Behind My Music: Vol. II

Seattle in 1994 was like Dawson City in 1898, two years after the gold rush. The bloom of grunge was past, long past, but the massive influx of young people to the city had barely slowed. Clusters of shivering kids crowded streetcorners in their plaid shirts and pre-dirtied boots, wondering if maybe they should give heroin a try. College dropouts from Florida and Minneapolis grew their hair like Chris Cornell and drove their Buick Skylarks to Seattle, sending the price of Fender Jazzmasters skyrocketing. Every garage and basement from Everett to Olympia had a knot of sweaty young guys angry about being breast-fed too little or too much, screaming tunelessly over humorless dropped-D grinds. The Crocodile, the Colorbox, Moe's, Rckcndy, and the Off Ramp were all slinging the Long Island iced teas, and the premier grunge bands were raking in multiplatinum sales, but the city had jumped the shark.

Likewise, I was not a success in music, although I had never experienced a heyday either. For six months I tried singing for an unlistenable grunge band called Bugbear, but our songs were so unimaginative that playing them actually made us stupider. We used band practice as an excuse to drink beer until I realized our music was a poor excuse even for that. We never played a show. After I quit Bugbear, they reformed with a girl singer and became a pretty successful country band called Goody Blick and the Country Kind, so that goes to show. Then I tried out as the bass player for a shoegazer band called Revolve, but their practice space had 5-foot ceilings and I had to play hunched over. Plus, they seemed unsure exactly where "one" was, so I never called them back. Then I was the lead guitarist in King Nilla, a massively heavy sludge-core techno outfit, but the band was so incredibly stoned that at most practices we just hammered one note for an hour thinking we were brilliant and avant-garde. Either that or the singer would get so paranoid he wouldn't come out of the bathroom. Interestingly, King Nilla shared a house with then–Sky Cries Mary keyboardist Gordon Raphael, who went on to produce the Strokes' first record. But at that time Gordon wore velvet stretch pants and lots of scarves, and showed no sign of his future brilliance. Anyway, King Nilla never played a show. I was borrowing instruments and playing other people's music, and truth be told I was not a very good musician. My main appeal was that I seemed unhinged, which was a big selling point back then.

Then Kurt Cobain killed himself. I wasn't really a passionate follower of Nirvana and had never seen them play despite a half-dozen opportunities, so I was surprised to find myself devastated. Why the hell should I care? I went that afternoon to Linda's Tavern, to the Comet, and to Ernie Steele's, looking for a wake, or a celebration, or something, but everywhere people were talking quietly, keeping it inside. Conversations avoided the topic, or touched on it with sardonic grimaces and downcast looks. It was unfathomable, and no one could express anything. Three days of wincing quietude later, quite unexpectedly, I sat down in a chair and cried, cried and cried, having never really cried about anything before. Why? The most I'd ever said about Kurt Cobain was that I thought he was a hayseed. He was pretty good, though.

But if there was ever a sign that the dream was over, that was it. It was an inauspicious time to start a band. But even as the tens of thousands of Generation X grunge wannabes started applying for jobs at Amazon and buying regular shoes, the music scene in Seattle survived. There were plenty of holdover bands still swaggering in sticky leather pants before ever-dwindling crowds, but as their numbers thinned the awkward geek-rockers who had always been the backbone of the scene here started to rise to the surface. Up Records was founded, everyone was talking about Hush Harbor, and the Presidents of the USA were starting to spaz out. I was clearly past my prime already, having survived two music scenes and five bands without ever having appeared before a live audience, but two things conspired to get me back in the songwriting saddle. First, a co-worker named Larry Rosen, who at the time was the ripe old age of 27 and was getting married and putting his punk-rock days behind him, found out I was a guitarist and gave me his old Epiphone electric guitar. What a mensch! Suddenly I had my own guitar again, and after I stripped off the Agent Orange and Black Flag stickers, it was almost playable. Second, Built to Spill released their first record, Ultimate Alternative Wavers, which turned the Northwest music scene on its ear. That record got inside my head and made me realize that it was possible to make good guitar music still. Four years of listening to bands that sounded like Dave Navarro humping Jimmy Page's mailbox had left me feeling like playing the guitar was a pointless exercise. But here was a band that was smarter than anything I'd heard in a decade.