When I asked "what do all those there blinky lights do?" it was as much in jest as for the answer. New to Portland in the Fall of 1987, I had wandered into the dingy club one evening to find an old guy with a greasy grey ponytail dialing in the PA with precise movements, old patterns played out in his fingers.
"Really want to know? Do you love music?" I remember Ray asking wearily. Fresh from an eviction from University of Oregon and its fledgling electronic music program, I assented. "Stick around, you won't later." Ray was a bit bitter. Maybe I was his leverage out. I don't know how long he had been trapped in Satyricon making maybe a hundred bucks a night to mix bands ranging from godawful to energetic-but-awful but by the end of the night I was his unpaid intern. My job consisted of doing everything he didn't want to do anymore and was rewarded with free beer, cocaine and spare groupies. Growing up in Seattle there had been two music scenes in the early 1980's -- the all-ages scene was relatively vibrant with a half dozen claptrap clubs hosting a rising flood of punk rock bands that pushed dented and graffiti'd bands up and down the West Coast while the over-21 scene consisted of cover bands and the occasional group getting some kind of "mainstream" attention. The remnants of the logging bust lay in doorways and nursed 40-oz beers while we ate LSD and smoked pot under the streetlights. Portland was like a step back in time but also coincided with us all turning 21 and bending the bar scene toward original music, louder guitars, howling resentment of the Reagan plastique.
I've run across some calendars from that first year at Satyricon. The black-painted, colorfully-scrawled walls hosted an amazing array of future "stars" on a weekly and monthly basis. A typical week would feature incredible lineups of local talent -- an early Dharma Bums (later signed to Frontier) with singer Jeremy Wilson as athletic frontman for a group that would go on to gain a new name and have the Number One selling album in the nation decades later or The Obituaries grinding through simplistic but primal rock while Monica Nelson opened her incredibly expressive mouth and shredded a wedding dress in her nervous fingers, standing perfectly motionless, quivering with energy. Drivin' And Cryin' on a Wednesday, the future Pearl Jam on a Thursday, Canadians on Friday and the only common thread was a commitment to something that they totally believed in. It was dark and powerful and reflected the heroin-flooded streets outside.
Portland itself was writhing. The local police targeted black businesses for racist taunts, firebombed stores that sold stolen goods and harbored Nazi sympathizers. Chasing a statuesque redhead, I found myself running with her brother's gang, SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP's) and got a glimpse of the political movement that in some way morphed into Antifa today. It was an active war that spilled into violence regularly. People carried weapons and spoke in apocalyptic terms. I could have been doing something more "productive" with my early 20's but who would have wanted to with this tableau spread before them?
I started working with local bands. The improbably named and less talented ska/party act Completely Grocery filled rooms by bouncing up and down and shouting a couple phrases over and over -- I never understood it but they were FUN and a great counterpoint to the angrier bent of the scene. People loved them. Pond moved to Portland from Alaska and found a decade of success with haunting lyrics and sensitive-yet-heavy song structures, a sort of Foo Fighters before their time. Bands like Zombie Toolshed and Galaxy Trio mined genres that weren't native to the NW but put a new spin on them. And a neo-folk scene produced alt-lesbian songwriters Doris Daze and XTC/Richard Thompson-esque act Orphans Reason or wish-we-were They Might Be Giants fans The Willies. My catholic tastes were flooded. It was heaven.
The apocryphal tale is that Kurt Cobain met Courtney Love at Satyricon on a trip to Portland one night. I didn't see Kurt in the moment but my first band, Kill Darling, had opened for Dharma Bums and I saw a friend at a table with a sharp-featured girl in a long wool coat. I fell across the table in a dramatic entrance and as she swam into focus slurred "you know you look just like Nicole Kidman!" She rolled me off onto the floor and tracked me down a week later -- her roommates boyfriend Ben knew that I was living in a band flop up by Portland State University. I moved into her room that night and we were married three months later.
Kurt Cobain re-entered the scene shortly after when Ben Munat (who was sleeping with Katie's roommate...for several months it was all four of us living in a 12x12 room) put together a show at a new club, The Blue Gallery. His first band was ready to play a show. I had talked to friends about a band and had found a guitar player but hadn't had a single full rehearsal. Another band was ready to go. Ben had a connection at a new record label in Seattle called SubPop and they had told him that they would send their star act, a nascent Guns'n'Roses looking act called Cat Butt, down to headline. At the last minute there was a drug overdose and SubPop called to tell us that they were subbing a band from Aberdeen that had never played anywhere either. The band was called Nirvana.
In a fit of marketing genius, we decided to flyer the hell out of the Navy fleet in town for the civic crown jewel, Rose Festival. We were blissfully unaware that the sailors were forbidden to leave a particular radius from the riverfront docks and of course the club was a bit past that demarcation. So the show went almost totally unadvertised, in effect, and we played to a group of 29 friends. Nirvana arrived late, loaded in through a stageside rollup door and proceeded to literally destroy the club with one of the single most amazing rock shows I have ever been privileged to witness. The peak and finale came as Cobain began hacking away at the drumkit with his guitar, eventually pushing it through the ceiling in a shower of lathe and plaster while Chris Novoselic turned and threw his bass out the rollup door where it landed in my hands like an outfielder saving the winning run. I can still picture every person in attendance and the looks of shock on their faces. This was raw electricity snapping across the beery floor. Every one of us stayed with music far longer than we might have without that cattle prod impetus.
Nirvana put themselves back in the van and drove off without asking for payment. They wouldn't have gotten anything. The next night or so they played a how in Seattle with Mudhoney and the rest is history of a sort that filled airplanes with moody kids for a decade making a pilgrims trip to Mecca.
It was a dark and stormy night as they drove away.
