This is Felix Von Havoc's hardcore band Code 13 rockin' the fuck out in the living room of what became known as the Radio House (or Radio Tower House). There is nothing like a packed living room or basement of kids with the band rocking so hard everyone in the room is dancing and singing along. You are coated in sweat, beer, blood and god knows what else, but for a moment everyone is on totally the same wavelength, it's a shared experience that can make my spine tingle.Felix lives in Minneapolis and went on to start his own label Havoc Records and become a regular columnist for Maximum Rock'n'Roll. This was probably taken before either of these things happened when he was just screaming in front of Code 13 in the early '90s.
Located just off Madison on 18th on the East side of Capital Hill was a house a bunch of punk kids moved into. Since it was situated right by some huge radio towers, it eventually became known as The Radio House. Cameron Chapman and Jordan Rain lived there, amongst many others, I think Cameron did most of the band booking. They hosted local and touring bands and really fun house shows. An early AFI played there before they were big, playing on the same equipment as the Swingin' Utters, with the bands trading off every 3 or 4 songs. It ruled! Jawbreaker I think played The Radio House, as did Sicko, Patterns Make Sunrise, Mr. T Experience, The Quincy Punx, Submachine and quite a few other punk and emo bands. I set up a zine library there with about 250 zines on some shelves, but they were absolutely raided, people just took the zines they wanted home, it was kinda lame. I ran into Cameron just last week and caught up, which totally brought back all the great memories of the house shows he and his friends put on. Cameron used to write for 10 Things, book shows, and gave fairly legendary tours of Seattle. He's a great guy.
1 comment:
Hay Dan, Long time... This is Jon, I used to play guitar in Scathed among other bands. I was just looking at your sight and i am really enjoying all the old photos. It is fantastic that you have all these up! Just a bit of history about the radio house... In the mid 90's it was indeed the radio house but the kids living there all got kicked out and the house was rented to other random people who also in turn got the boot and that was when a crew of us found the house and rented it with no knowledge of the past history. We called it the Animal Farm and started having shows there once again. It was myself and Sara that did just about all the booking when it was the Animal Farm and it is really easy to tell the time frame when looking at the photos of the bands. If the walls are white it was the radio house time and if they are red then it was the Animal Farm time period. I just think that it is really interesting that two groups of punks got a hold of the same house with out prior knowledge of each other and used the house to host some of the craziest house shows in Seattle history. Unfortunately, the final chapter of the radio house / animal farm is that we in turn got kicked out and the house was torn down and there are now condos where this bit of Seattle punk history use to stand.
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