The F-Word

Through a basement door one floor beneath his downtown Ballard club's main stage, Sunset Tavern owner Max Genereaux and booker Kwab Copeland are putting the finishing touches on a major remodel of a large storage room that Genereaux refers to as his former "coke den."

Genereaux is a recovering substance abuser who has been sober for two years. His drug-and-booze-addled past is something he's very comfortable discussing. But his experience as a former rush chairman and four-year resident of the University of Washington's Zeta Psi fraternity in the late '80s? Not so much.

"In the music community, it's perceived as being a very negative thing," says Genereaux of his frat alum status. "I'd much rather talk about being in recovery from drugs and alcohol. Because [fraternity life] is so misunderstood, I just don't bring it up."

That's not because Genereaux has anything negative to say about his Zeta Psi experience. Quite the opposite, in fact: "I loved it," he says. "It was a great way to go to school. You lived with upperclassmen who could help you with class selection and tutoring. We were there to get an education, and there was a lot of that going on. The guys I was friends with, we all graduated. I'm not saying there weren't dumb guys there—there are dumb guys everywhere—but there were many quality individuals that I'm friends with to this day." Given the drinking problem that he already had, Genereaux says, "I can't imagine what I would have been like on my own."

Genereaux took over the Sunset in 2000, when he was still drinking. "I always joke that I don't really like music," he says. "I like the party. I was going out to see shows to get loaded and see people."

Eventually, the getting-loaded portion of that equation snowballed to the point where Genereaux, whose struggle with harder drugs didn't begin until well after college, sought treatment at a rehab center in Central Washington.

"I behaved in my 30s in ways that I'm far more embarrassed about than anything I did in college," Genereaux says, "because my addiction continued to progress to where I was behaving in some pretty sick ways. And that had nothing to do with my days in the fraternity. I've watched guys who are gutter-punk skateboarders behave just as bad or worse than any of the shit I saw go down in fraternities."

Genereaux's ex-Greek status puts him in the company of countless creative and literary stalwarts. Kurt Vonnegut was a frat boy. So were Jon Stewart, David Letterman, Larry David, Will Ferrell, Zach Braff, David Spade, Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Ben Stein, Billy Crudup, David Schwimmer, Matthew McConaughey, Drew Carey, Jeremy Piven, Bob Woodward, P.J. O'Rourke, Dennis Miller, Brad Pitt, and Jim "Jesus" Caviezel (UW Sigma Chi, class of '90). Both Simon and Garfunkel were frat boys, as were R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and current alt-country darling Bobby Bare Jr., who was a Lambda Chi at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville.

"Because my dad is famous," says Bare, whose papa is Nashville royalty, "I had the opportunity to go to one of the rich-boy fraternities—but I didn't want to." Instead he went to Lambda Chi Alpha, which he says "was the biggest fraternity on campus because they didn't really turn anybody away. It was every yahoo. I hung out with lots of people from the most backwoods, out-of-the-way places that I would have never hung out with in other circumstances. I had a blast."

Yet Bare is quick to acknowledge that not all the stereotyping concerning frat boys is entirely baseless. "It's not that all people in fraternities were assholes," he says. "It's that all the assholes were in the fraternities."

Here in Seattle, the self-proclaimed capital of all things indie, the schism between creative types and supposed Greek conformists couldn't be more pronounced. "What do people think frat guys listen to?" asks Barsuk Records publicist Ever Kipp, before answering his own question. "Dave Matthews, John Mayer, and Jack Johnson: That's the antithesis of indie rock. The frat lifestyle wholeheartedly embraces the mainstream."

In college, Kipp was "sort of a weird goth dude" who did not belong to a fraternity. Yet there were moments of envy. "Sometimes I wished I could be at a party with 300 people, hitting on some hot blond girl," he admits.

This, of course, hints at a chink in the DIY community's anti-frat armor, which has been propped up in large part by broad pop culture stereotyping in movies like Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds, Van Wilder, and Accepted. "The whole point of those movies is that the outsiders are taking down the powers that be," says Van Riker, Kipp's colleague at Barsuk and a former Theta Chi at Syracuse University. "And Seattle is an outsider culture."