Welcome to the Jangle*

I wrote on my FB page, ‘should I make the trip to Seattle to see Teenage Fanclub  tonight? It’s 75 miles each way,” and Luiz wrote back from sunny Lisbon: “I’d do it on my bike. In the snow.” Happily it wasn’t snowing when I took off up the Five that night around 7:30, though it had been pouring most of the day, and I’m skittish about driving in the rain.

Just past Lakewood, there is an enormous emporium on your right called “Bass Pro Shops.” It’s the length and breadth of a CostCo and has a sign the size of the Emerald Queen Casino; I think the complex it sits on includes a bowling alley, a seafood restaurant and a shooting range. I might be wrong about the latter, but it generally gives the impression that going shopping there will be the time of your life. Judging from its logo, which involves a large fish, it sells every type of fishing rod and lure known to man, as well as, inevitably, guns. This makes sense since practically everyone here has some kind of a boat and also a bit of a death wish. But whenever I see it, I prefer to pretend  that it actually provides basses to bass players, and that it’s size is indicative of the enormous need here in the Seattle and South Sound area for people to have a wide array of choices in bass guitars.

This idea fits in with my fantasy notion of Seattle the mecca for my people, that is, as a place where literally everyone on the streets owns a copy of Big Star 3rd and deeply understands it’s beauty, and I must say, attending a Teenage Fanclub show is not going to disabuse anyone of that concept. From where I sat two hours later, my view of the band was totally enhanced by a guy standing center front in a homemade football jersey with the number 13 emblazoned on the back. (In joke. “Thirteen” is the title of a TF album and also an iconic Big Star song, but it was doubly funny since football jerseys in Seattle are supposed to say ‘12’ – it’s some kind of magic fan number for the Seahawks.) Rationally, I know that Seattle has its share of Bon Jovi fans and gun nuts. But in my mind it is a place of super intense fandom, the likes of which you will encounter nowhere else.

TFC Neptune Theater 3/24/17 Note 13 jersey in front.

That effect is only heightened by the rightness of the venues here. The Neptune is a converted movie theater in the U District, right by the UW campus. It reminds me of an old theater in my home town, the Varsity, where we used to go see midnight movies – “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones” and “Gimme Shelter” – with its cruddy loud carpet and low-hanging balcony seats. But the Neptune has something that makes it much more rock ‘n’ roll than the Varsity, and it’s not just the bar that’s been installed in the back of the orchestra section or the old fashioned décor, replete with fake stained glass windows of Poseidon and mermaids that looks like it’s going to crumble into dust in front of your eyes. It’s not really speakable, that thing that it has, it’s more like a sense you get when you walk in that you are about to enter a state of mind.

When I entered the Neptune for the first time on Friday, the opener, Britta Phillips, was already on stage. I took one look and went, “oh HI, it’s Luna,” because it was so Luna-like, in my opinion: that’s what it looked like, minus a member or two, and that’s what it sounded like in timbre and tempo if not in actual song choice. But that's cool, I like Luna's timbre and tempo and it's never not a good time to hear echoes of the Rainy Day. And then came the Fannies, as they used to be affectionately called by the UK press. (“Fanny” is a worse word in England than it is in America, where it merely sounds like something your grandma might say she’d paddle if you stole a cookie, but being a Teenage Fanny is definitely a good thing.) And the crowd pressed forward, hushed; expectant: it looked, I thought, like a group that loved this band with a passion but had somehow never seen them. I don’t know how a young person gets to hear of Teenage Fanclub these days, but the audience was not entirely elderly. Maybe Nirvana is still working its weird magic from beyond the grave, whispering into the ears of the children the names of their most beloved bands, and then forcing them to buy the vinyl. Or maybe it’s just the final result of the long-tail theory, and if you gather all those plot points together they aren’t as negligible as you’d think.

So, when you hear Teenage Fanclub, what do you think of? Do you think of 1991? I do. But it turns out that the Fanclub’s sound is more durable than that. You can go see them and be pelted back to that fantastic summer, or you could just as easily belong to the magic circle where, forever after, they will remind you instead of 2017 and that one great night in March when we were all so happy because the Republican administration finally had to eat shit in front of us all. Or, if you’re me, they can do both, amalgamating past and future in an aural shake and bake of the Byrds and Black Sabbath; of Husker Du and the Everly Brothers, or the Mammas and the Pappas minus all the Mammas. They are and always will be the zenith of  jangly guitars, hooky melodies, and creamy-sweet harmonies, not ringing but actually tolling like a massively mid-tempo church bell, with a beautiful mix of voices that sound like they swallowed a magical  potion made of Beach Boys DNA and are now expelling it in a gaseous cloud directly into our faces. That sound is so beautiful it is practically visible, so rich and creamy that at one point I felt like I could see its actual waves blasting out from the mouths and their guitars and coating every one of us with a thin layer of sonic frosting.

It’s been over fifteen years since I reviewed a show and I’m not going to do it here. If you want to find out what they played you can go online; someone may even have posted the show (although from my vantage point in the balcony I was incredibly happy to see that almost no one in Seattle had their phone up for more than a snapshot: it was like entering a classroom where no one was looking at Facebook, i.e. truly unprecedented.) Suffice to say they finished with “The Concept” from Bandwagonesque, and the crowd bounced up and down and ROARED out the words as if they were Smells Like Teen Spirit - “She’s gonna get some records by the Stay-tus Quo, whoa-oh!” – and that being the case, you can only imagine what the final encore, of “Everything Flows” was like. Or maybe you'll never know which way it flows...though if you've read this far that seems unlikely.

And I’ll leave it there, that is, in your imagination, as I get in my car and drive home down the Five, first past a vista of Seattle that never fails to enchant, then down the long boring five past Tacoma, the casino, and of course the Bass Pro Shop where the reverie began five hours earlier. Thank god I wasn’t on a bicycle, and it wasn’t snowing. But I knew exactly what Luiz meant.

* Credit for this headline goes to Steve Michener of Big Dipper. 

We get older every year, but you don't change


 

Go As You Were

Last weekend the sun came out in Oly and everyone went stark staring mad, even Caitlin, who for once agreed to leave the house. The only condition was that she had control of the radio in the car - le sigh - and that we be back by 5. Since she only wakes up at noon, that didn’t leave many places to go – no Portland, no Seattle – so we went to Aberdeen, in the hopes of seeing  the ocean.

Aberdeen, of course, is known by most people in America as the childhood home of Kurt Cobain, who in some ways was my childhood friend – though by childhood, I mean, my twenties, by which time he’d left there, and  “friend’ is an enormous exaggeration; he was the friend of one of my best friend's boy friend, and as I’ve said elsewhere, the extent of our so-called friendship was that at the height of his fame, I was a person who’s name he still knew, and that was about it. However, that was not nothing. If you think having the most popular kid in High School say ‘Hi’ to you in the halls makes for a good day, try having Kurt Cobain greet you by name in public somewhere. You won’t just bask in reflected glory. People will actually throw money at you.

I can tell you the last thing he said to me. “Hi Gina, what are you doing here?” I know that’s what he said, because it's like the last three things he said to me. I was always popping up in unexpected places -- like Denmark - and the answer was always the same: “Writing about you.”

 “Oh.”

End of conversation.

Anyway, the whole time I knew him – “knew” him – he characterized his home town of Aberdeen as a total shit hole that he didn’t want to go back to. But I never went there until this week, and what surprised me about it was that it was beautiful there. I don’t mean the town itself, but its surroundings. Indeed, you never saw a place that looked less like grunge sounds. To me grunge sounds urban, gritty, melancholic. Before the word was coined, the one we used to describe that sound was dirge. Bauhaus was dirge. Killing Joke was dirge. The Swans were dirge. Nirvana wasn’t dirge, exactly, it was faster, but it had points in common, and it sounded more like icky parts of London – crossed with icky bits of Seattle – than with this, the pastoral idyll that Grey’s Harbor County limns.

Here in Washington, Nirvana is still endlessly on high rotation on the radio. Maybe that's true elsewhere too, but it couldn't be nearly as true as here: you can't go twenty minutes without hearing them. Once, when I first moved here, I drove up to Snoqualmie Falls to see the water and the lodge, and KNND ("The End") was having some kind of grunge weekend marathon, and it was all Nirvana, the whole way there. Snoqualmie Falls is where Twin Peaks was filmed and the drive there - through Auburn - is very woodsy. It felt right to hear Nirvana on my way up o the mountains, because Twin Peaks and high grunge go together historically; plus, I am always happy to hear what I am lucky to call Friend Rock.

But Snoqualmie isn't anything like Aberdeen, it turns out. To get to Aberdeen from Olympia, you head out on Mud Bay road, across the flats and round the edge of the Puget sound, and up along the side of a forest, with watery boulders lining the sides of the road. Soon you head into open farm country, the kind with cattle grazing and old fashioned red barns, edged with tree-covered forests and bright, bright green grass, a color you’ll never see in California. The farms hint at fresh eggs and warm milk and new pototoes – they get them from here at Five Guys, I know – and you know that come summer there will be fruit trees galore as well.

Half way to Aberdeen, the cooling towers of a  nuclear reactor pops out along one of the forested ridges. It’s called Satsop and it’s not only abandoned, according to Wikipedia it was never even completed. It’s just a pointless ghost on the highway, a funny little pointer towards “The Simpsons.” Otherwise the landscape is lush and pristine. If it sounded like it looked, it would be a simple Mozart etude, or perhaps a folk song with a banjo. 

One of the things I can never get over here is how empty Washington State is. The freeway only has two lanes each way, and at the end part of it it just goes alongside houses. Caitlin and I wondered what it would be like to live there, right next to the highway. As we got closer to the port, there were a lot of churches. Or signs for them. The first one said, “Are you feeling flustered? Ask Jesus for Help.” Flustered? For reals? I am almost always feeling flustered, but it wouldn’t ever occur to me to ask anyone for help over it, least of all Jesus. Being flustered is the least of my problems.

We also saw a bunch of marijuana shops and tasting parlors (well, two); a paint ball range, a disk golf course, a ‘weekend getaway’ called ‘Tokeville,’ and inevitably a giant Walmart which sort of dominates the town. When you first cross into Aberdeen, there’s a tidy little stand-alone Starbucks on the right, and I am pretty sure all of these things were not in place when Kurt lived here. Neither, of course, was the welcome sign. "Welcome To Aberdeen. Come As You Are!" Do you think the city fathers have listened to the lyrics of that song lately? "Come as a friend, as an old enemy...come doused in mud, soaked in bleach, as an old memoria..." Talk about a spectre haunting Europe....not to mention America and everywhere else.

Driving on through town, we got a better flavor of Aberdeen-as-teenage-wasteland, especially when we continued on to Hoquiam, which is poorer and more downtrodden: it looked, Caitlin said, like some suburban part of San Diego got plopped into the deep south, and it’s true: as in the south, there are train trestles and empty store fronts and a port that looks like it's out of a Raymond Chandler novel, and in the residential part, lawns that look unkempt with burnt out cars on them. It looked like you might come across a body - or at least a dead drunk body - at any moment. You'd definitely see a mangy dog if you stayed for more than half an hour.

We continued on for a while up the highway, but it started to look eerie and strange and we had to drive through all these clear cuts. You know you're in the very corner of the United States out there, it ...plus the forest out there is somewhat unholy; the trees look like someone tortured them. Some of them are bent over like tall, skinny willows; others just lack branches except at the very tip top. It feels dystopian. Also, our five o clock deadline was looming and it seemed like we would never get to the actual ocean, so we eventually turned around and drove back to Oly.

It wasn’t a very extensive trip to Aberdeen, but it was interesting nonetheless. My colleague from here tells me that Aberdeen in the 1980s, when Kurt was growing up, was at the height of its degradation; that the death of the logging industry had made it into a wasteland of epic proportions, and for the sake of people here, I'm glad it's not like that now. In some ways it is a little unnerving to think how much has changed about the world since Nirvana walked the earth, but in other ways, maybe not so much. Kurt left this place because it was conservative and anti-gay and full of rednecks, and though we only talked to one person while we were there and he seemed nice enough, it wasn't hard to infer that Aberdeen still may be all those things. At one point on our way home, we were traveling behind a car that had two stupid Seahawks flags stuck in its windows, flapping like giant elephant ears, and a parody bumper sticker that depicted the owner’s stick-figure family as four differently sized and shaped automatic weapons. And I swear that I don't have a gun.

The words wafted unbidden through my head as I passed the guy. They won't be going away any time soon.

There's a Pussy Riot Goin' On

Nothing ever happens in this town, and then, BAM, Pussy Riot shows up. That’s what I thought when I saw their names on the marquee at the Capital Theater. That, and, “is it the REAL Pussy Riot?”

A short amount of research revealed that yes. Yes, it was. They were in America to go to SXSW, and these gigs – from Seattle to New Mexico – were rehearsals. What wasn’t clear was what the performance would be: a film? A talk? Some kind of musical thingamajig? In the end, it was all three of those things, and something else entirely – Pussy Riot Theater, they called it, and that pretty much describes it. Nothing ever sells out in Olympia but I bought a ticket online anyway, just in case. $20.

All day Thursday it rained like hell, and I was not very up for a show by evening. The faculty was having some kind of drinks night at the brewery next door, so I stopped by for a freebie, and not only was no one going to see Pussy Riot, they didn’t believe me when I said I was. “Is it like a Pussy Riot cover band?” one befuddled academic wondered, and what surprised me most was that they’d even heard of them. Pussy Riot has had better publicity than 99% of indie rock these days. If I said I was going to see the XX or Wilco, they’d have been blank.

Meanwhile, right around the corner, the longest and most excited line of people I’d ever seen in Olympia snaked past the theater and round the corner on to Capital Ave…well, the longest line but one. There was that time in 1991 when Fugazi was playing there during the International Pop Underground Festival. That line was longer. And that line may have been more excited. And if I think really hard about that line, I can see myself and Isabelle in it, wearing our babydoll dresses and combat boots, me with a backwards baseball cap on and my Clifford the Big Red Dog stuffed animal purse over my shoulder, surreptitiously peeking at all the tattoos on the people around us.

“If I was going to get a tattoo,” I told Isabelle, “it would be of Hello Kitty and I’d get it on my ankle.”

“That’s a great idea!” said Isabelle. “Then you should get some platform shoes stapled permanently to your feet as well.”

Point taken. Today I am literally the only person in my entire  hot yoga class in Oly that does not have one, but at the time, having a tattoo was still transgressive.

That night, some twenty five years later, there were many tattooed people as well – and many were girls who looked like the descendants of Is and I, wearing homemade shifts and torn tights and hair in pig tails, and, of course, a new wrinkle: pink pussy hats. There were also a ton of old people, like the over talkative hippie-dip guy behind me who struck up an unpleasant conversation with me about seeing some Elvis impersonator and the greatness of the blues. I read somewhere that Pussy Riot was playing Olympia in homage to the riot grrl movement, and I wondered if they were disappointed at what Olympia has on display instead now.  

Still, the point is that ghosts live in the Capital Theater though, and one of them is the ghost of me. She haunts the balcony, where I sat long ago with Isabelle staring intently down at the stage as Fugazi tore down the building: “Why can’t I live…free of SUGGESTION???”Today that song would be labeled performative feminism by my more enlightened students but at the time, Fugazi shook us and made us free: I date my feminism, such as it is, from that exact moment. It was in the air that night, because Girlie Night and Bikini Kill and all the young women that surrounded me there were infectious with fury -- girls that I didn’t know then but that came to dominate all the kinds of things that I care about, Miranda July and Kathleen Hanna and Carrie Brownstein…and when I say that they surrounded me, I mean that quite literally, like, they were sitting there, right next to me, doing what I did, thinking what I thought.

Of course, I had thought I was a feminist before that. I went to UC Berkeley. I read Simone De Beauvoir. And – more importantly though I didn’t understand it at the time – my whole life was lived in obeisance to Title XI: I was on the swim team and the diving team and I benefited entirely from its rulings. But I wasn’t really a feminist except in name. I was too square.. My daughter recently read something I wrote about being on tour with Metallica, and she said that I was sexist  because I was girl-shaming when I described the women backstage as sluts and made fun of a girl who had come up to one of the band members and asked them to  sign her tits. But I don’t know. Was I sexist, or was I just reporting? Was it important to put that in there? Was it perpetuating groupie-dom, or trying to undo it? If a man wrote it, would it have read differently? How could I have shown solidarity with those women backstage, the women I saw as somehow creating such a bad environment for me, personally, when of course they weren’t responsible for the atmosphere anymore than I was.

I think I’d probably write it the same today – OK, well maybe not using the word ‘slutty’ – but I have thought a lot about Caitlin's comment and how right she was: how deeply, embeddedly sexist I was – sexist in the blame-the-victim way. Being the only female rock critic west of the Rockies at the time, I felt like I wasn't, but I was.

Looking back, I see I was constantly, constantly, being victimized one way or another – body shamed (the most frequent comment I used to get in the mail was how ugly I must be), mansplained, talked over, belittled – and I did not even notice. I mean, I noticed, but I didn’t have the vocabulary, or the space in my mind to see what was happening: being asked to wear nylons. Being told by an editor that he needed to run my story ideas by his 17 year old son to see if they were “cool.” Being denied a story by Musician because ‘it wouldn’t be a good story for a woman reporter.’ Being laughed at. It wasn’t until the IPU – ‘ GIRLS TO THE FRONT!’ – that I got that men were the ones that needed to change their behavior to fit the situation, not me. I felt like the IPU gave me some kind of permission to bitch. And although it changed nothing in reality, if anything it made things worse, at least it gave me a justification for some of the things that had puzzled me in my life.

The year after the IPU, inspired by the movement, I led a panel on women in rock journalism at SXSW, with Claudia Perry,, Karen Schoemer and Sue Cummings. That’s right, there were four of us, and we weren’t all white! Amazing, isn’t it? It was insanely well attended and empowering; at it, literally hundreds of young women stood up and testified to experiences we all knew we were having at the same time but had never really discussed with one another. It was great. But twenty five years have passed since then and I noticed that at this year’s SXSW they have a panel called “Does Rock Criticism Still Matter” and all the people on it are white, older, men. When I looked into it, it turned out they had asked a woman, Ann Powers, and she had to cancel, so they replaced her at the last minute with another woman. But still – only one? And no critic of color? It seems incredible to me that they couldn’t see that the reason rock criticism doesn’t matter is because of whom they’ve chosen to write about it all along.

Pussy Riot are feminists of course. But first and foremost they are anti-Putin revolutionaries.. Their performance consisted of an hour long film describing their detention in Siberia and the events leading up to it,, with the collective dancing and shouting in Russian over a dance musical soundtrack. Their situation isn't really comparable to anything that's happened in America, but the takeaway was very clear; use your rights to protest having your rights taken away, and do it now, before it's too late. It was cool and inspiring, although not in a musical, Fugazi-ish way: to me, what stood out was the way that Pussy Riot’s experience of political repression has taken on sinister relevance in the age of Trump. While watching them, I had this constant nagging sense of foreboding and dismay, as I thought, throughout, about our government’s weird new alliance with Russia, and what it could mean for all of us. I was a punk rocker in the age of Reagan, but I have never thought punk rock could change any real conditions of our existence: I knew, deep down, that all us little suburban kids protesting against what we thought was repression were utterly privileged members of society to even pretend that it could.

Pussy Riot have lived and worked and protested in a different cultural context, but theirs might become ours before too long. As for feminism: today, it has to be a walk, not just a talk. It's taken too long and talk is too cheap. After the show, there was a Q and A with the band, and one questioner, an older woman who walked with a cane, came to the fore to say, “Here in America we had a woman’s march the day after the inauguration, and many people mad hats we call Pussy Hats.”

Then she hobbled haltingly toward the stage. “So I made you one.”

She handed it up to the panelists, and one of the men leaned over to take it from her. Then he put it on, which made me a little angry. But then Masha took it from him, and put it on herself. And she didn’t say anything. She just stood up. She walked forward. She hopped off the stage, and just hugged the woman tight.