1) A low-lit theatre in Boulder, Colorado. Was it 1994 or 95? Hard to say, but I remember lurking in the back row, transfixed by the tall man standing center stage and the unearthly, wounded sounds emanating from his microphone. Dressed in all black, laboring over a squeezebox concertina the size of a small coffin, his sandy blond bangs curtaining his sweat-slicked face. He looked gaunt and haunted, like he’d been wandering around for days in a mine shaft by lantern-light; he belted out lyrics in a kind of mournful, gospel-infused howl that didn’t shy away from the higher registers. He seemed almost possessed, like the music was singing him, with backing by hard-driving, punk-inspired bass and drums that quickened the heart and troubled the soul.

A nearby concertgoer was kind enough to share this opening band’s name: Sixteen Horsepower. A banjo, fiddle and cello gave them a country twang, but their music transcended Americana or old-timey genres. Imagine if Martin Hannett—the genius sound engineer who helped create Joy Division’s moody atmospheric echo and the entire “Manchester Sound”—produced a country band before his untimely death in 1991. Instead of Joy Division’s ARP Omni-2 synthesizer, Sixteen Horsepower’s lead singer used an antique Chemnitzer concertina to create the hypnotic, devastating hook on “American Wheeze,” my favorite song from their live set. I never purchased their soon-to-come first album Sackcloth ‘N’ Ashes or heard them on the radio, but this track ghosted around in my head for the next three or four decades, its phantom hand clutching a candle that helped guide me through the shadows to unearth some of my own creative practices and projects.

* * *

2) Pascal Humbert and Jean-Yyves Tola, the eventual bassist and drummer/percussionist for Sixteen Horsepower, grew up in Paris, where they received classical education in music. In 1981 they formed the post-punk outfit Passion Fodder; they released five studio albums and opened for Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Iggy Pop.

After relocating to L.A., Humbert and Tola happened to meet David Eugene Edwards while building sets for Roger Corman. Edwards was the Colorado-born grandson of a traveling Nazarene preacher. According to interviews, he traveled often with his grandfather through rough-and-tumble towns in the rural west, where he developed his love for gospel and old-time spirituals. He never finished high school and apparently worked as an itinerant ditch digger and dishwasher before moving to L.A. to build movie sets and attempt to establish himself as a musician.

When these three unlikely collaborators formed Sixteen Horsepower, they relocated from L.A. to Denver and helped launch a genre of music known as gothic country, dark country, or “The Denver Sound.” If Martin Hannett’s “Manchester Sound” reflected the scrappy British city’s industrial origins, class struggle, and gloomy weather, I think it’s safe to say that gothic country in its nascent form drew energy from Colorado’s dark and exploitative mining history, and from its sublime and scarred landscapes. And very likely from the legacy of high-country ghost towns that held so much fascination during my own Colorado childhood, with names like Gothic, Holy Cross City, Old Zounds, Mystic, Saint Elmo and Wideawake.

* * *

3) During my brief mid-nineties encounter with Sixteen Horsepower, my musical tastes skewed pretty far from country or bluegrass. Sure, I grew up in rural Colorado listening to Waylon and Willie cassettes in the truck with my dad, plus Dolly Parton, Crystal Gale and Juice Newton on the easy-listening country station my stepmother always played in her Jeep Wagoneer. Later in my twenties, though, my affinities hewed toward indie rock luminaries like The Pixies, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Drive Like Jehu, Dinosaur Jr, Superchunk, The Breeders and Built to Spill. Anything that smacked of country music was anathema to our punk and indie ethos; we despised the radio-friendly, Best Western-lobby songs of Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw and Alan Jackson.

There were a couple exceptions to our exclusive (and admittedly snobby) tastes. In the college house I lived in, a thrifted Johnny Cash greatest hits LP made regular rotations. We shouted along to “Boy Named Sue” and “Ring of Fire” with a mixture of irony and reverent, joyful nostalgia. Tom Waits was another outlier. Though most of his catalog was jazz- and blues-inspired, songs like “Jockey Full of Bourbon” and “Get Behind the Mule” had rootsy, southern gothic vibes—heightened by the percussionist’s wild crashes on a giant rusty wagon wheel—that feel like precursors to The Denver Sound. I was also a fan of Calexico and Giant Sand, who originated what we might call “The Tucson Sound.” Like all the best country western, their music vividly evokes the landscapes and culture of their particular corner of the west.

But I was definitively not a country fan, and I recoiled when, on the street in Brooklyn, an unhoused guy took one look at my long hair and pale complexion and called me a redneck. Relocating from Colorado to New York City in the early aughts spiked my sense of alienation and homesickness for the west in ways I never could’ve imagined. On weekends I cruised around Williamsburg in cowboy boots (that weren’t entirely out of place in 2005-era Brooklyn) and binge-watched episodes of Deadwood. Regrettably I never saw the it-kids of the moment, MGMT, play live, but I went out of my way to catch acts like Slim Cessna’s Auto Club—another Denver-based band that formed partly under the auspices of Sixteen Horsepower. On my CD Walkman I obsessively played and replayed Johnny Cash’s cover of the Nine-Inch-Nails song “Hurt” from his American Recordings albums with Rick Rubin. At the time I listened solely for the emotional catharsis—but it strikes me now that “Hurt,” along with covers of Tom Waits, Soundgarden, Danzig, and Depeche Mode songs are enthralling monuments in the cobwebbed realm of gothic country.

* * *

4) Sixteen Horsepower’s first full album, Sackcloth ‘N’ Ashes, debuted in February 1996 on the A&M label. It’s a genre-warping masterwork that channels equal parts Nick Cave, Violent Femmes, Hank Williams Senior, and Factory Records’ early catalog. Song titles like “Black Soul Choir” pretty well sum up the album’s vibes, with lyrics like “Every Man is Evil/ Every Man’s a Liar/ Unashamed with an evil tongue/ Singing in the Black Soul Choir.” Yet something paradoxically upbeat barrels through the steam-train drum beat and the bright, chimey banjo; the song reaches transcendent crescendos with the chorus “Oh (oh), the horizon’s my way.” Rootsy slide-guitar notes accentuate songs like “Scrawled in Sap.” Rattly, snare-forward drumbeats behind banjo and fiddle on “Ruthie Lingle” feel modern and propulsive (with only a couple breakdowns that admittedly make we want to break into the same goofy, joyful pump-trolley dance that overtakes my body when I hear even the best bluegrass). For me, Edward’s frenetic work on the Chemnitzer Concertina—especially on the standout track “American Wheeze”—drives my listening and keeps me coming back for an album that sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before or will ever hear again.

Sackcloth ‘N’ Ashes was acclaimed by the American underground, though reviewers and other bands of the era were suspicious of the brazenly Christian motifs in Edward’s lyrics. The corporate press mostly panned the album (back when music reviews in national magazines were an actual thing). Entertainment Weekly claimed that Sackcloth ‘N’ Ashes had a “violent, quirky power,” but that Edward’s “affected vocals and cynical, hollow songs become tiresome over a whole album.” Jim Alexander from NME used his review as the occasion for a tired rape joke: “the Deep South atmosphere is so over-pronounced you can almost hear someone, way out in the backwoods, squealing like a pig.” USA Today made a similarly poor-taste reference to the film Deliverance. I grudgingly agree that over the course of thirteen songs I’m ready for a break from Edward’s relentless fire-and-brimstone tones, but I’m certain that, had they existed back in 1979, these same media outlets would have glibly dismissed Ian Curtis’s sui generis voice and lyrics when Joy Division released Unknown Pleasures.

Sixteen Horsepower received a much warmer reception from Europe than the U.S; in the late 90s and as recently as mid-summer 2026 they played sold-out tours in France, Netherlands, and Germany. And despite the mixed, often condescending critical reception, they did still make an indelible mark in the U.S., directly inspiring Denver-based bands like DeVotchKa, The Handsome Family, Portland’s Builders and The Butchers, and national acts like Iron & Wine and Smog.

* * *

5) I grew up in a small Colorado town where so much happened beneath the surface. It’s home to subterranean wonders: the world’s largest hot springs pool, a system of vapor caves, abandoned silver mines, and a place called burning mountain, where a mining accident ignited a coal seam that still burns, over one hundred years later. A mining accident that took the life of a grade school friend’s big brother haunts my earliest memories. Around the same time, certain hidden things were transpiring in my own homelife; Glenwood Springs was a magical place to grow up, but a particularly virulent brand of American masculinity plagued my childhood.

Inspired by Sixteen Horsepower’s long stare into the darkness, as well as authors like Barry Lopez and Rebecca Solnit, I transformed my childhood memories and fascination with the underground world into a memoir project called A Field Guide to the Subterranean. Twined with the personal narrative are histories of Colorado mining, colonialism, labor rights movements, and the murder of miners by corporate overlords and the U.S. government during what came to be known as the Ludlow Massacre.

As the memoir progresses, it becomes increasingly light-filled and hopeful, but if pressed to name theme music to the early “underground” sections of the book, Sackcloth ‘N’ Ashes makes the top of the list; I played it on endless repeat while tunneling my way through the project.

* * *

6) As many readers will point out, country and bluegrass music have always waltzed with the shadowy, troubled side of life. Dolly Parton was generally a beacon of light—and one of the few things holding our entire fucked-up country together since 2016—but she’s also one of many originators of dark country or, as it’s been labeled more recently, “creepy country.” She could belt out a murder ballad with the best of them, and much of her early oeuvre was uniquely strange: “Daddy Come and Get Me,” centers a young psychiatric patient pleading for her father’s help after an ex-boyfriend gaslights and institutionalizes her against her will. In “Just the Way I Am” the adult narrator asks for understanding for her strange ways: crying all night, running through fields in pouring rain, even quitting her job to lurk around little kids on the playground. “Mendy Never Sleeps” chronicles an “uncontrollable” sixteen-year-old who sneaks out her bedroom window in a mini-skirt, staying out all night smoking and drinking with the “in-crowd” before dying in her parents’ arms. Parton adds a chilling final twist to the chorus: “Oh Mendy please don’t go to sleep,” her vocals layered over Lloyd Green’s ethereal steel guitar licks that echo around like a wailing ghost.

Then there’s “Jolene:” it always captivated me as a kid in my stepmother’s perfume-scented Wagoneer. Even as a ten-year-old I worried about the narrator’s codependent desperation, but loved hearing Dolly’s voice hurdling up toward the stratospheric high notes when perseverating on her rival’s name.

Reminiscent of Cash’s American Recordings, Parton embraced some more contemporary weirdness in her recent cover album, Rockstar. When performing Blondie’s new wave banger “Heart of Glass,” her signature quaver and earnest Tennessee patois give Debby Harry’s lyrics a wonderfully eerie quality: “Mucho Mistrust/ Loves gone behind/ Lost Inside / Adorable illusion/ and I cannot hide.” Of all the songs in The Police’s catalog, she chose to cover one of the creepiest love songs ever written, “Every Breath You Take.”

Consider the teased hair, the caked-on foundation and dark pools of eye makeup, the skin-tight black latex catsuits not unlike those worn by Lux Interior from the Cramps. Was Dolly a goth at heart? Has there ever been a more influential and loveable weirdo on the wide-open pastures of American music?

* * *

7) Earlier this summer I made my first trip to Pickathon, Oregon’s most bespoke music festival, where I caught live sets by Ora Cogan, Widowspeak, Friendship, Prewn, Alela Diane, Hudson Freeman and others. I’m not always a big festival person, but the music and the forest-shaded stages and art installations honestly blew my mind—as did the persistent thrill of witnessing the development of new styles of music as younger bands continue collapsing boundaries between country, Americana, folk, punk, and indie rock. “Indie twang,” some are calling it. Beneath the superficial labels, the music feels driven by deep artistic innovation and by a frustrated generation’s attempt to take back our country, in more ways than one.

Take the Canadian-based band Ora Cogan: think Siouxsie and the Banshees meets dark Irish folk music and Americana, with a splash of Vashti Bunyan and Cocteau Twins. In a 2026 interview, the titular lead singer mentioned that she writes many of her songs outdoors, “in the strange little bizarre worlds of estuaries, rivers, and abandoned mining equipment.” She often circles around environmental devastation and loss; she revels in the way that facing hard feelings can help us transcend them, especially via music, and consistently cites Dolly Parton as a central influence.

After one of Cogan’s Pickathon performances I scored the drummer’s set list and asked Ora to sign it. She indulged me, even though she was busy rolling up some audio cable to make space for the next band. I read the room and decided to spare her my burning question: are you a fan of Sixteen Horsepower?

All Pickathon bands play multiple sets and I was lucky to catch Ora Cogan twice. Whereas I hung in the back row at my sole Sixteen Horsepower show, not yet gleaning the importance of what I was hearing, this time I stood absolutely front and center for both Cogan sets, swaying around and dancing my ass off to my favorite song, “Bury Me.”

Because I’m a drummer myself, I kept my gaze mostly on the jazz-inspired percussionist, Finn Smith, rather than on the dark haired, tattooed Ora, whom I’m sure gets plenty of attention from men and didn’t need any more of mine.

My guess is the band members still thought I was a bit of an old weirdo, an aging indie rocker in a knock-off Joy Division shirt and an orange bandana knotted around my neck, cowboy-style. Unlike Dolly Parton, I didn’t spend a lot of money to “look this cheap.” And it’s true: I’ve been around for a while, long enough to recognize genius when I hear it.

One chilly Friday at noon, Karin Dibling performed the ritual she performs every time she opens her magazine stand. She slid the front boards off her kiosk, stored them beside her desk, and lowered the front counter. After decorating the counter with large broadside issues of The New York Review of Architecture, The Whitney Review of New Writing, and Bookforum, she bookended those with a new arrival she wanted to highlight: the glossy third issue of Mildew: The Secondhand Fashion Magazine. Cover price: $20.

The City Reader is Portland, Oregon’s only magazine stand, and it’s one of the few left in the country. Specializing in niche, small circulation, and unusual titles, this kiosk offers proof that magazines aren’t dead, they’ve just reinvented themselves. Since 2013, The City Reader has operated inside a revitalized apartment building on busy Division Street, sheltered in a corridor between an organic frozen yogurt shop and a taco joint.

Karin’s first customer arrived so quickly that she didn’t have time to put the store’s sign on the sidewalk. It leaned against her desk, where the green chalk read:

A Modern Newsstand

The Best in Indie Mags

Try Something New

Her first customer wasn’t a customer. He was a friend.

Matthew ran Babs Newsstand, a small kiosk in a corridor like this in San Diego. “Zines · Mags · Books · News,” his sign says. On his biannual trips to visit family in Portland, Matthew always visited Karin, too. “She’s my mentor,” he said. After its legacy business model collapsed, magazines have become such a niche market that you have to have guidance, and Karin has enjoyed enough of what qualifies as success in this business of thin margins that she can pass the do’s and don’ts to anyone passionate, and foolish, enough to try it themselves.

There in the corridor, they talked business. What titles sold well? Who delivered which British magazines at the best speed and price? She showed him a mag she loved. “I think I sold one copy of that,” he said, scratching the back of his head.

When she recommended another, he flipped through it. “You like it?

“I do,” she said. “It’s unique. It’s experimental. It’s far from the usual.” He reached for a mag on the top furthest shelf. “That I just got in,” she said. He studied Asterisk’s yellowish cover. Issue 8’s theme was communities. “It’s a social sciences journal—smart essays about culture, science, well-researched, bold.”

Matthew ran his hand across it: “And beautiful!”

From the waist down, Matthew resembled any other middle-aged cyclist with a weatherized backpack and black, Dad-rock sneakers. From the waist up, his glasses and collared button up gave him the look of an adjunct professor, with a handkerchief tied around his neck like an ascot. But when he spoke, Matthew spoke with the unapologetic nerdiness of a true devotee. Textured covers, tasteful fonts—how smart layouts should sell more copies than they do. He fucking loved magazines. Babs Newsstand had only been operating for three months, and by taking cues from Karin, Matthew planned to make it last.

Babs Newsstand operated inside a 45,000 square-foot, multi-arts space called Bread & Salt, which itself was experimenting with a unique mixture of events, local business, gallery space, and an artist residency. “It’s in a Latino neighborhood,” Matthew said. “I am the gentrifier.” Bab’s Newsstand grew from the BAB & Friends Gift Shop, which is some kind of community-minded activist risograph publisher and distributor of zines, books, and self-described alternative comics, in a multi-use, DIY arts space that also functions as a community event space and zine library, and that may involve cassette tapes. To sell magazines now, it helped to tap into an existing community—or build your own.

Since the internet era began in 2000, print magazines have suffered declining readership, losses in advertising, and shrinking sales at brick-and-mortar stores. Legacy titles closed or went digital. Redundancies merged. Others, like Elle, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, reduced the frequency of publication to reduce their losses. The market shrank. There were too many titles that were too broad, too generic, or too similar, and people who read online didn’t necessarily buy print editions. Social media and the pandemic further changed consumer behavior and cut deeper profits. Entertainment Weekly, Marie Claire, Rolling Stone, Seventeen, RealSimple, Country Living, Details, Spin—one by one, the titles of the era shrank or shuttered. By 2022, the publishing giant Condé Nast no longer presented itself as a magazine company. It was trying to find its footing as something else.

These weren’t just US problems. In the UK in 2018, the venerable music magazine NME ceased its print edition after 66 years of production. Glamour, England’s 10^th most popular print magazine, quit printing its monthly edition in 2018, too. According to The Guardian’s website, not its print edition, Ireland and the UK saw the sales of their top 100 magazines drop by half since 2000.

The print mags that Karin sells print smaller runs. They have smaller circulations. They aren’t sold in as many places. Some barely have a digital presence at all. Many qualify as luxury items. The key to successful magazine publishing now is to have a niche or a corporate backer—some media company or brand to fun production. Specialty magazines with a clear focus are thriving. Niches attract readers and allow advertisers to more precisely reach their target customers. In 2024, once popular magazine brands like Vice, Sports Illustrated, and Nylon have even relaunched their shuttered print editions, trying to find their niche in this new market. You’ll have to shop elsewhere to find those. Karin specializes in surprises.

From his backpack, Matthew pulled a small magazine he’d brought for her. She flipped through his gift while he flipped through The Gentlewoman, the self-described “fabulous woman’s magazine.”

Digesting the insights she freely gave, he shared his own experiences. He liked to hand-sell the Chicago-based magazine of ideas called The Point, but what was the cheapest way to source it? How had he missed that Wax Poetics relaunched their print issue? Did the once-popular Kinfolk have a strong sales rep to get it into stores or something, making sales pitches like “Hey, you sell neckties? You need this magazine!”

Think about what people want and what they want to be, Karin told him. “Who are they?”

He agreed. “Like, I aspire to be the kind of person who reads The Paris Review, but I’m not.”

It was just so hard separating what you liked to read from what customers might buy. But, as a curator of a kiosk, maybe those were the same things?

Forty minutes after opening, her first customer appeared and beelined for the rack. Wearing jeans with ragged cut hems, the young woman’s gloved hands flipped through the British design magazine Disegno ($20) then switched to a huge, British interior design and travel semiannual named Cabana ($40), whose top page edges were cut in a diagonal pattern, like a roof.

After letting the customer spend 10 seconds flipping through Cabana backwards, Karin sprinkled on some subtle encouragement: “That’s a great magazine.”

The customer smirked. “I’ve seen it here a couple times,” she said.

“Super fancy, a cool coffee table book size.”

“Yes. Full of inspiration.” She’d recently downsized her house, she explained, and wanted ideas about redecorating and rethinking her space.

With a mixture of detachment and precision, Karin laid a copy of Sloft in front of her—a French interior design magazine that focused on compact spaces. “See what you think of this,” she said before retreating.

The customer explored Sloft then switched to Dissent—a lefty intellectual journal of ideas and politics. When she stepped to the tiny rolling cube that functioned as the register, Karin said, “You found something good, huh?”

“I did!” Two magazines: the venerable graphic design magazine Eye, and Sloft. Total cost: $60.

The woman declined a bag for her purchase. “I will carry them proudly,” she said and stepped back outside.

Matthew hovered on the sidelines during the customer’s 12-minute visit. He seemed to listen to his mentor serve her magical blend of attention, enthusiasm, and distance, though maybe he was just reading.

Karin’s approach is to deliver a quick hit of personalized salesmanship with a lot of I’ll leave you alone now. She dips in and out, directing and validating without pressuring. It’s a skill. She knows reading is a solitary endeavor, and no magazine stand customers want an overbearing salesperson up in their biz. Instead, she gets to know her customers, their tastes, their desires.

Personal recommendations are what Karin calls her “the secret sauce.” They were, arguably, the core economic engine in bookselling itself.

In bookstores, this is called “hand-selling.” Clerks show customers a book they love or what to recommend, and that personal, enthusiastic transaction can make the sale right there. Enthusiasm drives this. Matching the product to the customer’s requests plays in, too. Also, handing someone something makes them feel indebted. It’s partly why stores provide free samples: Many customers feel the urge to reciprocate for the gift, however small, so they buy something, even something they may have felt lukewarm about, like a 60-dollar candle or a plastic clip that keeps teabag strings from falling into your mug.

But no one who comes to a magazine stand feels lukewarm about magazines. Print mags have become so niche you don’t stumble on them. You crave them, fetishize them, and seek them out. Most people visit The City Reader with great intentionality but little target other than to surprise themselves.

“I would say more than half of my customers don’t come for any specific thing,” Karin said. “They just want to see what’s new, what’s cool, see what I’m interested in right now. A lot of people will ask me what my favorite magazine is. ‘Show me which is the best magazine on your shelf’ is what they’re asking me, as opposed to what I think is a great magazine.”

Wearing orangish pants, a black and white flannel, and bobbed hair, the 57-year-old owner often stands with her hands folded atop each other, thoughtful, but relaxed. You could imagine her as a librarian, if she didn’t laugh so much. When she says ‘yeah,’ you hear her native Chicago, and her yeahs often come in twos. If one of her mags were profiling her, it might say that she had the bright vibrant eyes of someone deeply engaged with social and intellectual life. Because she specializes in unusual titles, shoppers don’t recognize most of what they see on her shelves, so her hand-selling works at the intersection of their interests and her recommendations.

“When people come to the newsstand without a specific magazine in mind, they’re looking for a feeling,” she said. “Like, they want something cozy. They want something to make them think today. They want something to entertain them, or that will expand their interests in whatever topics they find interesting. So I give them a half dozen things, and in one, two, three of those things, they see whatever they’re looking for. It’s a gut reaction, because it’s not like they can actually read a ton of what they find. I mean, sure, they can sit and stay as long as they want and read as much of it as they want! But they’re still following their feelings.”

And people feel smothered by screens.

“Because everything is screen-based now, people want to separate from that in their downtime,” she said. Unlike the way computers and phones make people feel, customers respond positively to the physical nature of a magazine. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to read a tablet. I want to read a print object.”

Second, the magazine format offers a unique experience.

“The beginning and end of a magazine make it appealing,” Karin said. “Like, it’s finite. It’s curated. Somebody picked what’s between the covers of a magazine. They thought it was important enough to put in there, so it’s not just endless scrolling, where it can be any crap that you’re lookin’ at. It’s something somebody thought was good.”

Unlike the endless scroll, you can lose yourself in a magazine temporarily, but it’s not a bottomless pit that squanders your valuable time. Having a tangible end makes a magazine something you can wrap your head around. It’s comprehensible. It rewards readers for their effort, instead of making you feel weak and adrift and powerless to resist. “I, personally, think finishing a magazine gives you a sense of satisfaction.” She shrugged. “That’s how I feel about it.” Do people look up from 30 minutes of vacant scrolling and go Ahh, that felt good?

You can get lost online. You can’t see all that’s out there. With no edges to guide you, navigating it can feel like wandering in the darkness while blindfolded. What will you bump into? You may arrive with a goal but wander off, getting sidetracked and lonely. Magazines give you page numbers, articles to move between, a back page you feel coming. And here in the corridor, people buzz by and carne asada scents the air. The smell, the sound, the feeling of being out in the world instead of scrolling on your couch—that becomes part of The City Reader experience. Shopping is tactile. It’s comprehensible, just like Karin’s objects.

Small-circulation magazines often have high production values. Heavy card stock, matted covers, dazzling colors—the sensory experience of a printed object appeals to people. You feel it. You smell it. Your brain engages with physical words and images differently than those on a screen. That’s biology. Humans have spent so little of our evolutionary history engaging with screens that, as helpful as technology is, our brains are so accustomed to print media that they consume that stuff and file it differently than digital information. “I carry beautiful things!” Karin said it with a laugh, but she was proud.

And no matter how beautiful, magazines demand little of you. Bound paper requires no electricity. You only need to open their pages to use them. Of course, there was nothing simple about producing a magazine, but print media’s simple user interface offers a refreshing opportunity to decompress from our overwhelmingly complicated world.

Her friend had more questions: Did most customers pay with cards, cash, or apps? How did she use her spreadsheets? Distributors, discounts, returns, sales, titles of interest—“It’s a lot of details to keep track of,” she said. With shifting inventory, staying profitable required organization and planning. “Spreadsheets are my external hard drive.”

He didn’t look like a spreadsheet guy.

Curating her inventory required reading people as much as it required reading to source new titles. “I’m always judging the mood of the moment,” she said, “what’s going on with people and the culture right now. When Covid was going on, people wanted interior design magazines, because they were at home so much. As soon as Covid started going way, people got interested in travel magazines, and food. People are always interested in food magazines.” She carried lots of those, like Toothache (created by chefs for food enthusiasts), Linseed Journal (“themed around a single ingredient with enduring cultural significance”), and Nobel Rot (wine). But right now, days after President Trump’s reelection, nobody wants to read Jacobin or anything remotely political. “So that stuff’s going away, and I’m going to fill some of that space with something else.”

The kiosk’s lowest shelf contained an incredible variety of kids’ magazines: Ranger Rick, Highlights, Anorak, and Kazoo. Above that, familiar mainstream titles like Dwell and Harvard Business Review stood by a whole magazine dedicated to an interview with a single person (Mono Kultur), a quarterly devoted to slow journalism (Delayed Gratification), and a whole zine for goths (Dark Entries). There was also Mother Tongue (a biannual about modern motherhood), Tools (a French annual that examines a single manufacturing technique in each issue), Konfekt (“The magazine for Sharp Dressing, Drinking, Dining, Travel and Design”), Brownbook (“An Urban Guide to the Middle East), We Jazz (about jazz), Solo (about coffee), Butt (a biannual about queer culture and sexuality), MOLD (“Designing the future of food”), Eaten (“the food history magazine”), Tonic (“A heady cocktail of drink, travel and adventure”), Slightly Foxed (“The real reader’s quarterly”), Lodestars Anthology, Field & Station, Pleasant Place, The Common, The MacGuffin, The Baffler, The Drift, The Beautiful Truth, Kitchen Table, A Rabbit’s Foot, Idler, Maggot Brain, Paperboy, Noema, Openhouse, Flaneur, Rebel Roots, Feels, Violet Book, Upper Case, and Luncheon. And Summit Journal, Surfer’s Journal, and Bicycle Quarterly.

“This is the new normal for magazines,” said Karin. “The beautiful things, as opposed to the disposable, conventional ones.” Like The Economist: It comes and goes in a week. But a 30-dollar magazine? “That’s going to sit on your coffee table for a while!”

At 1:08, a customer came in for the new Paris Review. She didn’t come to browse. She didn’t come to chat. She paid for her literary magazine and left.

Karin and Matthew shrugged. Some just sell themselves.

* * *

Karin’s relationship with magazines started when her mother gave her an issue of Cricket when she was little. Growing up in Chicago, her grandpa ran a print shop downtown, making the paper cards, stationary, catalogues, and event invitations that were popular at the time. Karin spent a lot of time in his print shop: first just running around during school breaks, later, “working” there as a teenager. In the summer, they rode the train in from the suburbs with their grandmother. Those summer rides felt nice in her memory. The large print ship machines made noises and smelled a particular way—like oiled metal. So did her grandfather’s crisp printed products. “I’m sure my love of print has to do with that,” she said. “It has to. Print is in my blood.”

Chicago used to have a lot of bookstores, and Karin made her living selling books in them. When she moved to Portland in 1999, the first thing she did was apply for a job at Powell’s Books. At the time, Powell’s was the largest new and used bookstore in the country. Back when Portland was a quieter bohemian city, it let you live on less money, so Powell’s drew all sorts of artists, aspiring writers, and bibliophiles who wanted interesting but less demanding work that paid enough to survive. Of course, Powell’s saw her resume and hired her. Unfortunately, she only landed a job in Powell’s contact center in a warehouse. Instead of ordering books as a purchaser, instead of spending her days in a store’s overstuffed aisles, putting books in peoples’ hands, she sat on the phone, taking customer’s orders. “I hated it.”

Around 2009, magazines started to experience a renaissance. Digitization, and America’s great recession, changed many businesses, including publishing. As mainstream commercial print publications like Esquire and Rolling Stone suffered declining readership and shrinking mastheads, independently published magazines started emerging in their place.

“Desktop publishing let people do it all themselves,” said Karin, “and a lot of small operations, these independent, rebel-type people, looked around and said, ‘I’m going to start a magazine!’” Some of those people were laid off editors and burned-out designers. Others preferred offline entertainment to screens, or wanted to slow down as life sped up. Although some were attached to design agencies and nonprofits, these were publications owned by big corporations like Conde Nast. Many qualified as independent publications, even DIY or “alternative” publications. Together, they formed what The City Reader website calls a “new and vibrant scene.”

Over the years, Karin’s phone job burned her out, but by working in books, she noticed the magazine renaissance.

For how arty and DIY Portland was, few people in Portland seemed to notice the indie magazine renaissance, though. Most of America seemed to have missed it, too. In fact, as commercial magazines in the United States declined, they thrived in the rest of the world. Japan had thousands of magazines. “They’re all in Japanese,” Karin said, “and they don’t export them, but there are plenty!” Paris and Barcelona still had newsstands. There were magazine kiosks in London and all over Europe. A few small newsstands still operated in New York City—including Soho News International, which enjoys a cult following. Maybe some exist in a few other large U.S. cities, too, but mostly, they’d gone the way of the mall and the Barnes and Noble bookstore chain. America was missing out. There in the contact center, Karin’s mind kept returning to the magazine renaissance. “Portland didn’t need another bookstore,” she decided. “It needed magazines. And I’m like, ‘What the heck. Midlife crisis. Let’s do it!’”

To keep overhead low, she wanted a kiosk, not a store. “As my first business, I wasn’t going to do some big thing. It was just me. I didn’t want employees.” She searched the city for a space small enough to accommodate a kiosk. When she told property owners her business venture, many got confused: You want a what? “Finally the guy who owns this building thought it was a great idea.” He’d just remodeled the building and created this common area.

So in 2013, she started The City Reader and filled Portland’s—and America’s—market gap. She trusted that Portland had enough people who still loved magazines. Gradually, she found them. They ordered from all over the country. The shrinking local marketplace also put a finer point on her offerings.

Powell’s Books’ flagship downtown location still sold magazines, but they’d moved their shrunken selection from massive racks near their busy Green Room entrance to a hallway where customers often lined up for the register. Rich’s Cigar Shop downtown used to have the city’s largest and best magazine selection. Tons of customers tolerated that gross smoke to browse. After the pandemic, Rich’s liquated their inventory and never replenished. Their buyer didn’t think young people cared about magazines anymore. They were too much trouble. Attrition made Karin the only game in town, but skill and enthusiasm made her the best. What she found was that it wasn’t true no one cared about magazines. It’s that the people who do care, care deeply. “Some people forgot about how much they loved magazines,” Karin said, “and they’ve rediscovered that here. Some never knew how great magazines could be until they found the kiosk.”

* * *

After Matthew left, Karin straightened titles, pulled stock from one of the bottom cabinets, and the sound of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” filled the corridor.

She put on her glasses and studied a spreadsheet on her laptop. She arranged five new magazines and photographed them for Instagram.

One woman sat at one of the eight nearby tables, drinking a pint of beer and reading a magazine she’d purchased here. Behind her, two folks did what looked like schoolwork on laptops.

Karin’s set up was simple: kiosk, a rolling cubicle for her workspace, one laptop, one tall chair. A single black plastic chair wedged itself between the kiosk and the front window, providing a place to read while facing the sunlight street. Above it a sign: “Shop Local.” As a devoted black tea drinker, she kept an electric kettle on her desk with an electric mug-warmer. On her feet, thick-soled house slippers kept her comfortable with warm wool uppers. Her profit margins aren’t big, but she filled enough of a niche to survive for a decade and counting. “It’s a lifestyle choice,” she told one reporter, “let’s put it that way.” Her motto: “Keep overhead low, and keep things moving.”

“It takes a little while—it took me a little while—to figure out the flow: How much stuff I could buy, and when. When to reorder things and not to reorder things. How many copies I should get. And it takes a while to figure out what your clientele wants. Then things change. For a while something will fly off the shelves, then interest will wane and some new cool thing will arrive, so you buy less of that first thing. Stuff like that. It takes experience.”

Even with experience, purchasing is tricky. If a title is popular, you don’t want to miss sales by ordering too few copies. “But on the other hand,” she said, “when the new issue comes out, you don’t want a stack of the old issue sitting around, so it’s better to sell them all than to have too many.” That’s another motto.

As clear as her categories of magazines were, she didn’t have a motto for how she organized her shelves. “There is a logic to it,” she said, “but I couldn’t say what it is. It’s just a feeling. Some of it comes down to space. When I add something to the design section, I have to pull something off that shelf, because those magazines are big. I just feel it out. There’s an art to it, but I also definitely think that moving things around helps people see different things. If everything’s in the same spot every time, then they’re not necessarily going to pay attention to something that’s been hiding behind something else for a long time. But if I move it around, new things are lookin’ at’cha!”

Her third customer arrived at 1:33 and immediately grabbed a copy of Eye.

Karin said, “Let me know if I can help.”

He didn’t look up. “Just browsing, thanks.”

This 30-something with brown pants, clean green sneakers, and a receding hairline flipped through “the international review of graphic design” at a casual pace, head tilted, mouth agape. A rolled-up copy of The Portland Mercury alt-weekly poked out of his back pocket. When he returned Eye to the shelf, he worked his way to the right and grabbed Wildsam, a new publication that had recently made the risky financial decision to transform from a series of pocket-sized indie travel guides to a traditional-looking glossy “dedicated to road trips, recreational vehicles and the outdoors.” What drew this customer to it? What made him put it back?

“Well,” said Karin, “that’s the tactile part. Watchin’ it, feelin’ it, smellin’ it.”

He flipped through Trails (“The only magazine for backpackers.”), then Surfer’s Journal (no), then Current Affairs (also a no).

“Doin’ alright?” Karin said.

He was. He marveled at the section.

“We just got this,” she said and set the new issue of Asterisk in front of him.

He thumbed through and returned it.

At 1:47 he bought Sight and Sound, the British Film Institute’s monthly magazine, and Karin slipped it into a satisfyingly crisp paper bag. Total cost: $11.

She estimates that three-quarters of her customers are regulars. “Not every week, or even every month customers, but absolutely regular customers.” As if on cue, the front door opened, and a man in a bright orange running jacket and shorts walked in. “Like this guy,” Karin said with a laugh.

Confused about suddenly being the focus on attention, the man said “Hello, I am a loyal customer” in a comical robot voice.

He’d come for his copy of the English runners quarterly Like the Wind, which he described as “the best running magazine in the world.” She special orders it for him then IG messages when it arrives.

His name was Mike Russell. A 54-year-old cartoonist and creator of The Sabertooth Vampire and CulturePulp comics, he’d majored in magazine journalism, back when more universities offered that course of study. He’d also worked in publishing in the 1990s: first as managing editor at Portland Living, a struggling startup that ran out of money, then as the editor of two community papers—one which no longer exists—then he reviewed movies and books, and drew a comic strip, for The Oregonian from 2004 to 2014. It was unclear how he earned his living now, but he still loved longform journalism. “I collected Spy magazine in the ’90s—I have all but six issues of it,” he said. “That was my great love affair with journalism, the classic magazines of yesteryear: Spy, Rolling Stone, and Esquire with the George Lois covers and all that stuff. So I’m a real huge fan of what she does.”

As an editor, he’d noticed the kiosk when he’d run past the building. When he finally stopped to ask if she had any running magazines, she presented Like the Wind. He’s never seen it anywhere else.

“She is singlehandedly keeping the craft of making magazines, and the art of reading magazines alive,” he said, “from the front of the book to the back. That’s a special way to consume information, and there’s not a lot of that going on now. She finds all the people who are trying to do that well.”

Karin smiled as he showered her with praise.

She could mail his purchases to him, but a quarterly ensured him four in-person visits a year. He liked seeing all the colorful covers on the shelves. He liked chatting with Karin. In our digital era, where you can get anything delivered and survive for weeks without leaving your house, magazines provide information as much as a sense of community, and community just feels good.

“It brings me back to a very nostalgic time in my life,” Mike said, “in my 20s, when I would go wander through bookstores and browse the magazines.”

He still thought like an editor, too. When he went to buy shoes at a local running store, he overheard someone talking about Like the Wind. It turned out to be Simon and Julie Freeman, co-founders of his favorite running quarterly. They were touring American running stores to build their U.S. audience, so he introduced himself and pitched them a freelance story in-person. The story was an oral history of the 1980s running movie, On the Edge. “Which nobody remembers,” he added. During the pandemic, his hobby became tracking down everybody who was in that movie to write an oral history about it. “I talked to actor Bruce Dern for three and a half hours. I talked with Pam Grier, who actually got cut from the theatrical release, though she was added back in on the VHS. Everybody was like, ‘Why do you want to talk about this movie?’”

It was a compelling pitch, though he and the running magazine hadn’t yet signed a contract. “We’ll see,” Mike said. “I don’t know if it will get in there.”

Karin waved as he walked back outside holding his magazine. “People like him are the reason I do it.”

Author’s note: I wrote this story in 2022. Since no magazine wanted to publish it, I give it to you, dear reader. I don’t know, I kinda thought it was interesting, but maybe I’m wrong?

Nostalgia can be a distracting neurological trick, but it can also be fun.

Come on. Going to video stores was fun. Browsing the aisles. Viewing the cover art. In-person movie shopping let you hold those video tapes in your cigarette-scented hands and literally feel the countless entertainment possibilities that you enjoyed as a pampered American. Look at all the choices—too many!—and look at the stifling weight of the American Movie Industry’s influence on your life. Before the rise of The Internet Enablement Complex, which started delivering everything from groceries to weed and worsening our social anxiety and disconnection, we had to leave our homes to get things. Remember that? Walking into a physical store and talking to human beings? You had to look them in the eyes and converse. If you were stoned, you had to look them in the eyes while snickering, often at the cash register. THC made it hard to count out the right amount of cash to pay for your Thirstbuster and video rental. Everyone could see how high you were, but whatever.

Wearing your most private, stoned-and-slightly-buzzed-on-a-Wednesday-night outfit, you wandered to rent entire rows of action and comedy and horror films. You could read the description of what this Janeane Garofalo flick was about in the analog meat space world outside of your own head. Life was good.

Pulp Fiction, Thelma and Louise, Clerks, Encino Man, Get Shorty, 2 Days in the Valley.

And Kids, Clueless, Wild at Heart, Fargo, Boyz 'N the Hood, Boogie Nights, Friday, Wayne’s World, Dazed and Confused, Sleepless in Seattle, The Joy Luck Club, Jerry Maguire, L.A. Confidential—all the titles you loved and loathed surrounded you as you strolled the aisles, wondering who to spend your night with. The faces of the actors on the boxes became the faces that defined your youth as much as your actual friends did—along with the video store’s ugly stained carpet. Shannen Doherty was there. Jason Lee was there. And Claire Danes, Meg Ryan, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jay and Silent Bob, though you probably got sick of those two.

Flipping through the new releases was exciting: What’s cool? What’s obscure? What new Pulp Fiction knock-off was Hollywood circulating now? Maybe you should just rent Heathers again? You’d seen it a million times, but nothing in the new releases was catching your eye, and you’d read the description on all the boxes just last Friday. Like The Cure, Heathers was proof that the ’80s weren’t entirely bad, so you drove that VHS tape to your apartment one more time to repeat the viewing ritual and smoke cigs in your plaid Gap PJs.

(Don’t forget to listen to the label that said, “Be Kind, Please Rewind.”)

See? Renting videos was fun, if only in your aging memories.

A gamer named Nick Collins missed the video store experience so much that he spent $1,2000 to recreate one in his basement. Seriously! He modeled what he called “Nostalgia Video” after a 1992-era Blockbuster Video.

His hobby of collecting retro video games expanded to VHS collecting, and the obsession quickly filled his house with lots of nostalgic inventory.

“There was just an indescribable feeling of seeing these old VHS covers again that I would see so regularly in the video stores of the late 90s,” he told Horror Geek Life. “Holding, examining, observing these works of art brought back incredibly warm memories for me. It was a joy to begin owning a lot of these movies that I rented so many times in years past.” After another video game collector, the self-proclaimed The Angry Video Game Nerd, built a video store in his basement, and that inspired Collins to do the same.

“From May-July of 2017, I spent pretty much each day & night cutting, sanding, measuring, and painting until the sun came up,” Nick Collins said. I am not a handyman and had no prior carpentry experience before this, but I was determined to build this damn basement video store. When it was finished, even I was shocked at the end result. It had the real look and feel of a Blockbuster Video from the ’90s. The first night of walking around the newly finished store, picking up and looking at tapes off the shelves – it was an awesome feeling, and an experience I’ll never forget.”

In 2017, that basement was one of the only places on Earth that a person could have this experience once more.

In the early 2000s, as digital media found its shape, other people marveled at the video store as a dying piece of an era, so they documented it before it went fully extinct. Here’s one writer’s visit to the last Blockbuster Video Store on Earth. And Netflix ended up doing a whole documentary about it:

Esquire published a great article about it, titled “The True Story of Netflix’s Blockbuster, and the Last Video Rental Store.”

And Atlas Obscura published a lively oral history called “Remembering the Glory Days of the Video Rental Store.”

You know, reading might actually more fun that going to a video store. But anyway.

Even after the 1990s ended, many of us still rented movies from stores, because Netflix had only just started its mail ecommerce service, and the Delivery Industrial Complex hadn’t fully transformed us into human veal.

In 2001 and 2002, I used to walk to my neighborhood Blockbuster Video Store with my pet ferret in my backpack and stroll the aisles while he sniffed the store’s musty air. That building still stands in Northeast Portland. That empty storefront is still vacant.

I pass it all the time.

I only think about it while driving by.

Like everyone else, I stream movies at night.

Just kidding. That’s the whole post: that title + photo.

I dedicate this one to Alive in the Nineties reader Kevin Alexander, with love and hair shavers.

Wish I had the academic chops to do a true deep dive into this early ’90s fashion phenom. Instead, I’ll appreciate it, bald and middle-aged, from the sidelines.

AG

On a frigid January day in 2024, my family went into a Portland resale store. As our six-year-old daughter searched for vintage toys, I searched a bin of 7-inch records. Among a litany of unwanted ’80s music, I found a record with an old train depot on the cover, by a band named Scenic.

The image looked desert-y. My heart raced at the sight of it.

I grew up in the desert. Ever since falling in love with The Friends of Dean Martinez’s first album in Tucson in 1996, I’ve looked for more instrumental music that sounds like the desert feels—something austere and haunting like that seminal instrumental album. If I could find another album that channels the spirit of the American desert or evokes it slightly, I’d be stoked. Maybe Scenic was it?

I searched inside the sleeve for clues.

Formed in 1992, said one paper insert, this band had recorded a full album, named Incident At Cima, and this single contained three of those songs. As the cover said:

The album consists of 18 pieces of music which serve as a soundscape to the sights one would experience when visiting the East Mojave Desert. In part, this is our way of paying homage to a land that is persistently inspiring.

That sounded promising. So did the song titles “East Mojave Shuffle,” “Down Black Canyon Road,” and “The Kelso Run.”

Inside the sleeve were three other paper inserts—one for each song. Each featured an antique-looking photo of the desert, printed on a washed out, sepia-scheme that evoked a dusty August day.

The sturdy textured record sleeve was a work of art in itself. It felt good to touch. It was essentially an envelope, made of firm paper stock, that folded up sideways. “Insert tab in slot to close package,” the text said. I did. The way the pieces interlocked felt satisfying, too.

This was no normal record. It was handmade. Clearly a lot of thought went into it. That’s partly why it stood out.

I grew up in the analog era. As much as I love the digital age, modern times could be too digital. So much exists on-screen, out of touch. Records like this offer a return to earth. So does discovering them accidently in a physical store. That’s one way people used to find music before algorythms and streaming services.

The cover said the train station is called the Kelso Depot and that it’s located in a ghost town in the remote Eastern Mojave. The sleeve was printed in Sedona, Arizona. And Scenic’s guitarist, it turned out, was Bruce Licher, from the avant-garde band Savage Republic. I loved Savage Republic. This boded well, too.

Holding my phone to my ear, I listened to some faint but beautiful instrumental track someone posted on Discogs. Even through my tiny phone speakers, it was clear: I’d found the desert music I’d been searching for since 1996.

Even though the whole Scenic album was already on Bandcamp, I needed this record.

The cashier pulled my record across the counter and studied the cover. “Do you know what you’re in for here?” he said.

His question reminded me of shopping for music in my youth. You’d take a chance on a record because you liked the cover or band name, or maybe you’d heard one song from the band on MTV. You didn’t know what to expect of the whole album but you bought it anyway. Maybe every song on the album but the single would suck?

“I do,” I said, and told him about my eternal search for desert music like the Friends of Dean Martinez.

He’d never heard of them but loved the sound of desert music. “My friend introduced me to Calexico when I lived in Tucson,” he said. “Can I take a pic?”

He also wanted to track down this band.

When I got home, I found more info about Scenic online. The phone number for Bruce Licher’s design firm was listed on Discogs, so I called it. When no one answered, I left a message. Three days later, we spoke. Two weeks later, I understood Scenic’s story.

Design + Music

When I bought The Kelso Run for $5, I had no idea that band-leader Bruce Licher is one of the most respected letterpress artists in the world. I only knew his guitar work from Savage Republic. Although Scenic had formed in 1992, the ideas and experience that led to its creation date back to the late 1970s, as the second wave of punk rock was splintering in interesting artistic directions.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Licher studied fine arts at UCLA, where visual art and music became permanently intertwined as his career.

In 1979, he took a photography class and started taking his camera to the punk shows that his classmates were going to.

“I was taking pictures of some punk band at the Whisky A Go-Go in my shoulder-length hair and Pink Floyd shirt,” he told Wire. “I don’t know why I did that! Halfway through the set, some little punk girl came up to me with a Marks-A-Lot marker and began X-ing out my Pink Floyd shirt. I tried to stop her and she wouldn’t stop, and the guy that was with her was like, ‘Oh c’mon! Let her do it!’ It was then I thought, She already wrecked it, so why not? After she was done ruining my shirt, she grabbed my hair and shook it and danced off.”

The experience of photographing underground musicians eventually drew him into performing, because he realized that he could do this himself. So did Brian Eno’s 1978 no wave compilation, No New York.

“I bought that album and it just kind of blew my mind,” Licher told me in 2024, “especially the two bands on the B side, Mars and DNA. I was just like, oh my God. It was DNA. Listening to DNA, it finally clicked in my mind: I can do this. They were just these really simple, repetitive things that were layered, and it just was like, I can do this.”

That’s when he went to buy a guitar.

“When I bought my first guitar I didn’t have a clue what to do with it,” Licher said, “so I signed up for lessons. I took guitar lessons for six weeks. Ok, here’s how you make this chord. Do this. Do this pattern. After six weeks I got tired of learning Chuck Berry riffs, and I was just like, Okay, I know what to do now, so I quit, and I just started experimenting. What kind of weird sounds can I get out of this thing?”

In 1980, Licher took a UCLA independent project class, called “New Forms and Concepts.” Led by an infamous conceptual artist named Chris Burden—a guy who shot himself in the arm during a performance piece—Licher befriended some interesting students in that class.

“One of them was wearing an Ultravox shirt so I immediately was like, cool! I’ll talk to these guys!” he told Wire. “They told me they were in a band called Neef and that they were opening for The Urinals at the coffee house on campus next week. So I went to that show and thought it was really cool. The guys in Neef were pretty much self-taught, and I could tell because they couldn’t play very well. So that’s when I thought, maybe they’ll let me play with them! So I asked them if they’d let me play with them the next time they got together and they said sure. Those were the first guys I started playing with, and we came up with some interesting stuff, but they never wanted to rehearse anything. They always wanted to improvise. I kept thinking we had good stuff and if we practiced it, we could get good at playing it. But they didn’t want to do that, so that only lasted about six months. We decided to do our own record because our friends in The Urinals had done it and we realized how easy it was. So we all put in $40 and pressed up as many as we could for $200. That’s when I realized I could do this by myself.”

For his UCLA independent project class, Licher recorded his own experimental music, named Project 197.

To release it, he needed his own record label, so he created Independent Project Records. “I had to create a name for my record label, but everything I came up with just sounded really pretentious,” Licher said. “Then I thought, ‘What is this? It’s an independent project record, so that’s what I’ll call it.’ By the time I got finished, it was like, ‘Hey, that was fun. I’m going to do another one.’”

He didn’t think he was creating a label for life. He just saw it as the vehicle for this project. But the label that he grew from there became one of the most unique and recognizable in underground music. The music magazine The Big Takeover called Independent Project Records “a magical realm where uncommercial approach meets accessible hook…” Licher’s work is a mixture of music and design, art and product, which he used to think of as art with a function. But there at the very beginning, he was still finding his chosen mediums and developing his visual vocabulary.

In 1980, punk rock was alive and well in underground Los Angeles. The punk ethos was revolutionary because it was all about accessibility and self-definition. The idea was that anyone could learn an instrument and form a band. Anyone could publish a zine or start a label and sound however they wanted. You just needed to learn a few guitar chords and utilize the means of production. Post-punk music—meaning, everything that came after the first wave of punk rock—could embody that ethos, no matter how the music sounded stylistically.

For a few months, Licher had been eying a certain open door on campus. He’d spotted it and wondered where it led. It was always open. So one day in early 1980, he went through it and entered a new chapter of his life.

“I got permission to shoot a film in the tunnels for an art project,” Licher told me. “They literally just gave me a key for six months and said ‘Bring it back when you’re done.’ So we had free reign.”

“Once inside, he discovered an intricate and claustrophobic entanglement of underground passageways,” reads the Savage Impressions book. “As the tunnels were built solely to service the campus’s utilitarian needs, they measure only about seven feet in diameter and are lined with conduit and pipe. Lighting is sparse, often provided only when there is a bend in the pathway. The air is hot and stifling, and once inside, one is subjected to the constant roar of the boiler rooms to which the tunnels are connected. The feeling one gets in the tunnels is that of being inside an industrial animal, amidst the arteries that carry the stuff of life. Here was an ideal location for Licher to create work exploring the limitations of an individual’s experience of freedom within the modern, industrialized world.”

With the key, Licher and his friend Daniel Voznick, aka Chez Voz, used their cassette boombox to record themselves playing in the tunnels. They called the project Bridge. It alternated between a jam session, performance art, and noise.

They pressed those recordings on Independent Project Records and sold them to local record stores on consignment. Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard even took a few copies. It was IPR’s second release.

In 1980, a UCLA student named Jonathan Gold heard the records and asked Licher if he’d assemble a band that could open for Gold’s electronic band Overman at their upcoming gig in Burbank.

Licher liked the idea. It also made him nervous. Although he and his art school friends had played for small gatherings of friends on campus in fleeting bands like Neef, they’d never played on what counted as a “real stage” at a real working venue, where people paid to attend.

To prepare, Licher, Daniel, and their percussionist friend Mark Erskine started practicing inside UCLA’s parking garages, still under the name Bridge. After recording in a tunnel, writing songs in a parking garage didn’t seem so odd. After all, it was LA. Why let cars rule everything?

Erskine played a pile of scrap offset lithography printing plates. Their friend Michael Gross sang on a megaphone that Bruce bought at a junk store.

Curious about the noise, a woman named Debbie Spinelli wandered through the garage to check it out. She liked what she saw and mentioned that she was a drummer. So the guys asked her to drum on the songs that required actual drumming, and a band was born.

Their show went well.

“When we came to a song in the set we’d named ‘Tools,’” Bruce said on Facebook in August 2025, “Michael prepared to do what he’d planned, which was use a number of different electric hand tools to make noise into the megaphone in between shouting ‘Tools!,’ and did something we’d planned to do (but had not rehearsed), which was to use an electric drill to drill a hole through my guitar while I was playing the song. As it happens, I had no idea of the amount of pressure he was going to need to use to get the drill to go through the wood, and the more he pushed, the harder it was to keep playing, and eventually we started spinning around and got all wrapped up in the electrical cord, and then the drill bit snapped off, still firmly embedded in the guitar.”

People applauded. That was Bruce’s first real live show.

It all happened in what you’d call a very organic way. It also offers proof of the value of the analog world. Stuff happens when you leave your house—and in our time, get off our phones and get outside. People bump into each other, and lives change after creative souls have random encounters.

“In the early ’80s, I think the rest of the world saw LA as this braindead, sunbaked, smoggy sprawl,” filmmaker Stuart Swezey said in his documentary Desolation Center, “which it actually kind of was. For those of us that grew up here, the early ’80s was actually a really vital and interesting time. It was a time of experimentation and rebellion.”

Licher and his friends developed in that fertile environment, surrounded by fierce, adventurous music and people.

Savage Republic

In 1981, while Licher still had the tunnel keys, he and Erskine went back under UCLA to jam and co-founded their experimental band Savage Republic.

Erskine brought his weird wooden drum set. Licher’s friend Phil Drucker suggested they bring his friend Jeff who wanted to learn experimental bass playing. Licher said cool, bring him. They recorded themselves on their boombox again, this time playing two basses.

Above ground after their session, they had a snack by some campus vending machines and listened to their recording, and they decided to keep doing this as a band. This was shortly after the Iranian Revolution. A lot of Iranian students attended UCLA. On the wall above the vending machines, Licher spotted a torn up flyer with Farsi and the image of someone getting executed. He told the others, “That’s our record cover.”

Originally named Africa Corps, Savage Republic pulled inspiration from African, Arabic, Greek, and Eastern European sources, as well as surf music, industrial music, post-punk, and psychedelia. It was original and weird—slicing and angular, feeling both international and from nowhere at once.

They banged old pipes, 55-gallon oil barrels, and railroad ties. They collected things at junkyards. Members listened to everything from Flipper to Can to the Beach Boys. They also really liked soundtracks. That’s one reason they covered composer Mikis Theodorakis’s anti-government song “O Andonis” from the 1969 political film Z.

Tribal, percussive, dissonant, droning, their early music had ferocious screaming vocals and noisy clattering. From the mid-80s and beyond, it had more cinematic, melodic, and hypnotic songs that alternated vocals with instrumentals. But even the tamest songs were unconventional.

Erskine was completely self-taught.

“And he did some completely wacko things, but he did some brilliant stuff too,” Licher told me. So he did. He didn’t read music, and he didn’t want a professional drummer. He wanted somebody who could play with feeling. “I value creativity over ability in some sense. I mean, ability is important, but it’s highly technical stuff I don’t need necessarily.”

Coming from the punk rock and art school worlds, he appreciated the freedom of creating beyond convention, and took an intuitive, rather than technical, approach. It worked. He was also ambitious, and he applied his creativity to life off his instrument.

During his final year at UCLA, he took a silkscreen class. So he silkscreened, Xeroxed, and hand-folded the sleeves for his first three IPR records: Project 197, Bridge, and Them Rhythm Ants. Because he was also making experimental films, he turned a still frame from a film into a postcard record insert.

“I was trying to do something different and creative with each of those in terms of silk-screening the packaging,” Licher told FLOOD. “But I don’t know that I necessarily succeeded greatly until I ran across the letterpress. That was when the ah-ha moment came.”

In 1982, Licher learned to do letterpress printing in a class at the Women’s Graphic Center in downtown LA. “For a lot of years, it seemed like most people that were doing letterpress were really into fine books, using it for making limited editions of some famous writing, which was all pretty dry for me,” he told the New Times.

As a fan of music and records, though, he was curious about the idea of making a record that was fine art. He liked the idea of art with a function. He liked the idea of getting fine art out of the gallery space and letting people find it in the real world. He enjoyed drawing and painting as an undergrad, but he wanted to do something different, too. “I always felt if someone else is doing it, I don’t want to do it,” Licher said. “I wanted to forge my own path.”

To see if he could print his own album covers differently, he signed up for a class in offset lithography at the Women’s Graphic Center downtown.

“The class got canceled,” Licher remembered, “but the teacher said, ‘Well, we have this letterpress class that we’re teaching next week. You could sign up for that.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, OK.’ But I had no idea what letterpress was. So I took the class, and the project was to make a postcard. So I made a postcard advertising the forthcoming album by Africa Corp. And while I was there working on that, I saw this other big flatbed press with an 18- by 24-inch bed that nobody was using. I kept thinking, ‘That’s the perfect size for an album jacket!’ The teacher said, ‘If you take the class again, I’ll teach you how to use that press. Nobody uses it because they’re kind of afraid of it!’ So I took the class a second time and bought a thousand sheets of chipboard, and I made an album jacket for Tragic Figures, Savage Republic’s first album. And then, once I’d done that, I was like, ‘Oh, this is it!’

Meaning: He managed to use a class to both teach him how to make records, and to create the actual covers for his own band’s record. That’s the punk approach. That’s DIY.

Learning letterpress led to him founding Independent Project Press, the publishing outlet for his graphic design work. The Press handled design, printing, and hand-letterpressing of album sleeves, labels, and inserts. Using IPR as Savage Republic’s platform, they released their first full album, Tragic Figures, in 1982. Naturally, Licher designed and letter-pressed all of Savage Republics’ album sleeves, by hand, himself, after that. He often hand-numbered the records, too. With his singular aesthetic, he made the world of fine art books somehow fit the world of underground music.

Licher knew he didn’t have to rely on existing commercial channels to release the band’s music or anyone else’s. They could do that themselves. He still needed to earn a living, though.

While working as a campus courier at UCLA, Bruce looked for ways to put his skills to use and generate more money than courier afford.

“I started approaching other bands about putting out their releases,” he told the New Times, “and as I did that, the word got out there. After a year of working at the [Women’s Graphic Center] it became obvious to me that I needed my own press. I was in there all the time, and I started getting jobs where I was getting paid, and that was not what the center was set up for. A friend of mine from UCLA—who, earlier that year, had been involved in a car accident—he got a big settlement and was basically looking for investments. He loaned me $5,000, and I was able to buy equipment, rent a space downtown, move in and start trying to make a living.”

The studio was inside the old brick Nate Starkman & Son building at 544 Mateo Street, in the industrial district by the LA River.

Through his label and his design firm, Licher went on to release records from other underground bands, including 100 Flowers, Party Boys, Kommunity FK, Ten Foot Faces, and Human Hands—as he continued recording music with Savage Republic. “I’ve come at this from being an artist in a sense. I didn’t study graphic design in school. That’s why it’s kind of ironic that here I am making my living as a graphic designer.”

Licher’s relationship with the desert deepened around this time.

The Desert

“When I was growing up, my parents always took my brother and I out to the desert,” Licher told me. “They owned a glider, a sailplane. And so they would go out to the desert to fly the sailplane like once a month. So I was very familiar with the desert from that experience, just going out there. And then when I was in college, I used to go out to the desert.”

As an undergrad around 1982, he had an idea for an experimental film. It would mix Eraserhead with Lawrence of Arabia. He’d film it in the desert, and Savage Republic would do the soundtrack. “I had no idea what it was going to be about,” he told the Independent Podcast Review. “I just had this idea in my head that we should make a film in the desert.” So Licher and Savage Republic drummer Phil [Drucker] drove to the desert to scout locations.

They never made the film, but Licher’s attraction to the desert remained. “So yeah, I’ve just always been drawn to the desert,” he told me. “It’s very beautiful and stark.”

In 1982, his underground artist friend Stuart Swezey had his own idea.

Sweezy was traveling with friends in the desert of northern Mexico. They were playing music like Minutemen, Wire, and Savage Republic. Looking out the car window, Swezey wondered: What would happen if they put on a punk show in a desert environment like this? You know, get away from the cops who kept breaking up their shows. Get away from conventional music venues. Just do it on the dirt, under the stars. What if? “That’s when it just clicked to me,” Swezey said in Desolation Center. “This is where I want to see this kind of music.”

Licher was the first person Swezey called to discuss this desert show. (The second person was D. Boon from Minutemen.) And not only was history made, but Licher’s connection to the desert deepened further.

“When Stuart approached me about doing a desert show,” Licher said in Desolation Center, “I said oh, I’ve got a location that I think could be really appropriate for this. …so I took Stuart out there to see the location, and we both agreed that it would work really well.”

It was Soggy Dry Lake near Victorville.

As with Licher’s record label, Swezey needed a name for the organization that put on this show. He called his operation Desolation Center. He called that first gig “Mojave Exodus.”

Savage Republic and Minutemen got invited to play. Swezey asked the keyboardist from the band Psi-Com to help organize the event.

Licher not only played. He hand-printed the tickets. Proceeds from the $12.50 tickets paid to rent a generator, a PA system, and three school buses.

For the first gig, a handful of punk rock kids got bussed from central Los Angeles out to the dry lakebed. The bands played on the cracked playa, using the buses to shield them from blowing dust. Decades later, that and Desolation Center’s subsequent desert shows inspired Lollapalooza, Coachella, and Burning Man. And it left a deep mark on the people who attended.

Everyone played near a Savage Republic flag planted in the ground.

“I felt like, Savage Republic, we need our own flag,” Licher remembered. “So I made this flag. We were art students, so I had access to canvas and paints, and I made the Savage Republic flag.”

In 1984, Swezey’s Desolation Center put on a second desert show. This time he and Licher scouted locations together. They liked the name of the town Mecca, near the Salton Sea. It intrigued them, so they drove to check it out. They ended up on a road in the Orocopia Mountains. Past a sign that said “Road Closed,” they found a dead end in Box Canyon and figured it was the perfect place to put on a show, since no one would drive that far up a closed road. So that’s where they had the German band Einstürzende Neubauten play with the Savage Republic-adjacent band Djemaa el Fna—named after a market in Marrakesh. They called the gig “Mojave Auszug.”

In the desert, attendees felt free to do whatever they wanted. They drank. They danced. They climbed crumbling hillsides. And free of fire codes and police surveillance, the performers were free to play what they wanted. They blew things up, banged rocks on sheets of percussive metal, and used saws to shoot sparks to make music. No one had a permit for any of this. It was just dirt, desire, and generators under the stars.

The desert environment itself changed the nature of live music. Stripped of urban convention and artifice, the desert provided a more direct form of communication between musician and audience.

“We’re not gonna be standing on a stage performing for people,” Licher told a camera person before the show. “The whole environment is gonna be our stage, and we’re gonna be using that.” In fact, before the show started, Licher’s crew played percussion on the top of a cliff to welcome attendees. “I just thought it would be really interesting to do some site-specific performance,” Licher said in the Desolation Center documentary, “to create something that was inspired by where we were.”

It was.

A kid named Victor Krummenacher, who played bass for what became the band Camper Van Beethoven, saw Savage Republic play at that first desert show. He’d bought their first album, Tragic Figures, and mailed back the reply card that Licher slipped into each copy. Licher wrote him back, and they began a correspondence. They finally chatted in person at Mojave Exodus, where the whole show experience left an impression of Krummenacher.

Camper Van Beethoven was young and developing—so young they hadn’t chosen their name yet—but they recorded a demo at the singer’s mom’s house and mailed it to Licher. “It was fun stuff,” Licher remembered, “but my first reaction was, ‘This is kind of interesting, but I’m not sure how I would work with it.’”

They eventually sent Licher a newer recording, and he found it more to his liking. And in 1985, he designed and released Camper’s debut LP. The album sold like crazy and became a cult classic.

“I said I’d be glad to get it out, so we printed up 1,250 copies of Telephone Free Landslide Victory in 1985, and it just took off. I did a second edition with a hand-printed cover, and it got to the point where I couldn’t keep up with it, so we licensed it to Rough Trade. ‘Take the Skinheads Bowling’ became really popular as a single.”

Hell, as a middle school skateboarder, I loved that album. Back then, it was as cool as anything by The Cure, Black Flag, and Violent Femmes.

That popularity helped bring other bands into the fold.

In 1987, Licher designed the cover for For Against’s debut, Echelons, his artist wife Karen illustrated, and it got nominated for a Grammy for “Best Album Package.” Not only did the album have a die-cut, letterpress cover, it had letterpress-printed labels and a letterpress reply card. It also included a real stalk of wheat—a nod to the band’s Midwestern origins—and, according to Discogs, “some copies also included live moths that hatched out of the wheat stalk after the LPs were assembled and shipped to distributors.”

Grammy, please.

Licher tells it a different way in the Savage Impressions book: “My wife and I had gone down to Mexico for a little weekend getaway. We went into this little store down there, and I saw this bundle of wheat stalks hanging from the ceiling. I was like, ‘Oh, we can put a wheat stalk in every record.’ So I bought the bundle of wheat stalks, and brought it back and we did that. And then there was a whole problem, because moths started hatching out of the wheat.”

Licher designed Camper Van Beethoven’s first major label LP, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, and in 1989, that also got nominated for a Grammy for “Best Album Package.”

As underground music caught commercial record companies’ attention and got greater airplay on college and mainstream radio during the late 1980s and early ’90s, his designs crossed out of the underground, too, and his distinctive design sensibility—and his ability to package music and imagery together—built him a deserved reputation as a dependable, devoted graphic designer who cares deeply about the quality of the work. He ended up working on albums with everyone from Hank Williams JR to John Lee Hooker and Stereolab, and with every label from Universal to Rhino, MCA to Touch & Go.

“One of the guys in the band Fourwaycross,” Licher told Wire, “who I ended up working with later on was a graphic designer at Warner Brothers Records in the ’80s and told me I should bring my portfolio in there. So I ended up taking a meeting with them and they really seemed to like my stuff and kept saying, ‘Jeff should see this.’ After that, they all went back to work and I was sitting there thinking, when is this Jeff guy showing up? It ended up being Jeff Ayeroff, who was the creative director at Warner Brothers at the time, and he ended up giving me the biggest job I ever got designing promotional sleeves and posters for Scritti Politti and their song ‘Perfect Way.’ That led to more projects with Jeff Ayeroff, and then some of those designers went onto other labels, so from that, I ended up doing a lot of work for major labels in the late 80s.”

He did the sleeves for a series of R.E.M.’s singles, which they released through their own fan club, starting with “Christmas ’89” and ending with their split 7-inch with Pearl Jam in 1997.

“I think it was 1989 when I got a call from the REM offices hiring me to print a Christmas card for them,” Licher told Wire. “Two years later, they came back and told me they wanted me to design and print the entire fan club package for them this year. They got such a good response that I ended up doing that for them for about ten years. I found out later [R.E.M. guitarist] Peter Buck was a huge Independent Project and Savage Republic fan. Someone who went to his house once told me he had an entire wall of his house dedicated to Independent Project Records. That was a great gig that sustained us for a number of years. It would keep us busy for three months out of the year and it would pay for half of our expenses every year.”

Boom times.

“Kind of the approach that I have is I want to make a beautiful object and I mostly want to make it for things that I love, whether it’s music or photographs or writing or whatever,” he told the Phoenix New Times. “At the same time, I don’t want to make things that look slick; I like the hand-done nature of things.”

No wonder Scenic’s The Kelso Run was such a seductively beautiful object: Everything Licher knew about music and graphic design at that point had gone into it.

Rather than printing on different types of paper stock, he printed on what’s called chipboard process. “It’s all recycled board,” Licher said. “They just sweep up whatever’s left on the floor and throw it in. Almost every time you buy chipboard it’s a different shade, color and texture.”

Many paper vendors carry chipboard, but he sources bulk chipboard from all around. In 1995, he bought some from a drywall company. He used to buy some from a reseller in Long Beach who stocked 10 to 15 different weights. For economy of scale, Licher bought a ton of chipboard a time, because $400 worth could produce around 5,000 album covers. But running a label and trying to make a living as a graphic designer while playing in a band got complicated.

After Savage Republic’s first LP, Tragic Figures, the band members developed different ideas about where to take the music. Some wanted to do more vocal music. Some wanted it to be more instrumental.

It’s telling that the 1985 Trudge EP is Licher’s favorite Savage Republic recording, because it embodied the direction he was heading.

“My original idea with Scenic was to go back to the part of SR that hits me the most deeply,” he told Perfect Sound Forever, “which is the Trudge EP material, and then take off from there with a new set of collaborators and see where we can take things.”

That led to Savage Republic’s next LP, Ceremonial, in 1985.

“That album ended up coming out way cleaner than I wanted,” Licher told Wire. “I also wanted it to be instrumental. Most of the other band members wanted vocals, so I just said, OK, whatever. I think it worked better as an instrumental album.”

Ceremonial also brought them back to the desert, which appeared on a different version of the album cover. It’s California’s Orocopia Mountains, where the Mojave Auszug show took place.

After playing and touring with Savage Republic for nearly a decade, Licher and the others disbanded in February 1989 and they perused other projects.

“That whole Ceremonial experience made me give up trying to lead the band and let it become a more collaborative effort,” Licher said. “Then it hit a point after our album Jamahiriya where I just didn’t want to do it anymore. This was not the direction I wanted to go in, and the people I brought in to be members were fans of Tragic Figures and wanted more of that. They didn’t understand I had already done that and wanted to move on and do something different. So that’s where Scenic came from. I wanted a band where I was directing what we’re doing.”

He was also returning to the desert as a source of material.

The eastern Mojave Desert, around the Depot, used to be very off the beaten path. “You have to purposely want to go out into a place where you’re 40 miles away from the nearest gas station,” said Licher. “At that time I was really enjoying exploring the backroads. We’d get a map and say, ‘Oh, that looks interesting. I’ll go check that out.' Or ‘That’s got an interesting name. Wonder what that looks like.’”

Naturally, his artwork changed.

“My wife is an artist, and she had been wanting to do some collaborative art projects, like land-related installation-type pieces in the desert,” Licher told me. “So she conceived of getting a group of artists together to go out and spend a weekend creating land art that we would document and then create a print of and sell, and donate the proceeds to environmental causes. So we ended up doing two of those projects. The first one was at the Kelso Dunes, which is in the East Mojave Desert. My introduction to that particular area was just going out there and doing that collaborative experience. It kept bringing me back. …And when I started getting these cheap cameras, I was like, well, that’s where I want to go photograph.”

Scenic

After photographing the Mojave Desert on his various excursions, he discovered these little point-and-shoot panoramic cameras. They cost $12. They had a plastic lens and you didn’t focus them. You just aimed and clicked the button.

He started sketching the instrumental music while he photographed.

“My idea for Incident at Cima was that I wanted to make an imaginary soundtrack, like an imaginary film soundtrack,” Licher told me. “But as time went on and we began working on it, I thought, well, that kind of idea had been done before. And it wasn’t that interesting. In the meantime, I’d been going out to the East Mojave Desert and taking these photographs with this little plastic point and shoot camera, fixed panorama. So all those photographs were on this little twelve dollar camera that I got at Spirited Drugstore [in LA]. And you put your own film in it. So I was putting black and white film in. And actually, I did like here’s, there’s a silver, sepia toned exhibition print that I had made of this, the image that’s on the first album. So I was doing all these photographs just because I love what I was getting from this camera. I mean, it’s a cheap plastic lens. It’s a little fuzzy around the edges, but it somehow just gave a feeling that this picture could have been taken a hundred years ago, or could have been taken yesterday. And I like that. So I was taking all these pictures in the East Mojave and I started thinking, well, what if this was a soundtrack for the East Mojave? What if we kind of switched it from being an imaginary film soundtrack and make it a soundtrack for a place? So that was the idea.”

When he and his wife left LA for Sedona, Arizona in 1992, he took his vision for Scenic, and the Independent Project Records business, with them.

“It took me a couple of years to get to the point of actually doing something. Moving to Sedona, that was the catalyst for it,” he said. A month after moving to Sedona, he took his first trip back to Los Angeles and had an early rehearsal with James Brenner and Brock Wurtz.

Licher had a lot of music he’d started sketching.

“James, the bass player, had a recording studio that he had set up in his house,” Licher said, “and he heard me playing some of these songs and said, ‘Bruce, just bring your guitar over. Let’s get these song ideas down. We can work on them, you know.’ So I went over there and I played everything that I had been working on, and he recorded it. Some of that is on the bonus disc [on Incident at Cima] and some of it is not very good at all, and so will never see the light of day. But we decided to just choose some of the songs to work on. Then we brought Brock in to be the drummer, and the three of us recorded all the basic tracks. Then we went into another studio to do overdubs. That’s when we started bringing in other people to flesh the songs out. Robert Loveless, who I had worked with in Savage Republic, did some keyboards and other instrumentation. We asked Jeffrey Clark to come in, who is now my partner in Independent Project Records. He was the singer in Shiva Burlesque. I first met James because of his bass playing in Shiva Burlesque. And that was why I decided I wanted to work with him, because of the band that I’d seen him play in before. But Jeff just did a few harmonica pieces on a few songs like ‘Kelso Run’ that he did with the harmonica. And we asked a couple of other people to come in and add spice here and there.”

Turns out, it’s not a big leap from Savage Republic’s raga-industrial-noise-rock to the desert in Licher’s own backyard. Where SV has songs like “The Ivory Coast” and “Andelusia,” Scenic has “The Road to Ivanpah” and “Chiriaco Summit.”

Listen to these songs side-by-side. While distinct entities, sonically, the bands share certain qualities.

Instrumental rock ‘n roll is it’s own form of expression. In high school, Bruce was a huge fan of The Ventures and mid-century instrumental surf music. The Ventures directly inspired Savage Republic’s song “Attempted Coup: Madagascar,” and that influenced Scenic.

“Sage” is one of Licher’s favorite Scenic songs.

“A lot of that has to do with James playing this melodic bassline,” he said. “He’s almost playing the lead line, in a way, on the bass.”

“Tundra,” one of Scenic’s 8-track demos, had another 1960s origin.

“I had been listening to an album by The Byrds,” said Licher, “and they have a song called ‘Why.’ There’s a couple different versions of ‘Why,’ but there’s one version that starts off with this dahdahdah, and it goes into the song. I was like, ‘I love that.’ I kind of did my own version of that intro and took it in a completely different direction.”

In Scenic, Licher played rhythm and lead guitar on the recordings.

The same place names that drew him down certain desert roads also provided the band’s cinematic and evocative song titles.

“We recorded all this music, and we didn’t necessarily have titles for it while we were recording it,” said Licher. “Afterwards, we would listen to it, then I would pick names off of the map of the East Mojave: ‘Hole in the Wall’ or ‘Down Black Canyon Road.’ You know, like, oh, okay, I remember driving down that black dirt road. That’s Black Canyon Road. You’ve got this huge expanse in front of you, and you’re miles from anywhere. Maybe there’s a campground up there, but there’s very few people. And just that sort of lonely feeling with the harmonica and everything.”

Scenic released The Kelso Run 7-inch in 1993 and then the full Incident At Cima LP in 1995.

Rolling Stone writer David Fricke described Incident At Cima’s sound as “Ennio Morricone dune-surfing in Death Valley…” Peter Gilstrap at Phoenix New Times described the debut LP as “Ennio Morricone meets Brian Eno.” In Raygun magazine, Grant Alden wrote: “Incident At Cima plays like futuristic chamber music. It is like nothing else on the landscape.” And in huH magazine, Robert Levine called the LP “a sweeping, swirling (sound) that’s full of both darkness and wonder.”

And as always, Licher designed the album art to match the feel of the music: austere, seductive, mysterious, washed out.

Even the band’s name functioned as part of the overall artful design. One word: scenic. It was descriptive. Punchy. Demonstrative. Typset.

“So for me,” Licher said, “Incident At Cima is, I think, one of the most successful records I’ve ever played on. I think there are issues that I have nowadays with some of the sounds on it, but on the other hand, I just love it. It’s kind of like: It fulfilled what I wanted to do with creating something as a musical expression. …[On] all the albums that I’ve been involved with, with the different bands, that’s the one that is most closely to how I conceived it.”

When they finished recording the album, Bruce, James, and Brock camped at a cool volcanic site called Hole in the Wall, in the East Mojave. “After we had dinner, he had a boombox, and we played a cassette of the entire album,” Licher remembered, “and just laid out there listening at the start of the album, like Yeah, we did it. I’ve heard from a number of people who have bought the CD, and they’ve gone out to the East Mojave, and they play it while they drive around out there and say, ‘This is the perfect thing.’ It feels great. It’s like, yeah, we did it.”

Incident At Cima completely eluded me during the 1990s, as it seems to have eluded many music fans.

While Grunge was peaking and kids worshipped Kurt Cobain, these outsider artists from the early ’80s L.A. underground had shifted their attention to very different sources of inspiration. Their instrumentals put the alternative era in reverse, favoring contemplative atmospherics inspired by a half-deserted land, instead of human voices. Loud singers dominated MTV at that time. Silence dominates the desert. Looking back, Scenic stands out not as an anomaly in the alternative era, but as a timeless, evocative musical statement, something wholly original and unconcerned with trends. It sounds as fresh 30 years later as the desert feels now: full of mystery and power and beauty.

Long after the ’90s, IRP finally digitized the out of print vinyl and made it available to a whole new generation of listeners.

The front cover of The Kelso Run single invites listeners to contribute to the preservation of the Kelso Depot, which graces the sleeve.

Originally opened in 1924, the Depot served Union Pacific passengers and employees food, and refilled steam engines with water, in an otherwise unpopulated part of California. Locals went there to eat and socialize. The Depot’s lush grounds had date palms and shady cottonwood trees. But after economics and technology changed, the Union Pacific railroad terminated passenger service to the Depot in 1964. Even though the railroad kept the Lunch Room working for railroad employees until 1985, the building had been falling apart. The once lush grounds withered in the desert heat. In 1985, Union Pacific suggested demolishing the property. Some people resisted, raising money and awareness in an effort to preserve the building. When the members of Scenic photographed the Depot, it had just been transferred to the Bureau of Land Management’s East Mojave National Scenic Area as a site of historical value, but it still needed help. Scenic invited listeners to write the Kelso Depot Fund, in Barstow, for more information about the restoration. The community activism worked.

By the time the Incident At Cima came out in 1995, the Mojave National Preserve had been established, and the National Park Service was managing the building. The Depot has since been fully restored. It includes a restaurant and hotel and functions as the official Mojave National Preserve Visitor Center. It’s located on Kelso Cima Road.

Scenic kept writing. In 1996, they released new music on the Aquatica album. They released The Acid Gospel Experience album in 2002, and The Long Run EP in 2003, and some singles, compilations, and live material. But for Bruce, it grew in a direction that veered from his original vision.

“So it’s kind of like everything else in Savage Republic ended up becoming much more of a collaborative process,” Bruce said, “and I didn’t really want that. But what happened, the same thing happened with Scenic. As we went along, we brought new people in and we developed new material. It became much more of a collaborative process. I’m not saying anything bad about the collaborative process, because there’s some amazing stuff that I would never have been able to do myself. I value the people I’ve worked with. But on the other hand, in terms of an artistic vision, Incident of Cima is the closest to anything that I’ve done so far that fulfills that.”

Eventually, he set Scenic aside and worked on many other projects.

“It’s interesting for me,” Licher said, “because I’ve been making music for almost 45 years now since I bought my first guitar. And I couldn’t tell you what notes and chords I’m playing. I mean, I don’t read music. I don’t. I know what the strings are, and I know what some notes are, but… It was interesting because I’ve played some music with a few people and they’ve said, ‘Well, you know, Bruce, you could probably do more if you learned music theory and all of that.’ And I almost don’t want to because I just, I like the creation of sounds that are pleasing to me. And fortunately, I’ve found some people that I can play with.”

2024

In 2009, Karen and Brucer Licher moved from Sedona to tiny Bishop, California, a small high desert town in the Owens Valley, east of the Sierra Nevada. There, the Lichers, co-curated an art gallery named The Project Room at Independent Project Press, which is their letterpress print studio.

And Bruce dug deep into his own archive, rereleasing his own music, releasing music by other artists both modern and archival, and expanding the offerings of his beloved record label, which he’s put so much energy and care into during his productive life.

The 7-inch is such a joy to hold, and to behold. It has heft. The jacket unfolds like an envelope to reveal the record and inserts inside. “I’ve always liked the idea that you don’t just get the record,” Licher said. “You get other cool stuff inside, too.” He made the sepia and black inserts on a Minolta two-color photocopy machine that he bought in the late-80s. “That was the most expensive piece of equipment I ever bought for my shop.

The day I found Scenic, ice still covered Portland’s sidewalks, after two serious winter storms had hit our city. I wore Sorrel snow boots, and my daughter wore her big boots. Everyone in town had been dealing with ice all week.

I hadn’t been craving desert warmth. I wasn’t searching for new music. We just wandered into a store after our daughter’s pediatrician appointment next door. When I saw bins of records, I pawed through them, and found my new favorite from 30 years ago.

Sometimes the digital age’s algorithmic power can’t deliver you the music you don’t know you need.

Sometimes you have to go into a store and search. Or listen to what’s playing overhead.

Sometimes you need to get lucky.

That’s one of Licher’s hopes when he designs such striking packaging.

“I just really liked the idea of somebody going to a record store,” Licher told Bandcamp, “perusing the bins and finding something really beautiful, pulling it out and going, ‘Wow, what is this? Where did this come from?’ and deciding that they wanted to take a chance on it, because they just got a feel from it that this could be good.”

Because as some wise person once said, luck isn’t only born-in good fortune. It’s also showing up.

Here’s my full conversation with Bruce Licher. Huge thanks to Bruce for his time and sharing his story!

Wake up little girl, you’re killing that world!

Forget about the words, think about the hurt,

And don’t let it die.

Formed in 1990 by songwriter Robert Roth, Screaming Trees drummer Mark Pickerel, and Soundgarden cofounder Hiro Yamamoto, Truly put out two killer albums in the 1990s, and another in 2000, before they went on hiatus.

But in January 2025, the band started recording new music at Studio X, on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. Then in March, they toured the U.S. to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their incredible debut album, Fast Songs...From Kid Coma. They kicked things off in Portland, Oregon and played their hometown of Seattle the following night.

It’s funny. When I told one of my oldest friends that I was seeing Truly play last week, he never even knew that Yamamoto had another band after Soundgarden. As kids, my friends and I saw countless shows during the ’90s, and we were huge Soundgarden fans, and somehow I only discovered Truly in the early 2000s. How did that happen?

What’s interesting about being a ’90s kid and Truly fan is that, unlike many bands who emerged during the so-called “alternative era,” their music doesn’t sound like any era. As the best rock ‘n’ roll does, Truly feels timeless, having incubated in the strange, singular world that musicians create among themselves, rather than in the periods that historians use to mark time.

That timeless character makes the name of their current “Then, Today, Tomorrow” tour even more resonant. As one of best bands from the ’90s, Truly comes from everywhere at once.

Truly’s Origin

In 1984, in rainy western Washington, the brothers John and Robert Roth recorded a cassette with two musicians named Evan Schiller and Jim Stonecipher, under the name The BridgeTown. John played guitar. Robert sang lead and played bass. Three of those four guys reconfigured as a new band, named The Storybook Krooks. In 1989, they recorded an album in their basement, on a four-track tape machine, though only four songs surfaced. Then, as bands do, they broke up. The timing was good.

That same year, Nirvana was searching for a rhythm guitarist to fill out their sound. They’d briefly hired a talented, brooding guitarist named Jason Everman to tour with them, but they’d decided to let him go.

Kurt Cobain asked Steve Turner from Mudhoney to join, but Turner told Cobain they sounded better as a trio. Expanding their sound remained an enduring interest, because years later, Cobain even asked Dinosaur Jr frontman J Mascis to join—twice. Eventually Germs guitarist Pat Smear joined. But in 1989, Robert Roth auditioned to join Nirvana.

“So the week that [Storybook Krooks] had broken up, I was riding the bus—the Queen Anne in downtown Seattle—and Jonathan [Poneman] was on the bus,” Roth said in Greg Prato’s book Grunge Is Dead. “I moved next to him and we were chatting. He’s like, ‘What’s going on with the band?’ And I told him we just broke up a few days ago. And he was like, ‘Well, this is top secret, but Nirvana is half kicking out Jason [Everman] and he’s half quiting. Basically Jason is not working out and they’re looking for another guitar player who can write.’”

When Roth ran into Cobain at a TAD show a few weeks later, Cobain told him, “When we get back from tour I’ll call you and let’s get together and play.”

“And I was like, ‘Well, by the time you guys get back from the tour I’ll probably be doing something else. So if you’re serious about wanting to play together, let’s do it before you leave.”

Wise move.

“They ended up hauling all their equipment up to [Storybook Krook’s] rehearsal space and we got together and played for probably three or four hours,” Roth told Prato. “It was incredible, because I had never played with guys that loud before in my life. It blew me away. Changed my life. I went to a much bigger ampn and a much bigger cabinet after that Krist was miking his bass cabinet, they were miking the kick drum, and this was just to try me out so that they’d get a rehearsal in.” They played a few tunes from Nirvana’s debut Bleach and one of Roth’s originals. “Then we just kind of jammed and made noise and played riffs, and that was a blast.”

Nirvana eventually decided to continue playing as a trio, but as Roth had predicted, he was already on to something else.

The same week that Roth received the news about Nirvana was the same week that his drummer friend Mark Pickerel joined him in the project that became Truly.

Pickerel had co-founded Screaming Trees with high school friends. The Trees were as brilliant as they were turbulent. After recording their sixth album, Uncle Anesthesia, in 1990, Pickerel left in search of his next venture.

“At that point, I was just going to go in and record a solo record,” Roth said in Grunge Is Dead, “and Mark ended up quitting the Screaming Trees that week. The guy who was playing bass at the time, Chris Quinn, quit his band that day. So once we got to the studio, we realized, ‘Oh we’re a band.’ I already had a song called ‘Truly.’ Chris said, ‘How about calling the band Truly?’ Mark was at work, and [Sub Pop cofounder] Jonathan Poneman said, ‘Why don’t you call your band Truly?’ Two different people came up with the same name — I figured that was fate.”

When guitarist Chris Quinn switched from bass to guitar, Pickerel called his friend Hiro Yamamoto to fill their open bass position.

Yamamato cofounded Seattle’s legendary Soundgarden, but in 1989, he’d quit the band. As his friends skyrocketed to fame as Grunge icons, he eventually completed his master’s degree in physical chemistry at Western Washington University. But after returning from Soundgarden’s 1989 Europe tour, he layed low in Seattle and took a breather.

“I was out of music for a while,” Yamamoto said in Grunge Is Dead, “I just didn’t want to play. I was pretty tired of it. Mark called me, and said, ‘I’m playing with this guy, and we’re looking for a bass player.’ I was like, ‘OK, I’ll give it a shot.’ …I listened to their stuff, and was like, ‘This is kinda cool.’”

Yamamato had moved from Chicago to Seattle with his guitarist friend Kim Thayil in 1981. The two scraped by, got involved with the city’s musical underworld, and Thayil went to college. In Yamamoto’s apartment in 1984, he and his new drummer friend Chris Cornell would jam late into the night, writing bits of songs on bass and drums. When they invited Thayil over to join, he contributed imaginative riffs to what became early Soundgarden songs.

“The first time we jammed, we wrote three songs,” Thayil remembered in Mark Yarm’s fantastic oral history of Grunge. “The very next day, we wrote two more.” Soundgarden played their first show as a trio in 1984, with Cornell singing while drumming.

In those protean years, Seattle was home to all sorts of inventive, weird bands like U-Men, Malfunkshun, 64 Spiders, and Fastbacks. Early Soundgarden had an intense, experimental energy. They mixed avante guard ambient elements with riff-rock that pulled as much from the SST roster as it did bands like Bauhaus and Killing Joke. Just as Black Flag slowed punk rock on their album My War, Soundgarden started slowing their heavist songs to a sludgy pace. Soundgarden’s songs like “Beyond the Wheel” and “Nothing to Say” blugeoned listeners and paved the way for what the world called “Grunge.” They even left their own Seattle friends’ heads spinning: How could any band be this heavy? Where people eventually heard Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath in their music, these young friends were initially listening to punk rock, British post-punk, and new wave, not power-chord rock.

“When I listen to myself play bass, even back then,” Yamamoto said in 2010, “I have kind of a dark way of playing. In that sense, it was kind a quirkier music. It was definitely more new wave. But there was a darkness to it.”

In Truly, he paired that darkness with Roth’s unique, psychedelic sensibility and unconventional song structures.

Soundgarden released their Screaming Life EP on Sub Pop in 1988. They released their full-length debut, Ultramega OK, on SST, the underground label run by Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn, whose roster included Meat Puppets and Hüsker Dü. In a cool twist, it was Mark Pickerel who helped them land there. In 1987, Screaming Trees and Soundgarden opened for Faith No More, inside Central Washington University’s Student Union Building, in Ellensburg. The Trees’ soundman, Rob Doak, taped the set through the soundboard to get a clean recording. But apparently, as legend has it, Pickerel sent the tape to Greg Ginn. Despite these arty origins, Soundgarden’s music, and Cornell’s incredible voice and stage presence, earned them a record deal with the commercial A&M label in 1989. But the label’s plans for the band and their album Louder Than Love didn’t sit well with Yamamoto.

“I was kind of a D-I-Y punker,” the bassist said. “We did it for the people, you know, and I’ve always had that ethos.”

When A&M started talking about marketing and touring to build their audience, he had concerns.

“A&M is telling us, ‘We want you to tour like 10 months. You gotta go out and hit the road,’” Yamamoto said in Everybody Loves Our Town. “That was more than I wanted, but I told the guys, ‘Look, we got to where we are by making our own choices, and now we’re on this major label and they’re tellin’ us this stuff. We don’t have to do what they tell us.’ I didn’t want to live on the road. …The label wanted to sell us to heavy-metal stations. I thought we were different than that. Sure, I’d like to sell a million records and live in a castle and not have to work, but at the same time, I want to be able to say, ‘This is me. I’m not just part of a mass-marketing machine.’ Maybe I’m being naive, but when we got to that point where we’re on the major label, you’re a product. You might as well be Ivory Snow or Clorox bleach.”

Well, that philosophy worked well, because Yamamoto, Roth, and Pickerel created powerful sounds together—and they’re still creating decades later!

In Truly, Robert switched from bass to lead guitar, and his song-writing clicked.

“My dad would always say some people make decisions on their ethics and they suffer for them, but they are the courageous ones,” Yamamoto said in 2018, after getting inducted into the Asian Hall of Fame. “And that almost makes me cry.”

Truly played their first show in 1990, opening for The Jesus Lizard.

In 1991, they released their debut Heart and Lungs EP on Sub Pop. It was the only time they recorded as a four-piece.

Guitarist named Chris Quinn left soon after. He and Roth didn’t exactly jive.

“I’m more of an intuitive type,” Roth once said, “he’s more a studied type.”

In 1992, the trio got a great opportunity: They joined the second Lollapalooza tour, playing on the smaller second stage. After the first tour’s success, the second Lollapalooza was even bigger and better run. By change, Soundgarden was a headliner that year. The second stage was great exposure for up-and-coming bands like Cypress Hill and Rage Against the Machine, and it put Truly in front of the young listeners than defined this neatly packaged “alternative era.”

And yet somehow, Truly still stayed underground.

After a two-song single in 1993 and a four-song teaser in 1995, Truly hit us with their full-length debut Fast Stories…From Kid Coma, in 1995. It’s 13 songs stretch for 72 minutes, and some of us fans still wish it was twice as long. It took five years to complete, and it’s their masterpiece.

Brimming with creativity, layers of sounds, and refreshing oddities, the songs highlight Roth’s inventive guitar playing and slide work. Yamamoto’s driving rhtymic sensibility and imagination pair seamlessly with Pickerel’s perfect mix of thunder, delicacy, and his sense of space.

Any marketer can see this band’s pedigree and go Ah, a post-Grunge supergroup! But Truly is not a Grunge band or a supergroup. It’s a collaboration. And Yamamoto’s concerns about disingenuous product marketing still resonate today, because marketing terms can distract you from how the music sounds and how it makes you feel.

Roth is a skilled songwriter, and each band member contributes their own musical personalities to the songs Roth creates. Fast Stores…From Kid Coma is a heavy psychedelic rock sound, written loosely around around a character named Kid Coma.

As Trouser Press put it:

“The band’s focal point is Robert Roth, whose dark, semi-mumbled voice (not unlike a sleepy Mark Lanegan), oddly tuned guitar riffs and affection for wheezy vintage keyboards shape an unusual and varied sound. At different points, Truly sounds like it’s from 1974, 1989 and 1999. ...The band’s reference points are fairly obvious (Zeppelin, My Bloody Valentine and all things psychedelic) but never dominant — Truly exists pretty much in its own little world. The droning, low-end riffs contrast nicely with Roth’s soft, multi-layered vocals, and although the elaborate instrumental work sometimes blurs the fine line between clever and stupid, Pickerel’s strong, steady drumming holds it all together in places where a less tasteful player might have driven the band into complete overkill.”

Trouser Press is famously hard to please, so that’s high praise. (And being British, when they eviscerate music, it’s especially articulate and biting. Same with their compliments.)

Roth loves Fast Stories…From Kid Coma. “I really feel it’s an album, in the sense that we weren’t just putting together a collection of songs,” he told Prato. “In our heads, it was like a movie we were making. By the time we made that record, they said things like, ‘Push the envelope – do what you want to do,’ and ‘Don’t worry about singles, don’t worry about hits until the third or fourth record. We want you to be an album band like Pink Floyd or Zeppelin. We’re like, ‘Are you sure?’”

“Some of the songs and lyrics [on Fast Stories] still put a chill down my spine when I hear them” Yamamoto said. “Certain parts of songs just have this feel, and to me, that’s the reason why I always played music — to make that kind of sound.”

Roth’s lyrics leave a mark on you, too. Certain phrases, certain ethereal images—they live in that ethereal space between narrative and impressionism. Some feel like bits of a story you walked in on halfway through. Others invite interpretation that refreshingly never comes clear.

Daisy does… does evening come?

We’re turning away from the sun.

The light connected to the stars

Won’t burn my eyes or break my heart.

Wake up little girl, you’re killing that world!

Forget about the words, think about the hurt!

Truly followed Fast Stories two years later with the Feeling You Up LP. It’s a ripper. Built with the same psychedelic impulse and rhtymic sensibility as their debut, Feeling You Up puts the instruments a bit forward in the mix, giving it a less gauzy, hazy feel with all of the heavy riffing and imaginative guitar solos. Just try not to sing along to this:

Listening to songs like “If You Don’t Let It Die” and “Wait Till the Night” in 2026, it’s hard not to call Truly one of the greatest sleeper bands of the ’90s, but that’s cutting it short. They’re just a stellar band, a mesmerizing band, and that’s why I want you to know about them so you can go see them play.

Truly, Right Now

To celebreate the 30th anniversary of Fast Songs...From Kid Coma, Truly is touring the U.S. It’s their first tour in six years. The band is stoked.

When I saw them play Portland, the musicains were laughing and having as much fun on stage as the audience was off-stage. Roth spilled his drink near Yamamoto’s pedal and snickered. “You can’t take me anywhere.” He introduced their song “Public Access Girls” with the story of its origin—from a time when us 90s kids entertained ourselves late at night watching weird local TV shows.

Yamamoto plays the bass with the same joyful energy he did in the late-80s, kicking out his legs, leaning back euphorically, jumping up and down. He exudes the same youthful energy that you see in Charles Peterson’s iconic Seattle photos. When the crowd clapped, his face lit up. Maybe I’m reading into it, but I take that as evidence that he made the right choice to leave Soundgarden to make music on his terms, while raising a family and having a career.

Pickerel has his own band, Mark Pickerel and the Praying Hands, and runs a shop called Roadtrip Records in his hometown of Ellensburg, Washington. He sat this tour out but is recording with the band.

When Truly went on hiatus, Roth released an incredible solo album, Someone, Somewhere… in 2004. It’s as inventive as anything Truly released and sounds like it could only be his music.

After earning his masters degree in physical chemistry at Western Washington University, Yamamoto went into a new career direction. He worked as Chief of Organic Chemistry at company named Edge Analytical, that tests drinking water for chemicals hexavalent chromium. And on the side, around his other life, he played music with Roth and his friends.

“I’ve got this weird brain,” Yamamoto said in 2018, after getting induced in the Asian Hall of Fame. “I love science and math and weird conceptual quantum mechanics. I can do all kinds of goofy things with math.”

Cheers to that awesome brain and the power of friends to make music.

The Fingers were an early-90s garage punk band from East LA, made up by Shane White, Jason White, Raul Balcarcel, and briefly, their first singer Brady Rifkin. And they knew the best Bay Area trash bands, like The Mummies.

In the early-90s, members of The Mummies, The Phantom Surfers, and Supercharger lived in a house together where they also recorded music.

“We recorded a bunch of stuff,” Mummies singer Trent Ruane said in Eric Davidson’s book We Never Learn: The Gunkpunk Undergut: 1988-2001, “and I put out a single by this band called The Fingers, and Supercharger single was recorded there.” The Mummies recorded their “Planet of the Apes” single at home, too. Ruane ran the small Pre-B.S. record label, to release Mummies music and records from friends. The living arrangement didn’t last. “But we were all kind of getting on each other’s nerves,’” he said.

“We played a show at Maxwell’s with Mudhoney and the Lyres for New Year’s Eve 1991” said Ruane. “On the plane ride back I turned to Larry [the Mummies guitarist] and said, ‘That’s it. I can’t do it anymore.’ Then, see, we used to put inserts in some records, to order T-shirts and stuff: ‘The Mummies will play your birthday party or tractor pull…blah blah blah.’ So I got this letter from a guy in Germany saying, ‘I want you to play my tractor pull…’ I thought it was just a joke. But I said, Fine, get us the flight tickets! So he said, ‘Yeah, I am buying the tickets, you are coming to Germany.’ I said okay, but told him to put Supercharger on the bill. At this point, end of 1992, the Mummies were dead, so I didn’t care. …So we went over to Europe with Supercharger, and it was actually a lot of fun. It was a three-week span, but we only played like ten shows. It was awesome….”

That marked the end of the Mummies’ infamous first run. But from that era, a few badass records emerged, including The Fingers’ First Time/ Barracuda single, which Ruane released in 1991.

“Barracuda” is my favorite of The Fingers’ few recorded songs:

On the website Lumpy’s Garage, Lumpy Sowers shared The Fingers’ story. I steal it here without permission, for your reading pleasure:

“Crawling out the pure filth of smoggy LA, the Fingers blundered their way through 2 singles before self-desructing, to the woe of the garage punks who are "with it." Embraced by no other than Mr. Russel Quan of the Mummies, Count Backwurds, Phantom Surfers, etc. etc. etc., the Fingers released a single on his very exclusive Pre BS Records. Members of the Fingers went on to fame and glory in bands like the Rip Offs and the Tight Fits. 2 posthumous singles followed, as well as a few bootleg videos, notably on the cable access show "Counter Culture," where some lady named Betty plays bass, and crazy Raul "sings." If you don't have copies of all 4 of their singles, get off yer ass and find 'em! Loser!”

On the back of their The Rusty Quan E.P. on Rat City Records, The Fingers’ guitarist Shane White wrote a more detailed version of their story, too. The bombastic hyped up style, and the speaker’s misspellings, are too good not to share in their entirety:

Dear Fans,

Over the past two years I have been pestered by every Tom, Dick, and Harry independent record lable (sic) nerd to comb my vast vaults fer unreleased fingers recordings. The hilarious thing about it all is that The Fingers were such utter failures in their own time. We always had a hard time trying to get booked into any clubs, and when we did manage to play out, it was to about fifteen people!! The two singles we did were no better, nobody bought them. So after all this time I'm expected to believe that there are actually Fingers fans out there besides Rusty Quan? I mean fer christsakes, Rusty was our soul supporter!! The four songs selected fer this E.P. are amongst some of Rusty's favorites. All of them were recorded in April of '92 by Mr. Raul Balcarcel in his wall to wall pornography ridden kitchen on a potable (sic) AM/FM tape recorder which used to belong to his older sister during the mid-70s while he was growing up in New York. Actually, the "louder" of the fourincluded here was done fer the never released Pre-B.S. split single with Supercharger. It was recently redone fer The Rip Offs L.P. but that version sucks balls compaired (sic) to this one.

It's funny 'cause nowadays all this garage crap is the big hit with college kids everywhere. It's made a lot of unworthy people into superstars. Now San Fransico is considered a mecca fer real rock n roll bands, when in all actuallity ut's (sic) nothing more than a dog eat dog pit of snakes. Nobody was interested in this shit five years ago, and because of that things were quite innocent.

The great laugh about it all is, The Fingers were just a wannabe cheap reflection of The Raspberries. That was the reason fer the blazers and ties, we were so lame and inadaquate that we couldn't play as good as the Raspberries or afford any decent equipment so we got lumped in with the garage circuit. We wanted to be a pop band from the get-go but were stifled by lack of ability. We wanted to sound good but it was impossible due to all sorts of things, such as poverty. The Fingers were a real fucking underclass band!! And I'd also like to note that The Fingers were not a San Francisco based group like so many people believe, we were spawned from fucking East Los Angeles!!

-Mr. Shane White

Here’s more of their music to listen to. It won’t change your life, but it is catchy fun. “She’s Just Eleven” is a horrible subject and pains me to hear, but the music is pretty good:

While jamming some instrumental beat music on a streaming service one day, the algorithm suggested a song by something called 13th Ward Social Club. I clicked it. The song mesmerized me. It was an infectious amalgam of all kinds of world music mixed with a hip-hop sensibility, a jazz pedigree, and a psychedelic feeling of tropical heatstroke. It seemed to hold everything I already loved about music while also carrying me into the kind of new sonic frontiers I always crave as a listener.

It didn’t take many more songs to turn me into a devoted 13th Ward listener. Shortly into my entry into this artists’ universe, I wondered what I always wondered about the best musicians: Who was this person, and how did they make this?

13th Ward Social Club is the name for the self-described “one-man sound orchestra” that Justin Catoni creates under, in Providence, Rhode Island. Catoni was generous enough to speak with me about his musical life, and to explore the ways his life in the 1990s influences his life now.

Catoni is a passionate listener who self-taught music, recording, and composition. His music blends what his Soundcloud profile describes as “psych-rock, samba, jazz, afrobeat, and Holy Week processional hymns, also known as: chooch-core / wop-wave / goombah-groove / paisan-punk.” In our globalized world, it’s inventive stuff. 13th Ward offers proof that the ancient wisdom was wrong: There are new things under the sun. Even if some of these musical influences sound vaguely familiar, the sum of their parts is fresh and electrifyingly new—the whole world passed through the sausage maker of Cantoni’s brimming imagination.

Originals like “Ariana La Madre” sit naturally alongside modern reimaginings of Compay Segundo’s classic “Chan Chan” and Fela Kuti’s “Water No Get Enemy.”

With three EPs, four LPs, a greatest hits compilation, and tons of individual songs, 13th Ward is also proof that the algorithm can deliver incredible music. Having grown up in the tape and CD era, I can see how it can also erode the listening experience, but I’ll happily take what I learned about listening to full albums in my youth to embrace the ways modern streaming technology delivers us new music and lets artists create it, because that’s exactly what it can do.

Buy his music at Bandcamp.

Listen to his music on the usual streaming services.

And buy his vinyl. It sounds awesome offline.

AG: What year did you start recording and producing music yourself under the name 13th Ward Social Club?

13th: 2020, after many of us found our schedules cleared indefinitely. I had bread baking down by May, so I decided to rededicate myself to music.

AG: What’s your history as a musician: You are self-taught, but what instruments and techniques did you teach yourself?

13th: Around 1993 I downloaded a program called ScreamTracker, which only ran in DOS. It was a predecessor to FruityLoops, meant for triggering sounds rather than composing.

I’ve always had moral issues with sampling, which I can manage to connect to all of society’s woes if I think hard enough. So I bought a keyboard and aimlessly hit the keys for a couple years.

I tried to give myself a traditional training, hoping to learn to read music by transcribing Chopin, keeping my hands in the proper place to hit the right key with the assigned finger. Eventually I went back to aimlessly hitting the keys. I’m writing these details for the benefit of any overwhelmed aspiring musician who reads this. I think the more rules you learn, the smaller the box you’re in.

Until recently, every string, woodwind, brass, and percussion you heard from me was played on the keys, running through guitar amps and tape machines, all in the box.

AG: So if you started that in 1993, what came before: wWere you a musical kid? Did you play in bands before?

13th: No musical background before that except as a collector. Rock, heavy metal, hiphop, jazz, doowop. I carried a case of 50 cassettes with me wherever I went. I didn’t have much of a budget at 10 years old so I would go to the flea market and buy bootlegged tapes, I believe they were 3 for $5 at that time.

AG: What moved you to start teaching yourself: Did you hear something so powerful in those cassettes that you decided I’m going to learn to do that, too? Did your parents play lots of music at home?

13th: At that age I’m sure it was just about admiration. As I get older, it is still about that, but more noble. You can be inspired by a movie or cry reading a book, but have you ever seen someone start dancing while looking at a painting? Music is uniquely powerful, you can make people feel the whole range of emotions, within minutes.

AG: The range of styles you owned as a kid collector is impressively broad. I mean, doowop and metal is impressive. People often talk about the 90s as this diverse musical decade, with Lollapalooza putting all kinds of bands on the same bill, and the divisions between genres dissolving so people were freer to like hip-hop, rock, and metal. Did you feel it was like that?

13th: The one block street I grew up on had first generation Italian, Cape Verdean, Portuguese, Colombian, Vietnamese, Puerto Rican families. As kids we were in everyone’s apartment, ate meals there, listened to their parents’ music, went to their churches. The religious societies had processions go down our streets with their bands. Doowop came from my dad, Motown from my mom, my grandfather would play the guitarra. Then I got sent to a school a world away where I started listening to metal and altrock in a failed attempt to fit in. But I see it all finding its way into my music.

AG: Your experience on your street sounds way more multicultural than many so called multicultural places. And the beautiful intimacy of your relationships there. But in our era, do you find that underground music or any musical circles have become more multicultural than even a decade ago? Because in the early ’90s, music was very siloed into genres, sadly.

13th: I remember feeling that way then. In adolescence, music is your identity. You base your appearance and attitude off it, and you build your social circle around it. Each group becomes isolated in that way. So perhaps those differences seemed larger when we were younger. I don’t see the isolation as a negative, though. I prefer multiple distinct groups evolving separately. When there is crossover it can be beautiful, but too much and everything sounds/looks the same.

AG: So you mean there’s a kind of flattening of each musical groups’ uniqueness when things blend too much? Or it just turns murky when you mix it? Because that siloeing in decades past had pros and cons: Sure, musically, divisions kept each genre’s sound distinct in a way, but we listeners weren’t always allowed to bridge the divide to enjoy multiple things. When I was a kid, the metal kids hated the punks, the punks hated the hippies, you weren’t supposed to like Y if you liked Z. It’s like our table was set for us. What’s more flattening than that?

13th: The blending will definitely water it down. Globalization can be a positive for some industries, science and healthcare come to mind, but not culture. It cannot be good for any art. The end result is complete homogenization. I see your point though, and I am familiar with those feelings of hate (really, misunderstanding), we may just be referring to different age groups. Things change quickly at that age, by 15 I think we start to be more open minded.

AG: But what about the Blues: Wasn’t that art that sprang directly from the meeting of African tradition and North American slave music, ie globalization?

When world music reaches you personally, don’t the forces of globalization carry it into your orbit?

13th: Right. We had musical traditions from different regions of Africa and Europe meeting in the Americas for the first time and giving birth to many distinct new genres. But they grew independently for generations before meeting here. It created something beautiful, but now they share DNA, repeat the process and they share more, the genetic diversity dwindles, and you see where this metaphor is going. It applies to humans, fruit, why not music?

AG: Going back to sampling, what are the moral issues with sampling that you mentioned?

13th: Imagine the ridicule you would face if you took a photo of a Rembrandt and signed it. For some reason in music, you can take someone’s entire life’s work and program it to a few buttons, and as long as you can count to four the crowd goes crazy. All the years of practice, sacrifice, missed meals and rent to save for your instrument, you pour it into your music, and someone reduces it to a button and puts their name on it. It’s not all negative, I can create a lengthy pros/cons list for this, but we know which side would be much longer.

AG: Excellent, pointed comparison. Let me ask about output. Maybe I’m off but it seems like many musicians release a ton of singles on streaming nowadays. Some compile them into albums. Some don’t. So singles serve a different purpose than they did in the ’90s?

Why do you do albums and singles?

13th: Every algorithm favors consistent output, so even if you plan to compile your songs into an album it is best to release them one at a time. I’ve done well with three-week spacing. I spend most of my summer in the garden rather than the studio and my streaming numbers are down 50% from their average.

Since I work in different genres, it may take years for me to have enough cohesive material to create an album.

AG: That’s super interesting about the algo. Do you think our modern era’s business model has advantages over the model of decades past? Big question, but from recording and distributing yourself without a label or label debt, to working the algorithms in streaming services, what do you think: Is 2025 better or worse than the ’90s?

13th: It is easier to pursue art and get in front of an audience than ever before. It is so easy that you don’t even have to be an artist...

The internet indiscriminately provides a global platform to everyone regardless of talent, and the abrasive record executive stomping on your dream has been replaced by the coddling of your friends. The financial barrier to entry has also nosedived. If you’re not creative enough to produce your music without a Gofundme then I’ll assume your music also lacks creativity. It couldn’t be easier or cheaper.

So this means the market is flooded with people who have no business making music, yet they will latch onto any excuse to explain their low listenership besides the obvious. Spotify is a common scapegoat.

Did you know artists don’t pay Spotify to host their music? They take it onto their platform for free, give you access to their millions of listeners for free, promote it for you for free. Then they pay you if people listen. That’s wild. Now this averages out to a fraction of a cent per stream and I do think they could do better, but when you run the numbers is not as far from reasonable as it initially seems.

AG: So you see streaming services as more empowering and helpful than as vampires growing off artists’ output?

13th: Even if that’s true, I don’t play the victim card. If this is the current landscape, I have to pivot and make it work.

AG: That’s a reasonable approach: work within the the parameters of our era, don’t embrace a defeatist attitude, do what you can with what’s here.

I want to go back to something you said earlier about growing up in a multicultural neighborhood. When you went to a school a world away, you started listening to metal and altrock but still didn’t fit in. So were you an edge dweller in school? What way did music shape your life back then. And do you still feel that way as a musician now, like, you don’t fit in, or no?

13th: I don’t want to be dramatic, I had plenty of friends, but I was and still am the oddball. Until I started releasing music a few years ago, I had no idea there was an audience for it. For better or worse, the internet helps you find your tribe. And these experiences definitely inform my music. I sampled for years as a teen, so I have to give credit there for sparking the desire to explore all the foreign film soundtracks and library music I became obsessed with. But to that point, Smashing Pumpkins are one of my biggest influences.

AG: The internet’s power of forging connections is incredible. Truly. So what about the Pumpkins do you like so much?

13th: One of my favorite Frasier quotes:

Niles: “I thought you prided yourself on supporting the arts?”

Frasier: “The arts, Niles, not the crafts.”

There were some phenomenal rock bands in the ’90s, but they stayed in their lane and perfected their craft. They couldn’t cohesively blend five genres on one album like Billy. That’s what separates the musician from the artist. He chose music, but if he pursued painting I imagine it would be brilliant.

AG: Oh my god, that’s one of the most ’90s quotes ever, and it’s excellent. Frasier was a hilarious show. I loved when Daphne called them out on their poshness, like the time she said something like “Oh, I’m soooo sorry. Here I am dawdling with the laundry and it’s 10 minutes into caviar time!”

So if the internet helps us find our tribes, what tribe or tribes are you in?

13th: The algorithm has placed me with good company, the instrumental/cumbia/surf scene.

AG: Damn good company. Tell me what you think about instrumental surf music specifically. I’m a huge old school fan of it so curious about your perspective.

13th: I’m not familiar enough to speak about it. I’ll explore it further someday and I’ll be ready in part two. These are just the genres the algorithm of the streaming services have told me I fit in with. For actual artists, I get placed in with La Lom, Khruangbin, and El Michels often, which I’m happy with.

AG: Those are stellar musicians to be grouped with. Going back to Smashing Pumpkins, I have to agree. Corgan is singular. To me, Gish and Siamese Dream are uniquely imaginative statements that sound just as moving and interesting today as they did when they came out. And he just kept making more stellar music. What other bands do you love that might surprise listeners?

13th: This isn’t surprising for the content but maybe for the length of time: I listened to Gainsbourg for years straight, rarely anything else. Jazz, especially bebop. Giant Steps is my top album of all time. Jorge Ben, Adoniran Barbosa, Fela, Galt Macdermot. Ska and rocksteady. New wave and freestyle. I think they would be more surprised by what I don’t listen to, which hasn’t included any hip-hop for nearly 30 years.

AG: What a varied interesting mix. The particulars are interesting but any listener of yours should expect this kind of range. Giant Steps continues to inspire artists of all kinds.

So speaking of 30 years: as you keep making music, where do you see yourself and your music in 30 years?

13th: I’ll be long gone, as for the future of music in general: I can see the utopian view that AI will free our time to create more as a possibility, but that would mean it would free us from most of our struggles as well. What’s the inspiration? Concentration camps create great writers, poverty great musicians. It’s a hard truth, but that’s where the magic is. Scientists will map our neural networks in no time, tying every key to a dopamine receptor until we’re numb. Musical pornography that can be generated with a prompt. I’m not optimistic.

AG: Yeah, ours is a dark enough time to see the power and the pitfalls of our technology. But you’ll be long gone in 30? Does that mean you’re 50 right now or just that pessimistic about our future?

Going back to music evoking a range of emotions: books have definitely made me cry, and they’ve bonded me with people, but yes, like you said, they don’t get you dancing the way music does. I dance with strangers all the time, at farmer’s markets, street fairs, a random celebration in downtown LA. Why do you think music is so powerful as a medium. Meaning, in an Oliver Sacks way, do you know what it does to your brains?

13th: Maybe because it doesn’t require much effort on the part of the listener, as opposed to a book or movie. You can’t close your ears, you just absorb it. It’s also fast paced and packed with stimulation compared to other media, which keeps you interested. Although it’s not always quick: Ballade 1 is great from start to finish, but you know if you wait til the 8 minute mark you’re rewarded with one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. I’m sure this is why people generally don’t care for jazz or classical, it’s less structured and the pay off requires some investment.

I am not familiar with Oliver Sacks, but I will be soon. A quick glance reminds me of the theory that people rewatch shows and movies repeatedly because it is predictable and calming, I’m sure the same could be applied to our favorite music.

I envy you. If I could dance it would be to ska.

AG: That sounds right about music’s impact, how stimulating it is even as a passive listener. But it can be pretty demanding. Jazz is so powerful, so it bums me out how it’s too demanding for so many people.

You mentioned spending most of your summers gardening. What do you like about gardening? Does time outside inform your music or approach to life?

13th: As for gardening, there may be some chain reaction that’s beneficial to creativity, but I don’t put too much thought into it. It’s not the spiritual experience you might be envisioning. It’s brutal, there’s blood, punctures, burns. Moving stone, digging trenches, building greenhouses. The only parallel I can draw between gardening and music is that I labor for weeks on end just for someone to say, “Oh, that’s nice.”

AG: In the ’90s, didn’t people call instrumental tracks with samples and drum beds “beat tapes,” or am I confused? I was pretty stoned back then, so….?

What do you even call music like yours?

13th: They did. I’m sure they still do.

You didn’t ask about the name but I’m going to give a quick history. The 13th Ward Social Club was one of my family’s bars on Federal Hill, the Little Italy section of Providence. Locals may know it as Lili Marlene’s or currently the Royal Bobcat. That set the theme for branding, an affectionate caricature of the culture. So to avoid the difficult task of categorizing whatever this is, I finally decided to invent my own genres: chooch core, paisan punk, wop wave, marinara music.

AG: Oh my gosh, good catch! I dropped the ball on that one. So when you describe your marinara music as chooch core and wop wave, what are peoples’ reactions?

13th: More confusion and disinterest. My friend hates it, he once said he wouldn’t let me play the dinner triangle for his deaf son, yet my first pressings sell out within a few hours. The cuica drum is polarizing.

AG: Not sure if you feel this way, but confusion and disinterest seem better than no reaction at all—just flatline, meh. Also, “I wouldn’t let 13th Ward Social Club play for me deaf son!” seems like a hilarious blurb to put on a record, or anything really. Cuica drum is often called “monkey drum,” but I wonder how many monkeys even like it

13th: I believe it was originally created to mimic a lioness, but I’ve also heard monkey, dog, even opossum. I couldn’t find any videos documenting an animals reaction to it, but my chihuahua perks up when it plays. There’s nothing pretentious about it, it’s utilitarian, and immediately places you in a West African jungle. It’s a powerful instrument.

In 1991, I was living in Spokane, Washington and had started publishing my own chapbooks and setting up spoken word shows for the first time. I was heavily influenced by the DIY culture of record labels like K Records and magazines like Factsheet 5. I ordered poetry zines and chapbooks through the mail and wrote a few fan letters to people I admired.

After reading a review of a zine called The Most Beautiful Girl Is a Dead Girl by Maggie Fingers, I sent the author $3 and a copy of one of my chapbooks, called Beautiful Teenagers Unite. About two months later, Maggie mailed a response.

I had forgotten about her letter until recently, when I found it buried in a box of other personal letters from my early poetry days in the ’90s.

Here it is:

Maggie Fingers was Kathleen Hanna.

Soon after reading her letter, I went out to find the Kathleen Hanna/Slim Moon spoken word single that she mentions, Mean / Rock Star.

It took some work.

Along with the works of Seattle writer Steven Jesse Bernstein, performance artist Karen Finley, and the band Bongwater, this record became a source of inspiration for my own spoken word performances. There were several other singles released as part of the “Wordcore” series on Kill Rock Stars, including work by recent Pulitzer Prize finalist Stacey Levine and Exene Cervenka of the band X. Of course, Kill Rock Stars has become one of the world’s best independent labels since then (though not really specializing in spoken word poetry records, they do often put out comedy records).

My favorite part of the letter is the oh-by-the-way tone of her PS in the upper corner. “My band is called Bikini Kill.” I looked for their records as well, but it would be a couple of months before I’d find anything.

In the meantime, I had moved to Fort Smith, Arkansas, where I was pretty far removed from any kind of indie or punk scene. I ordered the first Bikini Kill cassette from the K Records catalog, alongside various records by other similar bands. I would then have to take the records to the Fort Smith Library and use their record players to record them onto cassettes that I could listen to anytime. I spent a decent amount of time at the library, with stacks of 7” singles from K, Teen Beat, Sarah Records, and Sub Pop. The Riot Grrrl movement was already in full swing, just months before grunge became a household word.

In the early summer of 1992, my Arkansas girlfriend and I did a road trip to the east coast, thinking we might move there. While in Washington D.C., we went to a show sponsored by Sassy Magazine with Heavens to Betsy, Bratmobile, and Lunachicks. We saw Joan Jett hanging out. She was talking to a bunch of young girls and was surprisingly tiny, smaller than many of the girls. It was one of my first-ever celebrity sightings.

Heavens to Betsy (with a pre-Sleater-Kinney Corin Tucker) weren’t very good. They seemed nervous and more out of tune inside the big warehouse setting. Bratmobile was more fun and self-assured. I bought one of their singles and talked with their singer, Allison Wolfe, for a little bit after their set. My girlfriend got jealous and said, “She doesn’t know how to sing.”

There was a big music explosion on the east coast at that time, especially around DC and Maryland. I went to a record store and bought a bunch of stuff put out by Simple Machines and Slumberland, two labels from that part of the country that were run primarily by indie-inspired women. This particular record store haul was especially memorable because I also bought cassettes of PJ Harvey’s Dry and Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, which we listened to nonstop in the car.

My girlfriend and I eventually decided that the east coast was too expensive and crowded and we ended up moving to Portland, Oregon in the summer of 1992. There was an energetic music scene with numerous clubs, both all-ages and over 21.

The X-Ray Café was one of the most vibrant venues, right on Burnside Street. Standing not far from the river and the bridge where most of the houseless people slept back then, it was an odd place for an all-ages club, considering that sex shops, strip clubs, and drug dealers were never far away. Bikini Kill was scheduled to play there one night, and we went to see them.

It was a balmy night and godheadsilo was opening up for them along with Portland band, The Frances Farmer Gals. It had been almost two years since I exchanged letters with Kathleen. I had sent a response to her letter after I moved to Arkansas but never did get a copy of the zine (and to this day I have never actually seen a copy). I thought it would be cool to say hi to her before their set and introduce myself. About twenty or so people were hanging out on the sidewalk and a couple of beat-up vans were being unloaded.

I knew that sometimes Kathleen wore wigs or disguised herself in different ways, but I spotted someone I thought was her. I walked up with my girlfriend and said, “Hey, are you Kathleen?”

She looked at me quickly and said, “No.”

Caught off guard, I said sorry and walked away. I looked around some more, hoping I’d get to meet her but didn’t see anyone else that looked like her.

Later that night, Bikini Kill stepped up on the X-Ray Café stage, surrounded by the club’s décor of velvet paintings and mannequin parts. The crowd was about half male and half female, with the majority of the females near the front, by the stage—just as Hanna had urged them to do. “All the girls to the front” became one of Riot Grrrl’s enduring calls to action.

I bopped my head and watched as the person I originally thought was Kathleen outside grabbed the mic and sang the first song. At first, I thought maybe it was one of her bandmates, Tobi Vail or Kathi Wilcox, doing vocals for one song, but as they started their second song, I figured out I’d been duped. It was Kathleen Hanna after all.

All night I felt embarrassed and bummed out about the whole situation. I thought maybe I’d try to talk to her afterward again, but I realized that wasn’t a great idea. She probably thought I was some dude trying to hit on her or something—at the least, I’m sure I came across as a smitten fanboy. It wasn’t uncommon for Riot Grrrl bands to ignore or alienate male fans. In a way, it was their way of payback for years of men belittling women in music. Indie boys and rock dudes in the ’90s deserved to be shunned by women in bands—a kind of justified reparation.

My girlfriend offered to talk to her after the show for me—she could tell I was a little crestfallen—but I feared she would have been rejected too. We went home feeling more and more jaded. We didn’t listen to their music much after that. I was hurt and felt my Riot Grrrl/Riot Boyyy window closing.

Around this same time, I became a “go-go dancer” for a Portland performance art/lip-synch band called God’s Favorite Pussy. They were four women who had elaborate costumes and performed sometimes in roller skates. Me and a couple of other young men would dress in “sexy” get-ups like cheerleader skirts and lingerie and objectify ourselves for the audience.

Still, I admired what Kathleen H/Maggie Fingers was able to accomplish with her art and her ideas. This one letter from her proves that she was once a normal young idealist striving for a voice and the power to influence people for the better. But she still owes me a book.

Kevin Sampsell is the publisher of Portland small press, Future Tense Books. His books include the memoir, A Common Pornography, the novel, This Is Between Us, and I Made an Accident: Collages and Poems. He co-curates the online collage gallery Sharp Hands with artist Cheryl Chudyk and occasional guest curators.

Note: A shorter, different version of this essay originally appeared on the website Jewcy.

Out past the strip malls, donut shops, and Chinese fast-food joints that line Stockton’s Miracle Mile, along a narrow county road that cuts through a jigsaw puzzle of dusty, sun-scorched farmland, Pavement headquarters is tucked away in a quiet, residential enclave just east of the city limits. Band founders Scott Kannenberg and Steve Malkmus grew up here, in the neighborhood shaded by giant oak and eucalyptus trees, where kids leave their bikes unlocked in the driveways and American flags fly above manicured front lawns. Malkmus’ house burned down a few years ago and his parents moved to Idaho, but Mr. and Mrs. Kannenberg still live here, along with Scott’s younger sister, Kelly, who runs Pavement’s mail order business out of the back room, and Alabama, the family’s five-year-old golden retriever.

Rumbling at through the old neighborhood and Kannenberg’s blue 1982 Saab, Malkmus slouches low in the backseat and points out personal landmarks along the way. Over here is where he got arrested for walking across people’s roofs in the middle of the night. Over there is an irrigation ditch where you can catch the biggest crawdads in Stockton. Up the road a ways, the flat brown landscape is suddenly broken by whitewashed stucco walls separating the farmland from a sprawling new housing development. Both Kannenberg and Malkmus groan as we roll past row after role of identical pastel-colored ranch homes and giant multi-colored flags welcoming potential home buyers to “The California Dream…Made Affordable!” A little further ahead, Kannenberg slows down to admire a place where the subdivision ends and a creaky old green farmhouse stands alone, a solitary reminder of Stockton’s rural past.

“The people who live here have been fighting off these big developers for years,” Malkmus explains. “The developers tried to get the guy to sell, but he refused. So they just built up around him.

“I was so proud of them for not selling out,” he adds. “They’re like our very own Bikini Kill, or something…”

“Or, Fugazi,” Kannenberg cuts in.

“Yeah,” says Malkmus, grinning. “The Fugazi of Stockton Land development.”

Pavement looks at the world through an indie rock lens. From the intentionally lo-fi approach of its records to the tongue-in-cheek parallel Malkmus and Kannenberg draw between farmer’s stand against land developers and the struggle of independent-minded punk bands, the group’s identity is rooted in an oppositional sensibility, that arose among bands, fanzines, college radio, and small independent labels in the post-punk mid-’80s. Embracing low budgets, loud guitars, and an anti-corporate ethos which demanded that music be treated as something more than “product,” indie rockers transformed punk’s loose-knit DIY principles into a formalized subculture that often seemed to view signing a major label deal as the ultimate sell-out and obscurity, as an achievement in itself. 

But at a time when the underground has become mired in an orthodoxy as rigid as the mainstream pop market, it defines itself against, Pavement makes indie rock fun again. Not simply because the band turn down major label deals to stick with feisty Matador (though that label is affiliated with Atlantic, Pavement’s latest album, Crooked, Rain, Crooked Rain, is not a joint-label release). And not just because guitarist Kannenberg has refused to appear in Rolling Stone, a magazine he reviles for “ignoring all the best music of my generation.” Rather, Pavement is fun because Payment is truly independent: Steve Malkmus and Scott Kannenberg don’t play by anyone’s rules but their own. 

Often portrayed as smug, contemptuous slackers, hiding behind fake names and cryptic lyrics, slagging both Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots in the song “Range Life,” and greeting MTV VJ Lewis Largent with slack-jawed glares during an interview on 120 Minutes, the band has, in fact, stepped out of the murky in the underworld with rare poise and humor. Particularly on Crooked Rain, Pavement’s casual, brilliant guitar rock transcends indie convention and challenges notions of what (if anything) “alternative” really means, investing punk’s corporate-backed Second Coming with more guts and vision than any other American band.

It’s a warm, windless summer day in Stockton, and after lunch at a downtown Mexican diner, Malkmus and Kannenberg, accompanied by cannon Berg’s girlfriend Chrissy, shut off on a tour of the town. Although Pavement has never actually performed here, the bands to 28-year-old leaders have deep roots in this agricultural hub located at the tip of the Sacramento River Delta and California’s vast Central Valley. Malkmus and Kannenberg played on the Tokay High School soccer team together in nearby Lodi. They worked in local record stores and movie theaters, spent their free time smoking pot, collecting punk and new wave records and making up songs for the short-lived first band, Bag of Bones. These days, when Pavement isn’t touring, Malkmus splits this time between New York and Memphis, and Kannenberg lives with Chrissy, 100 miles from Stockton, in San Francisco. But Stockton remains Pavement’s homebase, the place it receives its fan mail and deposits its royalty checks, and the place for Malkmus and Kannenberg find their sense of perspective. 

“People always think there’s so much pressure on us now that we’re selling some records, and getting played on MTV and stuff, but we don’t really feel it,” says Kannenberg, browsing through a dusty row of guitar amps at a downtown pawn shop. “I guess if we had movie star girlfriends and hung around in Hollywood or something, maybe we would feel the pressure. But it’s not like that. I mean, we’re from Stockton, where there’s no scene, no bands—where there’s nothing. And I guess that’s part of the charm.”

While most aspiring rockers would kill for the kind of critical acclaim and commercial success that’s greeted Pavement, Malkmus and Kannenberg strategize ways to avoid entering the rock star realm. It’s not that they lack ambition, as has often been written, just that they view rock ‘n’ roll as more of an absurd aberration than a full-time job. “When we started, every record was like this little project we did on vacation,” says Kannenberg, “and that’s kind of how we want it to stay. Traveling around and playing is a lot of fun, and I’m glad we’re getting a chance to do it, but that’s not all there is. We don’t ever want to let this run our lives. “

Dressed in a blue T-shirt and jeans, Kannenberg is clean-shaven, square-shouldered, and solid, with an easygoing smile and a stoner’s laugh. Malkmus, the band’s singer, is ganglier and more ruffled, wearing an orange thrift store sweater and crooked baseball cap. Clutching a tape recorder in one hand and a can of Coke in the other, he delivers a rambling tour monologue that’s equal parts sarcasm and earnest nostalgia, unearthing memories around every corner and putting together pieces of the Pavement puzzle.

“I have a sad story to tell about the first punk rock show I ever wanted to go to,” he announces as we drive north from downtown into a battered industrial zone that was once home to several part-time punk clubs. “It was the Dead Kennedys, and I had just gotten my driver’s license the day before. I wanted to drive there really bad, but my parents said, ‘No, you can’t take the car. It’s in a bad area and it’s too late.’ I really wanted to go and I threw a temper tantrum. I got so angry that they wouldn’t even let me go with anyone else cause I was acting like such a brat.” 

Malkmus got his punk rock initiation a year later, though, when his own band Straw Dog open for Black Flag at another local venue. “I was backstage before the show, and all those guys, they look so scary, I was afraid of them,” he says. “Like Greg Ginn was mixing up the stuff in a glass. It was probably just protein powder or some healthy drink, and I thought it was like heroin or something—some kind of drug. And before they played, Henry Rollins is back there with this pool ball, this white cue ball, just squeezing it to get pumped up for the show.” He pauses, looking out the car window at a graffiti-covered box car sitting on rusty train tracks. 

“I mean, squeezing a cue ball!” he continues. “You’re not going to get anywhere! I guess that was his point. It’s like smashing your head against a brick wall. That’s what I thought punk was, you know. That’s when I knew that maybe I am just not punk enough.”

Beyond the junkyards and abandoned factories, around the corner from a massive gated compound that houses Stockton’s glimmering Christian life Center, Kannenberg pulls into a ’60s-era subdivision and parks across the street from a nondescript one-story house at 9318 Waco Way. This is the former home of local drummer Gary Young, who operated a small recording studio called Louder Than You Think out of his garage. This is also where one dull afternoon in the summer of 1988, Pavement cut its first record. 

At the time, Malkmus was visiting his folks between semesters at the University of Virginia, from which he graduated with a B.A. in history in 1989. Kannenberg had moved back home after dropping out of Arizona State. They had remembered Young from his days with the Stockton hardcore band Fall of Christianity and decided to book some recording time.

“We were just hanging around, you know, getting stoned and watching TV at Steve’s parent’s house, and we’d started making up the songs,” Kannenberg says, standing in the driveway while Chrissy snaps photos. “Steve had just started being a DJ at UVA and I think he just got the idea that, well, there’s all these bands, we can do it too. It was a completely naïve thing.”

The duo’s ragged, out-of-tune guitars and screeching vocals didn’t much impress Young, who spent most of his studio time recording demos for riff-heavy local metal clones. “The thing is,” Young remembers, speaking from his current home in nearby, Linden, “they didn’t know anything. When they walked in the door, they were two kids with two guitars. They had what I considered to be trash noise. I didn’t realize that there was a market for this at that point in time, so I just said this is noisy trash, what’s the deal?”

Young ended up drumming on some of the tracks Malkmus and Kannenberg laid down and thought he’d seen the last of Pavement. But while Malkmus ditched fall semester at UVA for a trip to Europe, Kannenberg pressed the record and sent it out to fanzines and record companies. By the time Malkmus came home, Pavement’s first 7-inch, Slay Tracks, had been released through Dutch East India and was getting write-ups in ’zines across the country. Returning to Young’s garage during the following Christmas and spring vacations, the duo tossed off two more mini-albums, Demolition Plot J-7 and Perfect Sound Forever, as well as assorted fanzine-distributed singles. (Drag City ultimately compiled all three albums, plus early singles, as the CD Westing by Musket And Sextant.) The music was still raw and unfocused, employing only two guitars and Young’s spare, rubbery drumming, there were also fragile melodies and crisp, inventive guitar lines reaching out of the harsh soundscape, signs of the band’s sonic vision evolving with each new song. 

By the time its first full-length album, Slanted And Enchanted, finally came out in 1992, Pavement was riding a major buzz. Songs hinted at myriad influences—the Velvet Underground, the Fall, Wire, the Pixies, Sonic Youth—but also had an edgy, spacious sound all its own, full of clipped, ringing guitars, choppy rhythms, and melodies close to perfection but always on the brink of falling apart.

Live shows were similarly precarious. Up until Slanted, Pavement have never performed outside of the studio. In fact, bass guitar didn’t even become a regular part of the band lineup until Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. So to greet a sudden wealth of opportunities to play live, Malkmus and Kannenberg quickly pieced together a band—with Young on drums, Mark Ibold on bass, and percussionist/chanter Bob Nastanovich—and hit the road after only a half-dozen rehearsals.

Before the group’s sold-out San Francisco debut, Gary Young stood outside the Kennel Club greeting people with gregarious handshakes and requests that they buy him a beer. Onstage, he stumbled around and forgot the names of tune after tune, often forcing his bandmates to start and re-start songs until he finally got it right. Young’s drunken antics became legendary as the band crisscrossed the U.S. and Europe, but they also made for chronically unpredictable performances. Following a particularly grueling European tour last summer, the 42-year-old drummer was replaced by Steve West, a high school buddy of Nastanovic.

If West has provided a more stable if less entertaining presence, Pavement’s haphazard approach has remained much the same. With Kannenberg studying urban planning in Sacramento State, Malkmus and Ibold living in New York, and Nastanovich in Louisville, little rehearsal went into the making of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Recorded for $10,000 in a makeshift New York apartment-studio, the album contains the same tossed-off unvarnished feel as Slanted And Enchanted, but is sharper and more cohesive throughout. Breezing from jagged, sarcastic pop tunes, like the single “Cut Your Hair,” to a tinkly reworking of “Take Five” by Dave Brubeck (a fellow Stockton native), called “5-4=Unity,” and the earthy country jam “Range Life,” Crooked Rain is like a secret tour of rock ‘n’ roll, full of clever allusions, subtle references, and sonic juxtapositions that hint at influences ranging from Creedence Clearwater Revival to the Beatles, Husker Du and, again, VU and the Fall.

In his lyrics, written mostly in the studio, Malkmus drops the arty ambiguity of past efforts for songs that dig into the tension, ambivalence, and absurdity of making a career as a rock musician. “Songs mean a lot / When songs are bought / And so are you,” he deadpans in “Cut Your Hair,” and lines succinctly describe the challenge facing Pavement and other bands trying to hang on to their indie values in the mainstream rock marketplace.

By early fall, Crooked Rain had sold 150,00 copies, spawned a hit video on “Alternative Nation” with “Cut Your Hair,” and even earned Pavement a spot next to Drew Barrymore on Jay Leno last summer. But if the band is flirting with fame in the U.S. and abroad, in Stocktone they may as well not exist. While another native son, retro-crooner Chris Isaak, is widely regarded as a local treasure, no one around here seems to know who pavement is. When I mention the band’s name to the teenager working the counter at a Taco Bell, his only reaction is a dull shrug. Even at the record store where Kannenberg used to work, not a single Pavement album sits on the shelves. Maybe that’s why the guitarist is surprised to find several copies of Crooked Rain on display at the nearby Tower.

“It’s here,” Kannenberg announces, holding a copy. Then he notices the price tag. “$15.98,” he says. “What a rip-off.”

If Malkmus is Pavement’s eccentric spirit, Kannenberg is its indie conscious. He’s the one who seems most uneasy with the band’s escalating commercial success, and the one most inflexible in his indie ideology. Kannenberg is also the one who refused to be interviewed or photographed for a July 14 Rolling Stone piece on the band. The rest of the group went along with the story, but as Malkmus explains in his own roundabout way, the episode highlights tough issues facing Pavement.

“I have a problem with appearing in that magazine, too,” Malkmus says. “They really gave a skewed, unfair history of rock ‘n’ roll in the ’80s. But to me it was more of a slippery slope kind of thing. I mean, what’s the difference between saying no to Rolling Stone but still appeared on MTV? MTV makes you bend down more—it’s like, ‘Make us a video, make sure it’s hot, spend a lot of money on it, and maybe we’ll play it. And then we’ll take the credit for it and we’ll play it as much as we want whenever we want.”

“To me, MTV is way worse,” he continues. “Even to sit down and talk with an MTV VJ, it’s so insidious. They’ll lead you on, just like that Lewis Largent tried to do with me, asking those dumb questions. So what do you do? When you’re on there you can protest it by just ignoring him and trying to be civil. Or you can just be rude for no reason—spit on Lewis Largent or something. A lot of kids’ll think that’s real cool—‘You spit on Lewis Largent. Oh, that’s real punk.’ But there’s no point to that. Besides, you might give him a disease.”

Late afternoon sunshine beats through the car windows as we drive past the vineyards and apricot orchards that line Highway 99 on the way to Tokay High. Pulling into the school’s parking lot, past a group of Asian teens sitting on the hood of a car, Malkmus points to a grassy area across the street where he says kids used to spoke pot between classes. “They hired a narc because so many kids were showing up stoned,” he says. “But it turned out the narc was also the dealer. So it worked out pretty good.”

Wandering through the empty halls of their alma mater, the two peak into the gym and point out a squat stucco building called the Newcomb Media Center where, Malkmus says sarcastically, “we spent many hours plotting, reading the magazines, and dreaming that one day we’d be as big as Toto.” They show me the assembly hall where Gary Young’s band, the Fall of Christianity, was set to play during lunch once time. The show was broken up because a bunch of kids blocked the entrance in protest and began chanting “Jesus lives! Jesus lives!”

“Everything was always in very black-and-white terms here. It was like, rednecks versus punks,” says Malkmus. “In fact, that’s kind of how our song ‘Fillmore Jew’ was inspired: by this high school where everything was just so easily separated.”

As athletes, stoners, and part-time punks, Malkmus and Kannenberg say that they didn’t fit into any of the neatly defined Tokay cliques. “We kind of hung out with this group of punkers from another high school,” says Kannenberg, “but we didn’t dress the part or anything. We were just kind of normal, I guess. But we were still outcasts.”

“It’s funny,” he continues, stopping to sit on a bench in the quad. “Today, the people who listen to alternative music are the people who were like the rednecks then, the people who would tease us and stuff. The people who listen to Pavement are those people. It’s kind of weird.”

Note: This story is republished here with author Jason Fine’s permission. It originally appeared in the September 1994 issue of the acclaimed independent music magazine Option. Published by Scott Becker, this print music magazine ran from 1985 to 1998 and was edited by a series of folks, including Richie Unterberger, Mark Kemp, Jason Fine, Steve Appleford, Erik Pedersen, Barbara Jordan, and Scott Becker. Kristin Bell was Option’s art director. This is this story’s first appearance online. To read more of Option’s back catalogue, buy the anthology We Rock So You Don’t Have To: The Option Reader #1, edited by Becker. Jason Fine went on to become Rolling Stone’s Editor in Chief, and later their first Senior Vice President of Films.

Our world is a strange, interesting place. That’s a large part of why I work as a paranormal researcher. People know me from my time on TV shows like A&E’s Paranormal State, Travel Channel’s Alien Highway and Portals to Hell, but off-camera, I’m deep into music, and I discovered that being a hardcore music fan is strange, too.

Exhibit A: My life as a listener has been colored by a series of convergences.

I don’t know how it all started, or how the pieces all fit together. I do know that my older brother played a large role in my musical life.

When I was in grade school, I played the violin. My older brother Joey had a massive collection of CDs that I would help him alphabetize and organize. I spent what seemed like hours looking at every CD jacket. (I always spent a little extra time looking through the art in the Mr. Bungle album. Boy was it bizarre!)

Joey was cool. He skateboarded, built halfpipes in our yard, and constantly had the sounds of ’80s and ’90s alternative tunes blaring on his gigantic stereo system. He had a poster of Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Farrell on his wall—from the cover of their debut live album, where Perry’s wearing the corset. My mom looked at it and always exclaimed, “Why do you have a dead person on your wall?”

Joey played Jane’s Addiction repeatedly. Once I heard Eric Avery’s basslines in their music, I learned the bass to “Mountain Song,” and I literally quit violin and taught myself bass instead. I couldn’t believe how explosive their music was. It took my child brain on a wild ride.

I have a vivid memory of my 7-year-old self rolling around on my brother’s waterbed shouting in my high-pitched tiny voice Everybody has their own opinion! Everybody has their own opinion! Jane’s music moved me so deeply that I ended up getting the title of their second album, Nothing’s Shocking, tattooed on my back in the same font from the album cover.

In the late 1980s, Jane’s were wizards of Los Angeles’ underground music world, and the people who passed through their life, photographing them and inspiring their aesthetic and songs, are now kind of legendary.

Years after I became a Jane’s fan, I briefly worked with this woman named Karyn in Las Vegas. I thought her name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t remember from where. She ran a cool jewelry store in Burbank, and I worked for a company in a showroom where she also worked a few times. I thought nothing of it. Then one day, another co-worker ended up recognizing my Jane’s Addiction tattoo, which was partly showing through my dress, and she told me to talk to Karyn. Then the name clicked: Karyn Cantor. I had come across her name in various interviews about the band. This Karyn used to live with Perry Farrell. She was a member of Jane’s circle, from their earliest days. Karyn was the one who took the photo of Perry that he painted and turned into the cover of their debut album—the image that hung on my brother’s wall! Karyn took many of the live photos that appear on the debut album’s liner notes. She was the one who photographed Jane Bainter, the band’s namesake and inspiration for one of their most recognizable songs, “Jane Says,” in what became the only circulating image of Bainter. Karyn ended up telling me some great stories of her days photographing the band and how she still had so many unseen photos. I was amazed. She went back to an early Jane’s era whose shows many of us fans would have love to have experienced. The weirdest part about this is that the day before I met Karyn, I was wearing the shirt from the band’s debut album—the one she actually photographed!

I’ve had other odd coincidences relating to Jane’s.

When Twitter was still a thing, my friend Cheyenne decided to comment on Jane’s guitarist Dave Navarro’s Twitter feed without telling me. This was when Jane’s was playing those full album shows for Nothing’s Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual, back in 2015 and ’16. She tagged me and told Dave that it was my thirteenth time seeing Jane’s live, and she mentioned my show Paranormal State. Dave responded and said that he’s seen every episode and had a crush on me. I was so embarrassed that she did that. But then he invited me to watch a few of their shows from the side of the stage, which was incredible.

Despite my initial embarrassment, it was a surreal experience that I would get to watch the masters of alternative music play my favorite album right in front of me as I stood there singing along.

Dave was the sweetest, most down to earth human. In between each song he would walk over to the side of the stage where my friend and I were standing and talk to us, while jokingly reciting the intro to Paranormal State. Meanwhile, in my head I’m thinking How is it that 17 years earlier, I was a teenager sitting in my room trying to play Dave’s solo on “Three Days,” and now he’s five feet in front of me playing “Three Days” live?! I guess nothing really is shocking anymore. I really appreciated his sense of humor.

He had me hold his guitar for a picture, and I just kept thinking Don’t drop it Heather, don’t drop it. Before we got onstage for a show, he told us to stand in the crowd on his side of the stage and he’d get his guitar tech to bring us up. I’ll never forget seeing Dave recognize me and come kneel down right in front of us while playing the song “Up the Beach.” I’ll also never forget walking behind Stephen Perkins playing drums during “Ted Just Admit it,” then seeing Dave walk up to hug me and kiss me on the cheek. WHAT?!

The second time he let me stand onstage during a show, we watched the bands Living Colour and Dinosaur Jr. play the same bill. What a strange life. It would have been amazing to have lived in L.A. in the 1980s to see their very early shows.

Jane’s is one of my favorites, but I have a deep love for Seattle music, too. Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Mark Lanegan, and Mother Love Bone—I’m enough of a fan that I’ve made the almighty musical pilgrimages to the Emerald City. I sat outside Kurt Cobain’s house on Lake Washington, reading a book. I sought out all the old venues that were integral to the Grunge explosion where my favorite bands have played, like The Vogue, Off Ramp Café, RCKNDY, and the OK Hotel. Sure, things change, but it’s still so disappointing to see them as other businesses.

I really loved seeing the blacksmith shop where Pearl Jam had their first practice space in an alley on the 2300 block between 2^nd and 3^rd avenues in Belltown—and possibly where Soundgarden had their practice space at one point. I stood in the alley at the back door imagining what it must have been like to walk past there 30 years ago and hear them practicing.

I’ve seen a lot of those bands play, but one major regret I carry is not seeing Mark Lanegan play when I happened to be in Seattle when he played one of his gigs in 2018. Big mistake on my part for being “too tired.” What an idiot I was!

Thankfully, I’ve seen some incredible shows. Soundgarden, Chris Cornell, Mudhoney, Alice in Chains, and even one of Tad’s projects. The music just seems to orbit me.

I have one last ridiculous Seattle story.

In 2023, I was waiting to see Henry Rollins do a speaking engagement in Pittsburgh, and this woman sat next to me. We started talking about music, and I somehow got on the topic of the early Seattle band Green River. She immediately started talking about how she saw them live, and I thought, Wow, this woman was in Seattle at the right time. Green River was short-lived but arguably the first “Grunge” band!

So, she casually goes on to tell me that she helped create a compilation with her then-boyfriend, Chris Hanzek, called Deep Six on their label C/Z Records. I was like Oh my goodness! I knew exactly what she was talking about. Deep Six was the first compilation to record the bands that went on to define Seattle’s early 90s sound, including Green River, Soundgarden, Malfunkshun, The Melvins, and Skin Yard. That compilation was hugely influential.

I proceeded to blow her mind by naming the studio it was recorded in—Ironwood Studio, for the record—and I dropped my nerd knowledge on all things Seattle music. She was super impressed that I knew all these weird details.

We talked more about music and then one of the theater attendants walked over and told her that she was in the wrong seat, haha! It was such a strange moment. Of all people to accidentally sit down next to me. Her name was Tina Casale. I never saw her again.

See what I mean about our universe being such a mysterious one?

The Breeders enchanted me when I first heard them 15 years ago. Freshly out of rehab, I was rebuilding my life in a 24-plex apartment building called The Norseman with a roommate, three cats, and a ferret named Pants. I needed music to teleport me from depression and the heaviness of losing a friend to suicide. I needed women-fronted bands for inspiration.

Even through tinny speakers on my clunky laptop, lead singer Kim Deal’s voice sounded medicinal, a honeyed elixir. The band’s music was both atmospheric and strange, while also melodic, charming, and joyful. It sounds liked it felt to stand in a craggy patch of sunlight, warm and sober after surviving a brutal, subzero Fargo winter in active addition. This was the band I had needed.

The Breeders playfully blend genres, blurring the lines between punk, rock, and pop like ’90s kids had started blurring gender lines. The band shimmers with their own brand of pop—vocalizations, harmonies, and catchy riffs that burrow their way into your subconscious in songs like, “Divine Hammer,” “Doe,” and “Saints.” The lead singer also played rhythm guitar, and her twin sister, Kelley Deal, played lead guitar and sang. Together, they brought a unique energy and shared love of classic country and folk that shines on their ballads “Do You Love Me Now,” “Fortunately Gone,” and a cover of an Ed’s Redeeming Qualities tune, “Drivin’ on 9.” The band also infuses surfer rock a la Dick Dale, with percussive, tremolo-picked guitars in the all-instrumental track, “Flipside” and bright slide guitar on “No Aloha.”

Simply put, The Breeders are fun! They’re a band who, unlike me, don’t take themselves too seriously. For years, I constantly looked for proof that the universe was smiting me—a parking ticket or a flat tire sent me reeling. I avoided my neighborhood grocery store for months after a clerk saw me crying in front of jars of Cheese Whiz because they evoked childhood nostalgia. Who on earth was moved to tears by cheese so processed it’s the color of a Muppet? Instead of letting me wallow in sadness and self-loathing like Elliot Smith, The Breeders sonically catapulted me to a bright future.

I was only a toddler when Pixies bassist Kim Deal and Throwing Muses frontwoman Tanya Donnelly started the band in 1989. It’s little wonder Kurt Cobain cited their debut album Pod, as one of his top 50 albums of all time. Though I love Pod too, their album Last Splash was my introduction.

“New Year,” the first track on Last Splash, begins with two pensively played, revered guitar notes and Deal’s warm voice like an incantation, “we have come for light.” The song then crescendos and speeds into a frenzied maelstrom of power chords, accompanied by a driving bass line. Kim croons, “I am the sun/I am the new year.” Clocking at just under two minutes, it’s one of my favorite opening tracks of all time. It sounds like an invitation to join the band on the verge of something unknown, but sublime.

I was back in therapy, and back in college again pursuing an English degree, and forming new friendships. My adopted city of Fargo, North Dakota was a hopeful place too, rebuilding itself after one of the most destructive floods in its very flooded history. I strolled along the muddy banks of the Red River humming another favorite Last Splash track, “Saints.” The chord progression was a variation on the classic hymn “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The octave-jumping lead guitar, smooth bassline, and punky swagger in Kim’s dragged out vocals buoyed me. I hummed along, believing the lyrics were “supper is ready when you are.” I later learned Kim was singing summer, not supper. To me, the song symbolized nourishment, which I was learning after years of self-abuse. I also found nourishment in wandering, relating to the song’s lyrics “walkin’ around/goin’ nowhere.” But nowhere is not a dead end. The murky water of the Red River whispered a vow: Keep going.

Of course any talk about The Breeders leads to their beloved single, “Cannonball.” which rose to number 2 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart in 1993. Rather than some forgettable hit, the song has sustained a lasting cultural impact. In 2023, a YouTube user commented: “Sometimes performers and songs are born for eternity…The Breeders' music is immortal. Every time I hear this song, I am happy again for 3 minutes and 46 seconds.” When the band opened for pop star Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour, Rodrigo told a sold-out Madison Square Garden crowd she remembers her life in two parts: before she heard “Cannonball” and after.

“Cannonball,” was one of the first songs I learned on bass guitar. I picked up the instrument because my therapist suggested I find a new way to fill my time after getting sober. As much as I loved brooding, it wasn’t conducive to recovery. In a gentle motherly tone, my therapist suggested building birdhouses or crocheting. But frankly, I was a brat who found birds annoying and lacked the fine motor skills that crocheting required.

I bought a cheap baby blue beginner bass and amp from a pawn shop. I fumbled for weeks, wishing I’d learned sooner and cursing myself for wasting six years of my life on the least rocking instrument on the planet, the godforsaken clarinet. The clarinet provided me with a musical foundation, but I knew I’d never be a bass virtuoso like Geddy Lee or Les Claypool. In rehab speak, I needed to KISS: Keep it Simple, Stupid.

A KISS mentality encoded The Breeders’ DNA. In a 2013 interview with Spin, Kim said, “If I had to choose between a simple melody and a really complicated rudiment sitting in the middle of a good song, I would prefer a simple melody every time.” Kim invited her twin sister Kelley to replace Donnelley when she left to form the band Belly. Kelley told Guitar World she learned to play guitar only a year before they recorded Last Splash. She had no desire to shred but wanted to play what best suited the songs and to create soundscapes.

Bassist Josephine Wiggs told Spin the opening riff of “Cannonball” resulted from accidentally playing the opening run in the wrong key, twice. “It’s hilariously deceptive,” Wiggs said, “because you think it’s gonna be one thing, and then all of a sudden it’s something else. We all thought it sounded cool. We left it like that.” It’s difficult to imagine “Cannonball” without Wiggs’ iconic mistake.

The band’s philosophy was a lesson for me, as I tended to overcomplicate and overthink nearly everything. I aspired for the cool and self-assured nature of The Breeders, to embrace my character flaws and mistakes as strengths. To experiment freely with abandon was a new motion for me, but it freed me to pursue writing and music. I don’t know what the lyrics of the song “Oh” on Pod mean, but I know the song wouldn’t be as moving without the break in Deal’s perfectly imperfect voice in the last verse. Similarly, the song “SOS” would feel flat without the crackling feedback created when Kelley plugged her sewing machine into a Marshall amp.

Eventually I graduated to a gleaming G&L bass with a maple neck, proudly hauling it on my cross country move to Portland, Oregon. I never became an expert, but I became proficient and loved playing. That was enough.

Shortly after moving, I had a mental breakdown. Shortly after that, I relapsed. I hocked my treasured bass at the pawn shop to buy a couple of 8 balls of heroin. My blurry days were measured by working, hustling for extra money to buy sticky lumps of black tar, and waking up glazed from a euphoric haze with sweat and a hollow ache in my bones alongside my boyfriend, J.

I never gave up though. I reached toward things I believed could save me or, at the very least, bring me fleeting non-chemical joy. On a rare day of stability and clarity, I scored tickets for The Breeders’ reunion tour. I was thrilled. Growing up as a millennial in North Dakota, I didn’t get the chance to see any of my favorite Gen X bands play in their heydays. Few of them came through. These tickets were a promise to myself to get better.

The night before the show, a drug dealer named Reset ripped us off, his neck tattooed with a power button symbol. He exclusively wore patchwork pants and listened to EDM. We were fools for trusting him, but desperation makes you do foolish things. J and I faced a decision: go to the show dope sick or sell the tickets to get well. We sold our tickets. It would’ve been the last show we saw together before I moved and he died from an accidental overdose.

Years passed. The Breeders came with me through it all: as a singleton, as an MFA student, a survivor of a small brain hemorrhage, an MFA dropout, a wife, mother, and now public health worker. The Breeders gave me permission to stay true to myself, embrace the weird, and rebuild burned bridges.

Last winter, when I was nursing my newborn daughter in the middle of the night, I saw an ad for the band’s Denver tour date. Lucky me! I snapped up tickets bleary eyed and without needing to check my bank account, relieved I was no longer tooth- and nailing it through life as I had been the last time our paths crossed.

Until the day of the show, I debated whether it was practical for me to go out on a weeknight. Mothering had already left me sleep deprived. Why make it worse? But I decided sleep deprivation was worth it. I’ve regretted nights I chose my couch over seeing bands like Jawbreaker, The Dresden Dolls, and Unwound. I couldn’t do that again.

Instead of the old illicit substances, I slid orthopedic inserts into my Vans for this show and nestled ear plugs in my purse. As I tucked in my kids, they cried. My husband soothed them as mom guilt washed over me. He urged me to go, told me “You deserve it.”

As soon as The Deal sisters took the stage, I knew I’d made the right choice. They beamed. Their jubilation was infectious. The show they gave was a full-bodied experience, a portal whisking me away from the ticker tape of worries that constantly played in my adult mind. Immersed in the crowd of mostly Gen X and Millennials, the nostalgia of their music comforted me, though hearing it live somehow also made it feel new again. The Breeders dazzled with syrupy melodies, looping guitars, and violin swirling to atmospheric, polyphonic places. We cheered for “Cannonball.” We fell into an enraptured silence during quieter tracks like “Mad Lucas” and “Glorious.” Their energizing set spanned the entirety of Pod and Last Splash. The fact that Wiggs maintained the stoic mannerisms of revered bass players didn’t diminish the energy a bit.

Throughout instrument changes and tunings, the Deal sisters entertained us with banter. Kim told us about Kelley hauling her sewing machine from their Ohio home to a California recording studio, naively thinking she’d have downtime to sew their mother a quilt. Instead, it ended up on “SOS.” Kelley joked how she wasn’t affected by the altitude like most people, so she “felt like an alligator.” She wore her band’s own Last Splash t-shirt, not needing to posture or impress.

The show felt especially poignant for me, as the Deal sisters had also overcome addiction. “I was my own worst enemy,” Kim confessed to Crack Magazine. Kelley was busted for heroin possession at the height of their success, which was a factor leading to the band’s hiatus. The sisters worked on their own healing and recovery until 2013, when they reunited the band’s original lineup.

Their sober joy and ease together on stage was palpable, but also hard earned. The old wounds hummed beneath the surface. In their tobacco-tinged harmonies lived the ache of two sisters who know what it’s like to fall apart and come back together again. I know this ache and this triumph. For once, I felt grounded, absorbing the beauty of this transcendent, full circle moment. The set told the story of their healing and mending, which was also my story, minus the rock royalty status. To quote their Pod opening track, “It’s glorious.”

Going down the YouTube rabbit hole in 2024, I found The Paper Tulips.

In the 1980s and ’90s, cool kids found new music from other people. The record store clerk played something awesome in their store that you had to buy. Your friend’s older sister played you a weird record that blew your mind. Nowadays, algorithms can suck the life out of the human aspect of sharing music with other people, but algorithms can also facilitate encounters as part of a larger “find cool stuff strategy.”

I’d been reading old, digitized issues of Flipside zine on Archive.com, checking out the live concert reviews, then listening to the more obscure bands on YouTube. The early ’90s still brimmed with what I called “new old music,” and it was fun to discover it 30 years after the fact. Then in the YouTube sidebar, a video by Paper Tulips popped up, and it became my favorite new old band.

Founded in Long Beach in the late 1980s, Flipside released Paper Tulips’ first full album, Insects, in 1990. Flipside released most of their music during the band’s brief existence. The band sounded as fresh as ever. Songs were often short, powerful blasts of guitar. The bassist and guitarist traded vocal duties. On some songs, they sang together in an off-kilter way that reminds me of X, though more playful than pained.

The music wasn’t punk like Bad Religion or Circle Jerks. It was weirder, more angular and melodic. It often sounded post-punk. One YouTuber described it as “punk rock with pizzazz.” That nails it.

Their song “Head Shot” alone earns The Paper Tulips a place in the pantheon of the West Coast’s best underground bands. To me, it’s the perfect rock song: catchy, weird, and energetic.

The Paper Tulips had a rotating cast of drummers, but their bassist and guitarist were the band’s core, and they seemed to have fun doing it. The bassist-vocalist was named Toast, aka Toastacia Boyd. She cranked out some wicked baselines, driving these already driven songs forward. She also moved like a badass on stage. Their guitarist Gregory Kay ripped, too.

Turns out, Kay later played in one of my favorite ’90s surf bands, The Bomboras. In that band, he went by the moniker Lord Hunt. That meant he played on one of my favorite ’90s instrumentals, “Last Call,” and that I’d seen him play a show in Phoenix around 1996 and hadn’t known it. He’d briefly led his own spin-off instrumental band, Lord Hunt and the Missing Finks, who wore masks on stage. There wasn’t much information about them online, but that’s how life goes in these little underground musical communities.

After the Tulips, Toast had played drums in a ’90s surf revival band, too, called The Neptunes. But it all led back to Long Beach in the 1980s and early ’90s when Flipside Records was releasing some of the best music southern California had to offer, before big record labels started marketing underground music as “Alternative Music” to hungry paying kids who’d lived their lives above ground—and to us kids who’d always felt like freaks.

Not to insult basic punk rockers, but as countless ’80s and ’90s compilations show, there are a lot of punk bands that sound pretty similar. The Paper Tulips stand out. They sound unique. They have personality. You pick up on their weird collective identity immediately.

God, I love the archival jewels people post on YouTube.

Something else that makes Paper Tulips appealing to me is that they have a unique visual vocabulary. Watch the second Drummer Wanted video below. Whoever edited it did a stellar job. It looks great and syncs with the music well, but more importantly, it shows a band who had design taste as much as musical taste. I’m not sure how much say they had in the design of their album covers, but from the images to the fonts to the way colors and text interact on the covers, the band looks good, too, and I don’t mean their faces. Look at their Linoleum 45, from 1991. According to Discogs: “Issued inside a 16-page newsprint booklet designed by the band. Recorded on a Tascam 48 in downtown Long Beach and later mixed down at Huey Dee Studios in Atwater. 'This was mixed to DAT (why?) and mastered by Carol at K-Disc in Hollywood.”

The Paper Tulips had something unique going on at this particular place and time. It was happening. And then: It ended.

The Paper Tulips made the cover of the Flipside zine in Dec 1995/Jan ’96.

As one YouTuber said, Paper Tulips were “a l.a. trio that deserved a lot more airplay in their time…” In that spirit, here are some Paper Tulips favorite songs of mine:

Orbital, 1992

Here are tracks from their second full-length album.

“Cloudage”

“Another Car”

Baker’s Dozen, 1993

Their third full-length album.

“Wallow”

“Kisses Back”

“Portuguese Bend”

Insects, 1990

From their debut LP.

“Rooftop”

“Film M”

“Manufacture”

“Escalator”

Drummer Wanted

If I understand correctly, the band and friends shot Super 8 footage on tours, in their practice space The Shredding Room, and at various locations—the roof of an apartment in Long Beach, at the club Spaceland, etcetera. They assembled that footage into their own movie called Drummer Wanted. The theme is that a rotating cast of drummers plays with them. One is Phil Colon, from Anus the Menace, another fun LA band from this time. One is Max Eldson from the LA gothic post-punk band Spiderbaby, which I’ve come to love. Thankfully Toast posted the movie on YouTube in 2010. I reached out to her in 2024 and hope she’ll get back to me for an interview one day.

#5 Is missing in action, but here’s #6:

For your further enjoyment, here’s guitarist Grey Kay’s YouTube channel.

Here’s Toast’s YouTube channel.

And here’s the YouTube channel of the guy who produced the Tulips’ first record.

But the music—it’s all about the music.

Remember this song? Everyone who lived through the ’90s remembers this song.

Maybe you hated it.

Maybe you remember it but never knew which band played it.

Maybe you loved it but heard it too much then tried to forget it. Then long after you turned 40, the algorithm served it up on some playlist for Gen Xers who played Mazzy Star and Pixies. Maybe the algorithm didn’t have to serve it. Maybe you walked into some boutique that sells crystals and vintage Hawaiian shirts and the Millennial clerk was setting the mood with a “people who like ’90s music” playlist, and The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” came on after Stone Temple Pilots’ “Sex Type Thing,” and you found your inner voice singing the lyrics all intensely like “I can change / I can change / I can change,” because those bittersweet lyrics had always nested in your mind, and the song’s signature symphonic sample puts you in a zone, mesmerizing you with a hypnotic mid-tempo, because whatever kind of music you liked as an alterna-kid, and whatever kind of music you like now, “Bittersweet Symphony” is truly one of the singular, memorable songs of the 1990s. It just is.

Then there’s the video. Remember the video?

Filmed in London in 1998, the video shows Verve lead singer Richard Ashcroft walking a straight line down a busy street, his eyes fixed and pale face callow, plowing through anyone and anything that stands in his path. He brushes a silver-haired passerby without slowing. He walks between two women and slams his shoulders into both of them. Incensed, they face him, but he plods on, singing the song lyrics as he goes. When Ashcroft hits a brunette in a maroon coat, she spins so hard she falls to the ground. He seems like a jerk—overly serious and just banging into people instead of sharing the streets. It’s a memorable video that provokes the viewer while inviting them to assign meaning to this mystifying scenario. Any urbanite can imagine similar scenarios happening to modern pedestrians who are too busy texting or checking their phones to notice a pending collision, but mostly, it’s just a cool weird video that grabs your attention, which is partly why it still hits today.

The thing is, maybe the video made you want to dislike this band entirely and discount this song, the way it initially did me in 1998 (initially), back when I had irrational polarizing reactions to things that were based on my idea of what kind of cool person I was and what people would think of me if I stepped outside of my cool person box and actually gave myself freedom to just like whatever the fuck I liked and whatever sounded good. The Verve’s lead singer looked like a dick to me, sure. But it was his haircut and style that first turned me off. It just seemed too Brit Pop for my taste, too like Blur or something for my style. I was in college, but teenage insecurity still had a grip on me, and I didn’t think cool people like me were supposed to like that stuff in 1998, so I was like “Fuck that song,” even as that song wormed its way into my head, where it played on repeat on the CD player of my soul, playing and playing on a hypnotizing loop down deep in my heart, which was filled with love and tenderness and fear, despite my hard posturing full-of-shit exterior, until finally I was like, “Fuck it, I love this song, I admit it!” just like I liked Bananarama and that Elastica song “Connection” and James’ 1993 hit “Laid.” So in 1998, I openly sang:

I can change, I can change, I can change
But I’m here in my mold, I am here in my mold
But I’m a million different people from one day to the next!

Because that’s how good this song is, and that’s how much being a young person can suck. Such fear. Such head games with yourself. Dreaming of acceptance and experimentation but fearing perceptions. Ashcroft sang of change. Why couldn’t I change, too? I was here in my mold, here in my mold. But I was evolving. I was exploring being a million different people from one day to the next, and this song’s signature symphonic element contrasted so beautifully with the heavy, grudging guitar music that I’d blared through high school—Fugazi, Soundgarden, Jane’s Addiction, Alice In Chains—and that I’d finally ditched in college for Cat Power, surf music, mariachi, New Zealand pop music, Bach, Beethoven, and instrumental jazz, and my self-conscious young self finally had to do what my 40-something-self now does and just let people think whatever they think of me and let it go, because a good song is a good song, no matter who sings it in whatever genre. That shit doesn’t matter. Brit pop. Post-punk. Vintage rocksteady. Taylor Swift. ABBA. Canned Heat. Salt-N-Pepa. I love it all, because if it’s good, it’s good. Love freely and embrace your world and yourself. And this song was good. So was the video. And sadly, it is still the only song I ever knew from The Verve.

Anyway, I thought you’d remember it, too! Bye!

Editor’s Note: The Chills’ founder Martin Phillipps died in July 2024, at 61. He’d just taken his band on tour, too, coming to Portland where I live. I had tickets but gave them to a friend. To celebrate Phillipps’ life of music, here is a piece from the July 1990 issue of Option magazine.

Now, 44 years after the band’s formation, when you read author Jason Cohen’s line that “one suspects that the Chills will be a band to be rediscovered and properly appreciated after their career is over, a la the Velvet Underground,” you know he’s right. Some folks are doing that right now, and they’ll continue to. I hope this story helps.

From his debut as guest organ play on The Clean’s first sing, “Tally Ho,” to the current Chills album, Submarine Bells, Martin Phillipps has produced some of the best, most breathtaking music of our time. As a songwriter and bandleader, he has largely done it by himself, going through ten different lineups of fellow Chills, counting as members Peter Gutteridge (The Great Unwashed, Snapper), Jane Dodd (the Verlaines), and David Kilgour (the Clean). The current group, Chills Phase Eleven, is now the longest lasting, and looks to stay that way. With a stable lineup and the support of a very larger record company (Slash/Warner), 1990 looks to be the year the rest of the world finds out about the Chills, and what they’ve been missing the last ten years.

In a way it’s quite remarkable that The Chills have been such an ever-changing outfit in the past yet have made such incredible music since they began recording in 1982. That, of course, is a testament to founder Martin Phillipps’ talent and vision. Phillipps’ songwriting is nearly perfect. His song structures build castles and playgrounds and dark caverns of imagery and melody. He doesn’t rely on repetition to achieve memorable melodies, though there are some hypnotic riffs, they twist and curl and jump at you, daring you to follow.

Through it all, the key ingredient in the Chills’ songs, the spell that sets free the magic Phillipps casts, is in the arrangements. Unadorned, on an acoustic guitar or a piano, the songs would still be plaintive and wonderful. Yet the Chills have woven tuns that reach across layers of harmony and melody, that are like three or four different songs within a song, a result that might be par for the course for a group of free jazz improvisors. But unlike improvised music (which it most definitely is not), the Chills’ multi-faceted arrangements fit together perfectly and accessibly. The Chills invite you to nestle between the different levels of the song, and slide you back and forth between them. Phillipps did this on the “Pink Front” (1984) and “The Great Escape” (1986) singles, on The Lost EP (1985), all with bands that didn’t play together for more than a year. He has virtually done it by himself.

Believe it or not, their breakthrough was supposed to happen a few years ago. In 1987, Chills Phase Ten—Phillipps, bassist Justin Harwood, keyboardist Andrew Todd, and drummer Caroline Easther—went into the studio to record the first Chills album, Brave Words. Three days after the sessions ended, the Chills were in New York, playing to fans and A&R types at the New Music Seminar. The jet-lagged band had to play three shows in three nights literally hours after getting off the plane, but they nonetheless dazzled the crowds who came to see them, so much so that another show was set up as a showcase for record company people who weren’t smart enough to catch them the first time. The word at the New Music Schmoozefest was that the band were sure to sign with a big American Label.

They didn’t. Brave Words came out on Homestead, as did reissues of The Lost EP and a collection of singles, Kaleidoscope World. The band toured America in late 1988 with, yes, another new member: the youthful Jimmy Stephenson had replaced Easther, who was stricken with tinnitus. Eventually, after eight months of negotiations, the Chills signed with Slash Records.

Part of the reason why things did not happen so quickly for the Chills with Brave Words is that Phillipps wasn’t terribly happy with the way the “long awaited first album” had turned out. Fans who had the chance to hear the songs live generally agreed, and the pointed their finger at former Pere Ubu/Red Crayola stalwart Mayo Thompson, who produced the record. Phillipps says it had more to do with exhaustion and inexperience.

“The main thing,” he explains, “was the budget. We’re not a spontaneous band, we need to do things carefully and meticulously, and to achieve the things we’re trying to do, and with the budget, we were putting things down as fast as we could. We only just made it in two weeks. Mayo Thompson really loved the music, he understood what we were trying to do. But he really couldn’t contribute very much, so the decisions about the quality of sound and the direction the actually final product would take were made by Danny Hyde, the engineer, who was really good to work with, but was more inclined towards sort of 12-inch club remixes. So he was going for a purity of sound, which really wasn’t what we were after.”

Besides the fast pace, which had the band leaving the studio each morning during London’s rush hour, only to return during evening rush hour for the all-night recording sessions, the band was ill-prepared with the material, having only been together a few months at that time. Pre-production rehearsals were not an option.

“The material was very new to them,” Phillipps says, “and we barely got past the stage of being able to play it without having to sort of think about what comes next, let alone really interpreting it. So it was actually like playing cover versions of Chills material which they knew had reached heights before, and it was very hard for them. Then, to top it all off, something went wrong with the mastering process. The copies all ended up being drastically cut in volume and presence, so it’s a very quiet, sort of lushy sounding record.” Phillipps has put Brave Words behind him, but not completely so—“we know we are still intending to remix it and release it as Braver Words.”

Despite that unusual move, the focus now is on Submarine Bells. Whether Brave Words turned out right or not, Submarine Bells is the Chills’ first proper album. “It’s the first cohesive whole album that we’ve done, it’s the first Chills record in a long time that hasn’t been a retrospective look at things that had sort of been shelved, waiting. It establishes us in some sense as a contemporary band. Andrew and Justin have been with me now three years, so they’ve sort of really come to grips with what I’m trying to do, and Jim has been with the group since ’88, so that’s quite a long time now.”

It is clear that with a tight group of musicians finally working with him, Phillipps’ possibilities have become even greater. “It has become sort of a more analytical lineup,” Phillipps says. “We’ve never really been a spontaneous sort of outfit, which was a problem for me for a little while because some of our peers, like the Clean, Toy Love, and so forth, were very spontaneous bands. I tried to live up to those sort of ideals for a long time before I had to admit to myself that that’s not the way I do things. I have to do things more carefully.”

“When this lineup formed, or Chills Ten with Caroline,” he continues, “none of those people had been in particularly spontaneous bands either, so that whole element of music really did go once and for all out the door. Since then, it’s been very much working out exactly what does create those sort of weird atmospheres—which in the long run has worked out very well, because it means you can get more consistent in achieving these things, and knowing how to achieve them. Andrew in particular is a severely training classical musician, and studied jazz for a while, and Justin’s played a lot of stuff. They really knew their music, so their input has been really strong in that sense. They’ve sort of educated me, in terms of what I have created and why. So far, it really hasn’t been to the detriment of the music at all, it’s helped. I’m still sort of a bit worried about learning too much.”

The Chills make the transition from the studio to the stage effortlessly, losing none of the grandiosity (and gaining more power) that their meticulous studio approach brings them. When they are raw, as on the punk “The Oncoming Day” (and old, old song that has long been a live favorite), they slash and soar without losing their otherworldly transcendence. And on slower songs which rely purely on delivery and atmosphere, they are so majestic that it is impossible for the band or audience to taper off or “rest,” as often happens with the inevitable slow song at a live rock show.

The band refers to “the fifth Chill” onstage, a reference to their various tricks and different approaches with live sound that result in the band sounding so full and so multi-faceted that it is almost like another member is up there with them. “The fifth Chill couldn’t really appear on Submarine Bells due to contractual obligations, musician’s union stipulations,” Phillipps jokes. “We’ve always put a lot of the instruments in the same sort of frequency range, get two instruments to play the same part, one hand of the keyboard playing the same party the guitar is doing, or the bass just creating a wash of frequency and harmonics. We’ve always gone for sounds as a whole, as opposed to the separate musicians trying to win favor. It’s something we’re able to do live when things really go well. With getting this record deal, we’ve finally got the money to upgrade our equipment, and the sound improved overnight. We finally sound like we’ve always imagined ourselves sounding.”

The recording of Submarine Bells also enabled the Chills to sound like they imagined themselves on record, which was very important to Phillipps. “The recordings have taken more importance because that’s the long-term thing you’ve got to live with,” he says. The band flew Boston-based produced Gary Smith to London to work on Submarine Bells. It was a good match. The Chills, unlike some other bands making the jump from indie to major, are very well suited for “production.” A few songs that Phillipps didn’t feel were up to snuff wound up as B-sides. These are “Water Wolves,” “Waves Watching,” and “While Lot of Non,” available on the English “Heavenly Pop Hit” single. He also says of “Oncoming Day”—which they tried to record for Brave Words—that “we finally got a version which is not perfect but more than adequate for people who may never see the band. It’s by far the oldest song on the record.

Naturally, Phillipps has much higher standards for how he wants his band to sound than his audience does. To these ears, all of the record sounds fine, “Oncoming Day” included. Whereas on earlier records, it was easier to hear traces of influences—Syd Barrett and the third Velvets record are the ones most mentioned—the new record is pretty unprecedented. “Heavenly Pop Hit” is just that, the fluffiest concoction on the record, but it is the subtleties on the album that are most impressive. Little percussive touches and delicate guitar lines float above the intricate, beautiful melodies of the title track and “I Soar,” like dolphins in the Dead Sea. The song entitled “Effloresce and Deliquese” describes some of the Chills sound perfectly.

Keyboardist Andrew Todd is probably the band’s secret weapon. His parts tend to both anchor the songs and expand them. Todd’s playing is the punchy riff on “Dead Web,” and the way he comes in with a quick, quiet piano line amid Phillipps’ crackling, distorted guitars on “Familiarity Breeds Contempt” gives the raucousness resonance. Submarine Bells is a whole album, where other records were collections of old things, and it is memorable as a whole album, as an experience, not as a bunch of catchy songs.

Submarine Bells is a new step for Martin Phillipps lyrically, too. With a few exceptions, the songs are among the newest he has written—Brave Words material was as old as ten years in some cases. He remains and impressionistic and literate songwriter, but in his view, he has shed the immaturity of some of his past songs. Phillipps has always taken the most flak for his escapist tendencies. All the Chills songs offer some kind of escape in the big, comfortable aura they offer, but they uplift and inspire questions and desire more than anything else. Older Chill songs not only invited escape in their music, but were very much a product of Martin’s own escapist tendences.

“I was basically a kid, and having a good time with my newfound talent of throwing together songs and lyrics with colorful imagery, which was great,” Phillipps says, referring to the early singles “Rolling Moon” and “Kaleidoscope World.” “I think [escapism’s] a bad thing, really. Right up until I was about ten or eleven, I seriously thought if anyone was going to get picked up and taken away by the spaceships, it was going to be me. That manifested itself in the way I did stuff—I didn’t bother learning how to tell the time, because I didn’t think I would need to. I must have been really quite out there in a lot of ways when I was younger. [Now] I’ve been very much tackling the qualities of life, experiencing the joys of actual life, the good side of it and the bad side of it. I wrote ‘The Great Escape’ in like 1984, and it was a farewell to escapism. Since then, I’ve been very much stuck here on planet Earth with the rest of you.”

One place on planet Earth that Phillipps found himself was at the concentration camp in Dachau, which inspired “Tied Up in Chains.” “That’s basically about skinheads, specifically, people who were living out a fashion, a very dark one, where they are generally not aware of why they’re doing it, what the roots of it are. Going to Dachau was such a moving, powerful experience you wish you could take every skinhead in the world to Dachau.”

Songs like “Familiarity Breeds Contempt” and “Dead Web” aim for universal truths about fear, alienation, and death. There is a sense of political and philosophical awareness to some of the songs, though Phillipps does not get specific. (He says that for the sleeve, which includes information about French nuclear weapons testing, U.S. deployment of missiles overseas, and the killing of dolphins by tuna fisherman.) He leaves the slogans to the sleeve because “it ca really date your music,” but also, he says, “I see my role as more to sing about the issues which I see as the root cause of all our problems, all the problems facing the world. Greed and apathy would be the two biggest, really. I sort of want to inspire people to think that they can actually do more with their lives, they don’t have to feel like a cog in the machine.”

Then there is “Heavenly Pop Hit,” which, in its way, encapsulates the very feelings the Chills, and all good pop music, can engender in a listener. “And so I stand and the sound goes straight through my body / I’m so bloated up happy I could throw things around me / And I’m growing in stages and have been for ages / Just singing and floating—and free” he sings. He also gets in, self-referentially (And there are a lot of abstract references to Phillipps’ own position as a songwriter, and as a person people look to, on the record), “It’s a heavenly pop hit, if anyone wants it…”

“The whole ‘Heavenly Pop Hit’ thing is basically, I’ve taken a different sort of route into contemporary music than some of my peers,” he says. “Sort of based on some aspects of the past, trying an alternative contemporary sound and showing people you can still make pop music of substance that can actually deal with genuine human responses as opposed to that small range of human emotions which you are allowed to talk about in pop music. There are like five or six subjects you’re allowed to sing about, and there’s just so much more that could be done. It should be the folk music of the times, it should be dealing with people’s real day-to-day sort of problems and thrills, that’s what it’s about.”

“It all seems larger than life to me / I find it rather hard to believe,” Phillipps sings on “Heavenly Pop Hit,” and while he is commenting on the wonder of being moved by music, he could just as easily be talking about what is happening to his bands.

“We can’t say, ‘Hey, we’re the latest thing, the Chills are the new happening band,’” Phillipps says. “Most people are discovering us for the first time, [but we haven’t even] got a major new direction.”

Whether or not the Chills become “the new happening band,” one suspects that the Chills will be a band to be rediscovered and properly appreciated after their career is over, a la the Velvet Underground. That would be unfortunate in a way—but wouldn’t be surprising. And while the Velvet Underground is an overworked comparison to lay on a band as unique as the Chills, it is a fitting one. The Chills are that good, potentially as important, and nothing if not undaunted. Still full of wonder after over a decade of work, an unjaded Martin Phillipps notes, “The power of rock music is still one of the best things in the world.”

Note: Republished with author Jason Cohen’s permission, this story originally appeared in the July 1990 issue of Option magazine, under the title “Where? Why? Here? Why Now? Why Not? New Zealand’s Hottest Export: Rock Bands.” Published by Scott Becker, Option ran from 1985 to 1998 and was edited by a series of folks, including Richie Unterberger, Mark Kemp, Jason Fine, Steve Appleford, Erik Pedersen, Barbara Jordan, and Scott Becker. Kristin Bell was Option’s art director. This is the first time this story has appeared online. Read the Option story about Cornershop here. To read more of Option’s back catalogue, buy the anthology We Rock So You Don’t Have To: The Option Reader #1, edited by Scott Becker, or browse Rock’s Back Pages.

“If P.M. Dawn came out today they would be Gods,” someone once posted on Twitter, and, as a fan of the group’s avant-garde hip-hop soul sound since the beginning of their careers, I agree. Unlike the closed minds of decades past that had a problem with the cosmic freakiness that Prince Be (Attrell Cordes) and his younger brother DJ Minutemix (Jarrett Cordes) introduced in 1991, new-millennium fans are more open towards experimentation. In addition, artists such as Kanye West and Childish Gambino, who once covered the duo’s wondrous soul track “I’d Die Without You,” have celebrated the P.M. Dawn’s innovation and taken it as inspiration.

These days we can hear and see P.M. Dawn’s influence in artists such as Solange, Frank Ocean, and other kooky creatives who have no problem waving their freak flags in stereo. Certainly, as Record Redux book series author and Albumism columnist Quentin Harrison says, “P.M. Dawn’s sound and visual aesthetics always felt like the something from another time and that ‘against the grain’ motif they wielded fearlessly has been taken up en masse by others. At the same time (in the 1990s) acts like Maxwell, Erykah Badu, and D’Angelo (among others) were reaping the benefits of the path P.M. Dawn helped pave for neo-soul.”

Back in the day, things weren’t always so diverse. As someone who lived through the gritty boom-bap era of the 1990s’ realness, when roughness equaled righteousness, rap music could be a brutal, sometimes deadly, profession, and the slightest dis could lead to the coldest response either on record or in person. In P.M. Dawn’s case, their 1992 clash with self-proclaimed teacher KRS-One was unexpected. “I never knew there was a beef until that night,” Prince Be told me when I interviewed him for Vibe magazine in 1995. Be was flopped down onto a comfortable white leather sofa in the living room of his Jersey City penthouse. A signed lithograph self-portrait of John Lennon hung over a table. “Even when we saw him that night we were like, ‘Oh shit, there goes KRS-One.’ We were excited, but he just looked at us like we were insane.”

It was an MTV-sponsored event at New York’s Sound Factory nightclub. The eclectic duo was already onstage and had performed one song. The year before they’d released their groundbreaking debut, Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience. They recorded the album in England, where the brothers had relocated after signing with Gee Street Records in 1989. New York Daily News music columnist Jim Farber defined Of the Heart… as “a kind of soft revolution, critiquing the world by refusing any involvement. Instead they’ve proposed a kind of defiant hedonism, a purposeful apathy. For rap that’s a first: expressing rebellion through escape rather than anger.”

However, that night they played the Sound Factory, there was anger in the air. Just as P.M. Dawn were about to do their mega-hit “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” a track that sampled Spandau Ballet’s 1983 New Romantic plastic-soul ballad “True,” things quickly went askew. While the song was P.M. Dawn’s second single, following the trippy bounce of “A Watcher’s Point of View (Don’t ’Cha Think),” it was “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” that became a major crossover smash and the first Black rap single to reach number one on the pop charts. Still, P.M. Dawn’s pop/MTV success did little to endear them the hard-core hip-hop gatekeepers.

While the perceived softness of P.M. Dawn’s music and Afro-psychedelic personas (Lennonesque shades, hippy beads, cloud-covered clothing) already made them suspect, it didn’t help that months before their Sound Factory appearance, in the pages of Details magazine, Be questioned KRS-One’s scholarly credentials (“KRS-One wants to be a teacher, but a teacher of what?”), which gave the rapper, along with his Boogie Down Productions posse, carte blanche to crash the duo’s set. Along with his brother Kenny, the two stormed P.M. Dawn’s set and KRS-One shoved Prince Be off the stage. Meanwhile, Kenny jacked the turntables and started spinning the BDP battle cry “The Bridge Is Over.”

Recording engineer and producer Scott Harding (aka Scotty Hard), who worked with the Cordes brothers at Calliope Studios, where he engineered the demo recording of “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine,” was at that show. Years later, he is still disgusted by what he witnessed. “Prince Be was a big guy, but he was like a teddy bear, so KRS-One found no resistance there,” Harding recalls. “It was a real invasion, and Prince Be didn’t deserve that. But, P.M. Dawn was blowing up, they had a pop hit and people resented that.”

Former Rush Management publicist Bill Adler, who had previously worked with alternative hip-hop/Native Tongue rappers De La Soul, was the Island Records press agent in 1992 and worked with P.M. Dawn on their first project. “When De La put out ‘Me, Myself and I,’ they clowned the limitations and aggressiveness of acts like Run-DMC,” Alder says. “But, Run-DMC merely brushed it off, while KRS-One lost his mind. But, he has always had a dual identity between having good politics and being a thug. I wasn’t at the show, but the next day the office was crazy and it generated a bunch of press. But it puzzled me that why so many people were taking KRS’s side.”

As though the beatdown wasn’t enough bad luck early in Prince Be’s career, diabetes sunk Be in a 3-day coma that same year, during what proved to be their longest marathon of hit songs. Diabetes hounded him his whole life.

Twenty-six years later, younger brother Jarrett Cordes says, “When all of that KRS-One stuff happened, it had a real effect on my brother. KRS could’ve pulled my brother to the side and talked to him, or anything else besides a physical altercation. Afterwards, Be even started calling himself the Nocturnal, because, he claimed it was a way to balance his positivity and negativity. All of that KRS stuff brought out a darkness in him that you can hear on tracks he made later that year like ‘The Nocturnal is in the House’ and ‘Plastic.’”

Both songs appeared on P.M. Dawn’s sophomore 1993 release The Bliss Album…? In an interview with Melody Maker that same year, Prince Be explained, “It’s like a documentary of what happened to me since the last album. I’m looking for the reasons for everything. I’d like an answer. To what, I have no idea. But I came up with no answers, no reasons. It’s called The Bliss Album sarcastically. The music is very out and laid back, but at times it gets to be real angry.”

Decades later, the KRS-One attack often seems to be more celebrated than the innovative music Prince Be left behind when he passed away on June 17, 2016, at the age of forty-six. Jarrett sang the P.M. Dawn soul hit “I’ll Die Without You” at Be’s homegoing services, shocking many in the church who didn’t realize that he had the chops. “Be and I sang together on many of those songs,” he says. “People just assumed that it was just him.”

Be’s underappreciated aural legacy can be heard in P.M. Dawn’s four commercially released albums, with Jesus Wept being my personal favorite, as well their remixes and outside productions for acts that included Elton John (“When I Think About Love”), Philip Bailey (“I Won’t Open My Arms”), George Michael (“Killer/Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone”), Cathy Dennis (“Falling”), Ambersunshower (“Running Song”), and a little-known rap group, Moodswingaz, that featured Be’s baby bro Jason.

Journalist Jon Caramanica noted Be’s New York Times obituary, “Even in an era of earnest bohemianism in hip-hop, P.M. Dawn stood out for its hippie-esque mysticism, fantastical imagery, crypto-Christian references and ethereal musical aesthetic. Prince Be was an early blurrer of the lines between rapping and singing, and between the earthly and the spiritual.”

When he was healthy, Prince Be was like a mountain with feet. Standing six feet four inches tall, he was a giant of a man with the talent to match. A welcoming collaborator in every aspect of P.M. Dawn’s music, he worked closely with everyone from the musicians to the engineers to the graphic designers. “I thought of P.M. Dawn as De La Soul meets the Beach Boys,” says writer Amy Linden. “Production-wise, Prince Be was like Brian Wilson, but without the mental illness and drugs.”

Still, while Be was the chief auteur behind their sound, he and Jarrett collaborated closely when it came to choosing samples. “A sample can make or break a song,” Jarrett says. According to the younger Cordes brother, it was his idea to use elements of the Gil Scott-Heron track “Angola, Louisiana” to construct “Paper Doll” and suggested the drums from the Soul Searchers’ “Ashley’s Roachclip” for “Set Adrift…” Jarrett laughs at the memory. “We always fought over samples, and with the planning of each album, we would break up. Jon Baker [Gee Street founder/president] used to call and ask if we had finished fighting. He’d say, ‘Can y’all brothers get your shit out so we can actually get some work done.’ He did that with every project.”

According to engineer Michael Fossenkemper, who worked closely with P.M. Dawn, “Be relied on Jarrett to get stuff on tape and to be another set of ears. Jarrett was instrumental and Be needed to have him around. I don’t think he could function without Jarrett around.”

“I think the songs should be interpretations of the emotions,” Be explained to me, “so we make the music first and, whatever the music brings out is what the lyrics are about. I’m like a kite and Jarrett keeps me from going too far out there. If I go way out there, I will either fall or keep going.”

In fact, no matter how much they might’ve argued about loops and beats, once the smoke cleared, the brothers realized that they were blessed to be doing exactly what they always dreamt when they was MTV watching boys. “We were just two kids from Lincoln Park, New Jersey, who came from nothing and literally made our way to be part of musical history,” Jarrett says. “We were brothers, so we fought and went through our stupid brother shit, but we also had number one records and got to work with our heroes. When we left Jersey for England, all we had was guts and a dream. I think that says a lot.”

In the beginning, there was MTV. Launched in 1981 when the Cordes brothers weren’t yet teenagers, the twenty-four-hour video channel started the ball rolling on the “second British Invasion” that introduced them to Culture Club, Duran Duran, the Human League, the Police, Depeche Mode, and Spandau Ballet. “When we became conscious of music it was the ’80s,” Prince Be said a few months before their third album, Jesus Wept, which critic Jim DeRogatis has called “a psychedelic masterpiece,” was released.

“I was an ’80s kid listening to Michael Jackson, George Michael, Prince, and Cyndi Lauper,” Be said, “but we were from an urban area and there was hip-hop everywhere. Some of the biggest innovations in music were coming out of hip-hop and we were witnesses to that.” Still, as much as they liked the new pop and hip-hop of the ’80s, Prince Be was always digging deeper and discovering the dusty sounds of Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Harry Nilsson, Joni Mitchell, Sly Stone, Paul Williams, Brian Wilson, and Phil Spector.

“To me, my brother was Brian Spector,” Jarrett jokes. “He experimented a lot, because he never wanted P.M. Dawn to sound too normal.” A few years before our meeting, Island Records (Gee Street’s parent company) publicist Bill Adler gave me an advance of P.M. Dawn’s breathtaking debut. I assumed they were British and was surprised to learn that they hailed from Jersey right across the Hudson from me.

“My mom had six boys, so she worked a lot,” Jarrett says. “Somebody had to cook and clean, and that was me. Be would help them with their homework, and us being responsible for the kids made our bond that much closer. We started our first group with my uncle Tim, who called himself Courageous Cuts. I was Minutemix [an homage to ’60s cartoon Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse] and there was Prince Be. My uncle was in it just to have fun, but as Be and I got more serious, it became just the two of us.”

During those years, the brothers performed at house parties where Be gained a rep for being an awesome MC and a crazy beatboxer. Jarrett says, “He would have beatbox battles and just slay people.” It was during that time that the brothers decided to try to make records for real. “We actually sat down one day after school and talked about what we wanted to do with the rest of our lives. We were totally consumed by rap music and decided to produce some tracks. Prince Be was reading a religious magazine called The Plain Truth, and had seen the slogan that read, ‘In the darkest hours comes the light.’ Be said, ‘That’s phat. That’s kind of like P.M. Dawn.’ That’s how we got our name.”

Although the brothers were fans of everyone from Big Daddy Kane to future foe KRS-One, it was their love for the Jungle Brothers’ 1988 album Straight out the Jungle that gave them the courage to submit their cassette demo to the group’s label Warlock Records. “To this day, Uncle Tim is a garbage man, and he knew we were looking for different kinds of records to sample,” Jarrett explains. “One day, he found this crate of records that someone had dumped in the trash. We listened to them and found this Ruby Andrews album and found a sample on there that was just crazy.

“Back in those days, we didn’t have anything to sample with, so we used a cassette deck. We would just record little pieces of what we needed and paused it then did it again until we had this three-minute piece of sample. We did all those early demos like that.” The homemade tape found its way to the label’s A&R man Al “T” McLaran, who was undecided on whether he should sign P.M. Dawn. Al called his homeboy Ben “Cozmo D” Cenac, a founding member and producer behind electro rap group Newcleus whose “Jam On Revenge (The Wikki-Wikki Song)” was a hit in 1983.

“After a while, Al decided to sign them,” Cozmo says from his home in Brooklyn, “but he needed someone to work with them in the studio, so that was my introduction to the group.” McLaran and Cozmo were also partners in Pet Project Records, a subsidiary of Warlock, and the label P.M. Dawn was eventually signed too. Located in Cozmo’s mother’s basement in Park Slope, Brooklyn, his Transitions Studios was where they recorded “Ode to a Forgetful Mind (It’s a Shame),” which was released in 1989. Cozmo remembers, “They were completely raw, they knew nothing yet. But, Jarrett only came to the studio one time. It was just me and Be doing all the work.”

Eleven years older, Cozmo adopted Be as his little brother. “He was only seventeen, but he was a big kid. At the same time, he was also very deep,” says Cozmo. “We would talk for hours, having these metaphysical conversations. He was into the Native Tongues and he wanted to meet those guys, but I told him, ‘You have to up [politically], because those guys are conscious.’ Be was the type of guy who would be conscious one minute and upsetting people the next. I tried to school him on the complexities of life, especially when it comes to the music business, but he wasn’t trying to hear that. His philosophy was simple—he was just about peace, love, and making records.”

The recording process went smoothly, though Cozmo does recall that when Prince Be told him he wanted to sing on the track, he laughed. “I said, ‘Man, you can’t sing.’ He insisted that he could, but it didn’t come out quite right. Later, I was shocked when they started releasing songs that were mostly singing. When I heard ‘I’d Die Without You,’ I was blown away, because I didn’t know he had those kinds of chops. We didn’t work long enough to get into an R&B side. Ours was strictly hip-hop, which he was dope as hell at doing. If he had decided to, Be could’ve been one of the all-time best rappers, because his skills were that good.”

In the meantime, McLaran got Jarrett a mailroom job at Warlock where Prince Be also hung out on the regular. It was in the office where they befriended labelmate and future collaborator Todd Terry, a dance-music artist and remixer whose energetic track “I Love the Way You Shake” they would later sample for their hip-house track “Shake.” Warlock/Pet Project released the 12-inch of “Ode to a Forgetful Mind (It’s A Shame),” whose label only had Prince Be’s name listed as the artist although Jarrett was credited as one of the producers alongside Be and Cozmo.

Unfortunately, Warlock did very little to promote the record. “Basically, they didn’t push it at all,” Cozmo says. U.K. partners Gee Street Records, who licensed the Warlock roster overseas, was having success with P.M. Dawn, getting their single radio spins and positive press. One afternoon when Gee Street president Jon Baker was visiting the Warlock office, he and Prince Be began talking about P.M. Dawn signing with his label. According to Jarrett, “Jon just told him straight, ‘Listen, I’m on your record more than Warlock is. You guys are awesome, but Warlock is not doing shit for you. I would like you guys to sign with me.’ Prince Be told me about their conversation and suggested we meet. Jon had already given him a [U.K.] magazine that was giving critical acclaim to ‘Ode…’and it was obvious he was busting his ass.”

Yet, somehow in the conversation, Pet Project Records owners McLaran and Cozmo were divided. “We were not moving any records, and Al wanted to sell their contract to Gee Street, but I was trying to start a new label called Black & Electric with P.M. Dawn as our star act,” Cozmo says. “Next thing I knew, Be said they were going to England. I told them they couldn’t go, because they were signed to me, but he just ignored me. We ended up with our lawyer signing over our rights to them. We got paid, but it was a bad separation. Be and I stopped talking for years. That happened in 1988, but we didn’t speak again until 2001. In the late ’90s, there was a P.M. Dawn website, and Prince Be would pop up on the forum. Eventually, I sent him a letter apologizing. Back then, he was a seventeen-year-old kid from Jersey struggling to get by. Really, I shouldn’t have blamed him for wanting to leave.”

The brothers were raised in a religious household, attended Catholic school, and sang in church on Sundays. That sense of spirituality spilled over into their music like forty days of rain, from The Creation of Adam/Sistine Chapel imagery of the cover of The Bliss Album to naming their third album Jesus Wept to Be giving out crosses to close friends and family. “I can remember him giving me a cross once,” says writer/filmmaker Vivien Goldman, who first met the boys in London when she was hired by Jon Baker to make P.M. Dawn’s video press kit. “I think we were at some gathering at Jon’s house, and Be gave me a cross that he designed himself and had crafted out of heavy silver.”

At the time Jon Baker was married to Ziggi Golding, founder of the Z Agency, which reps models and photographers. Vivian Goldman worked with P.M. Dawn to get the duo ready for prime time. Through it all, Be and Jarrett kept their spiritual side in check, never slipping down slopes of coke, weed, or sex. “They were not very worldly when they got to London,” Goldman continues, “and Jon and Ziggi took a caring interest in them. I filmed them a lot, but I was also their media trainer preparing them for interviews. Be was unconventional, but very natural and real, projecting a different sort of masculinity in living color.”

When I asked Be about his religious views, he answered, “Well, we both went to Catholic school, but I learned more about religion from going to the library. I used to play hooky and go to the library. For me, reading was better than going to school.” An avid reader, one of Be’s favorite books was Jonathan Livingston Seagull. “People always perceive Jesus as someone bigger than life,” Be said, “but they forget he was also a man. It’s that people are afraid to find religion within themselves. People have to realize that they are important to themselves and to each other. That’s the message I’m trying to get across. I found out last year that I have diabetes and all of that has affected me as an artist. In terms of life and death, I believe in reincarnation, I just don’t want to come back here.”

In the U.K., Black Brits Jazzie B, A.R. Kane (can’t nothing in the cosmos convince me that Prince Be didn’t spend hours in his flat listening to the dreamy pop of 69 through Bose speakers), and Loose Ends were encouraged to be different, and P.M. Dawn was on that same vibe. England was the perfect place for them to be free. Be developed a studio relationship with engineer/instrumentalist (guitar mainly, but also bass and keyboards) Tyrrell as they worked out of Berwick Street Studios in London.

“Right from the first session for ‘A Watcher’s Point of View,’ Prince Be and I got on extremely well,” Tyrrell remembers. “I had just turned twenty-three, and we were just kids left on our own. The first session was such a success that we booked in for the rest of the album over the next three months. Jarrett was only really called upon when Prince wanted scratching and cutting on sections of tracks. Jarrett was a real master on the decks.”

Although the brothers were new to London, there wasn’t much time for sightseeing. “Since our time in the studio was so precious, the boys would come to the studio right after waking up and not leave until after midnight,” Tyrrell says. “Prince Be had previously recorded demos of about half of the tracks, so he had an idea of some of the things that could be possible with sampling. I think my workflow speed and knowledge of the Akai S1000 sampler really opened his eyes a lot to new things that could be possible, which allowed for us to have much more creative freedom. Prince soon began to just play me three or four snippets off different records and asked me to make them fit together. He loved my ‘Paper Doll’ strings so much that every time after that when we wanted strings he’d say, ‘Let’s use the “Paper Doll” strings.’

“We were soon experimenting with guitar parts over some of the tracks, too, like ‘On a Clear Day’ and ‘The Beautiful,’” Tyrrell continues. “At first, he wasn’t too keen on my suggestion to layer many tracks of his voice [something he called the ‘Donny Osmond effect’] to create an ethereal vocal sound, but this soon became P.M. Dawn’s signature. I would layer eight or more tracks on every harmony then sample and re-trigger them through the track.”

After the worldwide success of “Set Adrift…,” the brothers were in France promoting Of the Heart… when they got a call from their management explaining that Eddie Murphy wanted to work with them. Although he initially wanted them to contribute to an album project of his own, their meeting led to Murphy asking them to create a song for the soundtrack of his then-upcoming movie Boomerang. “Eddie told us that L.A. and Babyface had the whole album locked down,” Jarrett says, “but, if we gave him a song, he’d make sure it was on the record.”

After returning to London, Prince Be summoned Jarrett to his room one night to share his latest inspiration. “Be was into Bobby Brown and Guy, but he had never written a straight R&B track,” Jarrett recalls. “But, when I got to his room, he said, ‘You’re not going to believe this shit, but I did a fucking R&B song. He started singing the song (‘Is it my turn, to wish you were lying here? / I tend to dream you when I’m not sleeping…’), and that was the beginning of ‘I’d Die Without You.’ We went to the studio [Strongroom] and started building the track with Tyrrell.”

Tyrrell recalls, “I was always trying to convince Prince Be to do a song without any sampling, so the music for ‘I’d Die Without You’ started just from the chords I did on a synth-pad sound. The melody and lyrics he wrote over top were so great, as was his performance. I built up the song with programmed drums, synth bass, and some electric guitar, then we wanted live piano, so I suggested a colleague of mine, James Barnett, to come in and put down some dreamy improvisations down the track. They even asked him to be in the video.”

Graphic designer David Calderley, who began working with the group with his stunning cover for “I’d Die Without You,” says, “Be was into the Storm Thorgerson album art for Pink Floyd, the Roger Dean paintings for Yes, and he wanted his own packaging to reflect that aesthetic. He had an affinity for the afterlife and cosmic experiences, and that became a part of the imaginary.” Calderley designed most of P.M. Dawn’s album, singles, and CD art during their Gee Street period, with his last commission being their greatest hits package. “Prince Be would tell me his thoughts and overview, and I’d take his words and try to make it into a visual story. The only disagreement we had was the Dearest Christian… [album] cover, because, originally, the album had a different title.”

Eddie Murphy’s soundtrack song “I’d Die Without You” came out so well, P.M. Dawn had considered saving it for their second project, but, according to Jarrett, the Gee Street/Island Record executives weren’t feeling it. “They said, ‘You guys don’t usually sing like that, where’s the rapping? You can give that shit to Eddie, we don’t need it.’ Of course, that record became a big hit and changed the sound of the group. After its success, we got a lot of flowers and apologies from the label. When we went to meet about the second album, they said, ‘We need more singing. We even want ballads, let’s get this shit going.’”

Returning to the Strongroom studio with Tyrrell, who also received credit for his musical contributions to the project, The Bliss Album was their last collaboration with one another. “I was pulled from the mixing session due to disagreements between our managements and lawyers,” Tyrell says. “This was a real shame, because Prince Be and I actually got on so well when creating together and I felt there was so much more we could have achieved.”

During the making of 1993’s The Bliss Album, Be decided he wanted different scratch sounds incorporated into the tracks “Beyond Infinite Affections” and “The Nocturnal Is in the House,” so he reached out to Philadelphia native DJ Cash Money and asked him to fly to England to work on the project. A few years before, the turntablist was signed to Sleeping Bag Records, where he’d released Where’s the Party At? with MC Marvelous in 1988. By 1992, he was spinning solo.

“Our mutual friend DJ Crash put us in touch,” says Cash Money, whose latest album, Street Cash, was released in August 2018. “I had seen the ‘Set Adrift’ video and I figured, ‘Ahhh man, let me go get this check.’ I thought they were going to be some spacey dudes, but we just hit it off so great. They were just regular dudes, and, when it was time for my studio session, I just went in there and knocked it out. I learned so much from Be about songwriting and layering voices. In the studio, he would just vibe out to the groove and next thing he would come up with a melody, build on that melody, and just start writing. He’d take it home with him and, next thing you know, he had a masterpiece.”

Cash Money and Prince Be became so close that the DJ was asked to become a member of P.M. Dawn, which involved him touring with them and remixing the “The Ways of the Wind.” The track was made into a video by a young Hype Williams. Film critic Armond White, who in 2006 presented the Williams retrospective Believe the Hype: An Auteur Study of Hype Williams at Lincoln Center, says of the video, “Hype is, of course, a genius. I can see what René Elizondo learned from that P.M. Dawn video (rhythm and color texture) and applied to Janet Jackson’s ‘That’s the Way Love Goes’ video the same year. Everybody learns from Hype.”

Be saw himself as a “sampling artist,” which meant that, like his new friend Cash Money, he was a crate digger who had a serious passion for record shopping. “We would go record shopping in London, but I knew a lot of the dealers personally, so we’d go to their house and buy records they didn’t have in the store,” Cash says. “Once, me, him, and Jarrett traveled for hours to a farm where the owner had the best record collection I’ve ever seen.” Jarrett, too, remembers the trip well. “The guy had the records inside of a barn, and the entire barn, every inch of the place, was covered in vinyl. It was unbelievable. I thought Cash was going to faint.”

Cash toured with P.M. Dawn, who had put together a band as big as Earth, Wind & Fire’s that included backup-singing women and percussionists, and also appeared with them on The Arsenio Hall Show, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and in the video for “Plastic.” “We shot that under some bridge in New York,” Cash remembers, “and it was cold as shit. First, my jacket caught on fire, then the pigeons shit on me. I guess it wasn’t meant for me to wear that jacket.” But, whatever city they were in, Cash knew where to buy records.

In New York City, Cash introduced Be to Roosevelt Hotel Record Convention where Q-Tip, Pete Rock, Large Professor, DJ Clark Kent, and countless others bought rare vinyl. If a bomb had fallen on that building back in the ’90s, New York City hip-hop would’ve been over. “I introduced Be to a lot of the dealers, and Be’s policy was never to haggle,” Cash says. “He paid whatever they asked. He had money like that. If a dealer asked a $1,000 for the record, he’d give it to them. No bullshit, he would drop like ten Gs on records. Pete Rock and all those guys would be mad as shit, because the dealers would be holding special records for him. When we first started hanging, he was buying a lot of Blue Note records, but I schooled him on other things the same way he used to school me.”

Writer, Ego Trip cofounder, and internationally known DJ Jeff “Chairman” Mao was a regular at the record conventions, and once sold Prince Be a copy of Mark Murphy Sings. “It wasn’t a rare record, it went for about forty dollars,” Jeff says. “There was a sense of resentment toward Prince Be from the other producers, because they didn’t understand what he was doing with all those beats. I don’t think many of them paid attention to his productions as well as all the songwriting and remixing he was doing.”

Although P.M. Dawn often used musicians, sampling was a major component of their sound. Being a student and buyer of such diverse music gave Be a wider palette when it came to sampling. “In many cases, sampling artistry is still looked at as thievery,” Prince Be said, “which was why we did ‘Norwegian Wood’ on the album.” The song was released as a single with a video directed by future Wes Anderson collaborator Roman Coppola. “It’s completely put together from samples,” Be continued, “but it’s a cover, so we didn’t need permission to record it. I think sampling depends on a certain level of creativity. When EPMD sampled [Zapp’s] ‘More Bounce to the Ounce,’ as much as some people thought that was thievery, I thought that was so creative, because of the way it was presented from a totally different perspective the original.

“Same thing with ‘Set Adrift...,’ because when it came out people said, ‘Them rap kids stole from Spandau Ballet.’ Even our record company thought we were a one-off until we delivered ‘I’d Die Without You.’ To me, you can’t be a sampling artist and not be a hip-hop artist. I would never exclude myself from being a hip-hop artist. I just wanted hip-hop to be bigger than it was.”

As much as Prince Be loved crate digging and recording, it equaled his disdain for being on the road. One night, he and Cash were in a studio in Los Angeles, and the DJ was supposed to drive them both to a show. “Be decided he wasn’t going to go, because his psychic advised him not to. The manager was begging me to get him to the venue and I had to push his big ass into the car. I had rented a [Nissan] 300ZX and I literally had to push his big ass into the car and do a hundred miles per hour to get us to the venue. Luckily, I was only ten minutes late.”

Released on March 23, 1993, The Bliss Album...? (Vibrations of Love and Anger and the Ponderance of Life and Existence) was another sonic marvel. “For me, the project possessed a dizzying array of aural vibes,” says critic says Quentin Harrison, “that includes funk (‘So On and So On’), hip-hop (‘Plastic’), pop (‘About Love of Nothing’) and contemporary soul (‘I’d Die Without You’).” It remains one of the boldest and most flavorful records of 1993.

Although P.M. Dawn could’ve gone anywhere on the planet to live and work, the otherworldly brothers returned to New Jersey. Prince Be married Mary Sierra and settled in a Jersey City penthouse where engineer Michael Fossenkemper built him a portable studio. Fossenkemperhad met the brothers the year before when he worked on parts of The Bliss Album at his then-usual home-base Chung King. “That studio was one of those places where everybody kind of went through there,” Fossenkemper says of the lab where Run-DMC, Brand Nubian, and RZA once recorded. “It was one of those places that many people ended up. It was popular in the hip-hop music scene.” Fossenkemper, who had worked with Color Me Badd, was known what he could do with vocals. “I think one reason Be liked working with me was because I had a lot of experience in harmonies and things like that. He really wanted to get more into that kind of thing.”

In the beginning of the relationship, Fossenkemper was a bit baffled by Prince Be’s work methods, not believing that certain samples or sounds would work or if his instructions were clear to the musicians. “After a while, I had to stop second-guessing him, because all his ideas worked,” Fossenkemper says. “I’m convinced that he had the whole song recorded in his head already. He just needed someone to help him mechanically put it together. When I build the portable studio, I had an endorsement with Roland and they came up with the DM-80, the first digital hard-disc recorder. It had eight tracks. I also had racks of samplers and a laptop with sequencing software.

“Be toured with the studio, but most of time we were working out of his place,” Fossenkemper continues. “He converted a closet into a vocal booth. When you’re at someone’s house every day, you become like a member of the family. You watch the kids grow up, you’re there for family arguments and the happy times. Every once in a while, especially if he was producing for someone else, we’d go to a conventional studio. You couldn’t really ask Elton John to come to your house.”

While Prince Be worked hard on the 1995 album Jesus Wept, he and Jarrett were also in the studio with artists he once worshipped from afar. “When we were in the studio with [Earth, Wind & Fire vocalist] Philip Bailey, he was schooling us on how Earth, Wind & Fire wrote songs together,” Jarrett says. “Be and I would be sitting on the floor in the lotus position taking detailed notes. Then we were in the studio with Elton John working on his duets album. He thought Be was a great songwriter, so he gave us advice on how to further succeed and survive. When we worked with the Bee Gees, it was just weird having Barry Gibb asking us how we thought he sounded. It was weird, but we went there.”

Fittingly enough, P.M. Dawn’s cover of “You Got Me Floatin’” for the Jimi Hendrix tribute album Stone Free was recorded at the guitar legend’s own Electric Lady Studios. According to Fossenkemper, “Be got selected for that project because [former Hendrix producer and engineer] Eddie Kramer, who spearheaded the project, picked Be because he like the way he panned on some songs. Eddie loved panning.”

Releasing Jesus Wept in 1995, the brothers created an album inspired by heaven, love, and the afterlife as much as it’s influenced by the Cali pop, Prince parables, and the Greenwich Village era of Bob Dylan. Jesus Wept combined cool existentialism, religious symbolism, and romantic ecstasy, and was exquisitely recorded at their home studio. The experimental and loopy album was on a mission to take hip-hop to new heights no matter how much the world resisted. With its blaring guitars (courtesy of Cameron Greider), retro go-go flow, graffiti-covered walls of sound, layered vocals, trippy lyrics, and the Holy Ghost floating above, the entire album was like a Victor Moscoso–illustrated acid trip in Zap comics that took the listener around the world in a day.

Jesus Wept was also a testament to Be’s diverse sampling savvy as he mixed in beats ranging from Al B. Sure’s new jack “Nite and Day” swoon on “Sometimes I Miss You So Much (Dedicated to the Christ Consciousness)” to Deep Purple’s boogie “Hush” on the glam “Downtown Venus,” first single. “There’s a solo on ‘Downtown Venus’ that Be helped pull out of me,” says Greider. “It’s crazy and over the top, but I never would’ve played it without his direction. Because of his sense of architecture, timing, and phrasing. He knew so much about constructing pop music and was a master without having an instrumental ability.”

Meanwhile, showing that they could still swirl straight soul if need be, “Miles from Anything” has the appeal of a Delfonics/Thom Bell song while “Fantasia’s Confidential Ghetto” partially covers Prince, the Talking Heads, and Harry Nilsson while throwing in some Charlie Brown cartoon samples as well.

In a four-star Rolling Stone review, it was written, “On their third album, P.M. Dawn completed their transformation from a rap-based pop group to something altogether different and wonderful. It’s not that P.M. Dawn…don’t operate in the hip-hop arena. Indeed they do. But…the duo has taken the sound of hip-hop so far beyond rap that it would be simplistic to discuss its music in those terms alone.”

The album was released on October 3, 1995, but two weeks before it was due to drop, Jarrett was arrested on charges of aggravated sexual assault after allegedly having sex with a fourteen-year-old cousin. Although charges were eventually dropped due to lack of evidence, P.M. Dawn’s reputation was tarnished regardless of the rave reviews the record received. Despite what Prince Be, Gee Street, or anyone else tried to do, Jesus Wept was overshadowed by the devil’s mischief.

“For the record, my brother didn’t rape anyone,” Prince Be told MTV News in November 1996, “but my family is highly dysfunctional, which is the reason why I like to deal with the spiritual rather than the realistic.” Four years later, P.M Dawn released their last Gee Street album Dearest Christian, I’m So Very Sorry for Bringing You Here. Love, Dad, a disc that Entertainment Weekly writer Matt Diehl called “a truly ambitious pop album.” Unfortunately, the project sank like a lead balloon and P.M. Dawn was dropped from the label.

In 2000, the brothers released Fucked Music, an album released on their label Positive Plain Music and only available through mail order. A few years later, as Be’s sickness began to worsen, Jarrett began feeling as though he was having a spiritual crisis and left the group to return to church. Having met Reverend Run when P.M. Dawn performed “I’d Die Without You” at his wedding in 1994, Jarrett went to the former superstar rapper for guidance. It was during that period that their cousin Gregory Carr began backing up the group under the name Doc G.

In 2014, Doc G told me he was one of B’s caregivers and that he had trademarked the group’s name in his own name. It all sounded suspect to me, but as Anil Dash wrote on Medium.com, it only got worse: “Today, most of P.M. Dawn’s social media presence is maintained by Doc G, who also put out a handful of unremarkable releases using the P.M. Dawn name, with no apparent input from Prince Be. In the final half decade of Prince Be’s life, Doc G carried on the P.M. Dawn name (perhaps not entirely with the blessing of Prince Be’s family, depending on the accuracy of online rumors), while Prince Be endured a further series of health setbacks. Another stroke, dialysis, and a leg amputation all took a heavy toll.”

Since Prince Be’s death in 2016, Doc G has recruited a partner named K-R.O.K., and the two are conducting interviews and touring as P.M. Dawn. While this is a bizarre chapter in the book of P.M. Dawn, I doubt that this will be the end. Currently, Jarrett has been recording music for his purposed solo project, Back to My Roots, an album that will, in its own way, keep the musical memory of the original P.M. Dawn alive.

In the spring of 2024 someone wrote on Twitter, ‘If P.M. Dawn came out today they would be the biggest thing in music’” Although that sounds great, being ‘the next Michael Jackson’ was never Prince Be’s mission. The humble but brilliant man I met simply wanted to be appreciated as an artist and acknowledged—like J. Dilla, like Marley Marl, like so many of the greats—as someone who advanced the aural language of hip-hop, unafraid of taking the music one step beyond.

Note: A different version of this beautiful story originally appeared in Wax Poetics #68, in the winter of 2020. Republished here with the permission of author Michael Gonzales.

In 1990, Flipside Records released a vinyl compilation of some fast, guitar-driven LA bands. They called it City of Power: LA.

Along with releasing music, Flipside also published a popular zine which contained band interviews and record and show reviews, so this crew knew what bands were interesting enough to highlight on a compilation. These bands are fast, but they aren’t all classically punk. Many are. Others have gothic, post-punk, and new wave elements, with steely, shimmering guitars. You can’t always put your finger on it. It’s that mix that really characterizes this music and captures underground L.A. at that moment in time: when mainstream media hadn’t started marketing this all as “alternative music,” the year before Nirvana released their game-changing album Nevermind. In 1990, Sub Pop was busy trying to sell Seattle music to the world, but it hadn’t “broken” yet.

“There is a pre-Nirvana and post-Nirvana record business,” said Gary Gersh, the person who signed Nirvana to Geffen Records. City of Power is pre.

There’s a purity to these City of Power bands—maybe a freedom—if only in my imagination. Two went onto fame. Many of them disbanded in the years following after this record.

“Especially in ’91, ’92, ’93, before Nirvana really exploded,” said Agnostic Front guitarist Craig Silverman, “it was honest, and it kinda lost that once that whole scene was commercialized. And it really hasn’t come back since.”

“Nevermind came along at exactly the right time,” Michael Azerrad wrote in his Nirvana Biography, Come as You Are. “This was music by, for, and about a whole new group of young people who had been overlooked, ignored, or condescended to.”

Very true. Nevermind was a turning point because it lifted the lid off the musical sewer, but great, weird, experimental bands had always been down there, doing their brilliant freakish thing, and speaking to use who felt overlooked or condescended to before. Comps like this, the 1989 Composite Drawing: Underground Compilation, and the 1990 Tantrum Compilation, capture that well.

City of Power is good stuff—a little time capsule to slip into.

Discogs said that Flipside Records only 2,300 copies of the purple version of this LP release. Here are the tracks, in order. Huge thanks so the heads who took the time to digitize and load this music to YouTube so we can all enjoy it.

Motorcycle Boy

Their lyrics are odd considering they were a Hollywood band who looked and sounded like a glam band, with shades of metal.

Sandy Duncan’s Eye

Post-punk noise rock, I’d say.

Bad Religion

Punk rock. You know.

Spiderbaby

Gothic post-punk, with synthesizers. Good stuff. (Check out their song “Twisted” next.) I love this band!

L7

Thundering, punk sludge before they called it grunge. These women absolutely ruled the early ’90s. They played one of the rawest shows I’ve ever seen. Proud to say my wife bought me a “Smell the Magic” tee from a recent tour, and I often wear it under collared shirts, and people at work don’t even know.

Anus the Menace

Surprisingly good for a band with this name.

Trash Can School

Singer sounds influenced by The U-Men. I love The U-Men, and I love this.

The Paper Tulips

This Long Beach punk band’s song “Sanitation” from this comp isn’t on YouTube, but maybe it sounds like their other songs? Turns out: This band is really damn good. I ordered two of their albums after writing this post. Good stuff.

TVTV$

This song isn’t on YouTube, but it appears on this album, Brainwashington, so maybe it sounds like this?

The Creamers

This song rips. Or creams or whatever.

In 1991, Flipside Records expanded the LP into a CD called The Big One, doubling the number of bands on it, and pulling many from San Francisco, too. With a wider frame, the photograph an even more beautiful picture of underground music at dawn of the alternative era. More Big One bands enjoyed longer lifespans than the City of Power bands did, but eras end and fame fades while music rings eternal.

(Also, hey, it’s my birthday today. If you read this far, then celebrate my birthday with me by sharing this music with some friends.)

Here they all are, in order:

Big Drill Car

Popdefect

Down By Law

Clawhammer

The Offspring

Hunger Farm

Distorted Pony

I love this one.

Blackbird

Steel Pole Melvins Task Force

Sharkbait

Helios Creed

Victim’s Family

Cringer

Monsula

Mr. T Experience

Green Day

In the 1980s and ’90s, before digital media changed the way we bought and listened to music, people bought physical copies of albums at traditional brick and mortar music stories like Tower Records and Sam Goody. But sometimes bands’ official albums weren’t enough to satisfy. We needed concert recordings, unreleased demos, and obscurities. For that, we went outside official commercial channels and bought bootleg recordings and traded stuff with other fans.

Diehards still go to extremes to get the music they love. Back in the analog era, fans would copy music onto blank cassette tapes and CDs and mail them to people through the post. This was called “tape trading.”

Many bands released live albums. But maybe the live album was only from one year of your favorite band’s long life. Maybe you wanted to hear concerts from all the other years the band toured or hear music from their earliest years as a band, or from a particular tour where they played different songs. Thankfully, so-called bootleggers had been smuggling recording equipment into concerts for ages. Unofficial live recordings capture a certain heat that studio recordings often lacked. Live recordings often include cover songs the band never released on their albums, or different renditions of their own songs, and some of us liked that. So fans would buy those bootleg concert recordings. They’d get hold of John Peel sessions from the BBC. They’d record radio broadcast off of their home stereos and got vinyl copies of concert recordings meant for radio DJs, not for regular listeners. And then they circulated copies of those recordings among other fans.

Tape trading was awesome.

It violated certain copyrights and contracts, so it pissed off many record companies and musicians. But many bands tolerated it, because the fans wouldn’t appreciate their musical idols trying to cut off access to music—remember Metallica’s response to Napster?—and some bands made enough money in the record industry’s golden years to endure the loss of revenue from these unofficial recordings. Some bands, like the Grateful Dead, actually allowed fans to record and trade copies of their shows.

Audio streaming technology, contentious file-sharing platforms like Napster, BitTorrent sites like Pirate Bay, ended tape trading in the early 2000s by replacing it with more sophisticated and immediate methods. Although some devotees continued the practice—and even revived it—as a nostalgic hobby, it’s an artifact from the analog era.

Another cool artifact? The letters that fans mailed to each other along with those tapes.

I saved all of my Depeche Mode fan letters from 1991-1992!

I’ve told this story before, but in 1989, I started high school as a huge Depeche Mode fan.

In seventh grade, a tight-knit group of female classmates had become obsessed with Depeche Mode. These girls sported their black DM concert tees in class. They chatted about the wonders of the Black Celebration album and longed for the band’s next Arizona performance. And they joked that they were married to their self-appointed DM “husbands.” Kristin wed herself to singer Dave Gahan, Nikki to songwriter Martin Gore, Kari to keyboardist Andy Fletcher, and Laura wed herself to the quietly powerful Alan Wilder. These girls were so cool to me. Their excitement was exciting, even though my skater friends and I teased them about it. Curious what about these Brits that had them so enamored, I bought DM’s album Music for the Masses because it appeared on some of the girls’ shirts.

While spinning the LP alone in my room, I discovered a partial explanation: DM’s music was profoundly different. It had haunted melodies, inventive percus­sions, and it created a moody ambiance by layering orchestral synthesizers with field recordings that the band made by banging on metal and revving their car engine. DM struck me drunk, which was a sensation as mysterious and domineering at age 13 as a romantic crush.

I spent weekends riding bikes with friends to record stores, searching for over-priced imports featuring multiple dance-remixes of single songs with names like the “Renegade Soundwave Afghan Surgery Mix.” I coated my bedroom with posters, painted the letters “DM” on the wall beside my bed, and mail-ordered concert tees from tours I was too young to attend. I ordered fan-made magazines and newsletters and read about ultra-rare, early-80s live recordings from places like London’s Bridgehouse Club that contained unreleased songs like “Price of Love,” “Television Set,” and “Reason Man.” These were considered holy grails in the fan community.

I wanted them. Before the internet, you relied on printed material and other fans for information, and information was scarce.

So I wrote to some English magazine called Select that once had DM on the cover.

And I wrote to a New York company that had pressed a rare recording to vinyl, and the letter got returned. I didn’t realize it was bootleg record and the company wasn’t legit.

I quickly learned that the best way to get rare live recordings and information wasn’t in record stores. It was from fans.

It was hard to tell where to start, so I wrote to the person who ran Fast Fashion! The Alternative Depeche Mode Newsletter. She wrote in stylish all-caps. She had an out-of-state job. How old was she? She was so kind:

To get people writing to me in 1991, I also put a paid advertisement in the printed newsletter of the U.S. Depeche Mode fan club, called Bong for some reason. I said something about my search for particular live recordings and songs.

Fans read it. Letters quickly started arriving.

Some offered recordings. Some could only offer to let me know if they found those recordings or met anyone else who may know where to find them. That’s how this worked before internet!

Once I had pen pals, we traded.

This went on for a little over a year. I’d write letters. Fellow fans would send these lists of shows they had recordings of and/or shows they wanted.

Trading required leverage. Some fans would freely give you recordings you desperately wanted, because they related to your desperation and hoped others would take similar pity on them. Other fans required I use whatever magazine articles, tapes, or band interviews I had as currency, and my pen pals would sometimes send recordings of cool rare stuff.

I often made covers for them.

The effort was worth it.

The live version of “Photographic” from DM’s highly bootlegged 1984 Hamburg concert struck me as one of the most stirring songs I’d heard. First a faint electronic twittering moved back and forth be­tween speakers. The deep thump of the base drum hit—doomp, doomp, doomp, doomp—before Dave sang: “A white house, a white room, the program of today.” I didn’t know what the hell he was singing about, but I sang with him. It wasn’t the lyrics that moved me so much as the layers of sound and harmonies where Martin lays his high voice atop Dave’s deep one. “And looking to the day,” they sing, “I mesmerize the light.” From then on, live recordings became my thing.

Most of these pen pals were just young fans like me who wanted more of the music they loved. Some were selling their recordings. Others were hardcore completists who wanted a copy of every show their favorite bands had ever played, in the highest possible quality, from REM to Siouxsie and the Banshees.

It was my first brush with hardcore fans and bootlegs, and I fell right in with them, even after my musical tastes broadened by 1992.

Here are all the letters I received from Depeche Mode fans, in chronological order. My letter writing started around Spring 1991 and fizzled by Spring 1992. The last letters I received went unanswered. I’d already moved on from DM to the so-called “alternative” music that got marketed to the world.

This is a time capsule of a niche underground teen network from a brief moment in time.

What’s clear among the teens is that one of the worst things you could be is boring. School was boring. Life was boring. Their town was boring. Depeche Mode and the escape of fandom was our antidote. And heaven forbid we, as letter writers, ever bored the recipients with what we wrote!

What’s extra sweet is how we teens shared our feelings and lives with strangers. As we traded letters about this band we loved, we sometimes started sharing details of our lives. I wrote to my pen pal Linh in Montclair, California about my grandpa going to the hospital and my first serious girlfriend cheating on me. We bonded. She was so sweet. And in that universal teen way, the course of just a few letters could build a powerful sense of connection—friendship, even love. Teenagers are intense. I love them for it.

Enjoy:

And that’s how it ends: abruptly, on a passionate note.

What happened to these lovely people? What became of their DM fandom and their lives? Maybe I’ll do some internet sleuthing to find out. For now, I’m grateful for their friendship.

As I bundled these letters to toss them in the recycle bin, my documentary impulse stopped me, and I wondered if these had a larger cultural value.

So I emailed the Director, Curatorial, Collections and Exhibits at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, offering them up. The Museum had a material archive as large as their appreciation for the varied manifestations of pop culture. Fan letters embodied a niche, teen, underground network whose subculture could make its own kind of exhibit if they could gather other letters or material artifacts from it. If not an exhibit, then maybe these artifacts would be worth adding to their collection?

The Director emailed back: He and his team were interested. After I mailed them, the Museum’s Registrar mailed me a deed of gift to sign for my donation.

It was official: I was old enough for my childhood to be a museum artifact. Seeing kids in Nirvana t-shirts still trips me out, but this was a new level. I still made me proud.

My collection, said the letter, “will be enjoyed by many generations to come.”

When I first found this new Nirvana album, Heaven Is a Hoax, on YouTube, I was like What the hell is going on here? I hadn’t had my morning tea yet.

“Heaven Is A Hoax is an album released by Nirvana in 1996, which shows the true colors the band has to offer,” wrote the YouTube poster, cafeex. “This beautiful piece of work is one of the last true grunge works of the 90’s.”

Wow, I thought, I know this is fake, but the songs “Talk to Me” and “Burn the Rain” were really good.

Some quick Googling delivered a 2020 NME article titled “YouTuber creates fake Nirvana song using artificial intelligence.” The song is called “Smother.”

“Using lyrics.rip to scrape the Genius Lyrics Database,” the YouTuber, Funk Turkey, wrote on his post, “I made a Markov Chain write Nirvana lyrics.” Funk Turkey then played and recorded the music “in my kitchen, on a sparkly red cheap Stratocaster, a crappy mic, and an old copy of ProTools”.

Pretty clever.

Other Nirvana fans went much further.

They took Cobain’s guitar licks and various bits from Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings and used them to flesh out full songs themselves. Fans zeroed in on acoustic Cobain songs like “Creation” and “Opinion” that Nirvana never recorded in the studio. They took demos like “Old Age” and live audience recordings of the song “Talk to Me,” which Nirvana played a few times on tour in 1991—“Talk to Me” could have been a huge radio hit had the band ever recorded it in the studio—and fans heard them and wondered: “What if Nirvana had recorded them properly?” So the fans created those songs themselves, often performing every instrument at home with computer technology Cobain never dreamed of. These are called mockups, covers, and renditions.

“This is my own rendition of Kurt Cobain’s song ‘burn the rain’ from the home recordings album,’ wrote a YouTuber named Harmonova in 2016.

Someone else did “Talk to Me.”

Compare the original song to the fan mockup of this searingly good one-off jam Nirvana made up on stage in Argentina in 1992.

Nirvana:

Fans:

Instead of playing instruments themselves, some fans use existing audio from Nirvana songs to create a savvy exquisite corpse montage.

“Here’s Opinion,” writes TheBeginningofMusic, “the drum stems were taken from Lounge Act, I added a bass guitar and three guitar tracks.”

TheBeginningofMusic used drums from “Lithium,” Cobain’s voice, and their own guitar and bass to mockup Cobain’s solo demo of “Do Re Mi.”

Fans are working hard to channel Cobain. They’re inspired, they’re moved, and they’re hungry for more than Cobain can now give them.

A band in Monterrey NL, Mexico, named To Boddah, has dedicated themselves to this process. “We are long time Nirvana fans,” they write, “and our goal is to record everything that the band didn’t have a proper recording for, so all requests are welcome.”

To Boddah has recorded tons of Nirvana rarities and brought songs to life that have become mythical.

That band is one of many.

“A.I. created the chord progression,” RUBBERTANKBOY wrote on his mockup of “Pure As Water,” “and I then recreated the song using drum samples from in utero. I am now using A.I. to model kurts voice which I think is amazing really, but I still have to sing and sing well for it to work. I also have kurts pedals guitars and amps. cheers!”

Montage of Heck proved a deep well of tantalizing tidbits and speculative material.

Fans take this to the inevitable next level.

They collect those mockups onto whole albums to create what they imagine Nirvana’s albums after In Utero would have sounded like had Cobain lived. Fans make their own covers. They write fictional descriptions of the project for context. And many mix fan-made mockups with existing Nirvana rarities like “Here She Comes Now” and “Moist Vagina.” It’s a trip.

As YouTuber Josias Garcia put it: “Fan-album made of compilations of the best unreleased/weird songs from Nirvana.”

These albums rarely clock in over 30 minutes. Some include early Foo Fighters songs that could have become Nirvana songs, like “Alone + Easy Target.” (Cobain is said to have liked that song.) Many of the same songs appear and reappear: “Talk to Me,” “Burn the Rain,” “Pure As Water,” “Creation,” “Old Age,” “Do Re Mi,” “Nobody Knows I’m New Wave,” “Living The Lie,” “Anorexorcist,” “Burn My Britches,” “Poison’s Gone,” and “Help Me I’m Hungry.”

But not always.

Some fan-made Nirvana albums dispense with Cobain and just use AI to create totally new “Nirvana” songs.

Some fan-made albums look backwards, assembling fictional pre-Nevermind albums from older songs.

Some fans use AI to create songs where Cobain covers songs released after his death, like Foster the Peoples’ “Pumped Up Kicks.”

And some fan-made Nirvana albums spiral out into distant speculative fanfiction territory far from the demos and mockups. Things get weird. Fandom can be pure and natural. And fandom can get dark and consumptive. Wherever these albums come from, most are just for fun, though.

Thirty years after the fact, Cobain’s death created an enduring mystery about the larger musical direction Nirvana could have gone. So many questions remain unanswered that fans have moved to fill that vacuum.

“My god I really wish we got just 1 more album,” someone on YouTube said. We all did.

I’m old enough to have seen Nirvana play. I remember when Nevermind came out. My friends and I loved Bleach and we all sat in someone’s teenage bedroom playing a cassette of Nevermind for the first time. I mean, the first concert I ever bootlegged myself was Nirvana. As a fan, I also wondered what Nirvana would have sounded like if Cobain had lived. So 30-years later, this fan-made stuff is interesting. It’s also confusing.

People think they know certain things. “We know In Utero came out in September,” one fan wrote online, “and several months later Kurt had three complete new songs that we know of, ‘You Know You’re Right,’ ‘Do Re Mi’ and ‘Poison’s Gone.’” Maybe that’s true. Is it?

Cobain has been gone for so long that younger generations can treat him like a character in their own historical fiction—like we Gen Xer’s did with Hendrix and The Doors. “This album takes place in a world where Kurt Cobain never died,” Guitar_Junk wrote about his fan-made album. “He got sober and divorced Courtney. The court also gave Kurt custody of Francis. Dave helped with the song writing. Foo Fighter’s songs like Everlong and My Hero became Nirvana songs.”

For a Gen Xer like me, this all seems like a unique subculture that digital natives created that mixes gamer culture, ’90s nostalgia, and AI-powered artistry—and it’s powered by questionable internet information and a confusing mess of too many posthumous Nirvana releases.

Aj61406, a person who makes these albums, explains on YouTube: “This is a fandom known as Nirvana fan albums, which are alternate universes where Kurt Cobain never dies or dies at a later date but lives longer at least. People like  @Cleberslk and @Handlemymeat make fanmade albums like myself and they create their own alternative universes in the descriptions of their videos and sample together some unreleased material from Nirvana. We are not trying to trigger or anger the family of Kurt Cobain, this is simply a tribute and some fanfiction. I’ve been a fan of Kurt Cobain for over five years and love such songs as Scentless Apprentice and Something in the Way, among others.”

Has any band every moved so many people to such lengths? Besides the Grateful Dead, I mean?

The fan-made album covers don’t always do the band’s legacy justice. The album titles don’t either. (Crack Babies? Really?) Some mockups, like “Burn My Britches,” are just bad. But the spirit of appreciation is usually there. I guess. I don’t know actually. YouTube is a weird place.

Not every Nirvana fan is into this.

“I don’t feel the songs on this mock-up really make the grade,” someone on a thread said. “They’re just not that good. I Know You’re Right is the best one. Not sure if the Dave songs would’ve been put on there either. Doubt they would’ve put the cover of Sunbeam. I think Do Re Mi is just ok. The rest is rather poor.”

“If you’re this dedicated to the pursuit of never listening to another band,” mariteaux wrote on a long post, “instead settling for fainter and fainter scraps of work from a man who’s been dead longer than some of you have been alive, at least do it right.” He called the post “The Desperate, Bottomless Pit of Nirvana Fan Albums.”

He makes many excellent points.

I agree, but you can decide.

I’ve collected some fan-made Nirvana albums here. Thinks of this as Silver: The Best of the Box for fan albums.

Here they are:

Heaven Is A Hoax

Posted in January 2023 by a YouTuber named cafeex: “Heaven Is A Hoax is an album released by Nirvana in 1996 which shows the true colors the band has to offer. This beautiful piece of work is one of the last true grunge works of the 90’s.”

Bliss

In 2018, a YouTube named Jone created this chiller album and its fictional backstory: “Side story: Kurt Cobain (who had been missing since the end of March 1994) calls to Pat Smear and ask for help because he’s thinking about killing himself. Pat talks to Kurt and tells his history with Darby Crash (who committed suicide), and advises him to start treating himself intensely. After treatment, Tom Grant (who was investigating Kurt’s disappearance) would advise Kurt Cobain to divorce. Even with his marriage almost over, Kurt would not listen to the advice. At the end of 1994 the 4th album would be planned and recorded in early 1995, and would be released in the second half of this year. It would sound like R.E.M but it would also have its aggressive side. In Kurt’s diary, he wrote “Bliss” as a possible name for the band. I think the name ironic and that would combine with the situation in which it would be passing and that it isn’t blessed.”

Aborted Christ

BuriedInBlack wrote: “Aborted Christ is the 4th album by grunge rock band Nirvana, released on January 5th of 1995. After the In Utero tour and the Lollapalooza 1994 performance, the band had a clear direction, basing off the songs they teased randomly, and later record and release on their next album, having a much heavier and old school sound. “We don’t have a very specific direction you know, just do whatever we feel like and hoping it’s affordable for the label at least, and hope for the best.” —Kurt Cobain, in a mid January 1995 interview about the album.”

No Guarantee

Posted in August 2023 by Guitar_Junk: “This album takes place in a world where Kurt Cobain never died. He got sober and divorced Courtney. The court also gave Kurt custody of Francis. Dave helped with the song writing. Foo Fighter’s songs like Everlong and My Hero became Nirvana songs.”

Old Age

“This is a fan album I created. DISCLAIMER: I do not own these songs they were written by Kurt Cobain and the rest of Nirvana. This album is a glimpse into an alternate universe when Kurt Cobain didn’t die in 1994. The songs are Sappy, Even in His Youth, Old Age, Burn the Rain, and You Know You're Right.”

The Greenhouse

Posted in 2019 by Josias Garcia: “Fan-album made of compilations of the best unreleased/weird songs from Nirvana.”

ENDOSULFAN

“After a 3 year hiatus following their last album, ‘In Utero’, they begin recording a new album, bringing back older songs, while still moving their sound forward.”

Doppelgangers

fOxXsHoRrOrSiDe posted this album on Oct 16, 2023, stating “This is finally my fan 4th record contribution to Nirvana...”

Made Not Born

In 2018, YouTube Jone shared this album and its side story: “Kurt decides that the next album should be a return to the roots of Nirvana because Perkidan was very slow and melancholic. So this is Made Not Born, an album with fast and aggressive songs.”

IVF

YouTuber lists the sources of the mockups he compiled, which is nice.

Drown Out

Posted by Cleberslk on July 29, 2023: “ATTENTION: This video is not for profit, I just do this for fun”

Final Unplugged

“Review from "NY New Musical Magazine: "Final Unplugged: The Riot Earth Concert" is a secret concert that Nirvana held in New York in a small venue in November 1993, some days after the first unplugged. Virtually no one was aware of it, except a few friends of the band who were invited to the concert. It also includes three songs recorded during a private rehearsal and not performed during the concert. The master tape, slightly damaged but still in good conditions, was miraculously saved from the Universal Studio fire of 2008 and thus contains Nirvana's last true unplugged concert." ....no, not indeed. This is NOT A REAL Nirvana album. It is entirely based on the excellent work of the YT member Riot Earth, original studio vocals by Cobain and instruments recreated to mimick an unplugged performance, check out his channel…This is just a fictional album, fan album, whatever you want. Made with original Kurt songs and vocals, plus new instruments. If you like it, i'm glad. If you don't, i could not care less. Bye ;)”

Solitude

YouTuber Aj61406 spins a detailed narrative: “Shortly after putting Nirvana on hiatus after burnout and future retirement plans for Kurt Cobain from music, Cobain posts his plans for some solo work with Taylor Hawkins on drums on the Nirvana website, some material in similar style to In Utero and the Alice in Chains EP "Jar of Flies", even taking some inspiration from them. Cobain and Hawkins decide to record this album in the near future under the record label Interscope. Cobain states in an interview that this new solo album would not come out until around 2000 or 2001, around or after the new millennium as it's already in the concept stages and with Kurt focusing on family and friends, now that he's back home and on hiatus. Cobain continues to take care of Frances Bean the best way he can while on hiatus. A few Nirvana compilation albums, mainly demos and outtakes, are set to release sometime in January of 1998 under the names "The Nevermind Home Recordings, 1991" and "Nirvana: The Studio Outtakes Compilation". Kurt Cobain performs alongside the Foo Fighters at Lake Tahoe months later in April of 1998, singing some songs from their recent Nirvana album Token Eastern and some Foo Fighters songs. Kurt Cobain starts to write a book on his life, titled "Montage of Heck" in 1998. Besides sculpture making, drawing, and painting, Cobain decides to make a career off writing and selling his diary entries to be viewed by the public. Kurt Cobain's solo project with Taylor Hawkins begins recording sessions for their album at Cobain's home studio. He wants to spend more time around his daughter and less time tirelessly touring and taking his daughter with him. Cobain would rather raise his daughter back in Washington as opposed to traveling constantly and never having enough time to do the things that he wants to do. In another interview around this time on the Howard Stern Show (his first appearance on the radio show), Cobain expresses his anger towards Courtney Love, threatening to place her and her boyfriend in prison if they attempt another custody battle or terrorize Kurt Cobain's life again. He reveals that a minor reason for going on hiatus was to shield his daughter away from those junkies for the time being. The two musicians meet at the studio and the album takes shape as a blend of grunge and experimental rock, featuring Kurt's distinctive songwriting style. Cobain continues to explore his artistic expression both visually and musically, drawing inspiration from his experiences and personal growth. Kurt tries to get a response from former Alice in Chains member Layne Staley via some voicemails to record some material for this Jar of Flies, In Utero inspired album. Layne surprisingly shows up to record a few songs, "Shatter" and "The Things You Do" (a track featuring Layne and Taylor singing together and isn't an unfinished Aftervibes song in this timeline), eventually getting into an argument with Kurt after recording a few takes, causing Layne to leave the home studio. Kurt would never see Layne Staley again after that. He would try to contact Layne for a few months following the unexpected argument with Kurt, but to no avail. He would ultimately stop contacting Layne completely. On July 13th, 1998, The Foo Fighters' second studio album "The Colour and the Shape" is released and features Kurt Cobain singing alongside Dave Grohl in a duet for a few of the tracks, including "Everlong". As the millennium approaches, Nirvana fans anticipate what the band and Kurt Cobain will bring to the world in the new century. Kurt's journey from darkness to creative rebirth continues to inspire and captivate audiences, promising an exciting future for both his music and his art. Nirvana reunites for a special one-night-only performance in Times Square for New Year's Rockin 'Eve to sing some tracks from their album "Nevermind" and the songs Creation, D-7, and Sappy. The performance becomes an unforgettable night for fans as the band makes their first public appearance since a year prior in 1998. Despite Nirvana having gone on hiatus a year prior, the members still talk to each other occasionally and work on their own projects, both musical and activities besides music with Krist Novoselic drifting towards US politics and thinking about ditching music in the future, creating music with his side project Sweet 75. Solitude, Kurt Cobain's first solo album, is officially released in 2000. The album is a fusion of grunge and experimental rock, showcasing Cobain's distinctive songwriting and emotional depth. It receives critical acclaim and becomes a commercial success, solidifying Kurt's status as a musician and artist beyond Nirvana. The album includes tracks like "Shatter," "Horrified," "She Only Lies," "The Things You Do," and "Soaked in Bleach," each with its unique sound and lyrical depth. The later 1990s and 2000s seem to be good and bad times for Cobain (who has to hear about Pavel and Courtney’s issues and hang on tight to his daughter because of that) and Nirvana”

Untitled

Aj61406: “It is now January 2001, it has been nearly a year since the more successful release of Worldwide Lobotomy, and Kurt plans on yet another solo album with plans to release one once every year based on when his last two albums were released by him onto the recently made music website Napster for download. People who are following Kurt Cobain’s mysterious persona begin to draw the connection between Cobain and Mr Mister around this time, something he had been fearing ever since he had produced his first solo album as he did not want to be associated with Nirvana and wanted to raise Frances, now eight, freely and still keeping his distance from Courtney Love. Similar to the last two Mr Mister albums, Cobain includes some home recorded tapes, including a jam with Nirvana known as Weirdo and an unknown live song. There is barely any new material on this new release, but still maintains the sound collage and experimental music theme his project had been known for. Along with Kurt's own material, he notably includes Pat Smear's Golden Boys, the last song written by Darby Crash before his death. An improved version of Come on Death simply called Come on Death V2 is also another notable track off the album. Once again, Kurt Cobain would offer to have Layne Staley show up on this new release, but he never gets an answer back as Layne had been attending rehab and had been in a sober living home recovering under the watchful eyes of Dave Grohl, Mike McCready (from Mad Season and Pearl Jam), roommate Morgen Gallagher, and Jerry Cantrell (Layne Staley does live in this timeline, but I'm still working on his lore), making sure that Staley was doing all right and would not touch any drug whatsoever. Kurt decided to complete the album with all the tracks it had already. Having trouble coming up with a title, he calls the album Untitled, which is released on February 9, 2001 to critical acclaim, much like the last album from 2000. This time, a week after the album had been released, more suspicion began to grow in the music community after Cobain's voice had starting being pitched up on his past solo albums. Some thought this unknown artist was sampling Kurt Cobain's material because of a reverbed version of Moist Vagina and a new (originally recorded as a demo for Fecal Matter) song called Mrs Butterworth, while a larger percentage thought it was Cobain himself which would be the case. Fans would stalk the artist from outside his home more often, causing him to flee to a neighborhood in Orange County not even a few days later and be photographed a week or two before his death, trying out a career as an anonymous visual artist under a different pseudonym, No Face, before finding little success (only completed two art pieces) and ending his own life weeks later through a drug overdose. Very little would be known about Cobain's final weeks and days alive before killing himself. Layne Staley, affected by the overdose suicide of Kurt Cobain in March 2001, would end up sobered by the news of his passing and would be offered to be featured on Jerry Cantrell's next solo album, Degradation Trip, which would be released on November 3, 2001 the critical acclaim instead of 2002 since Layne Staley is still alive. Layne and Jerry would re-record Angel Eyes and Anger Rising, both of which featuring Layne Staley on backing vocals. Alice in Chains isn't broken up in this timeline either, but the band would still remain on hiatus until 2008 to focus on their own solo projects, with Layne recording some music for Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Metal Gear Online. Alice in Chains would later break out of hiatus in October 2008 to record some material for their fourth studio album, Dirt & Grime, which would feature notable tracks like "A Looking in View," "Died," (previously on the Music Bank Box Set) "Get Born Again," (also previously on the Music Bank Box Set), "Hollow," and others”

Reflections

Aj61406 spins their narrative: “After Kurt Cobain is taken to a Seattle hospital after a heroin overdose on April 5, 1994, the singer-songwriter continues to battle his demons, gaining custody of Frances Bean and divorcing Courtney Love. He attends rehab multiple times from 1994 to 1997, even threatening to commit suicide in 1995 before being talked out of his suicide attempt by Dave Grohl, who had recently released his first album with his own band, the Foo Fighters. Dave hires a therapist to monitor Kurt Cobain shortly after threatening to kill himself. Despite facing several setbacks, his determination to overcome addiction finally leads him to sobriety after a last-ditch intervention sometime in May of 1997 with his bandmates, Frances Bean, Cobain's therapist, and Wendy Cobain, who takes custody of Frances after Kurt overdoses a few months prior to this intervention and is declared unfit to be Frances' parental figure. During his journey to recovery, Cobain explores various creative outlets, including writing, and is allowed permission to see his daughter again by 1998. He pens heartfelt verses about his experiences, delving into themes of pain, love, and self-discovery. These writings, along with artwork, resonated with fans, and he eventually compiles and publishes books about Cobain's life and time with Nirvana, offering an intimate glimpse into the mind of a troubled yet immensely talented artist. He even signs Nirvana fan's autographs. During this time period, Cobain would join his bandmates in overseeing compilation album releases. In early July of 2014, a reunion of the surviving members of Nirvana takes place years after the release of the group's third studio album, In Utero. Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, Pat Smear, Taylor Hawkins, and Krist Novoselic work on what would be Nirvana's fourth and final studio album, Reflections, reflections of the hidden gems of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain's troubled past, respectively. Prior to this reunion, Cobain receives the devastating news of being diagnosed with throat cancer a month prior, and decides to reunite Nirvana one final time for his fans, who had anticipated a Nirvana reunion for nearly two decades at the time. Despite the challenges that lay ahead, the band is determined to create a powerful record that would reflect Cobain's raw emotions and musical brilliance with some new and old Nirvana material. This new album comprises two main elements: tracks recorded in the mid-late 1980s and the early-mid 1990s that were previously unreleased, along with two new songs recorded 2014-2015 that showcases the deterioration of Kurt Cobain's voice over the course of a few months. The combination of old and new material gives the album a unique, nostalgic, and almost In Utero sounding feel, showcasing the evolution of Nirvana's sound over the years. The unreleased songs featured on the album include "Talk to Me", "If You Must", "And I Love Her", "Blathers Log", "Burn the Rain", "Ain't It a Shame", and "The Yodel Song". In contrast, the new tracks, "Drowned In the Sun" and "Broken Out In Love" are particularly poignant, as it reflects Cobain's declining health and vocal deterioration due to his battle with cancer. Both feature Taylor Hawkins harmonizing with Kurt Cobain's voice. The album is released to critical acclaim on January 23, 2015. Fans and critics alike praise the album for its heavy and old school sound, emotional depth in the newer songs, and musical brilliance. Many note that the album is a testament to Kurt Cobain's resilience and unwavering dedication to his art, even in the face of adversity. Tragically, just a month after the album's release the world loses Kurt Cobain to his battle with throat cancer at the young age of 48 on February 22, 2015. His passing is mourned by millions of fans worldwide, leaving a profound impact on the music industry and the grunge movement. Even after his passing, Cobain's poetry, artwork, and books continue to be cherished by fans, offering an intimate glimpse into the mind of one of rock music's most enigmatic and beloved figures.”

E-Coli

Aj61406 keeps their story going: “In early 1996, after recently releasing their fourth studio album, Cobain and crew begin work on their fifth album "E-Coli" together. Kurt Cobain, around this time, despite being on drugs again, is doing slightly better mentally, but is already showing small signs of another breaking point in the near future, refusing to stop working on the album and pretend that he's in perfectly good hands. Nirvana would release E-Coli on January 2, 1997, with Cobain recently discharged from a mental hospital the day prior after further support and examination after he blacks out from a mental health related attack he had from heroin. The details about his drug usage wouldn't become public for nearly a year. Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl are the only ones who know about Kurt Cobain's hospitalization, canceling a few shows due to this. There are also signs that the group is fading away into obscurity, eventually leading to rumors that they would disband after their sixth album, whenever that is supposed to occur. The album is a mixed ball with critics. Months later, Kurt Cobain mysteriously announces that due to blacking out, the cancellation of show dates, and being contained in a mental hospital for a week prior to the album's release, the future of Nirvana is to remain uncertain and that the group will be on indefinite hiatus and even cancel all future tour and concert dates to focus on the rehabilitation process, his final rehab. This is after Krist Novoselic convinces Cobain to enter rehab due to the breakdown he had prior. A tour with Metallica set to take place in March and a tour with the Melvins set to take place in November are both canceled. More fan predictions come along due to this event, leading to many speculating that the band would quietly break up or that Cobain would try to commit suicide in the near future due to his limbo mental state (acting normal then having occasional breakdowns) and failed attempts at remaining clean in the past. The band would basically never be heard from again for a while, until at least almost four years after Cobain stated that he would be in rehab again to the public in '97, now appearing visibly unkempt but in a calmer-ish state until his final breaking point in 2001 from exhaustion, fame, further descent into depression, his daughter being taken due to false claims from Courtney Love, and so forth. Kurt Cobain moves to an unknown location in Washington to further seclude himself for as long as he feels, seeing the big city as a place that is full of threats, people who want to take photos of him and share them with the media. Kurt Cobain keeps his location a secret and refuses to do interviews for the time being. The chalk message (featured on the cover of the album) "They hung him for me" pays homage to Kurt's idol, Leadbelly, and homage to the Nirvana cover of his 1933 song "They Hung Him On a Cross' ' featured on E-Coli. The game of hangman representing Kurt Cobain's suicidal side. During Nirvana's indefinite hiatus, he remaines absolutely private about his current status at this point (even going as far as refusing to do interviews, the start to a state of reclusiveness for Cobain) and reportedly retired from the public and the music scene briefly (for two and a half years) from 1998-2000. As the internet becomes popular in the 1990s, rumors begin spreading in 1999 that Kurt Cobain died of suicide via hanging. These rumors are debunked by Cobain's family, who update Nirvana fans on rare occasions about his life during this dark period. Cobain's mental health has once again dipped down and is close to retiring from public appearances and music all together, this time permanently in the near future. Dave Grohl joins the recently-formed Queens of the Stone Age, recording some material for the 1997 EP Kyuss/Queens. Krist Novoselic forms Sweet 75 around the same time. Everyone who at least sees Kurt Cobain for a brief moment during this timeframe grow concerned and have immediate feelings of worry flow through them, not understanding that Cobain is becoming a recluse and a shell of his former self over time, his physical appearance changing slightly. It would only get worse for Cobain by 2002.”

Life In a Flower Field

“Hello, This is a small experiment with AI, all the songs that are in this "album" are made with it. I recorded a couple of songs myself, and put the voice of Cobain. All rights to Nirvana or whatever, Dave Grohl, Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic. It was interesting for me to try playing with the neural network and see what it can do) If you liked it please like it)”

Dire

Dysmorphia

Needed Me

DeluxoVR: “This is an AI Album of 3 songs made by RUBBERTANKBOY (he/she used ai to generate music) used with vocal cords of Kurt Cobain. What is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer or a robot controlled by a computer to do tasks that are usually done by humans because they require human intelligence and discernment. This is not an official Nirvana album but an inspiration.”

Crack Babies

Spider Baby

Deeper mellower cuts here.

You Know You’re Right

AI hard at work.

Ivy League

To Boddah

Ok.

You get the idea.