2010 Northwest Pinball & Gameroom Show

This is a must go to event if you live in Washington or Oregon. 300 pinball and arcade games on free play with admission, along with speakers, prizes (a Ms. Pacman and two pinball machines), seminars and more:



Go to nwpinballshow.com for more info and to buy discounted tickets!

Seattle rocks!

You know, sometimes living in a big city, you get just get stuck hanging out in the same neighborhoods, same insular scenes, same favorite bars and restaurants... and your start to forget that you live in a massive thriving metropolis. Last week I took a ferry over to Bremerton. When trying to find a decent place to eat in a town that mostly has chain stores and restaurants, I was totally disappointed. I started thinking about how fortunate I am to live where I do. And when heading back into Seattle gazing upon downtown, I was marveling at how awesome and beautiful our downtown really is. I do love Seattle, and with all my traveling this Summer--I've been out of town almost every weekend--it only cements the deal for me each time I come home how much Seattle rocks.

Stella Pizza(featuring the Triggers and Dark Places)

Stella Pizza opened in Georgetown in 2001 at 5513 Airport Way Blvd South. Georgetown, for those not in the know, is an industrial/warehouse district South of downtown Seattle that over the past 8 years has blossomed into a working class and artist community with a string of great small businesses, bars, clubs and restaurants. It's also home to tons of local artists, great BBQ, two bike clubs (The Cretins and Magic Wheels), a record store, a few cool coffee joints, and more.

Stella was an early adapter to Georgetown and helped lay the foundation for businesses to follow. By the Fall or Winter of 2001, Stella and the nearby Industrial Coffee were both hosting live music every weekend. The kind of live music I like--dirty, loud, sweaty rock'n'roll. Garage bands, punk bands, noise bands, rockabilly bands... much of the same kind of live music featured at Seattle clubs like Funhouse, the Sunset or the Comet today. Since diehard rock fans will go anywhere for their music, a bunch of us were trekking down to Georgetown in the cold in the Winter of 2001 for live shows. All the rock fans helped foster the need for more bars and services, along with the local population's need for development. Often I'd pay cover at both venues and go back and forth to watch bands. Joetta Velasquez was booking Stella and Brian Foss was booking Industrial Coffee, both would end up later booking Zak's downtown (which is now Funhouse), and both had similar taste in music. Today Stella has changed it's name to Stellar Pizza and hasn't hosted live music in five years... about the time Industrial Coffee also went out of business. But Jules Maes in Georgetown revamped and reopened a few years ago and proudly hosts live music all the time that draws people to the neighborhood from all over the Seattle area and neighboring towns.

These photos are of Stella Pizza in it's hey day of live music. The first two are of The Dark Places, the last one is of The Triggers:

Zine Fiend Festival

The Zine Fiend Festival was a zine festival and zine art show that took place in Seattle, Washington in the Summer of 1997. The festival was hosted by the Project 416 Art Gallery, located at 416 Occidental Ave South. The festival featured a ton of Washington zine artists and publishers, as well as a few out of town guests like Aaron Cometbus and R. Seth Friedman. And the Primate 5 and other bands played at night! I tabled between Chris "Wez" Lundry of Pooldust zine and Seth from Factsheet Five, it rocked. The highlight for me was hanging out smoking with a bunch of zinesters and Aaron Cometbus accusing me of not liking him, which couldn't have been farther from the truth. Creepy cool artwork by local artist and zinester Blair Wilson.

Courtney Love

Less than 60 seconds after I handed a copy of my zine to Kurt Cobain and walked back over to my friends, I heard an awful ear-shattering squeal. The crowd lingering after Fugazi’s powerful show began parting like the Red Sea from the source of the racket, through the entire club, towards me. At the end of this corridor of music fans stood Courtney Love. She was drunk, irate and yelling someone’s name. I quickly realized as the crowd parted right up to where I was standing with friends, that it was my name Courtney was yelling. Holy shit! I gulped fear as I saw her eyes widen, honing in on the obvious target of her anger… me! As Courtney began charging through the club towards me and I prepared for an unavoidable confrontation, I took a moment to think about how I got myself in this situation.

I’d been publishing my fanzine 10 Things since 1991 with the help of a bunch of friends. We wrote about local Seattle bands, reviewed zines and music, interviewed musicians, and usually had tons of columns and editorials on everything from recipes and fashion to politics and social issues. After two years our hodgepodge of underground music and alternative ideas had grown into a fairly popular zine, slapped together in what I hoped was an entertaining package--written, designed, assembled and distributed totally by my friends and I.

One night at one of my favorites clubs, The Off Ramp, I spotted Courtney Love and some of the other members of her band Hole sitting in a booth. The newest issue of 10 Things was hot off the presses and I knew I had shit-talked about Love moving to town and sinking her claws into Kurt Cobain. Since I had brought a pile of my zines to the club, I did what any self-respecting zinester would do--I walked over to Courtney, introduced myself, and gave her a copy. It couldn’t have been five minutes before she came running over to talk to me and I was sure I was going to get yelled at. Love’s reputation had got around Seattle fast. She was known as a drama queen that was usually wasted and loved to make scenes. And boy was she wasted when she came to talk to me. Luckily it turned out she was a bit too wasted to read and hadn’t gotten to the part in my zine yet where I gossiped about her. It wasn’t a lengthy editorial on my part, but I had mentioned she seemed to have moved to town and was clearly after Kurt Cobain’s money and fame. But Courtney said nothing of my comments at all. Sweet, I thought to myself, I’m off the hook! She instead told me she liked my zine and went on a 20 minute ramble about how crappy Seattle’s college radio station was. The station, KCMU (now KEXP), was embroiled in a huge controversy after trying to limit the heavier music DJs played--ironically at the height of the grunge explosion. Over half the DJs were on strike. Courtney said she and Kurt wanted to lodge some kind of protest, but her drunken ideas didn’t seem very well thought out. She then proceeded to tell me the reason she was at the club that night was to steal the bass player of Janitor Joe, the Minneapolis band that was about to take the stage. Janitor Joe was Joe Breuer from The Bastards new band and I loved their 7” singles I had picked up. I was there to see them rock out, however, rather than steal one of their band members. Love continued, saying she helped break up Joe’s previous band and was going to break up Janitor Joe, like she had The Bastards. Nice! I completely thought she was talking shit, but sure enough, within a few months bass player Kirsten Pfaff had left to join Hole. Janitor Joe, however, continued with a new bassist. In June of 1994, Kirsten Pfaff died of an overdose, a little over a year after joining up with Courtney Love.

Even though Love was loaded and shit-talking when I ran into her at the Off Ramp, I ended up having a decent conversation with her. She was funny and flirty, and while certainly not someone I’d trust, I definitely saw a bit of her human side shine through that night. I went home and listened to a couple of my Hole singles (I don't think they had an album out yet) and came to the conclusion I had been kind of an asshole in what I’d written. So I wrote a small editorial for next issue of 10 Things in which I mentioned finally meeting Courtney. I apologized for printing gossip about her. Over the next few months I spotted Courtney at a party or two (once at the Jalepeno House in the U-District), but avoided talking to her until my new zine came out with the retraction.

Fast forward to the Fugazi show where this story began. I had seen Kurt Cobain sitting on a bench staring around aimlessly like he was pretty high, just after Fugazi finished their encore. “Nevermind” had already bolted Kurt and Nirvana into being mega-stars. It was actually the first time since the album was released that I had seen him out at a club trying to blend in. It wasn’t working of course. Everyone was whispering about Cobain being there, but no one was talking to him. So I did. I walked up and said hi, made some small talk about the show we had just watched, and I gave him a copy of my zine. Kurt smiled, said thanks, he like my zine, and started reading it as I walked away. Courtney Love must have walked up soon afterwards, seen him reading the zine, and began screaming for my head on a spike.

So there I was talking to my friends when the crowd parted and a yelling and irate Love came charging at me. She instantly got up in my face and told me she had read the zine I’d given her months before and was totally pissed at me. She said she felt betrayed because she thought we had a great conversation, then got home and read my editorial. I tried to explain I wrote it before meeting her, but she cut me off again and again. Courtney was truly an amazing piece of work, she laid into me for what seemed like five minutes without stopping to breathe. She ranted and raved about a wide variety of things that had nothing to do with me. It seemed like I represented everything bad that had been said about her in the press. She told me that she really was smart, that she was an accomplished musician in her own right, and how much she loved Kurt. About then she stopped, smiled at me, and asked to bum a cigarette. Immediately after I lit her smoke, her smile faded and Love started back up with the verbal assault. How pissed could she really be at me? And how weird was this whole experience? I was barely absorbing what Courtney was saying, I had too much going on in my head and she was droning on and on. A rockstar was screaming at me in a club because of something I’d said in my little punk rock fanzine. And there was a good-sized crowd gathering around us to watch the spectacle unfold. At some point I just started laughing. Thankfully, Love started smiling too. While she continued to yell at me, her volume level dropped a little and it seemed like she was just doing this for fun. Fun at my expense, sure, but at least she wasn’t entirely serious or angry. She was soon smiling the entire time she continued to rant at me. Eventually the situation calmed down and she paused long enough for me to blurt out, “Courtney, after meeting you I wrote an apology in my new zine!” We walked over to where Kurt Cobain was and took a look at the copy I’d handed him together. She made a half-hearted attempt to get him involved, saying “Kurt, this is the guy that thinks I’m just after your fame and money!” He seemed a bit too high or bored to care, he just kind of smiled and handed her the zine. After the longest pause in her now 15 minute rant, she read the paragraph with my apology. Then Courtney looked at me, smiled, and said, “Oh, it’s all good then. No big deal.” I quickly used the opportunity to leave the drama of the situation and rendezvous with my friends.

As I walked away I thought about Courtney’s final words. “No big deal?” I had just gotten yelled at for 15 minutes in a crowded club by Courtney Love with Kurt Cobain by her side. No big deal my ass, that was fucking awesome!

The lost Spits Interview: Part 1

Andres and I interviewed The Spits back in the Summer of 1999 for what was to be 10 Things issue #23. This issue never came out because I began working on Tablet instead. The Spits were still a recent phenomena in Seattle at the time, their first 7" had just come out... it was before they had put anything out on Dirtnap or had become very popular, but they already had a core following in Seattle.

When The Spits play live there are a couple things you can count on: they usually play in costume and they always put on a fun show. In these days with indie punk bands acting like rock stars, The Spits seem like a breath of fresh air, but really they are a flashback to the ‘70s punk scene with a raw garage sound, goofy antics, and they add in a keyboard (which most modern punk bands wouldn't do.) The result is great! Strip off the pretentiousness and strip down the music and you have pure punk rock. After seeing these guys a bunch of times live, hearing their great 7", and running into them at shows and parties, I figured it was about time 10 Things sit down and chat with them. The Spits are Sean Wood on guitar, Erin Wood on bass, Lance on drums, and Nicholas on keyboards.

10: So let's get some background info. When did you guys start out?
S: 1987
E: Was it '87?
L: Are you gonna tell them the secret?

10: Now that was in Michigan, right?
S: '87 in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

10: Did you guys play a lot of shows there back then?
S: Oh yeah.
L: Until we discovered time travel.
N: Tell 'em about the time travel, they gotta now know.
S: We pretty much got barred from Kalamazoo and East Lansing.
L: The whole western Michigan area.
S: So we had to move out here.

10: Now Sean and Erin are brothers… but when you started out was it the three of you?
L: Well, me and Nick are brothers as well. It's like a double-date kinda thing.

10: Lance, you are also from Michigan, did you guys go to the same school?
L: We did. Sean's like four years older than me, but we were in the same grade. We graduated together. So we were hanging out, and I was playing in high school with Sean when he was 18 and I was only 14. So thanks to Sean, I got a little jumpstart on the scene.

10: Did you guys ever play at a high school or anything like that?
S: No, no…
L: We did play at a party on this pontoon boat on the lake with some chicks one time.

10: Did they have a generator on the boat?
S: No, we were just singing our songs and doing mouth guitar.
L: One of the chicks was Nick's cousin, we were out there with her and a lot of her friends. We were telling them how we were in this band and stuff.

10: So, does the "We're in a band" thing really work for chicks?
L: Well we all have girlfriends, so obviously it works. And we've been using that for a long time.
E: A long time!

10: So when did you guys move to Seattle?
E: '93.
L: The thing was… we weren't doing so good back there.
E: Well in the early ‘90s, but in '87 we were pretty hot when we took off.
N: Let me mention again that these guys were time travelers. They introduced me to it, I'm from Nebraska.
L: All you have to do is take methamphetamines and head into the setting sun.
N: Let me tell you about the set up these guys have going on here. I don't know if they found it or if they built a time travelling machine…
E: We acquired one, let's just leave it at that.
N: So, they went in to the future and they seemed to like The Spits there, they like that kind of rock music. So they brought it back to the past, the stuff that they listened to in the future.

10: So you're saying The Spits are actually a futuristic band?
N: It is, it is.
L: No, no.
N: The material is futuristic.
S: Well, we're not from the future.
E: We're from Alagan, Michigan.
N: There is no Michigan in the future.
E: But the material IS pretty futuristic, if you think about it.

10: A lot of people would say you guys harken back more to the ‘70s "Killed by Death" kind of sound.
S: Well, we went back there, and we fit in pretty good with the other bands.
L: But we didn't do so well…
E: We tried it in the ‘70s and it didn't really go over.
L: People throwing fucking beers at us and shit. So we said let's go to a time when this kind of music is gonna be big. The thing was we miscalculated. We're here after the fact now and everyone's already done it. So we come on the scene with this sound and it's like...fuck! Great, it's passe now.

10: So if you guys have been around since '87, how come you only have one record out? E: Well, we just got HERE, in this time.
S: If someone wants to pay for the fucking thing, we'll put out twenty. Let me just say that I went into the future with Nick, to the year 2025. And let me tell you something, The Murder City Devils, they were no more. People never even heard of 'em. I didn't bother back-tracking a few years and find out what happened to them. But I can tell you, in 2025, they're gone. But when I was there, I saw fliers for the Spits.

10: So back to reality. Picking the name The Spits...
S: Me and Erin came up with it. We were on a road trip from Memphis to Michigan.

10: You knew people were gonna start spitting at your shows when you picked that name.
S: Well, we were trying to think of something cool.
E: And what's the coolest? A little spit.
L: That was pretty much at the top of the list right there.
S: It was either spitters or smokers.
E: Smokin' and spittin' is kinda cool. There was already plenty of smoke bands out there at the time.
S: Didn't Ozzy say smokin' and spittin' is all that I do?
(Confused looks on people's faces, followed by laughter)
L: I love that tune!

10: So does it piss you guys off if people spit at your shows?
S: No, but I hate it when people take a whole beer and just spit the whole thing.

10: I only spit a mouthful of beer.
S: Hey, fuckin' A, I've done it too.
L: Yeah, I hate it when you do it! Like, this interview's fucking over!
(Lance spits beer towards us)
S: I don't mind it if chicks spit beer, you know some pussy spit. But guys, man, fuck, I don't want you're nasty shit up on my ass.

10: But didn't you think about that happening when you picked the name?
S: Yeah. Matter of fact we have a little conflict with this arcade in Capitol Hill because of that.

10: I thought what they wrote about you in their paper was pretty funny. (Basically they played at the Hi*Score and then wrote this piece about how immature and unpunk The Spits were acting by spitting.)
E: That was good. That was good press, it was probably the best press that we've ever had. And maybe the only…
N: Well they did say we were a mediocre party band!
S: We were kind of mediocre that night.
E: That's kind of what we are! There's no denying it.
N: A mediocre party band that travels in time.
E: How old is that lady from Hi*Score anyways?

10: Probably around thirty.
L: So she's been around and seen party bands. And she knows when one is good or when they're mediocre.

10: Maybe she just didn't want bands spitting in her place like that.
N: But we don't spit, they spit on us! Girls especially.
S: Well, he let that girl spit on his keyboard so everything I hope is resolved.
E: Well she sounded a little hot…
S: Well, I went in there to play games, and got some evil looks.
N: No, no it's all good, she spit on my keyboard and it's all good now.
L: Nick ended up hookin' up with her later that night!
N: I told you not to say anything else! Goddamnit! I said quiet about that! It was just some guy who spit on me I said... it was a guy.

10: Have you guys toured much around the Northwest or the West Coast?
L: All over Portland
S: We've played Michigan.
L: We've also done Jack and Jills out there in Lake City. And Bremerton.

10: What was your worst show?
N: Bremerton.
L: There was a show a long time ago where Sean and the bass player beat the shit out of each other at the Rendezvous. Sean punched him.
S: He kicked me in the back, man.

10: Was this you Erin?
E: No, I quit the band for a little while.
S: I ended up beating the shit out of that guy.
L: And I walked off stage and I was not gonna play anymore, but then Sean came back and got me and we went back on stage. Sean and this guy were kicking each other and he threw his bass down. And we were supposed to have all these big pyrotechnics and they were all wussy.