Gigantic.14
On the Air
It was the age of the double-cassette boom box. In a sparsely furnished apartment thousands of miles from our home state, Joe and I had twenty cassettes between us, some store-bought, some copied. When we weren’t listening to one of these, it was KCMU.
KCMU was Seattle’s student station. It wove a distinct web of reality throughout the city, playing indie music and promoting shows, of which we’d seen plenty.
Most functional (or semi-functional) bands have at least one motivated band member. In our band it was Steve, the bass player. He was the one sending our demo to labels. He also used the demo to score a KCMU-sponsored show.
A few nights before the show, I promised to hand out flyers at The Vogue, a club on First Avenue that was a lot of different things to different people, depending on what night it was.
Back in New York, I could stand in a nightclub for hours barely talking to anyone, wondering why I was there. Seattle’s scene, while not entirely innocent, was a lot friendlier. As I handed out flyers, a few people rolled their eyes, but mostly the response was better than expected.
One girl took a flyer then looked at me with big eyes.
“When you finish, will you dance with me?” she asked in earnest.
She was seriously cute.
“Uh, yeah…”
The remaining flyers flew from my hands much more quickly. I’d almost gone through the stack when a female voice snuck up behind me.
“There you are!” she said.
I turned to find not the girl, but Cindy, an intimidating and inexplicably possessive stripper who would attach herself to me at the hip whenever she found me at the club, whether I wanted her to or not.
When the cute girl who’d asked me to dance found me again, Cindy flashed her a look like she would kill her.
“Uh, maybe I should go,” the girl said, a sensible act of self-preservation.
“No, wait…”
Too late.
I wound up dancing with Cindy instead before she could do any more damage. But I didn’t give her a flyer.
The day of the show arrived. Joe and I were sitting around the apartment listening to the radio. I happened to be talking with my mom on the phone when our song Land of the Free came on KCMU.
“Holy shit, Mom, we’re on the radio!”
We must’ve listened to our demo twenty times on this boombox through these same speakers. The song sounded the same, but somehow was different because it was coming over the airwaves. At this moment, people all over Seattle were listening to it too.
The show at The Central that night went well enough. We played okay, friends came to support us, but there were also people we didn’t know, people who’d heard our song on the radio and had decided to come check out the show.
We got it in our heads that this might actually lead to something. Orpheum Records started carrying our tape. They shrink-wrapped it, marked it $4.99, and even put an anti-theft sticker on it. Looked like the real deal.
We got a manager, a nice guy from Bainbridge Island named Jim. You would think things would get more organized after this, but the string of shows that followed didn’t exactly follow a clear path forward.
A benefit for El Salvador. A party in the U. District which turned into a hardcore show after we got into a fight with the other band. A party in Wallingford packed with new followers now expecting us to be a hardcore band.
Steve, determined to stay on track, booked another session at Jimmy Free’s studio. There may have been some “creative disagreements” at that session, but we persisted.
Our next show was at a tavern in Ballard. There was a small, random parade that night along Ballard Avenue, they closed the street temporarily right in front of the tavern. We attached ourselves to the parade and, with minor fanfare, that’s how we marched into our gig that night, with clowns and jugglers, which was fitting.
We didn’t realize it was our last show.
Joe and Dog had been applying to art schools back east. Both of them got acceptance letters right about that time. Within a month of the Ballard gig, they piled into an old Dodge and were gone. Steve said something about trying to keep the band going, but that wasn’t going to happen. It was done.
Of the practices, shows, recording and drinking sessions, my defining memory to this day is that afternoon in the apartment, talking with my mom on the phone when Land of the Free came on KCMU. That was the moment.
It did not escape my notice that Land of the Free was the song that the crazy dude, Curtis, had pointed his voodoo stick at back at Jimmy Free’s studio. That day by the mixing board, I’d become convinced that Curtis had put some kind of spell on it, investing the song with magic power.
Maybe it wasn’t as powerful as I’d thought. But it worked at least one time.
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Ah, Curtis returns – the world is right again.