Revolution Girl Trouble Style Now

Yesterday was the last day of my one year appointment teaching at Evergreen State College and of course everything went wrong, because it’s been that kind of quarter. Evergreen is the kind of place where what happens on campus should stay on campus, so I’m not even going to go into it, but the short version involved homophobic Jesus Freaks, mistaken identity and -- inevitably -- someone being dragged off to the slammer. And of course it was pouring with rain. I went home and thought, ‘Hmmm, what show that’s happening here tomorrow will cheer me up more, Mudhoney or Girl Trouble?’

Ha ha, talk about being between rock and a hard place! I'll definitely miss that kind of choice when I get back to Cali. Asked to help me decide, my FB page split pretty evenly, though they didn’t really know that the choice also included some variables: indoor/outdoor, rain/shine, close/far, drive/walk, all those things you have to factor into whether you want to go to a show or not. Honestly, much as I like Girl Trouble I might have chosen Mudhoney if I had been less constrained by those external factors, and not even because I like Mudhoney more than Girl Trouble, or because it was free; I just liked the opener better, and I thought the all-day carnival sounded like fun.  However, it was Prom night here in Oly and I had to take my popular daughter to have her hair done and all that jazz, which pretty much decided me. Girl Trouble it was.

Prom prep took quite some time, but come 9 o clock it was time for me to step out myself. There were four bands on the bill, and the sun hadn’t even set yet – it gets dark really late around here – but I thought I better go early just in case it sold out. I keep forgetting that this is Olympia, where you can park in front of the venue and nothing ever sells out, not even Pussy Riot. I went alone, my favorite way to go, with my notebook, and my phone to play on in the interim, but it turned out I didn’t need to crack open either of them: the second I sat down, the woman I sat next to turned to me and said, “HI! Are you here alone? I am too!”

The thing is, even in this tiresomely overpopulated and generic world where it’s almost impossible to find your tribe, there’s this thing about women – not men, only women – who go to shows alone. We’re all alike. I mean, in some ways, this woman Lee was nothing like me. She is the night time janitor at a nearby club and a gardener by day. But in other ways, we were two minds with but a single thought, and that thought was, 'Girl Trouble rocks!" She had been dropped off at the club by her husband (who hates going to shows); I was on a brief vacation from my daughter, and so for all intents and purposes, we immediately embarked on a brief, blind, heterosexual girl date-of-sorts. Within moments we had bought each other a drink, got some popcorn at the bar, and were discussing how empowering we always find the sight of a woman drummer, a la Girl Trouble's Bon Henderson. Then we talked early SubPop. Her favorite band is Unwound. Mine is the Fastbacks. And then, after we had expressed sufficient liking for the other person’s obsessions, the show started. That is, the first of two openers before Girl Trouble's set started.

You know, it’s really been a long time since I’ve been in the presence of bad bands. Too long, probably. And honestly, given the genus, these two bands barely qualified for the moniker. The first band wasn’t so much bad as seriously confused. They looked like hellbillies but then they sounded like…well, like they had no idea what they sounded like. Unlike, say, the actual band Hellbilly, they had a keyboard, and a long-haired lead guy playing it who was far too musical for his own good.  Lee and I listened carefully to their first few numbers. Then she turned to me. “I’m hearing…Crowded House?”

 Me: “Ben Folds? F.U.N.?” 

Her: “Rush? Styx?” 

Me: “Sort of the bad parts about Todd Rundgren?”

Her, after a long thoughtful pause, during which the band started to really wallow in mid-tempo madness. “Richard Marx?” 

Then Lee said, “The thing about me is, I’m one of those people who likes all genres of music. World music, metal, pop.” She paused. “Just not all in the same song.”

 I had to laugh. Honestly, in the past I might have really gone batshit negative on this band, but I think it shows how much I’ve changed that, as I said to Lee near the end of their very bizarre set, instead of hating on them I kind of admired them. Their inability to see or hear their own shortcomings was sort of charming. Bad bands are such a reminder of people’s endless ability to blind themselves to reality...to live in hope. Plus, bad bands sometimes get good. And even if you aren’t going to be there to experience that, you have to clap, just like you have to clap for kids who can’t hold a tune on the violin at the elementary school recital.  

The second band, the Shaken Growlers, were also sort of delusional, but in a more fun way. They were all men in their fifties and sixties, greying and paunchy, but they were wearing matching blue striped shirts with their band logo carefully stitched on the pocket. I said to Lee, “Do you think their wives organized those shirts for them?” 

Lee: “Yup. Or else their moms.”

The Shaken Growlers were a three piece, and one of them was wearing a lei, so I was like, ‘this better be surf music.” It wasn’t, but guess what, it shredded! Stone cold garage rock, alot like anything on Norton or Estrus, it would have fit right in at Cavestomp, or Burger Boogaloo. Pretty much all you need to know about this band is that, in addition to their originals, they covered the Sweet, Iggy Pop, and Cher’s “Gypsies Tramps and Thieves,” at a breakneck pace, as if Cher herself was chasing them down with a flame thrower.
Up to this point we’d been sitting, but we now stood up and moved forward. You know: girls to the front. And it really was girls to the front at this club…not only because Girl Trouble has this weird inexplicable girl thing going on, but also because it’s Olympia, where girls are always to the front. I had forgotten about that. Also forgotten: Olympia’s thing about dancing, and dance parties. It’s what they do best here. Within two songs the whole audience had broken into the Snoopy dance; every single person there was flopping around shaking their head and moving side-to-side like the characters in Peanuts during the school dance sequence in “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” myself included of course. The whole place was bopping, channeling decades of dank Washingtonian sludgey three chord rock: the Sonics, the Kingsmen, the U Men, Paul Revere – not to mention all the non-Washingtonian versions of it, like the Cramps and the Mummies and the Lyres, you name it.

So we shook. And, oh, snap, I thought. Here I am already half way on my way out of Olympia, and this is the first K Records act I’m seeing live, i.e. this is the first really local gig I’ve been to, and that’s so sad. I mean, I’m fairly sure it’s the only one I could have seen in my time here – but it says something bad about Olympia that I only found out about this gig due to a timely FB message from my friend Lindsay Hutton,  who lives in far-off Scotland. Lindsay has a fanzine called Next Big Thing in which Girl Trouble comes close to Jesus in his personal pantheon, and he's been nagging me by tweet all week to be at this gig. I’d like to tell the story of how Lindsay and I met, which I am sure is very interesting and possibly involves the Posies, but I don’t remember much about it except waking up in his house one morning and being forced to eat haggis for breakfast. I bet you anything you like that's happened to Girl Trouble too.

Girl Trouble are from Tacoma, and although I haven’t thought about them since the late 1990s, according to Lee, they’ve been playing at clubs like this in Washington all this  time since. You could tell this was so because a) they can grind it out like nobody’s business, and b) everyone in the audience was so familiar with their music – and because also, the audience was peppered with their family members. There was one, a niece of singer Kurt Kendall’s, who’d apparently never seen them before, and I was a little worried for her, since the last time I saw Girl Trouble, I am pretty sure that he was only wearing a teeny tiny bathing suit. A speedo.

Today. The t shirt says: Gay Witches for Abortion

Could that be true? “Yes,” said Lee, decisively. Oh yeah! As soon as I saw him I remembered: he’s one of those known nudists. Happily he kept his pants on at this show, but not his shirt, despite a very large and newly-formed stomach which he referred to as a baby he was going to give birth to soon. (“She’ll be 19 and fully formed when she arrives, so I’m just going to drop her off at Evergreen and say, “Make daddy proud!”) 

Suffice to say that Kendall looks really different now than he did back in the day when Girl Trouble would hold crazy house parties attended by Nirvana and the Melvins (and which, I know for a fact, that Nirvana were flattered to be asked to). The rest of the band, Bon and Bill Henderson and bassist Dale Phillips, look different too. But happily, theirs is an oeuvre that doesn’t age, since it started life so heavily in the looking-backward mode already, and here’s the thing that both Lee and I agreed on, if they don’t have to age, then we don’t have to either.

No wonder we were all in ecstasy in there! Briefly, time stood still. Truthfully, this sort of thing just gets better and better, as we get older and older, and by the end of Girl Trouble’s too-short set, someone had accidentally spilled a beer on me, and Kurt was crawling through the crowd, shaking his maracas and rubbing his naked chest on people in the grossest manner possible, and everyone grabbed one another’s buttocks and pretended to make out. At the end, as is his custom, he hurled plastic toys at the crowd. I got a figurine of Bobby, from “Recess” (he looks exactly like Kurt Kendall does now, only minus the beard and plus a shirt) and Lee got a little airplane. It was like our personal prom, I thought, and these were our favors: a prom for us real grown-ups, where popularity and looks don’t matter, where clothes and partners and the car you drove there are pointless, where your hair and nails can be a mess…a prom where the only thing left, shorn off of all the capitalist bullshit, is the dance ‘til you drop part. A prom in paradise, if you will.

To stretch a metaphor: this prom isn’t for the strivers, it’s for the survivors. Girl Trouble may never have made it in the so-called Real World in the same way so many of their peers did, but look around. Who’s still standing?

what a gig.