I spent most of my formative years in the "City of Destiny."

My family moved to Tacoma from Iowa in the winter of 1979, when I was 9 years old. I didn't move away until the fall of 1991, when I came to Seattle to finish my undergraduate degree at the University of Washington. In the intervening years, I conducted a typically rebellious teenage life—complete with a classic-rock soundtrack (that eventually morphed into a full-blown metal affliction) and a steadily increasing affection for marijuana, Jack Daniel's, and longhaired losers with gorgeous muscle cars and no futures. My parents, thankfully, pushed me firmly out of the nest, insisting that I locate my intellectual passions, get into college, and break the hell out of my own narrow world. If they hadn't encouraged me to expand my myopic viewpoint, I'd probably have a robust meth habit and be waiting tables at some crappy diner on South Tacoma Way.

In the 15 years since coming north, the only reasons I've had for heading back to T-Town were to visit my parents, pillage thrift stores, or make a pilgrimage to Frisko Freeze, home of Washington State's finest cheeseburger. I certainly never went back to check out the local music scene. For reasons grounded in both firsthand knowledge and a snotty sense of elitism, I assumed that if something interesting was happening in Tacoma, it was already happening in Seattle or would arrive here shortly.

This all started to change late last year, when I began detecting glimmers of activity. The ground down south is far from fallow: Tacoma is churning out a diverse crop of promising bands at an impressive rate. Whether you cite the swaggering, soulful bar rock of the Fucking Eagles; the sunny, cerebral pop of the Elephants; the Anglophonic guitar sprawl of Mono in VCF; or the dirty disco punk of Paris Spleen, it's an unusually fertile time.

It's not just the working rock bands either. The five-year-old Tacoma School of the Arts (SOTA), a progressive public high school with an array of music-related programs and an overall emphasis on the performing and visual arts, is helping foster a whole new generation of talented musicians. And those students aren't waiting for graduation to start their bands: Kids as young as 15 are picking up guitars, recording albums (the school is equipped with a state-of-the-art, Pro Tools–driven studio and an impressive stash of new and vintage equipment), and booking their own shows at the school's all-ages venue, Club SOTA.

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Walking into SOTA, which opened its doors in the fall of 2001, feels like stepping into an academic institution as envisioned by punk-rock parents Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. Bulletin boards on exposed brick walls are covered with fliers for upcoming shows, dance and theater auditions, and calls for writing submissions. The students are as animated and cocksure as any typical student body, but there's a distinct absence of that agitated-yet-disaffected attitude of kids who feel trapped and bored in a traditional high school. Part of this is because they aren't—SOTA is an open campus located in the heart of downtown Tacoma—but much of it has to do with the ambiance and attitude. Teachers go by their first names, classrooms are casually configured (typically circles of chairs or, in the case of one recording class I observed, a handful of couches), and students are clearly driven more by their own ambitions than by any sense of disciplinarian threat.

"Our school is really tight-knit," says Paul Eliot, head of the performing-arts department and instructor for the songwriting class I'm observing. "In the entire five years of the school, there have been exactly two punches thrown. Philosophically, it doesn't come top-down, the teachers aren't disciplinarians; we all work really hard on maintaining community. There's a peer culture that everyone is there to learn and be creative."

That's exactly what's going on in the recording studio adjacent to Eliot's office, where senior Ben Roth is recording a couple of fellow students strumming their acoustic guitars. The students alternate between razzing Roth and each other; earnestly focusing on the pretty, downtempo pop song; and noodling on Radiohead riffs between takes. Roth, a dirty blond who could pass for the younger brother of Spoon frontman Britt Daniel, is clearly devoted to the craft of recording and studies under the professional ears of sound engineer Zach Varnell, who also operates Spectre Studios in Tacoma. "I first started taking it seriously when we upgraded [SOTA's] studio last year," Roth explains. "That's what I want to do—and I'm studying jazz guitar at Pierce College next year." He acknowledges that when it comes to all-ages shows, he prefers to go to Seattle ("the Showbox has great sound"), but is quick to point out that Tacoma is hardly dead. "There are a lot of really cool things going on if you know where to look."

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One of the best places to start looking is Rocket Records, essentially Tacoma's Sonic Boom Records (though its bare-bones layout and old-school, audiophile ambiance is more reminiscent of now-defunct Seattle stores like Fallout and Orpheum). Located on Sixth Avenue, just a couple of doors down from Hell's Kitchen, Tacoma's landmark rock venue, Rocket opened its doors in 2003 and is managed by Ash Rivera.

"We've done really well—being so close to the college [helps]; we have tons and tons of college kids buying all the Barsuk releases," says Rivera, gesturing toward the store's prominent local section. "A lot people came out of the woodwork that I didn't expect to be in Tacoma—we have an experimental music section... I moved here from Portland, where we had a big avant-garde section in the record store I worked in. I moved up here and made one, expecting myself to be the only one into it [laughs], but we had all kinds of people in here buying stuff [right away]. There were tons of people up here who wanted that." He's also eager to point out a couple of local hiphop artists, including Meatlip—a one-man, Tacoma-by-way-of-Nebraska act. "He sounds like MF Doom jamming with Wolf Eyes in a custodial closet—grinding, slow, heavy beats with a really raw sense of braggadocio over it. He's really, really strange—probably one of the most interesting local guys we have."

When our conversation turns to which local bands Rivera likes to see live, he immediately mentions the Elephants, whose posters I've been seeing all around town and who are garnering attention from the Seattle press. As far as the musical landscape in general, Rivera has seen a dramatic change in just the last few years. "There are so many more bands than there used to be. Back in '98, I worked at a record store down by Stadium High School called Nothing Major and we put out a compilation with about 12 bands on it. That was about it in terms of bands on the local scene back then. Now there are hundreds."

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Of those hundreds, some of the fastest-rising stars are members of the Elephants, an instrument-swapping, semi-psychedelic pop outfit wielding exceptional songwriting skills and a refreshing sense of playful abandon. Chatting with Jason Freet, one-third of the trio's songwriting tag team, it's clear that he loves his community but is aware that outsiders may regard their ambitions as insignificant.

"People don't move to Tacoma; people leave Tacoma, so it's up to us to get things started," he explains via phone, shortly before heading to a recording studio to play on some backing tracks for another Tacoma band, Umber Sleeping. "The resources here are really scarce, so we have to make our own mischief. [The current scene] started out in warehouses and abandoned buildings—guys would rent buildings to live in, record, and party. When this band started out, we lived in a warehouse where we practiced and had parties. Tacoma is just such a ghost town that it's easy to find flophouses and big spaces. But really, I don't recognize a huge difference [between Tacoma and Seattle]. Once you've spent time on Capitol Hill, you see that there aren't a ton of differences between the [types of musicians you encounter]. But it's so much cheaper here."

That sentiment is echoed by Jordan Luckman, bass player for Mono in VCF, an elegant and arty rock band that frequently shares bills with the Elephants. The members met while attending high school in the neighboring suburbs of Federal Way, Spanaway, and Puyallup and decided to form a band and move in together after graduation. "We really wanted to move to Seattle, but because the rent was cheaper," says Luckman, they moved to Tacoma instead. Luckman and his bandmates share an enormous, retro-chic four-bedroom house near Cheney Stadium that costs them $1,000 a month—there aren't many two-bedroom apartments that can be had for that amount of money in Seattle. In Tacoma there's enough room to house three of the band members and a home studio where they recorded their debut EP. "It's not like we came to Tacoma for artistic salvation," quips guitarist Hunter Lea, "but it's a lot easier to get by."

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It's not just young people who are putting down artistic roots in Tacoma. Music business veteran and Crocodile soundman Jim Anderson owns a house in Tacoma, and 37-year-old "Flash," a lifetime fixture on the punk-rock scene, can manage a monthly $1,070 mortgage payment for a home in Tacoma by booking shows at Hell's Kitchen.

As a founding member of the defunct scuzz-punk outfit Portrait of Poverty, Flash speaks with authority on Tacoma's burgeoning music scene. After booking shows at bars like the Swiss and the Showboat, he's now focused on building up the reputation of Hell's Kitchen as a breeding ground for local bands and of Tacoma as a relevant tour stop for national acts. "It's the war I fight every day—trying to convince agents that Tacoma and Seattle are totally different markets. What people don't realize is that we [often] get more business from outside Tacoma than inside Tacoma. Our all-ages shows draw a more suburban crowd—kids come from Puyallup, Gig Harbor, Lakewood, Sumner, and Bonney Lake."

Flash has sharp words for Seattle agents whom he feels are trying to shut Tacoma out by insisting that touring bands only play Seattle venues. "That's the thing I can't convince [Infinite Productions owner] Lori LeFavor of... she'll convince the agents to not [allow bands to] play anything within a hundred miles of Seattle. But there's a ton of suburban kids who need their punk rock—it was the same for me when I was in Puyallup at the age of 16."

Competition woes aside, Flash has been pleased by the growth spurt on the scene, particularly among the younger audiences. "It's evident that giving them a place to play helps things a lot. As our all-ages shows started getting better I saw all these 16-year-old kids coming up to me with boom-box demos, which was great. We're watching young bands really grow—there's one called Durango 95 that's built an audience and has a real following now." Refreshingly, local government has kept its interference to a minimum. "At first they really didn't like us, and we had neighbors going to city-council meetings and all that," says Flash. "I think since then we've proved that we can be good neighbors, and the city has gotten off our backs."

This may change if the scene continues to flourish, but for now Hell's Kitchen enjoys the ability to host more than a dozen all-ages shows a month, featuring popular bands such as Schoolyard Heroes, Mon Frere, the Lashes, and Kane Hodder. National touring acts are a growing presence as well: The calendar for May and June includes appearances by Agent Orange, SubArachnoid Space, and Jucifer.

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All this development is not unprecedented: Tacoma has been a critical part of Northwest music history since the '60s, when bands like the Sonics, the Ventures, and the Wailers broke ground with noisier, deconstructed approaches to the homogenous Top 40 sound saturating the airwaves. Thanks to Seattle's restrictive teen-dance ordinance in the '80s and '90s, Tacoma venues such as the Crescent Ballroom and Community World Theater hosted landmark performances by seminal bands such as Soundgarden, Green River, Malfunkshun, Melvins, and Nirvana (who held band practices in bassist Krist Noveselic's Tacoma home for a brief spell in the late '80s). When the Northwest music scene began to break nationally, bands migrated north, and the focus shifted toward Seattle. The role Tacoma had in shaping the "grunge years" was forgotten.

Bon Von Wheelie, drummer for the proudly Tacoma-based Girl Trouble, has called the city home for more than 20 years. She feels like that cycle of relevance may be turning back in Tacoma's favor. "I think it skipped a generation, but to tell you the truth, I think it's starting up again. I think things kind of got stale after the whole Nirvana-Seattle-scene thing blew up. I think there was a lull, the kids were disinterested. But now there are young bands starting all over the place—and the thing is, they aren't copying anybody, they're coming up with their own sound. And they're not afraid to dance, thankfully." Wheelie and her bandmates witnessed this new level of enthusiasm firsthand when they played the inaugural show for the city's latest all-ages venue, the Commencement Bay Coffee Company. "It reminded me of what it felt like in Olympia when that scene was really starting to get going."

Ernest A. Jasmin, pop-music critic for the News Tribune, is more cautious. "There are more bands in circulation, which is great," he says. "But I think the thing that's missing is stability. A new venue will open, take off for a while, and then close." Jasmin has a point—both all-ages and 21-plus venues have a hard time gaining a foothold in a market that is still somewhat soft. And while Hell's Kitchen has got the punk, rock, and metal crowds covered, there's a distinct lack of diversity in venues, including spaces for hiphop and the bigger venues required to attract larger touring acts. Many of the Tacoma School of the Arts students I interviewed lamented last year's loss of Club Impact (since reopened in what seems to be universally regarded as an acoustically-disastrous space) and several said they would always prefer to attend all-ages shows in Seattle at clubs like Studio Seven, the Vera Project, or El Corazón.

That said, it's heartening to see kids taking matters into their own hands with the opening of the school's own venue, Club SOTA, which will host a year-end extravaganza headlined by Don't Tell Sophie, a sophisticated pop outfit fronted by SOTA student Paul Dally on May 19. Music teacher Eliot applauds the students' initiative and drive, noting that it represents a marked shift in ambition for a typically apathetic population. "I think what's beginning to change is that there's a can-do attitude," he explains, nodding toward the kids in his classroom. "When they were 14 they didn't think they'd be recording albums. Are 50 of [my students] going to stick around and start a club? Probably not, but if three of them do, that's a start. We're part of breeding the next generation that will build the scene. There's nowhere to go but up."

The Elephants, Stuporhero, Ruston Mire, Monostereo play Fri May 12, Sunset Tavern, 5433 Ballard Ave, 784-4880, 9 pm, $6, 21+.

Mono in VCF, the Elephants, Paris Spleen, Thee Emergency play Sat May 13, Hell's Kitchen, 3829 Sixth Ave, Tacoma, 253-759-6003, 9 pm, $5, 21+.

Don't Tell Sophie and guests play Fri May 19, Club SOTA, 1118 Commerce St, Tacoma, www.tacoma.k12.wa.us/schools/hs/sota/, 7 pm, $5, all ages.