It’s a rainy Wednesday night in Issaquah. I arrive at an
average-looking house off the downtown drag and make my way around to
the side door, following my ears. The small basement, half of which is
a makeshift bedroom, is crowded with 30 or so startlingly young faces,
most in the beginning throes of high school. Someone is wailing a song
about pyramids over lo-fi homemade beats as the crowd stares in the
dark. I find the show’s organizer, Jayden Long, the 16-year-old bassist
of the band Seahouse. I explain that I’m there to write an article
about Eastside bands.
“It’s a good thing you came, then,” he says. “Because they’re all
right here.”
If the Seattle music scene was a professional sports organization,
the suburbs would be its farm team. Few historic Seattle musicians
actually grew up in Seattle: Modest Mouse came from Issaquah, Heart
from Bellevue, the Blood Brothers from around the Eastside, Kurt Cobain
and Krist Novoselic from Aberdeen. When a suburban band outgrows its
small-town, minor-league roots, it moves to Seattle and tries to make a
national name. This is the way it has been and will always be.
The first obstacle for many young bands everywhere used to be simply
finding a place to play, an unfortunate reality the Old Fire House teen
center in Redmond sought to rectify in the early 1990s. “We started the
Old Fire House because there were a ton of kids who wanted a venue to
play music, but were too young to play in bars,” says Christopher
Cullen, the Old Fire House’s program coordinator. “For a long time, the
Old Fire House and the Velvet Elvis in Seattle were really the only two
options for all-ages music.”
Throughout the ’90s, the Old Fire House was an essential venue for
both young and touring bands. It was a social arena in which aspiring
musicians could cut their teeth in front of a crowd as well as learn
from bands that had already perfected their craft. And as one of the
only all-ages venues in the region, it was home to many shows with huge
crowds.
Casey Foubert, who currently tours with indie darlings Sufjan
Stevens and Richard Swift as a multi-instrumentalist, has a musical
background tightly intertwined with the Old Fire House. He began
playing drums for the band Seldom at the Eastside teen centers in the
mid-’90s, then went on to play in Seattle acts Pedro the Lion and
Crystal Skulls. “One of the first shows I ever played was at the Fire
House,” he says. “I was probably 16 or 17, and it was a big deal to
me.”
Foubert has fond memories of seeing Washington kingpins Botch,
Undertow, and Waxwing at the Old Fire House—packed shows that
drew big crowds from both the suburbs and from the city. “Now that I’ve
been playing a lot of shows, seeing how sparse all-ages shows can be, I
remember those old shows being pretty full,” he says. “If bands were on
a regional or national tour, it would be a really big deal if they
played in Redmond. A lot of times I didn’t even know who the bands
were, I would just go to a show to be at a show.”
The Old Fire House and Bellevue’s Ground Zero proved the importance
of all-ages venues. Their success was in many ways responsible for the
founding of Seattle all-ages venues the Paradox and Vera Project. But
once several all-ages options were available around the greater Seattle
area, the number of big shows at the Old Fire House dropped.
“We’re not the only game in town anymore,” Cullen explains. “It’s
easier for bands to come to Seattle than to Redmond. The venues in
Seattle can pay more money and it’s easier for the bands to get paid
because those venues aren’t nonprofit, government organizations like we
are.
“Our mission is not to put on big shows,” he continues. “It was a
natural process moving from bigger shows to the kind we have now, where
we are simply trying to give opportunities to the bands that will be
big in three to five years. If we were just a venue, I would think
differently—but as a teen center, that’s not our priority.”
The Old Fire House still has shows every Friday, but bills now
typically comprise young, local acts. These smaller, localized shows
provide opportunities for the
teenage musicians of Redmond and its
surrounding cities, but the Old Fire House’s impact has dramatically
changed from previous years. When the Old Fire House was regularly
putting on big shows, it was a reason for people—not just
teenagers—to come to Redmond and thus be introduced to Eastside
bands. Since the focus of the shows is now primarily on teenage bands,
that draw is gone.
For a while, perhaps out of necessity, the Eastside and Seattle
scenes were inextricably linked. As it stands now, few big-name bands
from Seattle or abroad come to the Eastside, leaving its young bands to
fend for themselves. Does this affect the quality, or quantity, of the
bands coming out of an area that has historically been rife with
musical promise? Do young Eastside bands notice or care that Seattle
crowds are gone?
The basement show in Issaquah put things back into perspective. Out
of the 12 bands playing, I recognized several names from the Old Fire
House show listings—young bands that now dominate the bills at
the teen centers. They are most likely, as Cullen put it, some of “the
bands that will be big” in the years to come.
“This is my first show with a microphone” are the first words I hear
upon entering the basement. Potentially troubling, yes, but the talent
amassed in this high schooler’s mom’s house is remarkable. Thinking
back to the music my peers were making in high school, and how
incredibly bad it was even to my unrefined high-school tastes, I can’t
believe how legitimately good some of these bands are. Seahouse play
smart, subtle, catchy pop that could easily incite a dance party. Shed
are a reincarnation of the sloppy energy and songwriting of early
Modest Mouse, opting to play in the laundry area instead of in the open
room, and tumbling dangerously off their drum kit. The Last Slice of
Butter are a loud, punishing, drum-and-bass duo with strong
songwriting, though they absolutely butcher a cover of “War Pigs.”
Most surprising is Deer City, a 15-year-old armed with a
Stratocaster and an iBook, performing songs way too good to come from a
kid his age. Not only are the songs smartly crafted indie rock, but he
already sings and plays guitar like a seasoned vet. He’s Issaquah’s
young Ben Kweller. During his performance, LP of Little Party and the
Bad Business turns to me and says it perfectly: “That kid’s got a
paycheck coming.”
One can assume that any of these kids would love go the route of
Casey Foubert—play music with your friends at the teen center,
meet like-minded individuals, stick to it, and before you know it
you’re touring the world with Sufjan Stevens. (“My musical circle keeps
getting wider and wider since I’ve always been traveling down the path
of being a musician,” Foubert tells me later, “and that all started
specifically from playing shows at the Old Fire House
and Ground
Zero.”)
Jayden thanks everyone for coming to this “celebration of the
suburbs.” More than that, the makeshift show is a reaffirmation: Even
though the big shows have moved away from the Eastside, there’s still a
thriving culture of young musicians playing the teen centers and
throwing concerts in their parents’ basements for their own enjoyment.
Witnessing it firsthand only reinforces that these will in fact be the
kids five years from now who will be making waves in the Seattle scene.
Maybe sooner if they keep at it. 