I dropped by the Browne’s Addiction punk group house in Spokane to deliver some typed out record reviews to Melinda, who lived upstairs and published Spokane Sado with her cats. I’d gotten some killer promo records from the Rats and the Avengers, and she seemed both happy to receive them but wondered who the fuck …
The album that Charlie Cross drove over to my apartment with his son during the pandemic, as he was unloading his collection. It was so kind, and said so much.
Really sharp conversation between Brady Corbet (The Brutalist) about making elevated and experimental entertainment and innovative music and money (and who gets it in the arts and who doesn’t). Just wish they’d talked more about Corbet’s love for Scott Walker’s album Tilt, yum. God, Corbet was astonishing in Funny Games, I gotta see The Brutalist. …
A History of Grunge – There was a sleaze bag flophouse hotel in the 90210 zip which made the scumbag artists who lived there seem like they lived in Beverly Hills. I did errands for a dude who lived there with an old zine correspondent of mine who wrote feminist sword and sorcery fiction, and …
1.) The Black Angels, ‘Passover’: A concept album based on lyrics inspired by Star Wars. It has to do with neither Vietnam nor the psychedelia era, admitted to at a Green Room afterparty after a show at Chop Suey where I ran around trying to get a light for Hannah Levin‘s cigarette. 2.) The meaning …
The compact disc section was encroaching across the broad record store floor when I bought this from Peaches on 45th upon its release. I loved the amorphous, mordant EP (but what’s all this about whores and eyes?), and missed Surfa Rose due to unwanted attention I was getting regularly from friends of a narc shit …
My brother Joe was really kind of my father. My actual dad, who I loved dearly, had become so fucked up by Air Force speed and drowning his hatred for the officers with beer. My mom was too busy working full time and managing the Washington state CREEP campaign (Committee to ReElect the President) for …
My mother’s face was horribly mauled by a German shepherd when she was a young girl. She had several painful operations but still had many scars. This didn’t keep her from being irresistible to my Tech Sarge father, who drove up to her family’s house on Roosevelt in his white T-Bird to propose to her …
The origin of recreating myself as Big Freak. My first two girlfriends were Christy and Cindy, twin sisters but not dated with at the same time, who looked like little miniature Bowies down to androgynous haircuts and both having different colored eyes. Starting after I “stole” Christy from Thai the little tanned jock-on-a-chopper-style-bike who wondered …
Mrs. Ford saved my ass in 8th grade art class. It was the first time a salty, sophisticated older woman of authority took an interest in me, as a student or anything else, and she praised my surreal mordant doodles before the whole class. And surprisingly they didn’t even resent it, they seemed to agree …
My sister was dating an older biker named Joe Cox. She was tiny, demure, had winged white-blonde hair, with a jersey style t-shirt of her favorite local bar band The Machine, and he was all dirty denim and beer belly and scraggly beard. Joe was known for picking up some dude’s “rice burner,” lifting it …
David and I were living on Peanut Butter Breakfast bars in his Hollywood and Bronson bedsit as I mixed my album on his two-track (like Waits with Bones Howe). My title for it was Shit-Stirring Songs, based on how my music was described by an Australian writer who read my short story ‘Cogs’ (early cyberpunk) …
I lost my virginity (whatever that means) to this album. John and I had been out in the desert all day, near the potato factory, playing “The Hill” with our friends, a Vietnam-based drama I crafted like some kind of future video game. (I have been mistaken for a “dungeon master” by some and never …
People often talk about Desert Island Discs, and it always reminds me that I could probably isolate myself there with Stevie Wonder’s 70s catalogue. My two older brothers, dressed in Bicentennial necklaces above hairy chests and and red, white, and blue platforms, took me to Seattle Center on Live Music Sundays to see bands like …
I stole a whole rolled up lid of Columbian out of my brother’s bell bottoms hung up in our shared closet, after he came home from his maître d’ shift at the Hyatt House and passed out in our bedroom. Charlie and I lit out for the desert surrounding the Tri-Cities, towards the smell of …
It was like contraband, my brothers brought to the back room of the trailer. Unwrapping and unfolding its glorious three gatefold LP cover to unveil all those cool underground comix like drawings, marveling at the queer dazzle and street hassle of the lyrics. Sure, my brother and I laid side by side and listened to …
This was the first record I ever personally owned. The poster hung above my bed in our weird little space age trailer at the end of the lot in Lynnwood, where a lot of bikers lived.. Bootsy, my sister’s enormous black and white cat, would often wake me by sitting on my chest as I …
Seattle writer Chris Estey will chat with Richard Hell, a true King of Punk, live on stage Thursday, March 21, at the Rendezvous in Seattle (2322 2nd Avenue) at 7 PM as part of a show promoted by the University Bookstore. Richard Hell has a new book out called I Dreamed I Was A Very …
I bought Armed Forces by Elvis Costello for my 14th year birthday present when it came out, from the import section of Budget Tapes N Records in Kennewick, WA. I had never been as excited about an album’s packaging before studying Barney Bubbles’ work on that one, which I wasted many hours absorbing, loving the …
I always think of this song as the pop music center of the 20th century. There are those 33 1/3 books, and the one on Low did a great job of describing its importance this way. Basically what you have here is Northern European melody with rhythm and blues backbeat; synthesized, but analog; intimate haiku …
Like fighters in a boxing match, raucous Seattle music writer Chris Estey goes ‘toe to toe’ with cagey music maverick Calvin Johnson about beards and other mysteries of life in the new film, Have You Ever Had a Beard? A study in contrasts, this film compares the lyric heavy songwriting of Calvin Johnson to the …
Morphine does for me what bands like The Smiths or The Cure do for so many others. They don’t have nearly the back catalogue, but Mark’s voice / lyrics /instrumentation combined are like several years of my life squeezed into sound. – Chris Estey is a renowned Seattle music writer.
. Scot-king songwriter, dark-hearted minstrel, troubled and temper-torn troubadour, bitter balladeer extraordinaire, roiling ace back alley jig picker Richard Thompson. I love this king of all the sad bastards with the golden hands, his records ooze delight and despair in the most organic and ornery of ways. Plays like the devil and knows all his …