There's No Such Thing As a Free Lunch

Jonathan Coulton built his entire career on the Internet. The rest of us are supposed to follow.

A friend and I were riding our Vespas over in West Seattle a couple of weeks ago when we rounded a corner and came face to face with a full-grown coyote standing in the street. His body-language and his tremendous ears gave him away from a distance: not a dog. Low-slung, grey and slinky, his tail bushy as a squirrel’s, he moved like a thief. By the time we pulled our Vespas to a stop he’d scooted up into the brush, but he peered back at us for awhile before dissolving into the shadows. Despite his wild manner he seemed perfectly unflustered on the manicured hillsides of Fauntleroy. My friend and I were jumping around with excitement, but a neighbor in his driveway gestured unperturbed (Mr. Cool West Seattle) to a sign on a nearby telephone pole, which read, “A family of coyotes is eating cats, so BEWARE!”�

I have to say, cat-lover that I am, that I am even more in love with the cat-eating coyotes of West Seattle! I haven’t rooted for an animal like this since that bear swam over from Vashon Island last year and freaked out Federal Way. I get the feeling that there may be coyotes all over West Seattle, but until they start eating Volvos no one is going to raise a stink. My one complaint about the wildlife around here is that it always seems to make itself scarce whenever I have out-of-town guests visiting from faraway places. I make a big production to my far-flung friends about how the bald eagles are going to eat their Pomeranians, and how the sea lions break into unlocked cars, and how the raccoons drink Night Train and have learned to make phone calls, but whenever I have a friend visiting from, say, Spain, the in-town animal life seems to take a union break. Two days before my most recent Spanish guest arrived I had a possum fighting a great Horned Owl across my front lawn, but for the three days of her visit, the best I could muster was a trip to watch the smelt get pummeled by the current at the Ballard Locks. “Their bodies are getting acclimated to the salt water, see?”� I said. “Yawn,”� she yawned.

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Behind My Music: Vol. III

I’ve talked a little bit about rock and roll lifers, but there are many different types and I should probably define my terms. The rock lifers of song and story, the ones we admire the most, are perpetual teenagers not good for anything else. They don’t have a “back-up plan”�, they don’t ever quit playing music to “get serious”�, and they don’t change their style to suit the fashion. They smell like cigarettes. Most of these rock lifers have day jobs, because playing music pays for shit, but their job is just a transparent formality. Music is their entire identity. Bear this in mind if you’re considering getting married to this type of rock lifer.

Another kind is the lucky lifer. They had bands in high school and college like a thousand other punters, but somewhere along the way they hit the numbers and became rock stars. The overwhelming majority of young bands imagine that this fate awaits them, a dream which in most cases will slowly shrivel and die covered in disappointment and agony. (But keep practicing, kids!) Brian May of Queen was working on his PhD in physics when his band took off, Tom Scholz of Boston has a masters degree in mechanical engineering from MIT, Dexter Holland of the Offspring has a masters in molecular biology, and so forth. These guys clearly didn’t intend to be rock stars, they were anticipating a lifetime of sodomizing bacteria before their rock dreams came true. Wankers.

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My Seattle Rock Journey - Part Two

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 the street corners 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 breastfed too little or too much, screaming tunelessly over humorless dropped-D grinds. The Crocodile, the Colorbox, Moe’s, Rockcandy and the Off Ramp were all slinging the Long Island Iced Teas, and the premier Grunge bands were raking in multi-platinum 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 they actually made us stupider to play. 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 five-foot ceilings and I had to play hunched over. Plus, they seemed unsure exactly where the “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 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 the 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.

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My Seattle Rock Journey - Part One

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 for the 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, would have been inconceivable to me when I first arrived in Seattle, even more unlikely after I’d been here a while, and I expect 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 twenty-two 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 twenty-four, 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 to Seattle, 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 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 had been hitchhiking 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.

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Where's Roderick?

I know, you're probably wondering what's going on with John Roderick's usual Wednesday morning column here on Reverb. Here it is, after 4 p.m., and Mr. Roderick still hasn't delivered his eagerly-anticipated follow up to last week's installment, "I Don't Need Pills, Just Psychology Today." No, he's not late, we're just making a change. We feel Mr. Roderick's prose will fit better on Mondays. What better way to get the week started! So, fear not, Roderick fans, he's not leaving Reverb, he's just moving to Monday.

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I Don't Need Pills, Just Psychology Today

A few years ago my sister, who is a few years younger than I, took a greater interest in psychology. She’d always been an adventuress, a mountain girl and a road warrior, but had reached a point in her life where she wanted to meet a nice man who was considerate and with whom she could fall in love. She couldn’t understand why, from the wide selection of skaters, snowboarders, surfers, hitchhikers, card sharps, crab fishermen, jugglers, smoke jumpers, pickpockets, pearl divers, flat-track racers and trance DJs she called friends, there weren’t any dependable, trustworthy guys who were capable of love. She actually knew a few guys who were dependable and capable of love, too, but she rejected them for not being able to skate. Naturally she concluded that the problem was that SHE had a fear of intimacy and wasn’t ATTRACTING the right guys due to UNCONSCIOUS signals she was sending, so she commenced reading multiple thick volumes of relationship-focused psychology manuals with names like “Men are Despicable Bastard Sons of Orion but We Selflessly Love Them and Here’s Why”�. The insights contained in these volumes were, naturally, the kind you want to share with those closest to you, so my sister and I had many conversations that went like this:

Sister: Did it ever occur to you that your many failed “relationships”� are just outward manifestations of your Narcissistic Personality Disorder?”�

Me: (Intentionally not looking up from a thick book on the Reformation) Hmmmm?

Sister: This book I’m reading describes you perfectly.

Me: (Still reading) Mmmm, yes. That is absolutely not fascinating.

Sister: Go ahead and laugh, but you are pushing people away because of a fear of intimacy.

Me: No, I am pushing people away because they won’t stop psychoanalyzing me with Oprah vocabulary. Also, girls can’t handle my animal reflexes.

Sister: That is exactly what a person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder would say. Face your problems or be doomed to loneliness.

Me: I don’t have a personality disorder, I have a personality. Why can’t the world see?

Sister: Well, don’t blame me when your kids call you Mr. Roderick and cower in fear.

Me: I HOPE my kids call me Mr. Roderick! They’d better!

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I've Gained a Gig, But Lost a Tooth

I've had a very busy week, flitting from this high-society party to that glamorous music industry shindig, hobnobbing with famous and brilliant artists and musicians, and brooding introspectively in front of a crackling fire with a beautiful Russian double-agent, but unfortunately the various non-disclosure agreements I was coerced to sign prohibit me from even referring to those events in print. Instead, I intended to offer my exegesis of the book of Deuteronomy, (which bares a surprising resemblance to the later work of Don Rickles,) when I received a curious letter from my editors at the Seattle Weekly.

I was asked to undertake this column a month or so ago as a short-term "residency", which served the purpose of legitimizing my claim that I was a "journalist" and so therefore would be financially unable to make restitution to the plaintiffs in the unfortunate miscarriage of justice that was the judgment against me in Radcliffe v. Roderick's Miracle Enhancement Pants. That ruse accomplished I was prepared to draw the curtain on my writing career in order to concentrate exclusively on fleecing consumers by finding ways to get them to pay me to play guitar. But now the brain-trust in the executive office suites of the Seattle Weekly, who answer directly to the cabal that runs the Village Voice from a subterranean cavern a mile under the Zugspitze, who in turn must submit to weekly spankings by the undergraduate members of Skull and Bones, have proposed that I continue to columnize.

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Land of the Lost

I've always enjoyed taking long walks around Seattle, especially late at night. Nosing around in secluded neighborhoods, sneaking up dark alleys, and peering over fences are not just the stuff of great blues lyrics, they're also the innocent pastime of a bored, curious and solitary type of person. Entertainment options are limited for those night owls who hate TV, and the local geography is completely fascinating at any hour. Over the years I've discovered most every shortcut, intruded upon every hidden houseboat harbor, and tiptoed around every overgrown shack with a yard full of washing machines and crab pots between Greenlake and West Seattle. In my early twenties I would pack two Grolsch beers, a pack of Old Golds, some weed, a journal and a flashlight in my trusty East German gas mask satchel and stay out all night dumpster diving and chasing cats. What a stupid hippy I sound like I must have been. These days I don't drink, smoke or chase cats, but I've kept on wandering the city like a tramp and keep discovering new things. Now that I'm living in the south end of town there's a whole new world to be explored!

Not that I didn't already know about parts of the south end. Both sides of the Duwamish are piled high with fascinating, unguarded mounds of junk and debris enough to make your head swim with delight, if you're delighted by junk and debris. Once I owned a car I started making trips further afield, taking my first dates down to Harbor Island and up the river, driving slowly among the canyons of shipping containers and brightly lit cranes. It was a kind of relationship litmus test: "Isn't that abandoned shipyard beautiful?" The squeamish indie girls had a hard time faking a positive response to that question. "Oh... yes! It's... very, uh, dark. And... weird!"

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Keep Your Hands Off My Chili Supply

A touring indie-rock band crashed at my place last night and it was a sobering reminder of some of the less wonderful and glamorous aspects of being a musician in a world of musicians. My band and I have crashed on many a generous person's floor, and scarfed the last Top Ramen of many an angry roommate over the years, so now that I have a place of my own I feel a karmic debt to the rock-n-roll universe that will be years in the repaying. Unfortunately, as is the way with all things, when it comes to my new house the last thing I want is to have a bunch of stupid bands stinking up the place. I feel like Eddie Murphy in Trading Places, "Who has been putting out their Kools on my floor? Have you people ever heard of coasters?"

I live in the south end of town, down where Tukwila meets Renton and Skyway, and unlike the neighborhoods closer to town there are absolutely no late-night grocery or food options in my vicinity. When I first left Capitol Hill for the sunny Rainier Valley I made several after-midnight trips to the local grocery before I figured out that it wasn't just closed for routine maintenance, it was simply closed after midnight. I actually went up and pounded indignantly on the glass at one point, thinking that the employees had locked the doors in order to make hanky-panky on the Charmin pallets in the store room, and it was only after I registered the looks of alarm on the stock boys' faces that I realized I could be mistaken for a deranged person. Living on Capitol Hill for so many years I assumed that everyone shopped for chicken Cordon Bleu at four in the morning, and that every grocery store was full of tweaking ravers in blue fur chaps sucking on LED pacifiers. Not so.

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It's not the city that never sleeps, it's me

I went to New York this week to see the fabulous new play Hello Failure by Seattle's own Kristen Kosmas at P.S. 122, and to take care of some business, get into some trouble, and check in on some friends. I'm reporting to you now from the exotic and glamorous Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, (which is not, apparently, the namesake of Houston rapper Bushwick Bill of the Geto Boys),

but which IS the latest Brooklyn neighborhood to be infested with the plague of conformist Williamsburg hipsters seeking cheap rent who are incrementally destroying New York in every direction. (No offense to the conformist Williamsburg hipsters who let me crash at their place and use their computer).

Yes, it's another glorious week in New York for your humble blogger, starting at JFK airport where, in the process of helping a charming little old lady (probably a pickpocket) negotiate the proper series of shuttle and train transfers to Manhattan to visit her ailing sister-in-law, I groggily got on the E train WITH her, not my train at all, and proceeded to spend the morning of my first day on a leisurely tour of many, many different subway stops across the boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan. I was heading to a nine-thirty meeting down on Wall Street, not because my indie-rock fortunes require that I personally monitor the stock exchange, but for altogether more tragic and hilarious reasons. In the aftermath of 9/11, most of the banks and investment brokerages started hightailing it out of the financial district and setting up shop in the relatively more bustling areas of midtown, where they could kid themselves that they would be safer from terrorist attack at least until the terrorists got hard-ons for Radio City Music Hall. Unfortunately, that area was the traditional home of all the record labels and TV networks, and as the rents started rising and the suits started pouring in to the neighborhood the first people to be displaced were the smaller labels and publishing houses operating on the lower floors of Rockefeller Center. Those small labels and publishers went where the office rents were cheapest, down in the now half-deserted canyons of Wall Street. The juxtaposition of rock slouchers and Financial District bluebloods is a treat for the eye.

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