Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard by Roni Sarig Page A
Authors: Roni Sarig
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continued singing, first with loungy jazz poppers and exotica revivalists Weekend, then as half of Devine & Station. In the ‘90s, she reunited with Weekend guitarist Spike as Alison Station & Spike, and released three albums in Japan. The duo’s final live recording featured Stuart and Philip in what essentially was a Young Marble Giants reunion.
DISCOGRAPHY
Colossal Youth (Rough Trade, 1980; Crepuscule, 1994) ; the astounding first album, reissued with the instrumental EP and two other non-album songs.
Testcard EP (Rough Trade, 1981) ; originally an instrumental 7-inch, this record has been tacked onto the reissue of Colossal Youth .
The Peel Sessions EP (Strange Fruit, 1988) .
BEAT HAPPENING
Doug Martsch, Built to Spill / Halo Benders:
I like Calvin’s outlook about music and life, he’s sort of a righteous person. He’s made up his mind about things he feels strongly about, even though it’s sometimes difficult. To me, it’s an affirming thing, like, “This is cool what we’re doing. It’s special, important.” And to be around people who actually realize that and make it that way is important.
Before Seattle was known for grunge, and before female bands from the Northwest were labeled riot grrrl, Calvin Johnson was doing his own thing up in Washington state. In fact, the example and support of Calvin’s label K Records helped encourage the formation of a self-sufficient punk feminist movement. And though Beat Happening’s skeletal ditties had little in common with Nirvana’s metallic roar, Kurt Cobain felt sufficiently inspired by Johnson’s do-it-yourself ethic to have the K Records logo tattooed on his body. From a home base in Olympia, the college town / state capitol 50 miles south of Seattle, Johnson did as much as anyone to ignite a regional music scene that would become the most recognized of the ‘90s.
The influence of Calvin, Beat Happening, and K, however, is not limited to the Northwest. Combining the childlike innocence of Jonathan Richman with the unschooled roughness of Half Japanese , Beat Happening is the progenitor of a style-known variously as cuddle-core, tin-can pop, or love-rock – that’s been adopted to varying degrees by everyone from L.A.’s That Dog to Louisville’s King Kong, and from D.C.’s Tsunami to Chicago’s Veruca Salt. In defining an indie-pop aesthetic that incorporates humor and melody with punk’s willful obscurity – and by forming alliances with like-minded acts such as Australia’s Cannanes, Japan’s Shonen Knife, and Scotland’s Vaselines – Beat Happening has landed at the heart of a worldwide network of subterranean music, dubbed (by Calvin) the International Pop Underground.
In the early ‘80s, Johnson got involved with Olympia’s community radio station KAOS and a related music zine called Op, which introduced him to the then-radical concept of independent music as an alternative to the entertainment/culture fed by major corporations. Soon he began collaborating with fellow DJ Bruce Pavitt on a new zine dedicated to the Northwest’s underground music scene called Subterranean Pop, which Pavitt later abbreviated to Sub Pop (their slogan – “We’re here to de-centralize pop culture”) and turned into the famed Seattle record label. Sub Pop began covering the local scene by releasing not only conventional fanzines but also “cassette” zines, compilation tapes that allowed readers to hear the music they’d been reading about.
Carrie Brownstein, Sleater-Kinney:
The first time I heard Beat Happening, I was just blown away. I was still in high school and I went to their show. It was the first time I saw a woman playing guitar up close. I would go to punk shows all the time, but I never really saw women. And they brought this kind of sexiness back to rock music. In terms of performance, it wasn’t about this kind of tense maleness. It was really fluid, feeling the music in a way that wasn’t about all this angst. In Olympia, and
DISCOGRAPHY
Colossal Youth (Rough Trade, 1980; Crepuscule, 1994) ; the astounding first album, reissued with the instrumental EP and two other non-album songs.
Testcard EP (Rough Trade, 1981) ; originally an instrumental 7-inch, this record has been tacked onto the reissue of Colossal Youth .
The Peel Sessions EP (Strange Fruit, 1988) .
BEAT HAPPENING
Doug Martsch, Built to Spill / Halo Benders:
I like Calvin’s outlook about music and life, he’s sort of a righteous person. He’s made up his mind about things he feels strongly about, even though it’s sometimes difficult. To me, it’s an affirming thing, like, “This is cool what we’re doing. It’s special, important.” And to be around people who actually realize that and make it that way is important.
Before Seattle was known for grunge, and before female bands from the Northwest were labeled riot grrrl, Calvin Johnson was doing his own thing up in Washington state. In fact, the example and support of Calvin’s label K Records helped encourage the formation of a self-sufficient punk feminist movement. And though Beat Happening’s skeletal ditties had little in common with Nirvana’s metallic roar, Kurt Cobain felt sufficiently inspired by Johnson’s do-it-yourself ethic to have the K Records logo tattooed on his body. From a home base in Olympia, the college town / state capitol 50 miles south of Seattle, Johnson did as much as anyone to ignite a regional music scene that would become the most recognized of the ‘90s.
The influence of Calvin, Beat Happening, and K, however, is not limited to the Northwest. Combining the childlike innocence of Jonathan Richman with the unschooled roughness of Half Japanese , Beat Happening is the progenitor of a style-known variously as cuddle-core, tin-can pop, or love-rock – that’s been adopted to varying degrees by everyone from L.A.’s That Dog to Louisville’s King Kong, and from D.C.’s Tsunami to Chicago’s Veruca Salt. In defining an indie-pop aesthetic that incorporates humor and melody with punk’s willful obscurity – and by forming alliances with like-minded acts such as Australia’s Cannanes, Japan’s Shonen Knife, and Scotland’s Vaselines – Beat Happening has landed at the heart of a worldwide network of subterranean music, dubbed (by Calvin) the International Pop Underground.
In the early ‘80s, Johnson got involved with Olympia’s community radio station KAOS and a related music zine called Op, which introduced him to the then-radical concept of independent music as an alternative to the entertainment/culture fed by major corporations. Soon he began collaborating with fellow DJ Bruce Pavitt on a new zine dedicated to the Northwest’s underground music scene called Subterranean Pop, which Pavitt later abbreviated to Sub Pop (their slogan – “We’re here to de-centralize pop culture”) and turned into the famed Seattle record label. Sub Pop began covering the local scene by releasing not only conventional fanzines but also “cassette” zines, compilation tapes that allowed readers to hear the music they’d been reading about.
Carrie Brownstein, Sleater-Kinney:
The first time I heard Beat Happening, I was just blown away. I was still in high school and I went to their show. It was the first time I saw a woman playing guitar up close. I would go to punk shows all the time, but I never really saw women. And they brought this kind of sexiness back to rock music. In terms of performance, it wasn’t about this kind of tense maleness. It was really fluid, feeling the music in a way that wasn’t about all this angst. In Olympia, and
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