventually, Pat would become deeply ingrained in the community of K, recording bands like Mecca Normal and Some Velvet Sidewalk at his Yoyo Recording Studio, the location of Beat Happening’s second session with Greg Sage that would yield more than half of the songs on the 1985 K Records edition of Beat Happening. Before the recital hall and before Yoyo, the first session with Greg Sage took place in the practice space of The Young Pioneers, a building situated at the edge of Evergreen’s campus, a repurposed firehouse.

•

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F is for Firehouse

As a way of preventing students from holding loud band practice sessions in the dorm rooms, Evergreen offered up spaces in an old, wood-frame, volunteer firehouse no longer in use. Olympia band Young Pioneers used the firehouse to practice, and after Bret moved to Olympia in September of 1983, they occasionally let the newly formed Beat Happening use the space. Those practice sessions mostly consisted of Calvin teaching Bret songs, since Heather had relocated to Seattle. Young Pioneers frontman Bradley Sweek remembers the practice room as bright, with commercial vinyl tile flooring, wood paneling on the walls, and an acoustic drop tile ceiling. The garage still housed an old fire truck. Calvin brought up the possibility of punk hero and Wipers frontman Greg Sage recording Beat Happening upon meeting him when Laura, Heather and Calvin opened for the Wipers at the makeshift storefront show earlier in 1983. Lois Maffeo’s book that accompanies Beat Happening’s 2002 box set Crashing Through indicates •

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that the firehouse setting, at least in part, contributed to his reasons for agreeing.6 That book and my own conversations with Bret also speak to Greg’s own penchant for challenging conventions as a possible motivator. “He had been exposed to Laura, Heather and Calvin, and he had a sense of what it was,” Bret says in reflection. “He had his own sense of music as an exploration, the mystical in music. He was inclusive, and he was supportive.” After all, in 1981 the Wipers had released Youth of America, an album of shockingly long punk songs tinged with piano. Greg was no stranger to trying an unorthodox approach. Regardless of his reasons, Greg built a reputation for frequently volunteering his time and expertise to record bands without being compensated, a fact corroborated by myriad friends and collaborators. In correspondence with me, Greg’s own choice in words underscores his altruism; he writes, “I was lucky to have some power and clout and used it to help others, to share it and spread it around and hopefully get others to take a look.” Describing one’s success as “lucky” takes humility, but to wield it so generously as to benefit up-and-coming artists reflects impressive devotion to community. Greg categorizes his supportive role modestly when he says, “It was just something I liked to do as far as helping out bands,” and he insists he’s not downplaying his contribution when he offers, “I was always glad to help anyone with almost anything back in the day.” Greg’s humble dismissal underscores his profound role. In trying to deflate his actions to anything less than heroic, Greg cites as evidence the commonplace nature of his willingness to help. Although that might make it common for Greg, it doesn’t make it common, and those with whom I’ve •

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spoken from this time and place emphatically endorse Greg’s influence and benevolence. Greg also mentions respecting the fact that Beat Happening worked to put on shows for young people, as opposed to the 21+ shows held in typical music venues. Since Greg had recorded some of all-girl punk band Neo Boys’ earliest material, he too helped open doors for outsider demographics and amplify underrepresented voices. Calvin met Greg in early 1983 around the impromptu storefront show, but the two interacted again in September of that year when Greg made a trip to Olympia to recruit a new member for the Wipers. While in town, Greg stopped by the Ray Apartments, where Calvin lived, and played a few songs from an upcoming Wipers album, Over the Edge. He also told Calvin that he was building a studio in Portland and searching for bands to record there. Since Laura, Heather and Calvin had disbanded and Beat Happening had just formed, Calvin couldn’t take him up on his offer immediately. But by December, Beat Happening had their songs rehearsed enough to reach out to Greg. Unfortunately, Greg still hadn’t finished work on his studio, but countered with an offer to come up to Olympia to record the trio. As a friend of both Calvin and Greg, Bradley not only agreed that the band could use the firehouse as the recording session locale but also showed up to help out. The space housed an old Peavey powered PA board with four inputs and two outputs that Young Pioneers used to practice. The band had dubbed it “the Frankenstein” because instead of sliders and faders, it had monstrous knobs. Greg and Bradley both describe the •

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session in simple terms. As Bradley best recalls, the mics were standard Shure SM-57s run in a simple configuration to capture both guitar and drums as the songs were performed. However, Greg did have access to an excellent Neumann tube microphone to record vocals. The session was recorded to reel-to-reel tape on a four-track machine borrowed from Evergreen student Michael Huntsburger. All four of the songs recorded on December 11, 1983, along with a version of “Run Down the Stairs” recorded live on KAOS Radio later that same day, comprised Beat Happening’s first ever cassette EP, an artifact limited to only around 100 copies. It came out just before the band left for a trip to Japan. Half of the songs from the December session, “Our Secret” and “What’s Important,” would be released to a wider audience as the band’s first seven-inch vinyl single in 1984—the first vinyl to bear the K logo. The front sleeve features a pattern of bongos and maracas that the band handcolored with red marker, while the back shows a picture of each of the band members and proudly proclaims Greg Sage’s role as the producer of the tracks. Denise Crowe contends that Greg’s prestige as a member of the Wipers lent credibility to the single, and Bret insists that Greg “had every right to say to himself, ‘What did I get myself into by agreeing to do this?’ And he had a right to say to us, ‘Why are you wasting my time?’ But he didn’t do that.” It helps to have an experienced and knowledgeable veteran overseeing a project, someone who can see the potential and nudge it in that direction, an experienced baker to taste the batter and give it a pinch of salt or sugar. •

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One of their earliest songs, “Our Secret” also remains one of Beat Happening’s most beloved. It is simple, but everything the band does best exists here: a tom-centered beat, a repetitive yet catchy guitar line, and Calvin’s baritone vocals. Beyond that, the song reflects Beat Happening’s focus on capturing life within their immediate community as Calvin sings, “I went to the Smithfield Café / There she was again, so I said ‘Hey, / We should go swimming in Capitol Lake.’” Despite the fact that Capitol Lake is completely unsuitable for swimming, Calvin’s lyrics draw from the iconic landmarks of his community and champion Olympia’s small-town ethos. This sort of regional pride would continue to guide Beat Happening’s and K Records’ mentality for years after the band laid the groundwork on these early tracks. With this recording, Beat Happening tapped into the aural pleasure of pop and an endearing love of their hometown, but they also accessed something larger. Celebrated producer Steve Fisk points out that some of Beat Happening’s songs are tropes, “famous kinds of songs: the gravedigger song, the ‘let’s play together’ song— romance reset as child’s play.” A forbidden love song at the core, “Our Secret” has Calvin confessing, “I knew right then we’d have to be alone / ’Cause no one in this whole world could ever understand,” before droning repetitively, “That’s why we’re running away.” With the theme of lovers who must flee, Beat Happening digs into the deepest roots of music, harnessing something universal and timeless, a story that resonates with people across cultures and throughout history. That day in the firehouse, when Greg and the band tracked “Our Secret,” Calvin recorded the vocals •

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separately from the instruments. He listened as Heather and Bret played and, at some point, determined that the two had laid down enough of the song’s unchanging guitar and drum parts to accommodate the vocals; he gave them the signal to stop. But when he went back to record lyrics over the guitar and drums, the recording ended abruptly as he sang, leaving him to intone, “I had dinner with her family,” one final time over nothing but empty tape. “I got through half the song,” Calvin says. “The song ended completely different when we played it live.” In Calvin’s recollection, the song has one, maybe two lost verses. With Beat Happening, external circumstances, peripheral elements, and chance occurrences become part of the music. Rather than try to eliminate the imperfections and accidents, Beat Happening embraces them wholeheartedly. These recordings capture a band in process, and in that lies one type of perfection—a reflection of reality. Often, recording aims to present a polished, flawless version of a band and their material, in some ways an abstraction of itself, rendering the song no longer real. (Even tape hiss, a hallmark of the medium itself, might get eliminated in digital recording and mastering today.) Beat Happening avoids these abstractions entirely. Over the course of their discography, Beat Happening would improve as musicians, so it can’t be claimed they tried to sound unrehearsed. But the lack of pretense achieves much more than just sounding good. The band’s refusal to posture gives Beat Happening power and value within the context of music’s evolution. Beat Happening pushed music forward by engendering selfconfidence in those who discovered their music. •

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The other two songs recorded at the firehouse, “Down at the Sea” and “I Love You,” appeared on the self-titled, limited-run cassette EP but saw a more proper release on the debut full-length over a year later. It would take the full-length and more to wake up the world to Beat Happening, but many people in the band’s most immediate sphere took note of that first single. Bret himself remembers feeling in awe of what Greg captured at the firehouse that day. “I respect the work we accomplished in that studio,” says Bret. He saw the songs as evidence that Beat Happening was a band in a way he had not previously adopted in his mind. Afterward, he remembers thinking, “Okay, I’m in on a different level.” Bret’s brother Jonn Lunsford says the first single made the band impressive for two reasons: first, they’d recorded with Greg Sage, and second, they’d created this physical seven-inch. “They were demystifying rock and roll,” Jonn says, and the friends surrounding the band couldn’t help but want to join in.

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G is for Girl City

Eventually, Olympia became the unofficial headquarters of the riot grrrl movement, propelling bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Sleater-Kinney, and others into underground fame as well as the occasional mainstream limelight. However, many of the forerunners that made that possible, Stella Marrs, Donna Dresch, Toni Holm, Dana Squires, Kim and K. T. Kincaid, Heather Lewis, and others are often omitted from the wider conversation. Long before the 80s and 90s, much of the Pacific Northwest had cultivated an ingrained egalitarian view of gender. Entrenched within the pioneer spirit of the region, gender equality’s origins remain difficult to pinpoint. In interviews with Calvin Johnson, Bret Lunsford, Heather Lewis, Denise Crowe, John Foster, Dana Squires, and many others, even the idea of equal treatment of women registers as surprising, because the idea of being open-minded still necessitates a view, however slight, of the other as potentially different and thus potentially inferior. All genders, races, and mindsets •

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being equal, you have to ask yourself: open-minded to what? It helps to remember that Calvin’s mother served as a central force in his upbringing. “I definitely benefited from her subscription to Ms. Magazine,” says Calvin, speaking of the still-functioning feminist publication founded in 1971 by Gloria Steinem. “The two magazines we got that were the biggest influence to me were that and The Columbia Journalism Review.” The latter also served an important function in opening Calvin’s eyes to seeing the story from less obvious angles. “It really showed me to question media, to see behind what’s the motivation, what’s the perspective. That’s pretty important. When you got into punk, that’s huge. The only media was mainstream media.” When mainstream media outlets covered punk at all, bands and ideologies were derided or dismissed, but Calvin had a way of seeing through the veneer. “When you saw an article in the mainstream daily paper, you had to put your filter on immediately, because you knew they were going to get it wrong,” Calvin says. “You’re reading the article, and they’re just saying all this bullshit, but you could read between the lines and understand what really is going on.” Although popular thought during the riot grrrl movement discouraged talking to the press or being photographed, Calvin recognized that mainstream sources like MTV functioned to inform people about bands like Blondie and The B-52s. As he puts it, “So what if The New York Times writes a bunch of bullshit about Bikini Kill? All you need is a photo of Kathleen Hanna; that’s all a girl in Iowa needs to see. She doesn’t care what it says; she sees that photo, and she’s like ‘That’s what I want.’” •

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Calvin navigates the topic of inclusion with a deep understanding of what equality truly means, saying, “I don’t know if it was open-minded. It was just, ‘we want to work with the best, with the most interesting people, the most creative, expressive people.’ So, that means Heather, Stella—they’re the people you want to work with.” Rather than intentionally include or exclude women, the role of women in Olympia’s music community results from having no preconceived notions whatsoever—strong evidence of the kind of equality that can occur within a society without discrimination. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bret’s thoughts on the topic are strikingly similar. “I’m just going to interact with who they are regardless of gender,” he explains as the prevailing mindset of the time, “That was the thing about Olympia. It was at a time when punk was getting more and more injected with masculinity, and that wasn’t what was appealing to me. That wasn’t strength to me.” Shrugging off the revolutionary vantage point, Calvin makes women’s involvement in art and music seem commonplace, pointing out, “The first punk bands that played in Olympia had women in them.” He’s talking not necessarily about bands from Olympia, but bands from the region: Bellingham’s The Accident, whose lone female member sang one of the group’s main hits “Kill the Bee Gees,” and Portland’s Neo Boys, who regularly opened for the Wipers and in 2014 released a retrospective of their hard-to-find material through K Records. Calvin adds, “When I first started working at KAOS, it was half and half in terms of who was running the station,” referring to Toni Holm and Dave Rauh, •

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the station managers at the time, to evidence the gender equality that permeated Olympia’s culture. Before Heather and Calvin worked together, two of his earliest collaborators were women, Lois Maffeo and Stella Marrs, both of whom carry enormous credibility in Olympia’s music and arts community. Early on, Lois championed the art and music created by K Records artists and released her own albums, four LPs under her own name along with dozens of singles and collaborations, on Calvin’s label. In the 80s, before the onset of the riot grrrl movement, she started Your Dream Girl, a radio show on famed station KAOS aimed at giving a voice to marginalized women everywhere. In 1986, the same year that the UK edition of Beat Happening came out, Stella Marrs orchestrated a massive performance art piece called “50 Girls 50 States,” in which many of Olympia’s forward-thinking women participated, including Julie Fay and Denise Crowe. “50 Girls 50 States” had women donned in extravagant gowns march through Olympia’s downtown in an effort to reclaim ideas of femininity. Julie Fay says definitively, “In my mind, Stella Marrs was the most powerful person in town.” She goes on to describe Stella in heroic terms, “I was very fortunate to have been taken under her wing for a period of time, and I learned a lot from her about survival and resourcefulness and freedom and fearlessness. She set a tone of ‘anything is possible,’ which was really life-changing for me, to be that close to somebody that brave.” Julie saw the march as a way to signal to mainstream culture and women with traditional values that the women of the counter culture were not, in fact, so different from them. While she calls the move •

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an “infiltration” and admits that it might be a “Trojan horse,” she also says the purpose was to “find agreement and to work together toward the greater good.” Julie remembers wanting social dialogue and recalls trying to quell some participants who wanted to chant, thinking the march would be more effective if the participants avoided overt protest. “Gowns can be thought of as demeaning,” she says, “and somehow owning that and being powerful at the same time was part of it.” Denise Crowe agrees with this framing of cultural reappropriation, commenting, “I think we were interested in taking cultural icons of femininity from the 50s and 60s and earlier and revisiting what was important about those icons and reinventing them. It felt rebellious because it wasn’t along with the constraints of what it meant to be a woman in the 50s.” As another example, she offers, “Being able to master pie making and enjoy that was beautiful and more complicated than getting a box mix to make cupcakes. There was real creation in it. There was art in it.” Maybe they still used the same ingredients as past generations, but these bakers’ understanding of the significance differed entirely. In 1982, the same summer that Calvin launched K Records, he lived next door to and shared studio space with Stella. Together, they also played in a band called 003 Legion. The studio, housed in the Capitol Theater building in downtown Olympia, was Girl City, a workspace and planning grounds for myriad arts and music projects involving Olympia’s empowered women. Aspiring painter Heather Lewis was one of the women who frequented and worked in Stella Marrs’ Girl City. Heather says, “Stella was a big artistic force. She was •

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kinda like Calvin. She had this crazy art studio with these doves flying around pooping all over the place. If you’re like me and grew up in the suburbs and came to college when you were 17, going into Stella’s art studio was really inspiring.” Heather remembers the artists at Girl City primarily creating “functional and handmade” art such as purses and clothes. One of her main contributions: a bunch of painted sneakers. As Heather and Stella both explain, with goods and art to sell, and an entire culture to electrify, Girl City made an important move out of the secluded studio space and into a storefront in the Angelus building in downtown Olympia. Heather remembers one of the first window displays consisted of dangling, painted 45s. In Heather’s telling, the drive to open the space has the same impetuousness that hallmarks many of the happenings of this time period. She describes their mentality as, “Let’s just open an art studio. Let’s just make it happen,” and adds, “No one had any money. We were all really young. People wanted to make stuff and try to sell it, and we just did it. In Olympia, at that time, there wasn’t anything remotely like it.” Stella expected the project to last three months, but it stretched out to six; she considered the endeavor a major success. In 1981, Heather had begun playing drums in her first band, The Supreme Cool Beings. After hearing Heather’s band at an apartment party in Olympia in the summer of 1982, Calvin invited the band to play a set on the air during his KAOS Radio show Boy Meets Girl. Only after the set of off-kilter pop songs built on Heather’s drumming and Doug Monaghan’s saxophone finished did Calvin reveal that he’d recorded the entire •

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performance to cassette tape. Drawing inspiration from Sub/Pop’s fanzine cassettes and DIY ideologies, Calvin had the idea to share the eight-song set with the world. With Gary’s blessing to release the material, all it needed was cover art. Having seen Heather’s paintings in Girl City, Calvin approached her about designing the cover. The cassette release, entitled Survival of the Coolest, marks the birth of K Records. Less than a year later, Heather and Calvin would collaborate in their own band, a band that would eventually become Beat Happening.

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H is for Heather

Originally born in Pennsylvania, Heather Lewis moved at age ten to Westchester County, north of New York City, where she lived her young adult life and attended high school. For her senior year, she enrolled in an alternative school program called Walkabout. Consisting of about thirty kids and three teachers, the curriculum included multi-week backpacking trips, a month-long internship, and community service projects along with academic work. The program clicked for Heather. Following a suggestion from her older sister Pamela who lived in Seattle at the time, Heather discovered Evergreen and took a trip out to Olympia to visit the school with her mom. With her sister nearby, Heather felt that the move west to Washington had intrinsic benefit, and she arranged to begin studying art at Evergreen in the fall of 1980. Even before Evergreen, Heather had developed a reputation within the family as the black sheep. Her siblings, Pamela and Peter, are seven and ten years older •

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respectively, both in disparate life stages from Heather, who describes her family’s general regard for her as, “Oh, what’s she doing now?” Her first year, Heather lived in the Evergreen dorms upstairs from Calvin but didn’t become involved in music until the next year when she met Gary Allan May. Her second year in Olympia, Heather lived in the Angelus, one of Olympia’s popular off-campus apartment locations on 4th Ave., situated above the same storefront Girl City would occupy and across the street from the Barnes Floral Building, which Gary lived above. One day, while hanging out at his apartment, Gary pitched the idea that Heather join a band he was forming, The Supreme Cool Beings. Heather had never thought about being in a band before, but she was an artist, and the art medium of the time was music. By the next day, Heather found herself back in Gary’s apartment, this time for band practice. In fact, Gary’s apartment, which hosted not only band practices but also the occasional show, constituted just about the only place to play in Olympia at the time. After releasing only Survival of the Coolest, recorded live by Calvin and issued by K in 1982, Supreme Cool Beings broke up when Gary moved away from Olympia. Around that time, Calvin had an idea to organize a more solid band, following his loose, experimental forays into improvisational music with Stella. Calvin had already started planning the band with Laura Carter, and the pair was on the lookout for a third. Laura lived in the Angelus with Heather, and it was her idea to ask Heather to join the band. The band experienced some local success during the year it existed, landing the song “To the Beach” on the cassette accompanying the fifth issue of •

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H is for H eather

Bruce Pavitt’s Sub/Pop zine and opening for the Wipers. The connection between Calvin and Heather continued when Laura moved to Olympia, and the groundwork laid by this project paved the way for Beat Happening. Within Beat Happening, Heather’s wistful, shy voice served the important role of contrasting with Calvin’s booming timbre, a dichotomy that worked not only sonically but also in terms of increasing gender access and widening the audience of punk. Beat Happening didn’t set out to make music that could be appreciated in particular by women, but, by virtue of the music reflecting their own personal ideologies of inclusiveness, the music organically drew the attention of women. Heather, along with many others, defines the music community at the time as “male.” “The Seattle music scene was really aggressive, and we were weird. If you went to a show in Seattle at that time, girls wouldn’t dance,” Heather explains. Beat Happening’s music offered an opportunity. “There was a feeling of wanting girls to be at shows,” Heather acknowledges. “Girls would go to the shows, and they wanted to dance. That was a big deal—feeling like you had the space to dance.” Both of Beat Happening’s singers create playful songs, but Calvin’s, abstract and powerful, carry a touch of austerity in his booming vocal delivery. Heather’s songs thrive on specific scenes and recount introspective emotions; they contain an overt, relatable vulnerability. “Down at the Sea” recounts a beach party as Heather sings, “I’ve got the beach ball and you’ve got the song / Everybody’s gonna sing along, gonna sing along,” and in “I Let Him Get to Me,” she confesses, “I try to change the way I feel about you / But when I see that, I’m not •

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being true.” Heather says much of the inspiration for songs she wrote stemmed from whatever she felt or saw, her immediate surroundings. “My emotions are right there on my sleeve,” Heather says. Whereas with Calvin, Heather explains, “Things are articulated in these unusual and creative ways. They’re layered, and it can be interpreted in different ways. My songs are much more like the open wound. He’s more guarded. I’m more spilling out.” Of course, Heather’s role as a drummer in the band spoke to audiences as much or more than the songs she sang. “People would talk about Mo Tucker,” Heather says. “If there was a girl in the band, she usually sang. When you thought of women, they were usually singers, backup vocalists, or up-front playing guitar. The fact that I played the drums is what stuck out the most.” Of the two roles, Heather found drumming much more comfortable. “It was easy for me to sit onstage and play the drums, but it was always really hard for me to sing,” she says. When she thinks back on writings songs, she says of her attitude, “I’ll try to write a song. I was trying my hand at it, and winging it,” but she says, “I never really liked them. I never really felt very good about them. It’s really hard for me to listen to them.” Heather explains that part of the embarrassment in hearing her own songs might result from the lyrics being so open and personal. Much of the band’s draw for Heather related to her friendships with Bret and Calvin; despite her reticence to sing, Heather says, “I loved hanging out with them, and deep down, I knew that what we were doing was of value.” After moving away from Olympia in 1983, and while remaining an integral member of Beat Happening, she •

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became deeply involved with an independent theater organization in Seattle, the Annex Theater. She describes the organization as “a really similar tight-knit scene, like the music scene in Olympia—this group of people, and everybody knows everybody and we all hung out together and people still know each other and get together even though they’ve moved all over.” Echoing her sentiments with her role in the band, Heather explains, “I like to do projects with people,” clarifying, “I’m more comfortable being a piece of it and not being the focus.” As such, in her role at the Annex Theater, she built set designs. “I love being part of the production, but I had no interest in acting,” she says. According to Heather, the only reason the songs got recorded and released was that “Calvin and Bret were like, ‘Yes! This is good. We should do this.’” Like most people’s conceptions about life, Heather’s uneasiness can be traced back to her relationship to her family. “My family did not support it,” she says bluntly, “It was never okay with my family that I was spending time doing that. It was never valued.” Instead, Heather says her family wanted her to “get a job where I had health insurance.” Whether explicitly asked or not, Heather felt her mother constantly inquiring, “When are you going to stop this band business and start finding a career?” Heather points out that Calvin’s and Bret’s families were much more supportive. Calvin’s mother’s freethinking feminism had given him a worldview ripe for independent self-exploration, and Bret had siblings who had embraced hippie values. According to his brother Jonn, Bret’s mother was also supportive. “In her worldview, a band was no different from a basketball team,” Jonn says, “so she would come to the shows.” •

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Heather received this sort of support and encouragement less often, and the result shaped her understanding of identity and her responsibilities. “The messages you get growing up affect you,” she says. Along with the disapproval of her parents, Heather’s first love of painting continued to occupy her mind. The tour that occurred just before the UK release of the first album serves as an example. Heather didn’t go on the tour, as she had moved to L.A. for a short time to pursue a potential job. “That was a time when I was trying to figure out: should I keep doing this? That was the one time I pulled out, but in smaller ways, always they had to convince me.” Between parental questioning and selfquestioning, the burden of constructing her life weighed heavily on Heather throughout the duration of Beat Happening’s career. Likely, she’s too hard on herself for the effect these hesitations had on the band. By the time Beat Happening stopped touring and recording, Calvin had both hands full with other projects and Bret had married and become a father. All the same, Heather says, “I think, if I have to be honest, the reason we stopped playing is pretty much me.”

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I is for International

“Until it was acknowledged elsewhere that we were of any worth, that was not the opinion in Seattle,” according to Beat Happening’s Heather Lewis. The band had their fair share of hometown voices championing them in Olympia and a few more spread out around the Pacific Northwest, but the voices of some international personalities helped expose Beat Happening to a wider audience surrounding the release of their debut record. David Nichols played drums in an Australian band called The Cannanes* and ran a fanzine called Distant Violins. While on his trip to Japan in 1984, Calvin wrote to Nichols after reading about him in an issue of Op Magazine. Nichols had read about K and written to Calvin at almost exactly the same time. According to Calvin, their letters crossed in the mail, a fitting coincidence for   The Cannanes would forge a relationship with Calvin and K, eventually releasing material with the label: a cassette, two seven-inch records, and contributions to two different cassette compilations. *

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the role Nichols played regarding Beat Happening’s first LP. The two became pen pals, and when David traveled to Olympia in the spring of 1986, Calvin loaded him up with a stack of the Beat Happening record just released on K. After all, he had plenty in stock. From the U.S., David headed overseas to England, where he looked up another fanzine operator he’d become familiar with through the publication The Legend! That moniker, in fact, functioned as a catchall for the writing, music, and total personality of a guy named Jerry Thackray.† Jerry also wrote for larger publications such as New Musical Express and later Melody Maker. From reading his work in The Legend!, David had a hunch that Jerry would enjoy the Beat Happening LP, and he was right. As far as Calvin knows, Jerry took the LP down to Rough Trade and played it for some people, who also liked the album. Pretty soon, Rough Trade’s owner Geoff Travis had heard Beat Happening’s ten tracks. Back in Olympia a nearly despondent Calvin Johnson had no knowledge of the mechanisms of fate carrying his little record into the hands of an overseas label owner. “He just called me up out the blue,” Calvin remembers, “and said, ‘Hey, I’m Geoff Travis.’ And I’m like, ‘Whoa. The guy who produced the Raincoats album?’” Geoff says to Calvin, “Yeah, I really like the Beat Happening album, and I want to put it out on   Through his work with Melody Maker, Jerry Thackray became ingrained within the Pacific Northwest’s burgeoning grunge scene. He became close personal friends with Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, and others, and authored Nirvana: The True Story under the pseudonym Everett True. †

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Rough Trade.” In his retelling of the story, Calvin pauses dramatically before saying, “I was like, ‘Whaaat?’ I mean this is just like a day where I woke up and I’m like, ‘Life sucks. I got all these records nobody wants. What am I gonna do?’ And then the phone rings. That just made my life. It was incredible to have this phone call.” This story has been told in almost every account of the time period surrounding Beat Happening’s first album, notably in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life and Mark Baumgarten’s Love Rock Revolution. In a post from January 2014 on Collapse Board, an online blog that happens to have been created by Jerry, David downplays the role he had in this chain of events, but it’s difficult to see it any other way.7 Both David and Jerry played integral parts in broadening Beat Happening’s fan base and fostering a connection between the Pacific Northwest and the UK that would lead to much more Beat Happening material being released in England as well as K releasing records by British artists like Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, and The Pastels. To accompany the LP, Calvin sent Geoff a copy of the “Our Secret” single. Although Beat Happening’s version on K eschewed the convention of including previously released singles on the ensuing album, Geoff suggested they add both songs from the single—“Our Secret” and “What’s Important”—to the UK edition of the record. This made sense, as it added incentive for anyone who might have purchased the first album to buy the new pressing. As Rough Trade prepared to release Beat Happening in Europe, Jerry wasted no time writing about this newfound love in his outlets. According to Calvin, Jerry •

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devoted a substantial amount of space to the band in The Legend!. To a much wider audience in the June 28 issue of NME he wrote, “Beat Happening are a three-piece minimalist group from Washington, USA, who specialize in stripping down the sound of pop music (viz: guitars, bass, drums) to its basics and reclaiming it as a vibrant source of imagination.” Of Calvin and Heather, the write-up said, “There are two vocalists—one male, one female—sharing the honours, both captivating, both slightly disturbing in their quietly compelling way.” He concluded his brief, enthusiastic spotlight of the band by writing, “With a firm twist on reality and a firm grip on basics, Beat Happening are simple, unforgettable and gorgeous!”8 When the album came out several months later, music journalist Simon Reynolds wrote a feature review of Beat Happening in the November 15 issue of Melody Maker that addressed many of the elements that make the record significant. “There’s a delicate poise between pastiche and underlying seriousness here, that’s delicious, almost camp,” wrote Simon, hip to the balance of playfulness and gravity within the songs. Even more importantly, Simon saw that Beat Happening challenged the masculine paradigm of punk, writing, “But best of all are the songs where they’ve purged garage punk of its misogynist insolence and reanimated it with a proto-feminist tenderness.” For someone living in Olympia, that might have been clear, but the prescience of the review deserves recognition. Simon concluded the review with a resounding endorsement: “Our own shamblers have yet to produce anything this strange, this moving.”9 •

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Simon’s insight into Beat Happening’s aims and ethos arises from his work documenting Britain’s so-called C86 scene. The name derived from a cassette released by NME containing forty-eight tracks from up-andcoming UK indie-pop bands like The Pastels, The Shop Assistants, and Primal Scream. “The fact that something similar was happening in America, I immediately got interested,” says Simon. “Beat Happening were definitely among the most special of all those groups.” Regarding his first reaction to the band, Simon says, “I instantly thought it was great—magical—and then tried to work out the how and why.” At the end of the year, Melody Maker’s December 20 issue ran a double-page spread highlighting the year’s best thirty albums—Beat Happening made the cut. In the magazine’s estimation, it ranked number twentyseven, five spots behind Sonic Youth’s Evol and two spots above The Triffids’ Born Sandy Devotional. The list also included The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead at number six, Prince and the Revolution’s Parade at number two, and topping the list, The Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill. The brief, two-sentence text accompanying the picture of the album cover in the spread dubbed Beat Happening “an unexpected masterpiece.”10 Calvin saw the effects the international press had on how people received Beat Happening. “We’d had a few reviews,” he says. “Bruce had written about us a little bit. Being from the Northwest, to have a big review in an English paper seemed so out of context. Other people were like, ‘Oh whoa, I should take this band seriously? I didn’t realize that.’ It made people do a double take.” The approval of the British press gave Beat Happening •

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the boost it needed to keep at it, and it gave Calvin an array of allies in another part of the world. That alliance fed the thoughts he held about networking like-minded, regionally focused groups of artists. Although Beat Happening’s relationship with Rough Trade did not remain consistent, the band found a home on another British label, 53rd and 3rd, named after the Ramones song and run by members of The Shop Assistants. The legendary C86 cassette featured The Shop Assistants’ “It’s Up To You” as the first song on the tape’s B-side. Positioned among the UK’s burgeoning scene of shambling bands who, like Beat Happening, had begun to change the rules of punk, The Shop Assistants created unassuming, lo-fi pop music built on bright guitars and female lead vocals. Paralleling the movement occurring in mid-80s Olympia, the C86 cassette included numerous bands in which women played prominent roles and most of the groups embraced progressive social politics, in action if not in lyrics. These groups, as with their American counterparts, understood that methods and personal action could carry more weight than simply stating one’s position. The Shop Assistants’ 53rd and 3rd label put out Beat Happening material, including two releases in 1988—a flexi-disc for “Honey Pot” b/w “Don’t Mix the Colors” and the four-song Crashing Through EP. And Beat Happening’s music extended farther than just the UK. K Newsletter #1 reported that Australian fanzine Distant Violins planned to include a few Beat Happening songs on their next cassette. K Newsletter #2 reported, “The K empire is ever expanding to foreign lands … our international (rockin’) compilation Let’s Together is •

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being released by those Swiss swingers at Calypso Now (Jurastriz, ch-2500, Biel, Switzerland).” It fits that Calvin functioned as a conduit between the U.S. and numerous countries around the world; he isn’t the type to acknowledge a border or even an ocean as a legitimate barrier. In all likelihood, he had an eye on England ever since he visited the country on a high school trip to Europe in 1977, when punk rock had reached the pinnacle of its hype. On that trip, Calvin planned to procure some punk albums, but with most of his time dictated by the tour group, he had few opportunities to scout record stores. Those he did encounter carried only mainstream music, and he had no luck until the very end of the trip, when he ran across a locally owned establishment. Having heard several unfamiliar songs he liked on European radio during the trip, Calvin didn’t know the names of the bands, so he simply sang one of the songs for the guy running the store. “Oh, that’s The Jam,” the guy told him and pulled the album for Calvin. The album actually didn’t contain the song Calvin had sung, and he had no qualms in letting the clerk know. Soon, the pair had located the song on a seven-inch by The Jam that had been released after the album. Ultimately, Calvin left the store with the two records by The Jam, a Stranglers album, and the newly released Sex Pistols single “Pretty Vacant”—good finds for the aspiring punk rocker. Less than a decade later, Calvin would find himself releasing his own albums in Europe, but before he brought the gospel of Beat Happening to the UK, he tried to do the same with another country—Japan.

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J is for Japan

The ambitiousness and audacity of Beat Happening’s 1984 trip to Japan, only a few months after the band formed, typifies the courage that made them so unforgettable. According to Calvin, the “whole idea” of Beat Happening was “let’s go to Japan.” The adventure underscores the band’s ability to act spontaneously and imagine a world without limitation; it also displays Calvin’s philosophies of global connectivity. Although Calvin managed to arrange for the trip to provide school credit through Evergreen’s liberal Independent Living Contract and planned to use his time there to gather information for Op Magazine, the band’s visit to Japan had little aim or definition. “We went there with nothing,” Heather says. “We didn’t have any shows. We just flung ourselves out there and hoped for the best. We didn’t really know where it was heading when we went other than hoping we’re going to play some shows there.” Similar to Bret’s trip to Bristol Bay the previous summer, the band headed •

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for the horizon—just open ocean, hoping to catch some fish. Luckily, they did have one piece of information: the name of a person who might be able to help them get established in the city for their stay, a former Evergreen exchange student named Ai Miyake. The Miyake family, Takaaki and his wife Momoe, proved instrumentally helpful for the band. “The one phone number we had was this family that knew a real estate agent who knew of a building that was going to get torn down,” says Heather. The trio was able to secure an apartment in the building for next to nothing. However, the building, on the verge of being condemned, had no heat or hot water. The band arrived in Tokyo in the spring, but the weather was still cold, and Heather remembers the apartment being freezing most of the time. What the apartment lacked in bare necessities it made up for in charm with traditional Japanese style including tatami mat floors. Much of their time in Japan consisted of hanging around in the apartment and listening to Armed Forces Radio, likely one of the only forms of entertainment in English outside of speaking to each other. Members of the band all used some of their time to write letters and journals, and long, noteworthy excerpts from these can be found in Lois Maffeo’s excellent booklet included with Beat Happening’s box set Crashing Through.11 It was also via letter from Japan that Calvin first made contact with The Cannanes’ David Nichols, a fortuitous connection that would prove invaluable. As for sources of food, the band had to practice resourcefulness with what little they had. “Calvin and Bret perfected an elaborate method of making whole •

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wheat bread in a very small toaster oven,” Heather says. “This involved a trip to a department store specialty food section to buy very small and expensive bags of whole wheat flour. The baking process included an aluminum foil tent that was adjusted periodically. Then we would sit in our cold apartment eating hot bread slathered in butter.” Completely appropriate to the Beat Happening ethos, Calvin tells me the band didn’t have a recipe. Beat Happening’s elemental baking experiments in Japan parallel their approach to music and reinforce the idea that all one needs is the essentials. Calvin says, “We just knew bread was made with flour, salt, water, and yeast.” The band did spend a good amount of time out in the city, trying to track down an opportunity for a show, “little missions,” Heather calls them. They played briefly in Yoyogi Park, a public space that served as a gathering place for rock bands on Sundays, but they underestimated the ingrained machinations of the park’s system and found their acoustic guitar performance vastly overshadowed by highly organized groups with amps and full arrangements. Still, things were happening in Japan. “We’d go off on some weird adventure,” says Heather, and one thing would lead to another. Eventually the band was able to play a show at a local high school after classes one day, a strange but oddly fitting place for a Beat Happening show. “The high school show was literally all girls in their uniforms sitting on their desks with their hands folded across their laps watching us play,” recounts Heather. She describes the show as a reflection of much of their time in Japan: “It was all really weird—very Beat Happening weird. People didn’t know what to think, but they were Japanese, so they were very polite.” •

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Eventually, the band locked down a few shows at actual clubs, even if they had to hit the pavement and sell the tickets themselves, and made connections with a few of the nation’s purveyors of rock music. In another important achievement during their stay, Beat Happening recorded five songs to boom boxes purchased while in Japan, advanced models not yet available in the U.S.12 These songs would be released upon their return as a cassette entitled Three Tea Breakfast, and all of the songs would be included on the 1996 expanded reissue of Beat Happening. Japan itself becomes a character in these songs, both in lyrics as well as in sound samples. In “Youth,” Calvin sings, “When I was young I thought I was old / I sailed across the sea to Tokyo / I thought there must be more to this world / Than we’re being told / When you’re young / You can afford to be bold.” The lyrics document the band’s immediate location and offer insight to the line of thinking that enabled the band’s trip in the first place. That final line rings with clarity and wisdom. In truth, it parallels the sentiments of punk, implicitly encouraging the listener to shrug off the pressures of finding a career or succumbing to traditional patterns of behavior. But the message lands without vitriol and angst; it sounds like an ideology capable of sustainability instead of a flash of reckless anger. The first track on Three Tea Breakfast, “In My Memory,” opens with a sample of a street vendor in Nakameguro singing in Japanese before guitar strums and simple percussive claps interrupt. The five-song cassette ends with “Don’t Mix the Colors,” an unapologetically juvenile song that features the line, “I like the •

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yellow, as bright as your hello,” and ends with another Japanese voice and a sample of the Tokyo subway. In keeping with their artistic precepts, Beat Happening make their surroundings part of the songs. In “The Fall,” Calvin names several people evidently in his immediate presence, “Bye bye, Mari and Momoe / Bye bye, Takaaki and / Bye bye, Ai in America and / Bye bye Heather.” Everyone laughs. In this moment, Beat Happening incorporates not only Japan but also the very room they occupy. In the same way the mishaps of the firehouse recording altered songs’ endings, “The Fall” uses the circumstances of immediate time and space to create an artifact from the Japan trip that captures genuine fun with friends. Heather sees all of these chance encounters, spontaneous shows, and impromptu recordings as similar to what she saw happening in Olympia. “I don’t know how we ended up meeting, but we always did,” she says. “Things just happened to work out.” She reflects for a moment on how connected and unavoidable current communication tools have become, then says, “Maybe because people were more open to taking what comes and not having a plan, not knowing what was going to happen. There’s always this pressure to make a plan and know where you’re going and where you’re headed.” She pauses again, and concludes, “Things like Japan and with the band and in Olympia just happened—it was like this cosmic wave.”

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K is for KAOS

Evergreen served as the vessel that attracted a crew of creative minds who ventured into uncharted waters of music and art, but the engine that powered the entire expedition was KAOS Radio. The station launched in January of 1973, six years after the founding of Evergreen.13 One of the station’s earliest DJs, Stephen Rabow succeeded in convincing his high school buddy John Foster of Evergreen’s worthiness as a school. In high school, Stephen had exposed John to rock bands like The Velvet Underground and jazz records like Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, making him highly credible. In 1974, the year after KAOS opened, John did his first radio show. “I was so interested in KAOS and what I thought it could be. I was always interested in radio in general and freeform radio,” he says. Outside of his DJ responsibilities, John began working at KAOS as the music librarian, a job that required him to listen to all of the incoming albums, categorize them, and file them accordingly. As he performed his duties, •

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he realized a couple of things: A) the station received many interesting even incredible records but only a small percentage got played on the air, and B) small, independent labels released almost all of the music John discovered and enjoyed. “Just learning about all that other music was a mind blower for me,” says John. “I realized soon that there were six labels controlling ninety-eight percent of the sales and the airplay. That didn’t seem right to me.” The station’s mission sought non-commercial, educational programming, but that didn’t fit their policies as John saw it. “What we were doing at KAOS at the time was playing whatever was hip,” he says. John’s wife, Olympia artist Dana Squires concurs, “It never occurred to anyone that you would want to listen to anything but the big hits.” Longtime friend and KAOS colleague Dave Rauh continues, “We all tended to think, pretty much everybody still tends to think, about the major labels as what is music. John just turned that on its head.” John thought the station could create non-commercial and educational programming by allowing listeners to hear all these obscure yet quality albums from underrepresented record labels. He saw an opportunity to implement his plan in the democratic structure of decision-making in place at KAOS. “The way KAOS worked,” he explains, “was we had to reach consensus on everything, but it was consensus among the people who put in the time. If they wanted to be part of that process they had to come to the Monday meetings. I wrote up the policies thinking, ‘Well this is the way I think it should be, and I’ll throw it out there and see if it can get passed.’” The primary policy John’s talking •

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about, dubbed the Green Line Policy, dictated that 80 percent of the music played on the air had to come from independent labels. Luckily, John says, “The people who came on that Monday agreed to it,” and adds, “What’s amazing is that it has stood the test of time. It’s still 80 percent independent music.” John’s right—to this day, you can walk into KAOS, scan the shelves of the music archives, and find them littered with kelly green tape indicating which albums fit the policy. John had been interested in the experimental, free-form aspects of the radio station from the beginning, but credits KAOS station manager Toni Holm with developing its community-centered aims. “I didn’t have much of a sense of community radio per se,” he says. “I learned a lot through Toni, because she was already into that through WYSO Antioch in Yellow Springs, Ohio where she grew up.” Both concepts, independent music and community responsiveness, would resonate deeply with Calvin when he began volunteering at KAOS in his junior year of high school, not long after John. Calvin’s first show, Life in the City, aired Tuesday afternoon. Later, when KAOS altered its programming approach, Calvin moved to Friday nights from 10:00 p.m. to midnight and changed the name of the show to Teenage Paradox. On first meeting Calvin, John says, “He was into the Who and the Beatles, but he was also into small town culture even then. I grew up in a small town, but I was desperate to get out. He saw something about Olympia we didn’t see.” In addition to the Green Line Policy, John’s vital contributions to KAOS’s ethos include the Lost Music Network, which he explains like this: “The idea was •

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trying, remember this is pre-internet, to put a lot of people in touch with people they wouldn’t get to find out about otherwise. Someone doing interesting projects in a basement in Des Moines could find out about someone doing interesting projects on the Big Island in Hawaii. I was always curious about what people are doing other places. I was figuring, there are going to be people all over the place doing this stuff, and they don’t know about one another. If they’re putting out a fanzine or a record or some interesting art project, I want to put them all together.” Op Magazine functioned as the mechanism for orchestrating the Lost Music Network. “The magazine had features and several hundred reviews of records. It’s ridiculous how dense it was. I’m still sort of in awe of it,” says Dave Rauh. He’s not exaggerating; the depth and breadth of the publication are hard to understand without actually holding an issue in your hands. Capsule album reviews with full contact details for labels and industry organizations sprawl across page after page. At some point, John wrote to the New Music Distribution Service, one of the nation’s largest distributors of independent label albums at the time, especially within the domain of jazz, asking if they could send all of the releases they represented to Op. They said they couldn’t, but sent John a long list of labels and encouraged him to contact them directly. He had never seen such a volume of information about independent music all in one place. Soon, the publication started receiving a staggering volume of mail. “I remember going down to the post office five days a week and getting a full postal tub [of albums] and not one of them being anything you’d ever •

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heard before. It seemed like every time, we were peeling back the onion,” says Dave. In response to the truly inexhaustible volume of art available to document, John made a decision after a few initial issues to publish content themed with a single letter. The features explored topics deeply and passionately, and their subjects corresponded to a letter of the alphabet. The first issue was A, the second B—the alphabetic sequence continued. “For me,” John says, “because things were exploding and so much was coming out, it was a way for my brain to handle it. It was an artificial construct so I can focus—I don’t have to worry about the other stuff.” John’s ingenious approach to Op mirrors the same ability to reduce the world to fundamental components possessed by Calvin. Maybe one learned this skill from the other, or maybe both men simply internalized a knack for deconstructive analysis by spending so many hours staring at a wall of laboriously labeled, categorized, and alphabetized albums inside the KAOS offices. The simplest explanation is often accurate. Dana Squires, who designed the magazine, found enjoyment working within the constraints of the format. After all, many artists have succeeded with a system of self-imposed guidelines that allows for playing and building on an established paradigm. Dana helped manage the methodical manual process for laying out and printing the magazine. First, the team assembled a huge stack of typewritten pages. Next, a hired typesetter retyped all of the text and arranged it into standardwidth photographic columns. Those were cut apart, assembled on pages, and adhered with wax, along with all of the graphics and artwork. The editing process •

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required rereading everything once it had been laid out. “If a letter was wrong, we’d print and cut out that individual word and stick it on,” Dana says. From there, the pages were transferred as a photographic image onto large plates from which the magazine was printed. The several hundred record reviews found in each issue did not abide by limiting themselves to only bands corresponding to the issue’s letter theme, but they were, of course, arranged alphabetically. Reviews ranged from a few words to a few sentences and included any contact information available for the label or band or both. In this pre-dawn-of-the-internet era, subscribers and industry personnel alike could catalog addresses of entities across the country for the purpose of corresponding or purchasing items. If you read a review in Op of a brand new tape or record that compared the band to Minor Threat, you could then write to the label and ask for their newsletter or mail-order form, often one-inthe-same. Once K had set up shop, their newsletters worked in this way, notifying underground music fans everywhere of the newest albums they had out. Subscribers would receive the newsletter and catalog in the mail, mark albums for order, and return the form with payment. Talk about commitment. Labels and bands could also take out advertisements in Op—including one of their most legendary and consistent patrons, a mysterious musician in Houston, Texas, who went by the name Jandek. His advertisements appeared in virtually every issue of Op, simply reading, “Jandek on Corwood / Corwood Industries / Box 15375 / Houston, TX 77020,” in bold black text on a white background. According to John, after Jandek •

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self-released his first collection of bizarre, tonally experimental songs, he felt discouraged at the lack of interest. However, after Op wrote about Jandek in one of their issues, the reclusive Houston artist started to receive letters from fans and interested parties, energizing him to continue his work. To this day, Jandek’s expansive, secretive, and strange catalog of recordings remains one of experimental music’s greatest stories. In all John’s fastidious work and ambitious networking, Calvin found a kindred mind and learned a tremendous amount about music. “I think they’re both sort of obsessive,” says Dana, and Dave agrees, “John modeled this constructive type of obsessive approach to doing things.” John has no quarrel with this characterization of him. “I’m a worker bee,” he grins. “I modeled that behavior.”

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L is for Love Rock

Many descriptors—shambling, twee, cutie, love rock, and more—have been employed to describe the style of music created by Beat Happening. Terminology seemed to manifest and diversify as quickly as the bands of the era. Most of these terms eventually congealed into the catchall “indie-pop” nomenclature. As for the band members themselves, Bret, Heather, and Calvin tended to simply call their music punk. Calvin says, “There was a lot of genre invention at the time, new modrocker, crashpop, etc. I personally admired the concept of self-invention but never felt Beat Happening fit into any of the new assorted genres or labels.” Bret adds a warning about labels: “Be careful what you name things because they become compartments you’ll get crammed into; I remember that we usually said ‘punk’ or ‘punk rock’ when people asked what type of music we played.” However, of the many descriptors batted around, “love rock” found at least some favor in usage among the •

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members of the band and other artists within Olympia. The term appears on an invitation and advertisement for the International Pop Underground Convention, organized by Calvin in 1991. The ad reads in part: “Hangman hipsters, new modrockers, sidestreet walkers, scoot mounted dream girls, punks, teds, the instigators of the Love Rock Explosion, the editors of every angry grrrl zine, the plotters of youth rebellion in every form … .” Coined by Some Velvet Sidewalk’s Alan Larsen, the term substantiates the powerful and immediate effect Beat Happening had on people tuned-in to their art and ideology. Some Velvet Sidewalk came to release records on K in part as a result of Al’s unequivocal love for Beat Happening and Calvin’s label. As a K super-fan, Al saw the music and art coming out of Olympia and thought, “Let’s take this thing I like a lot and try to build on it or push the edge of it out.” Theorizing love rock was Al’s response to the inspiration Beat Happening manifested within him. Al’s essay Love Rock and Why I Am appeared in an issue of the zine Snipehunt and operated as a manifesto of sorts, detailing new ways of thinking about art and music. “I meant it to apply to a lot of different things,” Al says of the term “love rock.” “We were constantly trying to stretch the definition of punk. ‘Yeah, it’s punk, but …’” Ultimately Al felt that paradoxes could only be sustained for so long and saw love rock as a personal way to conceptualize a new framework. He also notes that none of the terms really stuck. Instead, people continued to broaden the scope of punk. Love rock sought to avoid defining the world in negative terms and to instead embrace positivity. Al summarizes, •

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“Punk rock is black clothing, and love rock is colors.” He saw negation as the rhetorical fulcrum of punk, and cites “I Don’t Wanna Go to the Basement,” a track from the Ramones’ debut album, as a prime example. According to Al, love rock in response posed the question, “Oh, well what do you want?” From Al’s perspective, “Embedded in the form of rock music is perhaps stuff we’d be well to leave behind.” When he first began creating music with his band Some Velvet Sidewalk, he sought to subvert the expectations of song structures. Al says, “We’d have this song, and here’s a part in the song where we might have a guitar solo, but instead I’m going to draw something.” In a musical period that glorified aggressive behavior, the most aggressive stance was being anything but. “Here’s the part where you’d have the groovy guitar god solo,” Al says, “but I’m going to put down my guitar and draw a picture of a dinosaur with a crayon.” He adds, “This other time I carved a pumpkin. It sounds silly, and it was silly, but it was aggressive.” These sorts of moves flew in the face of standard punk and could dismantle and unnerve audiences. Most importantly, Al says, “There’s really no way this would’ve happened without Beat Happening.” He goes on to name a few other models, such as Jad Fair, but remains emphatic on Beat Happening’s influence. In discussing Beat Happening’s first album specifically, Al says, “I thought of that music and those lyrics as really serious. I know ‘I Spy’ is funny and goofy, but I thought of those as really serious.” Al insightfully views the narrator of “I Spy” adopting the persona of a spy, but also standing outside it, effectively criticizing the standard masculine roles set forward for young men. Regarding •

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the lyrics, Al says, “They said something to me about growing up or about manhood. That was what culture was doing to you as a male. That was your archetype. I thought of that work as something that could talk to me about gender,” says Al. “Ah, wait,” he thought, “here’s a different model.” Al realized, “It’s not all Rolling Stones. The models in my life were dudes or total squares, and here was something else.” Through this opening up of possibilities, Beat Happening codified new modes of living and thus provided a way to be oneself. Later on, when K began to put out records by Some Velvet Sidewalk, Al had the complete freedom of expressing his own artistic vision. He remembers being given an enormous amount of trust and freedom. Calvin’s initial invitation to join the roster came without decoration—something like, “Hey, why don’t you make a record,” as Al puts it. “We’d record something,” he says, then ask Calvin, “Well what do you think of it?” Calvin’s response: “I think we should release it.” Al says at first he expected or wanted “some kind of discussion or exchange.” Instead, Calvin’s approach provided general encouragement and support but was effectively hands-off in terms of artistic guidance. Al admits the method elicited conflicting outcomes. “It was frustrating,” he says, “even though it was quite cool.” But the resolution at which he arrives resonates clearly: “It was an extension of faith.” Without a doubt, K’s open forum for experimentation and self-discovery enabled the volume and diversity of art the label has produced, and Beat Happening serves as the guidepost.

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M is for Martin Apartments

Olympia’s Martin Apartments served as a hub for bohemian activity in the 1980s, housing many of the city’s artists and musicians. Said simply by Beat Happening producer Pat Maley, “The Martin Apartments were a thing.” Bret Lunsford lived in several different units in the building, as did Calvin Johnson. One song on Beat Happening, “In Love with You Thing,” was recorded in Calvin’s apartment, Number Twelve, on February 13, 1985, making it the last song recorded for the album. Calvin used a portable cassette player he had owned since high school to capture the track straight to tape. The recording exudes impromptu energy with a minimal, almost a cappella arrangement. Recording straight to cassette via boom box can be written off for many reasons—one could call the process simplistic or sonically underdeveloped or a utilitarian by-product. However, in reality, the decision corresponds to crucial, egalitarian social views held by Beat Happening. Home taping allowed artists to quickly and cost-effectively •

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share their music with others. K Records was founded on the promise of a “cassette revolution,” although it would eventually evolve as finances and industry standards allowed. When Calvin was asked what happened to the cassette revolution, Pat Maley remembers him saying, “Didn’t you hear? We won.” Home taping also took the record industry out of the picture. By taping songs right off the radio, listeners had no reason to buy records. Although some feared that this phenomenon would kill the music industry, it proved less significant than expected. Still, the end user’s ability to increase a sense of agency within the music industry remained. In the case of Beat Happening, boom box recording offered a way of giving listeners the most immediate experience outside of a live show. The unprocessed recording of “In Love with You Thing” from a DIY session in the Martin Apartments offers authenticity free from recording techniques, delivered via the uncomplicated medium of the cassette. The process of recording, producing, and mixing an album usually utilizes many different tracks—each track can be set to one microphone or instrument, or these can even be recorded onto different tracks at separate times. In other words, vocals can be turned down or up in relationship to guitar or drums and vice versa before making a final recording of the song. Boom box recording is essentially one-track recording—no editing. It takes commitment and action. Ian MacKaye explains it well: “Tracks equates to delaying decisions,” he says. A musician or a producer can find themselves obsessing over the levels of the instruments or a guitar effect, overthinking the song. “That takes out the passion. That’s •

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tragic,” says Ian. He boils it down to a gastronomical metaphor, “If you’re cooking pasta, there’s a moment where if you let it cook too long, it’s mush.” Ian’s right; Beat Happening is definitely al dente.

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N is for Negative Space

What Beat Happening was not doing carries almost as much value as their actions. Another way of looking at it says that inaction still constitutes an action; the negative spaces in their work say something vital. In discourse concerning Beat Happening, commentary frequently calls attention to the band’s lack of ability to sing and play their instruments or the absence of a bassist. Of course, in reality, Beat Happening did sing and play their instruments, even if not in the way the established paradigm saw fit. Within the omissions, negative spaces, and transgressive behaviors, we as listeners begin to see ourselves, undefining our own conventions as a result of the hollows created within and by Beat Happening’s music. By carving out these spaces, Beat Happening invites anyone to participate. Where creative spirits without technically trained skills previously found exclusion, here they find encouragement. Olympia artist Dana Squires, who worked in Girl City and designed layouts for Op Magazine, says, “Negative •

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space in artwork allows you to look at things from a different perspective. It’s important that it’s there, but no one notices it. I’m really conscious of those spaces. It’s an integral piece of it. If it’s not there it changes it.” However, none of the band members ever tried to sell these ostensible shortcomings as intentional, a pretentious move that devalues the music’s true power. The strength lies in the fact that the band did not possess knowledge or experience yet embraced that reality and charged brazenly forward. “We were always trying to play our best,” Heather says. “We weren’t trying to sound incompetent. We were all playing the best we could. But at the same time we weren’t practicing all the time, and I wasn’t taking guitar lessons to learn how to ‘really’ play guitar.” Being able to play and choosing not to makes a different statement, but the decision to diminish focus on talent and improvement reveals the genius and insight of the band. Bret elaborates, “We figured out what Beat Happening needed to be Beat Happening, and it wasn’t, obviously, entirely about musicianship.” One way Beat Happening subverted expectations and inspired listeners to create their own art hinges on the band members trading instruments. Not only can we play an instrument, we can play all the instruments, and who cares at what level? The importance lives in undertaking the challenge. Even as Beat Happening encouraged others to participate, it didn’t mean one had to accept the invitation. It stood, regardless. Bret himself sees some inconsistency in the fact that he remains the only member of the trio who did not sing. “No doubt, Calvin and Heather were the voices of the band. I realized at the time that there was a contradiction in my •

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voiceless role,” he admits. “One of the messages of Beat Happening is, ‘You can do this too,’” Bret says, “but  I realized that Calvin and Heather as the lyricists and singers for our group was too great to mess with. Their collaboration and contrast is so special, empowering and enduring … it’s hard to imagine it any other way. Which is part of the other message of Beat Happening: less can be just right.” The following page is left blank intentionally for you to admire in its emptiness or to fill with words and images of your own choosing.

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O is for Olympia

In Olympia, Calvin, Heather, Bret, and many more found refuge from not only the buzz of mainstream culture but also the tyranny of dominant subculture trends. Free from both of these often-restrictive paradigms, creative thought and art prospered. Many Olympians with whom I’ve spoken—Calvin, Heather, Bret, Al Larsen, Rich Jensen, and more—emphasize the communal warmth and support experienced here. Olympia artist and photographer Julie Fay says plainly yet beautifully, “It wasn’t expensive to live there. We took care of each other. We shared food. It was about the quality of life.” While working in community radio at KAOS, Calvin first founded K Records and later Beat Happening, eventually deciding to settle down in Olympia for good to begin the work of releasing independent music from mostly local artists, sharing the voices of the Northwest with the rest of the world. As KAOS Radio pioneer John Foster points out, “Calvin was very interested in building •

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communities, local scenes, from the very first.” With a spirit of pride in their hometown, Calvin and his cohorts used to host “Go Olympia!” tours, during which they would walk the streets of the city, essentially pretending to be tourists in their own town. They’d take photos and have picnics beside the lake. During the height of K’s productivity in the late 90s, members of the second wave of K Records heroes like Khaela Maricich (The Blow) and Mirah teamed up with veterans like Lois Maffeo, Nikki McClure, and Calvin to record one of these outings, resulting in a cassette documenting the experience. In the spirit of this hometown affection, Calvin spent an afternoon in mid-July of 2014 giving me a walking tour of downtown Olympia. We began our afternoon on the front porch of the current K Records offices and Dub Narcotic Studio, housed in an old synagogue on the southwest corner of Jefferson and 8th Avenue. We walked north on Jefferson, down a set of concrete stairs, and crossed a set of railroad tracks. Commenting on the warm, sunny day, Calvin told me about a tour of Canada with Julie Doiron in the not so distant past. He likes to stay in Olympia during the summer, but sometimes it’s nice to use those months to explore climates that are less ideal in the winter. We crossed 7th Avenue and approached Legion way—on the northwest corner sits the former location of the label. The enormous building housed a number of individual studio spaces rented by artists such as Stella Marrs and Nikki McClure. Additionally, “the big room,” as they called it, served as a large studio workspace used for projects ranging from recording to massive amounts of screenprinting. I was reminded of Warhol’s •

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Factory—so many artists living and working in close quarters. “Yeah,” Calvin noted, “less tin foil.” Originally, the building housed an expansive knitting mill and, later, an aircraft parts manufacturing facility.14 During the late 40s it served as a dance hall used primarily by Olympia High School. During dances, many students covered the building’s industrial walls with their names and drawings. The building has been the location for many first kisses shared by young couples. For the last decade or more, the Fish Brewery has occupied the space. While the original wood floor upstairs and the charming high school graffiti remained intact for a while, the brewery just expanded their storage capacities and removed the second story, tearing out the floor—a fact displeasing to many Olympians. Calvin raised his voice as we walked by the brewery’s large bay doors. “Then, these fuckers tore the floor out!” he shouted, stretching out his arm through the open door and extending his middle finger. We continued walking north and came to a stop next to a red brick building on the northeast corner of 4th and Jefferson. Calvin pointed up toward the second floor of the building, “See up there where those rounded windows are?” he asked. “That’s the Ray Apartments. There are seven apartments—I lived in Number Three.” Calvin paid one hundred and three dollars in rent when he moved in. On November 27, 1983 in this apartment, Calvin recorded a version of “fourteen” on a boom box he had owned since high school. The song does not appear on the original version of the album but is included on the 1996 expanded reissue. As far as I can tell, this recording is the first Beat Happening material •

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ever committed to tape. Recording wasn’t without difficulty here. “It was a pretty noisy place to live,” Calvin told me. A tire shop started their pneumatic drills early each morning on the opposite corner of this busy intersection, and a train often passed on the nearby tracks. Apartments were occupied mostly by older people. Marie, who lived in Number Four, managed the building and frequently asked Calvin to turn down the stereo. “It’s so strange to me that she was so concerned about noise,” he mused aloud. “There was already so much noise!” We turned left and headed west on 4th Avenue. Calvin gestured toward the left side of the street, indicating the artesian well, a natural, spring-fed water source right in downtown Olympia. In Calvin’s younger days, the well consisted of two cisterns, one overflowing into the other. “We’d go over there on hot days and dunk ourselves,” he told me. The grounds of the artesian well have changed over the years and now serve as a sort of urban park. Along 4th Avenue, Calvin indicated a business that used to be the Eastside Barbershop where he got his hair cut for years. We came to a stop at 311 4th Ave. between Adams and Franklin—the former location of the Tropicana, an all-ages venue integral to the formative years of Beat Happening. Calvin told me that the space once housed a Montgomery Ward department store but had been empty for a decade or more. What was once the Tropicana became a hot dog and burger joint called Jake’s. The establishment expanded to include a former alley that ran alongside the Tropicana. The Tropicana closed because a commercial developer wanted to put a restaurant in the same building, but he wouldn’t do it with the live music  100 •

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venue next door. Since much of mainstream Olympia wasn’t keen on the weirdos who hung out in front of the Tropicana, the building’s manager didn’t renew their lease the next year. “I don’t even know his name, but I hate his guts,” Calvin sneered with deep loyalty for the bygone venue. “It gave us so much. So much happened because people were involved, whether they were performing or putting on events or just having a place to go to shows.” Another block down 4th Avenue is the storefront Bradley Sweek rented for one night to put on a makeshift show for the Wipers. That space became a hair salon shortly after, but in this case, no one intentionally ran the musicians out. Incidentally, the salon’s owner’s kids Kerry and Kevin both hung out at the Tropicana. On our right, we passed the State Theater, which operated as a dollar theater throughout the 80s. Calvin and I turned left onto Washington before ducking into a stairwell inside the back portion of the Capitol Theater building. Calvin told me he wanted to stop in on K Records artist Arrington de Dionyso’s studio. The door was propped open, and we walked in to a warm greeting from Arrington. “Nice chairs dude!” Calvin exclaimed as soon as he entered the room. “Are these the old K chairs?” asked Arrington. “Yeah I can’t remember who I sold them to,” Calvin said. Such is the way close-knit communities of artists function. “If you have any flat files you want to get rid of, let me know,” Arrington said. “I know the ones at K are filled.”

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“Yeah, I would never get rid of any,” Calvin responded, “but I would be on the lookout for more.” Arrington showed us costumes he was working on for an interpretation of the ballet for Tchaikovsky’s Rites of Spring, which played in the background. “I wanna do a real Olympia punk rock version of it,” he said. “Well if you need any dancers, let me know,” Calvin said coolly. Admittedly, I didn’t know the full significance of the room in which we stood until Calvin gestured toward a room on the left off of the studio’s main room. “Yeah, this used to be Stella’s studio,” he said. These rooms comprised the original Girl City and served as a practice space for some of Calvin’s earliest forays into creating music when he collaborated with Stella Marrs. As we made our way out of Arrington’s studio and back onto Washington Street, Calvin commented on Stella’s influence. “She’s a very important person in terms of Beat Happening,” he said. “She was a creative force that was inspiring to all of us and good friends with all three of us.” Looking east down 5th Avenue, Calvin pointed out the Capitol Theater, the space that hosted the legendary International Pop Underground Convention in 1991, which featured performances by Fugazi, Bikini Kill, The Melvins, Jad Fair, Kicking Giant, L7, Bratmobile, and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, among many others. According to reports, the egalitarian and communal tone of the festival became clear when punk legend Ian MacKaye worked the door on the first night. We walked half a block farther south on Washington  102 •

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and arrived at the Martin Apartments, a building that housed both Bret and Calvin in the past and served as the recording location for one track on Beat Happening. I gazed up at the archway above the entrance and read “The Martin” spelled in dark green letters set against tan stone trim as Calvin punched the code into a keypad to gain access. We entered through a small vestibule that was added long after he last occupied the building. When Bret first moved to Olympia just after joining the band in 1983, he lived in Number Nineteen, a small one-room unit. Calvin moved into Number Twelve around a year later. Calvin pointed to these various doors as we walked along the narrow hallways, which are lined with shelves full of silverware, plates, miscellaneous junk, and strange artwork. A couple of years later, Bret moved down the hall to Number Nine, and Calvin moved into a bigger unit, Number Three. The Martin constituted a veritable musical chairs of apartment living. We walked up a short flight of stairs into the building’s laundry room, which was decorated with flowing drapes and filled with sunlight and the fresh smell of detergent. His voice echoing in the sparse room, Calvin explained that a photo of Heather taken here appears on the back of the “Our Secret” seven-inch single, and part of a video for the Beat Happening song “Hot Chocolate Boy” was filmed here. We headed back downstairs and exited through a back door into an alley on the south side of the Martin. Calvin told me he used to have his own key to the door when he lived here since his radio show on KAOS ran so late at night. He pointed toward an offshoot, an even narrower alley bisecting the alley in which we stood. At some  103 •

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point, a gate was installed to create a dead end behind a building that has expanded, but in the early 80s, the alley continued all the way to the street. This spot hosted the famed alley shows where Olympia’s bands held acoustic candle-lit performances since no better locale existed. At the request of KAOS DJ Vicky B, New York hip-hop DJ Whiz Kid came to Olympia for one of these and set up some blasters for an alleyway dance party. Everyone dug it so much that Whiz Kid was invited to play the opening of the Tropicana a couple of years later. We walked west a few feet and emerged from the alley onto Capitol Way a half-block south of Sylvester Park, where Julie Fay hosted her cakewalks. We made a right and headed north back to 4th Avenue, where we headed farther west. At the end of that block we encountered the Barnes Floral Building, bright purple with white accents. Here, Gary Allan May of The Supreme Cool Beings and Sub/Pop founder Bruce Pavitt lived. Heather first played drums in an apartment in the building. In a recent foreword for Bruce’s retrospective book Sub Pop USA, Calvin writes, “There was still no regular venue in downtown Olympia for original music, but epic parties were held that combined the three apartments above Barnes Floral. Apt. #1 would have a DJ. Apt. #3 would be the lounge for refreshments and conversation. Films were shown in the laundry room.”15 Calvin pointed out the Angelus, where Heather Lewis and Laura Carter lived, on the other side of the street from the Barnes Floral Building. Calvin told me, “Bohemia has moved farther east on 4th Avenue,” but it used to be right here. On the  104 •

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adjacent block farther west, a Thai food restaurant was once the Smithfield Café. Calvin informed me that Smithfield was the original name of Olympia, named after Levi Lathrop Smith, one of the town’s founders in 1846. But four years later, the town changed its name to Olympia. We continued west, and the green grass surrounding Capitol Lake came into view. Calvin began to explain that during the summers of 1981 and 1982 a terrible smell permeated downtown because of sewage from the lake. “When I was a kid, it was open for swimming,” he remembered. Long before that, the entire area where we stood consisted of only mud flats. Installing a dam at the point where the Deschutes River feeds into Budd Inlet, a part of Puget Sound, created Capitol Lake. Calvin took us across the street to a boardwalk to view a series of historical markers that depict Olympia and the lakefront area in various stages over the years—shacks on stilts over mud flats, the development of the dam. Several photos taken on a beach beneath the boardwalk, which didn’t exist in 1980, appear on the back of the album jacket for Beat Happening. From Calvin’s current office at K to the beach at Capitol Lake, Beat Happening history permeates Olympia. I have to wonder how many times Calvin has taken this exact walk. In one photo taken of the band in Japan, Calvin wears a homemade I “Cat” Olympia shirt that plays on the classic “I Love” shirts. In place of a heart, Calvin has drawn the Beat Happening cat face. He has shared the love of Olympia with the world for decades, and he remains one of the town’s strongest cultural ambassadors.

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The Ray Apartments

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The Martin Apartments  109 •

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Barnes Floral

The Angelus

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Capitol Lake

The Capitol Theater

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P is for Punk

A clear line of demarcation runs between two camps with competing conceptions of punk. One side maintains that punk centers on a specific style of music that insists on loud and fast as the guidelines, a fixed mindset largely held as true within the hardcore community. The other side sees punk not as a descriptor of style but as a mindset that embraces a multitude of alternatives. This other side foregoes rules and embraces punk as an idea and method of being. Both sides agree that mainstream ideals and norms must go, but the former substitutes its own constraints, resulting in exclusion. The latter turns to inclusion as the fundamental building block, creating a dynamic like argumentative children of a common parent. Heather says, “When I was in high school and I thought of punk, I thought of Sex Pistols and the one kid in school that had a safety pin in his jacket and CBGB’s. Then, when I came to Olympia, it was like ‘Oh, there’s this other way to think about it.’” The conception of punk pioneered by Beat Happening  112 •

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holds otherness as its central, defining characteristic. Years after the band altered the conversation surrounding punk, their notions still pervade thought in Olympia, and a newer class of K Records artists has adopted this outlook, including musicians such as Phil Elverum. Bret and Calvin both served as mentors to Phil, and their influence is clear. “I started from the assumption that punk means this Olympia version of the definition of punk,” Phil says. “It’s about this method rather than actual flavor.” Bret’s vision of punk had little to do with style or sound. Instead, he saw that the punk movement at its core meant giving voice to underrepresented parties. “The beliefs of punk had a lot to do with the beliefs of the folk generation, although they probably wouldn’t want to admit it at the dawn of hardcore,” says Bret. “They’re both about voice. Do people feel their voice can be heard artistically, creatively, musically, politically? A lot of people didn’t.” Bret has a point here. Punk music is folk music. In the way that folk music represents a specific set of people and reflects its cultural values, punk is folk music. It’s a musical form indigenous to a subset of society that aims to elevate the voices of its invested parties. While the boys’ club of hardcore in cities like L.A. spoke out loudly against the popular constraints of mainstream music and social norms, it created rules of its own, effectively excluding voices, whether intentionally or not. Farther up the West Coast, Beat Happening’s Olympia turned into an all-ages, all-genders tree fort of fun with no such restrictions. Calvin’s conception of punk rock stretches back to a time before punk existed altogether and considers  113 •

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music as an extension of a community. “The reason punk seemed exciting to me in the first place is that I had been into the Beatles,” Calvin explains. “I had read about how they came from the scene in Liverpool, and it was this cool local scene. And I thought, ‘That’s rock ‘n’ roll heaven right there: a cool local scene.’ Then, punk came along, and I was like, ‘Here it is! This is the cool local scene.’ Punk is Memphis in the 50s; it’s Detroit— there are these cool scenes that happen all over in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, and punk is just carrying on that tradition.” Although challenging punk’s conventions may seem merely like a difference of ideologies, the dispute had tangible consequences at shows, and Beat Happening faced tremendous hostility when they played live. “I think there was a feeling of, ‘You have no right to be onstage,’” says Calvin of the difficult crowds for which they often performed. “That was something we confronted for years and years and years. People thought, ‘You’re not a legitimate band.’” Calvin’s brother Streator says, “There was a lot of confrontation. The intensity of the shows could be really scary sometimes.” Streator also astutely points out that the conflict stemmed from Beat Happening playing bills alongside bands with disparate aesthetics. Fans who showed up to see the touring hardcore band had no interest in seeing an act like Beat Happening. It wasn’t even who the hell is this? Streator says, “It was what the hell is this?” Heather remembers not only being yelled at and laughed at but also items being hurled at the band while onstage, even an ashtray at a legendary show in L.A. when the band opened for Fugazi in 1990 at a  114 •

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lounge-like venue called The Country Club. According to Minor Threat and Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye, “While they were playing, an ashtray came winging out of the audience and split his [Calvin’s] nose open.” Ian reports that Calvin didn’t miss a beat, responding, “Somebody broke my nose; dump the whole balcony!” His retort references a live bootleg of The Germs’ final show at The Starwood at which L.A. punk icon Darby Crash gets his nose broken and shouts this phrase. In Ian’s mind, Calvin’s knowledge evidenced his cred to any true punks in the Los Angeles crowd. Ian compares the conflict at this show and others like it to the spray that results from ocean waves colliding— hardcore and Beat Happening’s interpretation of punk trying to inhabit the same rooms. He knew the scene at the time, and he’d given Beat Happening a fair warning. “When I booked the show,” he says, “I told them, ‘This could be fucking punchy.’ They were like, ‘Yeah, we wanna do it.’ I was thoughtful about this stuff. There were so many skinheads and all this shit. I was used to it, but anytime people opened for us, I was always really aware. Part of what was so intense about the band was Calvin has an enormous amount of charisma. He’s an aloof person. He’s hard to know in a way, but when he goes onstage, he’s aggressive.” The fact that Beat Happening knew the risks and plowed forward indicates their punk rock attitude. Even if the band acts nonviolently, taking a stand in a violent context substantiates their mettle. In personal interviews, not only all three members of Beat Happening but also many of their friends and fellow musicians continually emphasize the confrontational  115 •

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nature of many of the band’s shows. “The most telling thing about Beat Happening was we just kept doing it despite all that,” Heather says. If punk is about doing things your own way, pushing the limits, and shirking the expectations of crowds, predecessors, or anyone else, Beat Happening might be the most punk rock band ever. As UK journalist Simon Reynolds puts it, “Beat Happening took flimsiness and naïveté to the limit and made it extreme.” Ian sees this point of view as well, commenting, “They may sound like campfire songs, but they’re call-to-arms. They’re pointed.” Perhaps the most recounted story indicative of this tension involves Beat Happening opening for Black Flag in Olympia in September of 1984. As Beat Happening played, Calvin danced around the stage with his typically odd movements. Henry Rollins stood front-and-center and proceeded to heckle Calvin, who forged on through the set without batting an eye, displaying true punk rock heart. Frustrated by being ignored, the Black Flag frontman put his hand on Calvin’s crotch, or perhaps tried to unzip his pants, according to KAOS employee Dave Rauh. As the story goes, Calvin just took a step back and quipped, “Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?”16 The exchange proves two things: one, Beat Happening didn’t have time to concern themselves with the attitudes of machismo punk rockers, and two, politeness can be equally as confrontational as a fist. Beat Happening did earn the respect of plenty of people aligned with the hardcore movement, perhaps most notably Ian, who Calvin met when he was just in high school and with whom he maintained a friendship from that point forward. But Ian wasn’t the only one;  116 •

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Gerard Cosloy, who managed Homestead Records in the 80s and who eventually co-owned indie giant Matador Records, found much to like about Beat Happening. Homestead’s earliest releases included music from less typical bands like Salem 66, an all-girl rock band that formed in Boston in 1982, as well as albums by punk acts like Meat Men and Big Black. Gerard published a glowing review of a 1987 Beat Happening show in his fanzine Conflict, writing “The 20 minutes of Beat Happening I saw was enough to make me regret not getting them on next issue’s cover.”17 After dismissing some of the prevailing trends and general tendencies of current bands, Gerard claims, “Beat Happening are 1000% [sic] real … with no trace of condescension or irony … this is rock as genuine as Greg Ginn’s bleeding fingers, only the playing field looks a little different.”18 The review concludes with Gerard stating, “If I saw them more often, I’d think they were the world’s best band or something.”19 Strong words coming from a guy who had the ingenuity to identify and release records from some of independent music’s most lauded artists. It’s likely Gerard saw the same thing Calvin saw in regard to the possibility of punk. The inclusiveness central to Calvin’s definition of punk rock had longevity, and as hardcore music died slowly over the course of the 80s, the other school of thought spread out and diversified, giving rise to innumerable new genres and styles, paving the way for today’s independent music scene. Those who mimicked exactly the sounds and styles of early punk bands in some ways missed the message, and those who started bands that embraced new, individualistic approaches to music—they got it. The fanzines may  117 •

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have been photocopied, but punk itself was never meant to be. Beat Happening was a call and response, but when they sang from the stage, they never intended to hear their own voices echoing back. Listeners had to come up with their own answers; Beat Happening simply asked the questions.

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Q is for Question

Hearing Beat Happening for the first time can make for a head scratching experience. Some listeners find themselves filled with questions. Where’s the bass? Is this really punk? Is this band serious? But Heather, Calvin, and Bret ask just as many questions of both listeners and society at large. Who says this isn’t dancing? Can’t our punk rebellion be ideological? Why can’t a girl play drums? In action, Beat Happening questioned the constructs of gender as well as making and distributing music. In doing so, they challenged others to question these parameters. It’s easy for fans of rock music to see a band without a bass and write them off as clueless, a reaction Beat Happening regularly encountered. On the other hand, noting the lack of bass, contemplating the instrument’s role and how it might be supplanted, how music evolves, and why some arrangements feel more legitimate than others expands and enriches art. When we don’t question, the blandness of the status quo sludges  119 •

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onward through the collective conscious. In questioning, alternatives manifest and individuals can choose with greater accuracy what they like and what they do not. Centralized industry interests dissolve. Why should a select few act as the arbiters of cultural value?

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R is for Regionalism

The concept of decentralization denounces large corporatized interests and homogenized culture, carrying with it an important, positive reciprocal: an emphasis on locality and regionalism. Beat Happening’s regional awareness can be observed in lyrics that rely on images of Olympia’s recognizable locales, but this goes deeper than mere pandering to the days of one’s formative years. In conversation, Calvin exhibits a deep and sincere knowledge of not only Northwestern music but also regional history and politics. Calvin’s hometown of Olympia lies at the far southern edge of Puget Sound, an expansive inlet of the Pacific Ocean that covers over one thousand square miles. At the far northern extremity of the sound sits the small fishing village of Anacortes, the birthplace of Bret Lunsford. Both men take seriously their places of origin. If you ask the right question (or wrong question, depending on how much time you have), you might find yourself neck deep in a flood of detailed history.  121 •

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These regional attitudes consist of more than simply loving or even understanding one’s community. The mindset suggests that localized communities offer the greatest opportunity for responsiveness and involvement. The stakeholders and community members comprise the governing bodies. Citizens are the creators of cultural artifacts and the architects of the community. As a brief history of K Records found on their website puts it, “Johnny Appleseed had the right idea: homegrown tastes best, decentralize the means and distribution of your sustenance, cultivate  strains outside the Petri dish of corporate culture.”20 Keen on sharing the local music of the burgeoning Olympia community, former Portlander Bradley Sweek of the Young Pioneers planned an “Olympia Goes to Portland” night to take place at 13th Precinct in January of 1984. On the bill was Brad’s own band, Young Pioneers, along with Beat Happening, The Wimps, Idle Worship, and Rich Jensen. Rich operated as the community’s documentarian and put considerable effort into conceptualizing the abstract ideologies of Olympia’s artists as well as making field recordings, so the show presented an excellent opportunity. “That was kind of my thing,” says Rich. “I was really into cassettes as a medium.” During Beat Happening’s set, Rich captured the band’s performance of “Bad Seeds” using his portable Panasonic recorder, and the song appears as the final track on the original version of Beat Happening. The brief note on the back of the album reveals the importance placed on archiving cultural artifacts; it reads “Bad Seeds (live) was preserved for posterity by Rich Jensen.” Committed to tape ten months before the studio session at Yoyo, the  122 •

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song ambles through some rough spots, and the guitar’s tuning is noticeably flat. Still, the live version is sneering and chaotic, full of punk rock ambition. Rich doesn’t remember exactly how much he taped that night—likely, much more of the set than just one song, but if so, no more of the recording remains. More shows in the spirit of exchange between communities occurred in the Northwest, “Olympia Goes to Bellingham,” for example. Even in such close proximity, small towns nearby had relevance as they began to birth bands in the rising tide of underground music. Pride in one’s hometown was real. While Calvin set up K in Olympia and remained invested in his immediate community, Bret moved back to his own hometown of Anacortes in the late 80s. There, he began his own work in community building, transforming a book and camera store simply called The Business into a record store and forming a record label, appropriately dubbed Knw-Yr-Own. Eventually, Bret founded an annual festival called What the Heck that operated as a family reunion of sorts by attracting many of 1980s Olympia’s creative personalities, who still enjoy camaraderie and fellowship. That festival would not end until 2011, when it reincarnated after falling into the hands of another native Anacortian and Evergreen grad who had returned home: Phil Elverum. Physically connected by the waters of Puget Sound, Anacortes and Olympia share a bond that represents another iteration of the same idea of networked regional outposts prevalent in the work of the Lost Music Network, Op Magazine, and another fanzine that emphasized reporting on local communities, Subterranean Pop.  123 •

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S is for Subterranean Pop

Just as Calvin Johnson left Olympia to attend his senior year of high school on the East Coast, Bruce Pavitt showed up in the Washington State capitol city to intern at Op Magazine. He took over Calvin’s radio time slot and began broadcasting his show Subterranean Pop from ten to midnight once a week on Friday nights. By May of 1980, Bruce had conceived the Subterranean Pop fanzine and released its first issue. Eventually, the radio show-cum-fanzine evolved into one of the nation’s most significant outlets for independent music. Before Calvin and Bruce ever crossed paths, the two had a tremendous amount in common, and their ideas led them each to establish entities with similar aims. K angled toward obliterating official establishments in nearly every regard and Sub/Pop sought to decentralize culture while networking independent outposts around the county in order to supplant the dominant industry powers; both were ready for the revolution. When Calvin returned from the East Coast to attend Evergreen, he and Bruce became fast friends, both  124 •

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working for Op. Soon enough, Calvin began regularly assisting with creating issues of Sub/Pop. Even before he met Bruce in person, Calvin contributed a scene report on Washington D.C. in the form of a letter written during the summer of 1980 and published in the second issue of Subterranean Pop in November of that same year. Calvin even became the designated director of the publication for a stint during the summer of 1982 when Bruce left town on tour with Pell Mell, as he recounts in an essay published in Sub Pop USA, an anthology of the fanzine issues and columns Bruce wrote for Seattle’s weekly paper The Rocket.21 In Bruce’s “New Pop Manifesto,” which ran on the third page of Subterranean Pop’s first issue in 1980, he writes, “Only by supporting new ideas by local artists, bands, and record labels can the U.S. expect any kind of dynamic social/cultural change in the 1980s. This is because the mass homogenization of our culture is due to the claustrophobic centralization of our culture. We need diverse, regionalized, localized approaches to all forms of art, music, and politics.”22 Clearly, Calvin agreed, and together, the two set out to work on just that goal. Issues of the fanzine focused on documenting and discussing specific scenes around the country and featured reviews of records and write-ups about bands from places as widespread as Boston, Athens, Austin, Minneapolis, Kansas, and Cleveland. A page in the inaugural issue reads “Make Your Own Records” at the top and provides contact information for companies who can help in that process. As with Op, each issue overflowed with contact information for bands, labels, and other industry relevant entities. The network was real.  125 •

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By the fifth issue, Sub/Pop had taken cue from an Australian fanzine called Fast Forward that released interviews and music via cassette. Sub/Pop #4, printed in June of 1981, declares that the publication “will alternate between a C-60 cassette and a magazine” and goes on to “urge everyone to start making and trading cassettes.”23 As a call to action, Bruce declares that these cassettes “sabotage the corporate record industry by ignoring their system completely.”24 He closes by insisting, “In order to mobilize any kind of alternative we need open minds and open lines of communication. We must maintain the network. Let’s decentralize, diversify and keep those local scenes going … O.K.?”25 Three issues of Sub/Pop—numbers five, seven, and nine—included brief writings about the songs contained on the releases along with a sixty-minute cassette filled with music. These issues alternated with standard print runs. No Beat Happening songs landed on any of the cassette issues, but Calvin’s band The Cool Rays’ song “Diary of You” appears on Sub Pop 5, and the Laura, Heather and Calvin song “To the Beach” can be found on Sub Pop 9. Much later on, after Sub/Pop firmly established itself as a label, Beat Happening released their last two records, Dreamy (1991) and You Turn Me On (1992), through the imprint. At the time of Beat Happening’s release in 1985, Bruce had relocated to Seattle and Sub/Pop Records had not quite yet taken hold. However, Bruce’s thoughts appeared in monthly columns in The Rocket. In February 1986, two months after the release of Beat Happening, a large reproduction of the album’s cover art ran at the top of the column. Of the record, Bruce wrote, “Produced by Greg Sage of Wipers fame, this totally rockin’ acoustic  126 •

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folk LP (K Records) has more character, more genuine personality, than anything I’ve heard all month. Calvin swings his hips with an awkward deep baritone, and trades off on vocals with Heather.” Although calling the record acoustic folk feels drastically misguided, Bruce calls attention to the record’s earnestness and comes closer to capturing its truly oppositional aims later in the review, writing, “Beat Happening is a positive force; sincere and willing to take risks, they show that it’s just as radical to openly like someone as it is to brutalize and degrade them through cheap sensationalism. Great record!” Bruce’s Sub/Pop column gave Beat Happening more love when Rough Trade released the first album in 1986. In that year’s December column in The Rocket, Bruce celebrated the news of the release and reported the British press calling for interviews. In the column, he also praised all things K Records, championing Calvin’s ethos and work ethic as well as several releases on the imprint. Sub/Pop also gave Beat Happening attention for several months during 1988—specifically the March, April, and July columns. In March, Bruce avidly defended the band’s cute and unpolished sensibilities and encouraged his readership to check out the band’s newest album Jamboree. In April, he plugged a Beat Happening tour and mentioned a show getting cut short for being too loud. In July, Bruce’s final column for The Rocket, he elicited opinions from various personalities, one of whom, magazine Away From the Pulsebeat’s editor Art Black, proclaims the Beat Happening/Screaming Trees split release as “hot.” Although Bruce’s Sub/Pop column in The Rocket had ended, Bruce’s label had just begun, and Sub/Pop’s best years were still to come.  127 •

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T is for Tropicana

The impromptu storefront show Olympia band Young Pioneers member Bradley Sweek organized for the Wipers in 1983 energized the music community in Washington’s capital city. In keeping with his inclusive, egalitarian views, Calvin had been suggesting an all-ages venue for years. Early on, both Heather and Calvin played in bands that found difficulty in getting shows or playing already booked shows because of age restrictive venues. To Calvin, this simply made no sense. “I was always like, if you build it, they will come,” he says. But no one else thought underage kids in Olympia had any desire to attend shows. That changed with the storefront show. The show had been all-ages, and a slew of high school kids showed up, evidencing teen interest in Olympia’s music subculture. “We pulled that off,” says Brad, “and everyone was like, ‘Hey, are you gonna do this next week?’” Considering Olympia’s lack of suitable live music venues, it wasn’t a bad idea. Unfortunately, shortly after the Wipers’ show,  128 •

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someone leased the storefront Brad rented to put on the show. As it turned out, this didn’t slow the process too much, since Olympia’s downtown consisted almost entirely of abandoned commercial spaces, made so by the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. When the federal government developed the Interstate Highway System across the United States, cities and towns not directly bisected by the highways experienced crucial economic failure. “The thing that changed this town more than anything else was the freeway, first by killing it,” says Calvin in the 2002 documentary Go With the Flow. “It used to be you had this main route from Vancouver to San Diego or Seattle to Portland or whatever coming right through downtown Olympia. When they built the freeway, it killed that. It just destroyed Olympia. When I was in high school, downtown Olympia was basically a ghost town—just all empty storefronts.”26 While this phenomenon demolished Olympia’s cultural offerings and development, it inadvertently created a playground for these young artists needing large spaces to create and perform music. Still to this day, the low cost of living in Olympia stands out as an enabling factor for K’s existence. A few blocks farther up 4th Ave. from the location of the storefront show, Brad and a guy named Larry Roberts found another vacant space and planned to open the Tropicana. The building was improperly conditioned for a live music venue, but Larry came up with the money to get everything up to code, including installing a ramp to the bathrooms, putting a fire door in the back, and reorienting the front doors so they swung outward.  129 •

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In addition to Larry’s monetary contribution, Heather remembers a communal effort to get the space ready. “Everyone was down there sheetrocking it and spackling it,” she says. On February 25, 1984, the Tropicana celebrated its opening with a bill including Young Pioneers, The Wimps, an old school hip-hop DJ from New York called Whiz Kid, and Beat Happening. “All of the sudden, we had our own all ages venue,” says Brad. The Tropicana brought out Olympia youth like Tobi Vail, who soon formed a band with Calvin called The Go Team and was later a founding member of Bikini Kill. Several notable artists collaborated with The Go Team, including Kurt Cobain, credited as Kurdt Kobain on a single released by the group in July of 1989, the same year as Nirvana’s debut album Bleach. The Tropicana played an enormous role in solidifying the artistic boom in Olympia that gave birth to both riot grrrl and grunge. Even more importantly, Olympia transformed into a stop on the punk rock tour circuit, bringing in bands like Saccharine Trust, D.O.A., Death Sentence, and Butthole Surfers. Even Slayer played the Tropicana. Many regional artists such as Greg Sage, Green River, The Wimps, and John Foster also played the venue. Brad remembers everyone being particularly impressed by a young Buzz Osborne and his recently formed band The Melvins, who played the Tropicana almost half a dozen times during its brief eleven-month tenure. The Tropicana functioned as the community’s broker for cultural exchange; the venue informed Olympia’s bands about the rest of the world and informed the rest of the world about Olympia.  130 •

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Arguably, no one benefited more from this than Beat Happening, who played the venue an estimated six to ten times including its opening on February 25, 1984 and its closing on January 31, 1985—especially shocking since the band’s trip to Japan occupied a few of those months. The Tropicana offered a public outlet for Beat Happening’s early material and acted as a springboard of momentum leading up to the release of their debut album. The band’s second recording session with Greg Sage happened during this time, and Beat Happening opened for Black Flag at the Tropicana that September— the show at which the infamous standoff between Calvin and Henry Rollins occurred. By the time Beat Happening dropped in November of 1985, the band had Olympia’s enrapt attention.

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U is for Unfinished

In truth, nothing can be considered finished. Some tasks are abandoned sooner and others later. Beat Happening as well as other releases, particularly early ones, by the band implicitly suggest that the art documents a moment in time or one version of a moment. When the drum and guitar tracks ran short as he recorded vocals in the firehouse session, Calvin sang one more line and stopped there. We get the song as it happened. Later there may be another version, a rerecording, a reimagining, or maybe not. Of course, each tape, album, and song can be seen as a project—it gets committed to a physical format and printed; the project ends. Another way to consider it suggests that this—Beat Happening, K Records, the International Pop Underground—is all one big project, a total body of work, ongoing. Today one idea, tomorrow another, but all contributing to this continuing collaborative project to create art and share in community  132 •

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building. The story goes on. After all, Beat Happening never officially broke up. Beat Happening, the “Our Secret” 45, Three Tea Breakfast, early K compilations like Let’s Together, Let’s Sea, and Let’s Kiss—these are historical documents, time capsules from outposts of society, field reports from sonic adventures, entries in a journal labeled “Notes from the Cultural Underground.” They chronicle the work of substantiating new ways of thinking. Beat Happening didn’t start it, but with the help of like-minded contemporaries they furthered it, and more work remains to give agency to underrepresented voices, value the contributions of independent art, and consider issues from alternative angles. Beat Happening outlined a method for fostering discourse, empowering individuals—individuals like you and me—to take ownership of culture, art, and politics. The invitation to participate still stands, and the revolution never ends. Get in.

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V is for Vinyl

Although Beat Happening and many other Olympia artists deeply valued the accessible properties of cassette tapes, vinyl remained the standard of recorded music formats. Even if Beat Happening already saw their own cultural contributions of cassettes as vital, their debut seven-inch single and inaugural LP lent them greater credibility in the eyes of the world at large. K Newsletter #2 mentions a forthcoming ten-song cassette tape by Beat Happening, but it seems that this idea morphed into the Beat Happening LP. After all, the band had more than enough material in limited releases to cull together a proper album. After selecting the songs for the LP, Calvin utilized a triumvirate of companies to achieve the professional grade final product: K-Disc for the mastering and cutting of the lacquers, Bill Smith Custom Records for the reproduction of the vinyl, and Stoughton Printing for the creation of the album jackets. Calvin and his friend Rich Jensen decided to head south to K-Disc in  134 •

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California to see the lacquer cutting first hand. (K-Disc had absolutely no relation to K Records, although Rich Jensen understandably found the coincidence quite mystical.) During lacquer cutting, a machine plays back the audio, and an etching needle carves grooves into the surface of an aluminum plate coated in lacquer. A little vacuum runs during this process, sucking all the excess, cut-away material into a little baggie. Rich Jensen found this method incredibly fascinating and saved the scraps of lacquer, which he remembers looked like thick purple thread. From his perspective, since the album’s music had been cut into the lacquer, he also possessed a copy of the album in the cut-away scraps. Jensen saw a sort of creative power in hanging onto such a treasured item. In a book about Haitian cosmology, Rich had read about the concept that a physical object has life and a connection to everything it has ever touched. He explains, “In Olympia, somebody new moves to town and you go to their house for dinner, and you sit down on chairs that used to be in your apartment.” Pat Maley reports that once Calvin chose the song sequence for the album, he was thrilled that both sides of Beat Happening clocked in under ten minutes. Since K-Disc charged more for mastering and cutting longer albums and they charged per side, Calvin had saved money twice over. The three companies Calvin used worked together frequently, and pretty soon Calvin had copies of Beat Happening in his hands. K had printed its first vinyl LP. However, the KLP-001 discography code wasn’t applied until much later. Calvin can’t remember exactly when they started, but maybe as late as the 90s, and  135 •

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even then, they didn’t count correctly. Reminiscent of the laid-back approach of guesswork recording in the firehouse, Calvin just sort of counted back in his head, picked a number that sounded about right, and began applying numbers. Soon, he realized he’d left out a couple of records he’d forgotten about. Since those albums never got reissued, it didn’t end up being a huge mistake. In any case, at least they got the number for the first one right.

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W is for Washington

Not one but two Washingtons have played formative roles in Calvin Johnson’s young adult life. While capitalin-the-woods Olympia and capital-of-the-nation D.C., positioned on opposite coasts, represented disparate geographies and aesthetics, they shared at least one important characteristic: cultural undercurrent. Both communities deserve credit for fostering early American punk scenes as well as giving rise to the eventual riot grrrl and independent rock movements. As Minor Threat and Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye points out, “The biggest noise in town is the government. When you have that kind of circumstance, quite often, it provides an opportunity for things to grow in the corner. Given that most of the traffic in these towns is just going to the office, on the side roads is where you find people having the ability to develop ideas.” In Ian’s view, the government industry operates as an “economic cover,” allowing an exchange outside of the primary economic system, working as an advantage for  137 •

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the creation of forward-thinking art. In this subcultural system, “Ideas are the primary currency,” says Ian. “That’s where innovation develops and creativity flourishes.” On the other hand, he says, “If you’re in a place where the creative culture is in the marketplace, as soon as it’s recognizable, they cut it and sell it. New ideas don’t have a chance to develop.” For a year, from 1979 to 1980, Calvin saw some of D.C.’s development happening first hand. When his mom took a new job and moved from Olympia to Maryland in 1979, Calvin found himself headed away from the Evergreen State to attend his senior year of high school in the nation’s capital. Once there, he explored a variety of music from the rockabilly sounds of Tex Rubinowitz to the instrumental surf rock of The Insect Surfers, one of several D.C. bands on a label called WASP Records. Run by a guy named William Asp (W. Asp), the label and its owner represent yet another figure in early punk whose impassioned rhetoric spoke strongly against centralized, corporatized music.* Having seen little in the way of live punk music, Calvin’s time in D.C. proved eye-opening and invaluable. However, none of the shows were more seminal than a Cramps show on August 21, 1980, just three months after the band released their debut album. The bill also  Bill Asp also worked with a young D.C. band called Tiny Desk Unit, whose member Bob Boilen would later go on to found a popular concert series similarly named Tiny Desk Concerts, which appears on NPR. Later in life, Asp worked as a data analyst for Amnesty International and the ACLU, testaments to his steadfast beliefs in equality. *

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included psychedelic surf-rock group Slickee Boys, a predominantly black funk-leaning group called Tony Perkins and the Psychotics, and a band in which Ian MacKaye played bass—Teen Idles. Each of these bands signifies a vital connection to Calvin. All of the opening acts reflect the diverse, growing D.C. underground scene, but beyond that, Ian and Calvin would develop a long-standing friendship. And perhaps most importantly, with their wild stage antics, dark melodies, minimalistic punk, and decision to forego bass guitar, The Cramps’ sensibilities reverberated in the music Beat Happening created a few years later. Ian remembers considering Beat Happening through the lens of The Cramps when he first heard it. “It was a way of expressing oneself through unconventional means, and I respect it on that level,” he says. “It was a little startling because it seemed so rudimentary. But also it has traction. Once you hear it, you know what it is.” Others have noted similarities between The Cramps and Beat Happening, and Calvin himself cites them as a band that affected his thinking. Although The Cramps’ aesthetics embrace a more overt darkness and sexuality in their sinister psychobilly songs, Beat Happening frequently traffics in double-entendres, and both bands thrive on simple, distorted guitar lines. From D.C., Calvin wrote to Bruce Pavitt back in Olympia recounting some of his exploits. The letter ran in the second issue of Subterranean Pop in November of 1980 as a D.C. scene report. “I sure am having fun in D.C. this summer,” Calvin writes. “What I like to do most is go to the Club 9:30, pay my money and walk in (no fat bouncer sitting on a stool, checking i.d. like at  139 •

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some of the other ‘rock ‘n’ roll clubs’ around here).”27 Indeed, the 9:30 Club was one of the first rock clubs in the city, if not the country, to host live music for groups of all ages. Though Calvin did not know it at the time, Ian MacKaye felt the same way he did about all-ages access to shows. Soon after Calvin moved back to Olympia for college, Ian formed Minor Threat and wrote the song, “Straight Edge,” which spawned a movement still active today. The song’s lyrics proclaim, “I’m a person just like you / But I’ve got better things to do / Than sit around and fuck my head.” It continues to specifically address and cast off a number of substances. Ian claims he never meant to create a movement, that his actions and the song merely reflect the personal values he saw as his own form of rebellion against trends at the time. As a means of proving to the club owners he and his underage friends were only interested in seeing bands and not drinking, Ian would draw huge X’s in marker across the backs of their hands. Thus, the X became a symbol for the unintentional straight edge movement. In fact, Teen Idles’ first and only release, the Minor Disturbance EP, displays a photograph of someone’s crossed wrists with large black X’s across the back of both hands. Although Calvin says the two never discussed it, their shared belief in abstaining from drugs and alcohol is at least noteworthy. Similarly, Calvin has also maintained a vegetarian diet since age eleven. Calvin returned from the East Coast informed about many new bands and the inner workings of another music community. He had plenty to share with his Olympia friends when he enrolled in Evergreen in the  140 •

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fall of 1980. And Calvin’s lifeline to D.C. continued to hold value over the years. Just a few months after moving back to Olympia, while visiting his mother in D.C. for the holidays, Calvin saw the second Minor Threat show ever at the Unheard Music Festival, an event about which he wrote in the “E” Issue of Op Magazine. That same winter, Calvin met Ian at a New Year’s Eve party at Sharon Cheslow’s house in Bethesda, Maryland. At the party, Ian remembers commandeering the turntable to spin Teen Idles’ first single and an epic snowball fight erupting in the front yard. When the party ended, Ian and some friends went to help their good friend Henry Garfield move from his apartment in Arlington, as he was being evicted as of January 1. A short time later, Henry Garfield would be asked to join Black Flag as the band’s singer; he would accept the offer, change his name to Henry Rollins, and move to L.A. Years later, Calvin would use the trip back east to see his mother as an opportune time to distribute his newly released first LP, taking his brother Streator and good friend Julie Fay along for the ride. When I discussed with Calvin the vital and sustaining connection between Olympia and D.C. through Calvin’s familial connection to both cities, his take was more practical. “Well it was a great way to buy Trouble Funk records,” he said simply.

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X is for X-Rated

Much of the time, Beat Happening’s lyrics flirt with sex more than they delve into sensational lewdness or vulgarity. Their ability to deliver a hint of sensuality makes lines even sexier, leaving something for the imagination to explore rather than revealing everything—the difference between arousal and post-coital tristesse. Arguably, sex became increasingly central in Beat Happening’s songs; 1989’s Black Candy and 1991’s Dreamy are particularly rife with sexual imagery, emerging in almost every song. On Black Candy’s “Pajama Party in a Haunted Hive” Calvin chants “Leave some honey / Drippy runny / On your tummy / Rich and yummy,” over distorted guitar, and in “Nancy Sin” from Dreamy, Calvin fires off, “Fill my mouth with hot sand / Kiss you and leave my brand.” Compared to these, Beat Happening can be considered mere foreplay. Still, glimmers of this heavy sexuality flash here and there, most notably on “In Love with You Thing.” After two verses of playful nearly a cappella singing about  142 •

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an unrequited crush, Calvin delivers the lines, “If I could touch those parted lips / Your swinging little hips just gotta be kissed.” Not only the rhyme but also the proximity of “hips” and “lips” is no coincidence, as Calvin cleverly plays on the geography of the body as much as he plays on words. The couplet epitomizes the suggestive sexuality Beat Happening would continue to use as a counterweight for their sugary sweet juvenilia. The 1996 expanded release includes the previously unavailable song “Christmas,” perhaps Beat Happening’s most overt confrontation of sex in their discography. A deadpan, repetitive thud, click-click runs almost the length of the minute-and-a-half track as Calvin intones lethargically, “I had sex on Christmas / I had sex three times today / Three different women taught me how to be bored / In their own separate sweet little way.” Here, Calvin’s treatment of the topic is startlingly bleak, full of adult ennui. And it doesn’t get any better—the song concludes, “Learned my lesson / Life is one long session / Of disappointment, heartache, pain.” The percussion ceases, and for good measure Calvin chants one more time, “Disappointment, heartache, pain,” then quickly mutters, “despair.” However, it’s worth mentioning that most listeners’ reaction to the song is laughter. Something absurd, darkly comical, yet full of angst exists within these lines. Latter day K hero Phil Elverum remembers “Christmas” being the anthem for his teenage holidays. He would wake up on Christmas morning, shut his bedroom door, put on this song, and crank the volume all the way up on his stereo. Maybe the song’s allure lies in the striking juxtaposition of Christmas joy and the  143 •

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depression of dysfunctional sex. While looking back on youthful sex as an adult may feel wistful and romantic, we forget how fraught with drama and pain early sexual encounters can be. Perhaps the song resonates with that conflicted teenager in all of us. Maybe it’s just that someone shouting about having sex on Christmas is funny. Like so many facets of Beat Happening’s appeal, they’re riding the line between dark humor and intense sincerity.

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Y is for Yoyo Studio

As if the firehouse wasn’t surreal enough as a makeshift studio, the second Greg Sage session, which yielded the majority of the songs on Beat Happening, took place adjacent to a communal house that previously served as a chicken coop on a yogurt farm and, at another time, a Montessori school. Pat Maley, a fellow Evergreen student, lived in the house along with quite a few other students. Pat studied music at Evergreen, and after inheriting a small amount of money, decided to use it to procure the gear for a small studio. He had read an inspiring article about The Eurythmics that told the story of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart writing “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” According to the article, the band’s first record hadn’t sold well, and they’d spent a substantial amount of money paying for studio time. Dave Stewart realized that if he allocated the recording session fees to his own gear, he’d have enough money to buy his own studio. He took out a small loan and purchased a Tascam eight-track, some  145 •

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mics, and a drum machine. The memorable refrain from The Eurythmics’ sophomore album title track was captured during a moment of passionate despair in the pair’s romantic relationship. Pat recognized the power in being able to create something spontaneously, worrying about neither the expenses nor logistics of scheduling studio time. With gear purchased, Pat just needed a name for the studio. A sign out front said “yogurt,” leading some friends to erroneously believe the house made and sold yogurt. It didn’t, but since it had once been a farm, a friend of Pat’s jokingly referred to the spot as the yo-yo farm one day. As in, the sort of place for the weirdos and the crazies. It stuck. Many different spellings (Yo-yo, Yo-Yo, Yoyo) have been used, but Pat says it has been Yoyo from the beginning. After its use during the farm days, the chicken coop next to the main house had been converted into a small Montessori school at some point, but that too had fallen into disuse. Here, Pat set up Yoyo Studio. Built for primary school children, the room where the session took place had shorter than average doors, coat hooks low to the ground, and tiny sinks—an unusual yet apt recording location for a Beat Happening album. Pat first heard Beat Happening when someone handed him a cassette and told him he should check them out. The tape was a Linda Ronstadt cassette with some early Beat Happening demos recorded over it. Although psychedelic music suited his tastes more, Pat had enough interest in strange music that he invited the band over to record. Since they would use his studio, Pat naturally assumed that he would engineer and produce the session,  146 •

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but when Calvin showed up at Yoyo in November of 1984 with the band in tow, they had Greg Sage alongside them. Pat admits that he felt some disappointment, but soon found himself wrapped up in assisting the session, grabbing whatever gear Greg might require. Pat remembers Greg as nice but quiet and aloof— mumbling a hello at the door and speaking minimally throughout the session except for asking where he could find a piece of equipment. The recording utilized a Tascam 38, half-inch, eight-track reel-to-reel and a Tascam mixing board with eight buses out and twelve channels in. According to Pat, Greg spent the duration of the session behind the board smoking one cigarette after another. For mics, Pat and Greg used a pair of AudioTechnica 813 condenser mics and some Shure SM-57s and SM-58s. Pat also had a digital reverb that Greg used, most apparent in the finger snaps on “Bad Seeds.” Other than some basic layering, overdubbing, and separate tracking of a few instruments, the session didn’t call for anything elaborate, thanks to Beat Happening’s spartan approach to arrangement. The five songs recorded during this session account for the entire A-side of Beat Happening, creating a cohesive production value. Heather sings on three (“Foggy Eyes,” “I Let Him Get to Me,” and “Run Down the Stairs”), while Calvin sings on two (“Bad Seeds” and “I Spy”). Of the songs recorded that day, rocker “Bad Seeds” possesses the fullest instrumentation. It’s the only song on Beat Happening that has cymbals. It also includes bongos played by Pat, but they’re almost completely obscured by the crash cymbal and tom fills. All five of the songs sound tighter and cleaner when compared  147 •

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to the songs from the first Greg Sage session almost a year before. No doubt the more controlled studio environment had an effect, but most importantly, the band had improved considerably. “Foggy Eyes” became the lead track on Beat Happening, unsurprisingly, as it showcases the band at its most mature to date. Calvin counts off the song and the drums and guitar kick in simultaneously; the percussion provides an upbeat tempo as the guitar part wanders the fretboard to achieve a bouncing hook. Complete with an actual chorus and an almost-bridge mid-song where Heather hits a high note and the guitar ascends to meet it for a few strums, “Foggy Eyes” marks a moment when Beat Happening put it all together. Of course, this wasn’t always the aim, and later records still featured plenty of challenging, minimalist, and unusual recordings, as their second album Jamboree proved. Like “Bad Seeds,” early fan favorite “I Spy” thrives on Calvin’s playful baritone croon that recalls male icons like Lee Hazelwood and Scott Walker. The song shuffles along with a guitar line ideal for its title. It induces the uncontrollable shaking of some body part—shoulders, hips, head. Calvin sings, “I got a bulletproof car and a secret star and a ring with X-ray eyes.” Everything about the track feels like a kid’s take on a B-grade spy movie theme song until Calvin drops the last line with wry cynicism, “I wear Spanish boots, Brooks Brothers suits / And I don’t know how to cry.” While the casual listener might miss the indictment of conventional masculinity, those in-tune heard it loud and clear. The remaining two songs, “I Let Him Get to Me” and “Run Down the Stairs,” both emphasize jangling guitar  148 •

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lines and steady snare as Heather sings sweetly about vague relationship woes. “I cut my hair / I run down stairs / I dance around in a small room with the lights turned off / I think about you now,” she sings on the latter. Balancing this sentimentality with Calvin’s playful intensity provides varied points of entry, and the A-side’s track sequence embodies an Olympian egalitarianism. Heather sings the first song, Calvin the second, Heather the third, and so on. After the session ended, Pat remembers Greg shuffling over to him and softly offering, “You’ve got a really nice setup here”: a compliment Pat accepted as high praise from a man as respected and experienced as Greg. This session was the first ever at Yoyo Studio, but the space would later be used to record not only further Beat Happening material but also an array of bands including Some Velvet Sidewalk, Softies, Bratmobile, The Microphones, and Mirah, among others. In the 90s Pat formed his own record label, Yoyo Recordings, and released material from some of these bands and more. After Calvin Johnson organized the renowned International Pop Underground Convention in 1991, Pat carried on the tradition, creating an annual event called Yoyo A Go Go. The inaugural installment in 1994 included Karp, Unwound, The Halo Benders, Built to Spill, Fitz of Depression, Lois, Yo La Tengo, Neutral Milk Hotel, as well as Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl onstage together for the first time after the death of Kurt Cobain. Later events included other Northwest staples like Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney.

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Z is for Zooming Rocket Ship

Often a listener’s first experience with an album is its cover. In the case of Beat Happening, the simply drawn stick figure kitty in a rocket ship on a bright yellow background subtly embodies the band’s influential sensibilities. Childishly adorable, the drawing induces an unavoidable smile from anyone who might find it on a record shelf. At that point, you’re already halfway to being a Beat Happening convert. Anyone smug enough to dismiss the cover with an I could do this attitude unwittingly finds themselves convinced of one of the band’s primary aims. The cover’s drawing is so rudimentary, it almost begs to be added onto—maybe a few stars or a planet in the distance. Very likely, the band wouldn’t mind at all. Many Beat Happening show flyers feature the iconic cartoon cat, invented and drawn by Calvin. One flyer for a show with Girl Trouble and Screaming Trees at Capitol Lake Park in Olympia depicts the cat flying on a broom. Another flyer for the “Olympia Goes to Portland” themed  150 •

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show, at which “Bad Seeds (live)” was recorded in January of 1984, features the cat face on the side of some sort of decorative container. The art on the front of the first seven-inch single in the International Pop Underground series, “Look Around” b/w “That Girl,” has the cartoon cat head atop a snowman’s body. Beat Happening’s cover art originally appeared on a flyer for a show at the Tropicana featuring Young Fresh Fellows, Girl Trouble, and Beat Happening. A reflection of the trio’s DIY ethic, the cover’s bright yellow hue derived from available means. When Calvin went down to the print shop to make posters for the show, one of the choices was Astrobright yellow. The bright, primary color fit Beat Happening’s aesthetic perfectly. Of course, like many of the band’s actions, the decision is also ingenious, since the vibrant color worked to attract attention. “Trying to catch people’s eye—that’s the purpose of a flyer,” Calvin says flatly. The cover’s minimalism works as an analogy for the simple pop contained on the record within the album jacket. Both the art and musical sensibility went along with the band’s earnest employment of only first names. On the back of the album jacket, Beat Happening is credited only as Bret, Heather, Calvin, via a caption beneath a photo of the three. According to Bret, “Calvin had a minimalist vision for the band’s presentation, and it fit. I didn’t say, let’s just have our first names on the record, and I don’t think Heather did either.” The black-and-white photo is taken on the rocky beach of Budd Inlet, part of the South Basin portion of Puget Sound, just north of the 4th Avenue bridge that connects downtown Olympia to the city’s west side. In the photo,  151 •

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Calvin wears a tattered gray sweater with white lining: standard thrift store attire that once belonged to Young Pioneer’s member Bryan Learned. Three more photos appear on the album’s back cover: one of Heather taken on that same beach; another of Heather and Calvin walking down a sidewalk together near the rose gardens on the grounds of the Capitol; and one of Bret standing behind the Capitol Theater clad in plaid flannel and a baseball cap, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. Even as Beat Happening extends an invitation for anyone to make music, Calvin, Heather, and Bret aren’t afraid to own the artwork they’ve created. They peer out at the listener from the album cover and present themselves without affectation. Anyone who likes pondering what the K in K Records stands for should note that the bottom right corner of the 1986 Rough Trade edition’s record jacket reads “Under License from Kalvin” next to the shield logo. Along with little drawings of maracas like the ones that appeared on the first single and a large drawing of the cartoon cat, the record insert includes two more photos of the band. Taken by Julie Fay, the photographs show Beat Happening performing one of their first shows ever at the Smithfield Café. The pictures can be overlaid to create a sort of panoramic of the scene. Bret plays drums on the far right, Calvin stands in front of the kit, playing guitar. Heather also plays guitar toward the left-hand side of the photo. Rich Jensen operates as a human mic stand, holding the microphone as Heather sings into it. Ultimately, the simplicity of Beat Happening’s art embodies the band’s music and characterizes its creators,  152 •

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the community in which they live, and the principles by which they act. It signifies not only the band’s unified vision of creating art but also their holistic approach to being. The iconic cover stretches forward through time like a banner in the subculture’s collective consciousness, arching above the domain of independent music, marking the achievements of three unassuming musical pioneers and the community that surrounded and supported them. Beat Happening’s work effected change in a wide range of cultural domains and sought to end gender discrimination, encourage freedom in musical expression, forge accessibility to mediums of artistic creation, and build a decentralized network of exchange. The band’s actions provide implicit inspiration for you to pursue your own quests—they might concern wealth inequality, race, access to health care, improving education, or any number of other aims. Whether in elementary lines on a page, sonic experimentation, or a surprising new ingredient for cake, Bret, Heather, and Calvin offer points of access for a cultural expedition, and Beat Happening will be the patch sewn to the sleeve of your safari jacket. Here is where you start. Grease the pans and beat the batter. Crank the heat to 400 ºF and pop the revolution in the oven. Sign up for the renegade bakers’ convention. A tastetest party for the socially perplexed. The cultural seas need a culinary pirate with a penchant for new recipes. Hand-sewn sails whipping in the salty breeze. Expand and erupt, heartthrob outlaw.

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Notes

1  The Shield Around the K: The Story of K Records, directed by Heather Rose Dominic (2000; New York: Northstar Pictures, 2000), DVD. 2  Gunnar Knapp, “Bristol Bay, Alaska Department of Fish and Game.” Bristol Bay, Alaska Department of Fish and Game. June 26, 2013. http://www.adfg. alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=commercialbyareabrist olbay.main (accessed December 31, 2014). 3  “ARCHIVEGRID,” ArchiveGrid: Washington State Library’s Collection of Calvin Johnson’s Papers, 1960–1964. http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/ collection/data/406473073 (accessed December 31, 2014). 4  “Welcome | History,” Welcome | History. http://www. cwu.edu/welcome/history (accessed December 31, 2014). 5 “ARCHIVEGRID,” ArchiveGrid: Washington State Library’s Collection of Calvin Johnson’s Papers, 1960–1964. http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/ collection/data/406473073 (accessed December 31, 2014).

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N otes

6 Lois Maffeo, Crashing Through (Olympia, WA: K Records, 2002). 7 David Nichols, “The FULL story of the 10 records David Nichols took round to The Legend!’s house in mid-1986,” Collapse Board (blog), January 7, 2014, http://www.collapseboard.com/features/ the-full-story-of-the-10-records-david-nichols-tookround-to-the-legends-house-in-mid-1986/ (accessed November 15, 2014). 8 The Legend!, “BEAT HAPPENING,” New Musical Express (June 28, 1986): 28. 9 Simon Reynolds, “ALBUMS: STATES OF INDEPENDENCE,”  Melody Maker 61, no. 46 (November 15, 1986): 29. 10 “THE WAX MUSEUM,”  Melody Maker 61, no. 51 (December 20, 1986): 46–7. 11 Lois Maffeo, Crashing Through (Olympia, WA: K Records, 2002). 12 Mark Baumgarten, Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music (Seattle, WA: Sasquatch Books, 2012), 81. 13 “About KAOS,” kaosradio.com. http://kaosradio.org/ about/ (accessed November 15, 2014). 14 “The Loft on Cherry and Olympia Knitting Mills: Bathing Suits, Beat, and Brew,” olympia history.com. http://olympiahistory.org/wp/the-loft-oncherry-and-olympia-knitting-mills-bathing-suitsbeat-and-brew/ (accessed December 10, 2014). 15 Bruce Pavitt, Sub Pop USA: The Subterranean Pop Music Anthology, 1980–1988 (Brooklyn, NY: Bazillion Points, 2014), 136. 16 Lois Maffeo, “Fascist Bully: Henry Rollins,” Stranger  155 •

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(Seattle, WA), April 1, 1999. http://www.thestranger. com/seattle/fascist-bully/Content?oid=661 (accessed Novemer 22, 2014). 17 Gerard Cosloy, “Beat Happening, ABC No Rio 9/24/87,” Conflict, no. 46 (1987): 12. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 “K History,” krecs.com. http://www.krecs.com/history/ (accessed November 15, 2014). 21 Bruce Pavitt, Sub Pop USA: The Subterranean Pop Music Anthology, 1980–1988 (Brooklyn, NY: Bazillion Points, 2014), 136. 22 Ibid., 15. 23 Ibid., 116. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Go With the Flow, directed by John Paget (2009; Buffalo, NY: Paget Films, 2009), DVD. 27 Calvin Johnson, Sub Pop USA: The Subterranean Pop Music Anthology, 1980–1988 (Brooklyn, NY: Bazillion Points, 2014), 59.

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Bibliography

“About KAOS.” kaosradio.com. http://kaosradio.org/about/ (accessed November 15, 2014). “ARCHIVEGRID.” ArchiveGrid: Washington State Library’s Collection of Calvin Johnson’s Papers, 1960–1964. http:// beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/collection/data/406473073 (accessed December 31, 2014). Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981–1991. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, and Company, 2001. Baumgarten, Mark. Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music. Seattle, WA: Sasquatch Books, 2012. Cosloy, Gerard. “Beat Happening, ABC No Rio 9/24/87.” Conflict, no. 46 (1987): 12. Go With the Flow. Directed by John Paget. 2009. Buffalo, NY: Paget Films, 2009. DVD. “K History.” krecs.com. http://www.krecs.com/history/ (accessed November 15, 2014). Knapp, Gunnar. “Bristol Bay, Alaska Department of Fish and Game.” Bristol Bay, Alaska Department of Fish and Game. June 26, 2013. http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=commercialbyareabristolbay.main (accessed December 31, 2014). Legend!, The. “BEAT HAPPENING.” New Musical Express (June 28, 1986): 28.  157 •

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Maffeo, Lois. Crashing Through. Olympia, WA: K Records, 2002. —“Fascist Bully: Henry Rollins.” Stranger (Seattle, WA), April 1, 1999. http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/fascistbully/Content?oid=661 (accessed November 22, 2014). Nichols, David. “The FULL story of the 10 records David Nichols took round to The Legend!’s house in mid-1986.” Collapse Board (blog). January 7, 2014. http://www.collapse board.com/features/the-full-story-of-the-10-records-davidnichols-took-round-to-the-legends-house-in-mid-1986/ (accessed November 15, 2014). Pavitt, Bruce. Sub Pop USA: The Subterranean Pop Music Anthology, 1980–1988. Brooklyn, NY: Bazillion Points, 2014. Reynolds, Simon. “ALBUMS: STATES OF INDEPENDENCE.” Melody Maker 61, no. 46 (November 15, 1986): 29. “The Loft on Cherry and Olympia Knitting Mills: Bathing Suits, Beat, and Brew.” olympiahistory.com. http://olympiahistory.org/ wp/the-loft-on-cherry-and-olympia-knitting-mills-bathingsuits-beat-and-brew/ (accessed December 10, 2014). The Shield Around the K: The Story of K Records. Directed by Heather Rose Dominic. 2000. New York: Northstar Pictures, 2000. DVD. “THE WAX MUSEUM.”  Melody Maker 61, no. 51 (December 20, 1986): 46-7. “Welcome | History.” Welcome | History. http://www.cwu.edu/ welcome/history (accessed December 31, 2014).

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Also available in the series

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans Harvest by Sam Inglis The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli Electric Ladyland by John Perry Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard Let It Be by Steve Matteo Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk Aqualung by Allan Moore OK Computer by Dai Griffiths Let It Be by Colin Meloy Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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Exile on Main Sreet by Bill Janovitz Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli Ramones by Nicholas Rombes Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno Murmur by J. Niimi Grace by Daphne Brooks Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Wilder Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese Low by Hugo Wilcken Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes Music from Big Pink by John Niven In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy Doolittle by Ben Sisario There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis The Stone Roses by Alex Green In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti Loveless by Mike McGonigal

BEAT HA PPENING

37. The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard 42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris 58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs

59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. XO by Matthew LeMay 64. Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. One Step Beyond . . . by Terry Edwards 67. Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. 69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol 70. Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Kid A by Marvin Lin 76. Spiderland by Scott Tennent 77. Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Dummy by R. J. Wheaton

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A lso available in the series

86. Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer 89. I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Entertainment! by Kevin J. H. Dettmar 92. Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold

97. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. ( ) by Ethan Hayden 100. Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann

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