Oddfellows Local

One night in Seattle 1993 echoes down the years

DIY shows require cheap rent and all ages spaces. Naturally Oddfellows Halls, Elks Clubs, Eagles Halls, VFW ballrooms and community centers have always been natural choices. The bands play, the makeshift PA squawks, kids (us at the time) stand around with their hands in their pockets or maybe they mosh or dance. $5 at the door. What made this night of Feb 20, 1993 unique is that every one of the bands on the bill became important in my life and some of the musicians are dear friends of mine to this day. That doesn’t usually happen. At most multi-band gigs the various players respectfully move around each other. You hope the transitions go smoothly. Sometimes people are standoffish or sometimes the other bands are super warm. Rarely do you stay in touch unless you end up sharing a full tour or broader social connections over time.

Something else important about the 90s indie music world was that despite some very hard lines being drawn about what was cool or not cool, many bills were genre agnostic. It was common to have a hiphop act, a hardcore band, and a folksinger on a show. That seems rarer nowadays at least in the usa where things are pretty siloed. This night at the Oddfellows Hall in Seattle was an example of this as none of these acts sounded remotely like each other. There was the songwriter (me), Tattle Tale with acoustic guitars and cello, the distorted and funked up guitar fury of Rain Like the Sound of Trains, the emo-core of Sunny Day Real Estate, and the tribal industrial onslaught of ¡Tchkung!

Oddfellows Hall, Capitol Hill Seattle

MY SET
That afternoon, I had an operation to get my wisdom teeth removed. My friend Jordan picked me up at the dentist. The sedation they gave me made me a loopy mess for hours after including soundcheck. At the show I was pretty out of it but somehow managed to sing (or scream and beat up my guitar which was a lot of what I was up to at the time). I was initially going to play with a band I was in called Butter but we called it quits after a few Olympia house parties and I played the set solo. The only poster I have lists Butter and is missing a good few of the acts. I know there was an updated one but I don’t have it. Maybe it was the nitrous oxide the dentist gave me that put me in another place, but my own set tapped into a well of energy I had never quite reached before. It was a place I would access continually in the years ahead.

TATTLE TALE - see my last Substack ‘Sewing Truth’ all about them.

RAIN LIKE THE SOUND OF TRAINS
The one out of town band (from Washington DC), this crew had Pete Chramiec from hardcore band Verbal Assault on vocals/guitar and Soulside’s singer Bobby Sullivan on vocals and percussion. RLT/SOT were political as hell - funky the way Fugazi were and very Joe Strummer inspired so of course I loved it. Their DC adapted version of The Clash’s ‘Washington Bullets’ is one of my favorite covers. Pete ended up moving to Olympia not long afterwards has been a great pal of mine ever since.

SUNNY DAY REAL ESTATE
They had just changed their name from Thief Steal Me a Peach to the the far superior Sunny Day Real Estate (a truly great band name). They would become wildly popular after the first record ‘Diary’ came out on SubPop not long after. It’s one of those perfect albums that lives in my DNA. I opened for them one other time at the OK Hotel and by then they were packing out clubs and appearing on tv. The following year there was also a pretty sublime show in the University District house a few of SDRE band members lived in - an evening of all quiet songs with their singer Jeremy Enigk, the sublime Brad/Pidgeonhead singer Shawn Smith and myself each doing sets. Sunny Day broke up after two records then reformed and are currently active. The rhythm section ended up joining the first incarnation of Foo Fighters and bassist Nate Mendel is still in that band.

¡TCHKUNG! played last because to follow the chaos and fury they conjured was pretty much impossible. I ended up opening for them many other times up and down the I-5 corridor - WOW Hall in Eugene, Capitol Theater in Olympia and at least one show deep in the woods. Here’s how they are described on their Bandcamp page - “¡TchKung! was a music, performance and agit-prop direct action collective (1993-1998). Their live concerts featured were as assault of drums, bass, electronic samples & noise effects, a violin, and vocalists performing to a dim flicker of torches while all manner of chaos erupted in the audience.” That description only partly captures the utter mayhem of a ¡Tchkung! gig. Much of that would evolve later and this set I recall being more of a music set by their standards without much pyrotechnics. Soon afterwards their shows would become full-on communal performance events. There was so much fire. They would bring out a chainsaw on stage. One of the bandmembers would wear a welders mask and metal chest plate and other would press the chainsaw against the plate to create a shower of sparks. This didn’t happen at Oddfellows either, but it soon became a tradition at the end of their shows where percussion instruments were handed out to the crowds who would march out into the streets of whatever town they were in and take it over. Fire Departments tracked their tourdates!

It was one night of music out of countless ones but this Oddfellows show was a watershed night for me. Hope you enjoyed this one. More soon…