Seattle Bound

Seattle's Tacocat

Old Stomping Grounds

Setting out with the coolfamily for a little trip to Seattle. CoolMom and I spent about half of the 90s out there while we attended graduate school at the University of Washington (U-Dub). This will be the first trip for the cooldaughters to the Pacific Northwest, and we're excited to show them some stuff.

Here's some stuff from a few Seattle / Northwest bands who aren't Nirvana or Pearl Jam. See you on the flip side.

Tacocat, "Dana Katherine Scully," from 2016's Lost Time



Dude York, "Love Is," from 2017's Sincerely



La Luz, "Cicada," from this year's Floating Features



Chastity Belt, "Used to Spend," from 2017's I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone



Brandi Carlile, "The Joke," from 2018's By The Way, I Forgive You



Jo Passed (Vancouver, BC), "Milennial Trashed Blues," from this year's Their Prime



Pure Bathing Culture (Portland, OR), "Pray for Rain," from 2015's Pray for Rain

The Seattle Seahawks Won The Super Bowl. Made Me Think of 1994.

Photo by Rattlhed

I Moved to Seattle 20 Years Ago

In case you missed it, Seattle won Super Bowl XLVIII yesterday. Also, here in New Jersey it is snowing. Again.

Those two things got me thinking about 1994. 1994 was a big year for me as I moved out to Seattle with CoolMom so that we could attend graduate school at the University of Washington (UW, pronounced "U-Dub"). It was also the worst, most snow-filled winter I can remember.

The early part of the year saw snowstorm after snowstorm, the last one dropping 2.8" of snow on the area on March 18th. 53.2" of snow fell that year, making 1994 the snowiest year in over 30 years. CoolMom and I were living in Hoboken; and, for the first three months of the year, parked cars were just icy lumps on either side of the street. I guess those people didn't need to drive as much as they thought they did.

We'd both applied to Ph.D. programs in economics. Determined to stay together and not do the long-distance thing, we ended up at UW because that was where we both got accepted and received funding. We could have stayed in New York, which would have meant a big tuition bill for one or both of us; but the idea of moving out to Seattle appealed to both of us for reasons beyond the financial or the relative strengths of the various economics programs. And I was ready to get out of the area after the horror of that winter.

So, in around August I guess, we moved west. We rented an apartment that was bigger and about 1/3 the price of anything we could have gotten in New York (Turns out we were paying more than almost all of our classmates). We had a car in CoolMom's red Tercel hatchback ("The Pod") that we could actually use to cart groceries back from the supermarket, and we started our program at the U.

We spent five years in Seattle and fell in love with the place. We fell in love with the scenery, the coffee, the wine, the beer, the food, the people. I never fell in love with the sports teams. More on that in a minute.

That first year was not easy, though. None of it. It was my first significant amount of time away from the East Coast. We were back in school after a few years and navigating a still young relationship. People often expressed disbelief that we'd turned down other programs to go to UW, but we wanted to be together. Also, if I'd had to do it on my own, I have no doubt that I would have flunked out quickly. As it is, I never got past a Masters and what they call ABD (All But Dissertation), which isn't a real thing; while CoolMom buckled down and became Dr. CoolMom.

My relationship with Seattle sports teams was a complicated one when we lived there. Actually, no. It was quite simple. I hated them.

During the mid-90s, when MLB still used the balanced schedule (AL teams played each other somewhere around 12 times per year, I think), there was a pretty significant rivalry between the Yankees and Mariners. I went to lots of M's / Yankees games at the dreary Kingdome; and many of them were good, old American League marathons. I even saw Ken Griffey, Jr.'s first-ever walk-off home run, hit against Yankee closer John Wetteland; and, of course, there were the playoffs in 1995. The M's had grown to be a thorn in the side of the Yankees; so, by the transitive property of sports hatred, I hated all Seattle teams. CoolMom never got it.

I did love our time in Seattle, though. It remains one of my two favorite cities in America, and it's where CoolMom and I officially decided we'd make this a forever thing between her and me. But grad school ended, and it was kind of a foregone conclusion that we'd come back to the New York Metro area. We've been back to Seattle maybe twice since 1999.

I actively rooted for the Seahawks yesterday. I guess the return by MLB to the unbalanced schedule combined with 15 years of being among, mostly, like-minded fans has softened my position on Seattle's teams. More than that, though, whenever I think about our time in that city -- particularly our decision in 1994, after that horrible winter, to take the leap and move out there -- I'm grateful. CoolMom and I are together, twenty years later, partly because of what we shared and worked through in Seattle.

CoolMom loves the place. I've never seen her root as hard for a non-Olympic sporting event as she did yesterday. She often talks about bringing the cooldaughters out there for a trip, showing them where Mom and Dad lived before they came along. Sometimes we talk about what it would be like to live there again, but we've got way too many attachments here now to consider really leaving.

They almost never get snow like this, though.

Built To Spill aren't from Seattle. They're from Boise, but this is from one of my favorite albums of 1994.

Sub Pop "25" Edition

Silver Jubilee Friday

Founded in 1986 (yes, 1986) by Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman, Seattle's Sub Pop Records are celebrating their 25th anniversary this weekend. It wasn't until 1988 that the company moved into their first office and began the famous Sub Pop Singles Club.

From Michael Azerrad's fantastic must-read Our Band Could Be Your Life:

For $35 a year, subscribers got a single a month -- but the brilliant part was that Singles Club subscribers paid before they got their records, which gave the label a significant financial boost. "On a limited budget, if you have the desire to sell a lot of records," says Pavitt, "you have to figure out a way to scam and manipulate the public." With typical Sub Pop irony, the teaser line was "We're ripping you off big time."

The first single that those early subscribers got in 1988 was a cover of Shocking Blue's 1969 single "Love Buzz" by a little band out of Aberdeen, WA.

Happy birthday, Losers.

Rock on.

Back to Basics

"Sugarcube"

Made a few abortive attempts at blogging about some not that interesting to me things today.  Maybe I'm feeling a little down as the end of summer approaches and the fall business travel schedules of CoolMom and me begin to fill, but nothing's been grabbing me lately.

One of the things I've found as I've tried to learn to play the guitar over the last year-plus is that, when you're in a rut, sometimes it's good to get back to basics and to start from the beginning.  With that in mind, here's, probably, my favorite music video of all time.  Even without the video, hearing this song brings back memories of the years CoolMom and I spent together in Seattle during the 1990's.  There's something funny and predictable about the fact that the song that never fails to take me back to the only time in my life I've spent outside the New York Metropolitan Area is by a band from New Jersey.

Sunday B and B Blogging

From Capitol Hill, Seattle

We've kept pretty busy on our trip to Seattle. On our second night, after a day of hiking, shopping, and reminiscing, I dragged CoolMom to a show right around the corner from where we're staying. With the Sasquatch! Festival going on relatively close by, the pickings in Seattle are pretty slim for music this weekend, but we were able to catch local musician Erik Blood and neo-shoegazers Mahogany at the Comet Tavern.

Opener Erik Blood, a charismatic frontman, did a great set of distortion-heavy pop.  Mahogany headlined and didn't go on until about 12:30. I'm sorry to report that CoolMom just wasn't up to staying for the entire set, but what we saw was very good and about as noisy as I could have hoped.  It was mighty big of CoolMom to stick it out for me as long as she did.




I think the highlight of the trip for me so far has been the Experience Music Project Museum near the Seattle Center. Founded by Paul Allen, the museum focuses on popular music and science fiction. Today, I saw a fragment of the guitar that Jimi Hendrix burned on stage at the Monterey Pop Festival, several of Kurt Cobain's guitars, letters to friends and fans from Nirvana's early days, and some drawings Cobain did when he must have been about sixteen or seventeen years old. I saw a 19th century Gibson acoustic guitar and the guitar that J Mascis used on Dinosaur Jr.'s late-80's albums. An AC/DC exhibit had examples of Angus Young's SG and schoolboy outfit. The exhibit on horror movies contained Buffy's "Mr. Pointy" stake, an original script for Night of the Living Dead, and the alien "mother" from the Alien films.

Many of the exhibits were interactive. There were three or four "jam rooms" where several people could jam together for ten-minute stretches. A scream booth snapped a picture of you screaming for posting on the wall of the horror exhibit.

CoolMom loved the museum (and, surprisingly, yesterday's Mariners game) as much as I did. We still have a lot in common, but our night at the Comet showed me how different we've grown from each other over the years. It's nice to know, on our anniversary weekend, that even though we're two totally different people than when we met, we still make it work so well.

P.S., The 11th Avenue Inn is a great B and B on Capitol Hill, very close to downtown. The proprietor, David, knows the area well and is just a nice guy.

Seattle

Memorial Day / Anniversary Long Weekend

CoolMom and I are headed back to Seattle tomorrow for the first time in about twelve years to celebrate the arrival of summer along with our anniversary.  We had some good times there back in the grad school days, and I'll be interested to see how it's changed.

We were there during the height of the corporate alt rock era and listened to KNDD-"The End" through the awful radio in our red Tercel.  Then, one day, I discovered KCMU (now KEXP), and the world got a little brighter.

Lots of great bands from the area.  One from our grad school days...