Behind My Music (Before the Long Winters)

For those readers unfamiliar with the work of my band, The Long Winters, I'm going to delve into the history of my little corner of the Seattle music scene in order to answer the question "Why does this ding-dong have a music column in Seattle Weekly?".Seattle has produced four or five complete generations of music in the time I've been hanging around, and although I played almost no role in any of them, I witnessed them all from the back of the bar. The life I lead now, as a singer-songwriter with a full-time band and a small but devoted legion of fans, was inconceivable to me when I first arrived in Seattle and seemed even more unlikely after I'd been here a while, and I expect it's still hard to comprehend for some of the musicians who've played alongside me.

The drummer in my first Seattle band, back in 1991, once said to me, "If we haven't made it by the time we're 24, I'm quitting music." He was the sort of guy given to making pronouncements like that (he also told me he wouldn't play "slow" tempos, mostly because he couldn't), but he was expressing a common sentiment, one I heard often from other musicians and one I felt myself at that age. We were both 22 at the time, and our band, Chautauqua, had never played a show, but we both thought we understood a great truth about being a rock musician: If you haven't made it by the time you're 24, you ain't gonna. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I got started in the Seattle music scene by accident, and I was incredibly unlikely to succeed. I had no intention of being a musician, hadn't really even intended to move here, didn't want to be a rocker dude, didn't care about bands, and didn't really play guitar. I could play a few chords I'd learned in high school, and had written a few "blues" songs about "life on the road," but they were terrible songs and I had enough taste to know it. Honestly, although I admired the rock-'n'-roll "lifers" who wore engineer boots and denim vests, for the most part I thought rock culture was too dull-witted to take seriously. I wanted to be a writer, like Raymond Carver or Paul Bowles. I wore my sweaters inside out and hitchhiked around America, trying to be gritty and hard-bitten until the brilliant writing poured forth. Every day I wrote in my spiral notebook and every day my writing was crap. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong.

I arrived here in the fall of 1990 with no money and no prospects. Some kids I knew from Anchorage were renting a big house on the edge of the U District, with a half-dozen punkers squatting in their closets and kitchen cabinets, and I followed them home. They'd moved up from Olympia, and their band, Motor Virus, practiced in the basement, along with the all-girl punk band Dickless and a newly arrived Tucson band called the Supersuckers. They had four Marshall stacks in a room just big enough for a washer and dryer. I shared a bedroom with a fellow Alaskan who made money by picking psychedelic mushrooms on the UW campus and selling them to frat boys. He slept on the single mattress and I slept on the floor with a rolled-up sweater for a pillow. One afternoon I was loafing around the house when the phone rang. It was the promoter from the OK Hotel, looking for one of my housemates to work security at a DOA concert that night. I told him no one was home and he said, "What about you?" That was my first "music industry" job, crouching onstage at a DOA show with instructions to tackle stage divers and throw them back into the crowd, where they were heading anyway. The singer, Joey Shithead, whipped out a chainsaw and started waving it around in full punk-rock theatrical glory before promptly cutting off the tip of his own finger. That show ended rather abruptly.

My high school girlfriend's older sister graduated from the UW in 1990 and, in the fashion of the time, had declared herself unequivocally and irrevocably a lesbian. (She's now happily married in the Tri-Cities with three kids.) She was working as a bartender in a seedy gay bar next to I-5 and clued me in to the fact that the owner was going to start booking rock bands and wanted to hire some straight kids to work the shows. It was January 1991 and I'd been kicked out of my punk-rock crash pad, left to sleep during the day at the Godfather's Pizza on Broadway and wander around in the rain at night, feeling gritty and hard-bitten. I applied for a job and was the second straight kid hired full time, after Sue the ticket girl.