At the corner of Broad and Thomas Streets in Seattle, the average music-consuming passerby will find two choices for immediate entertainment.
To the north is the famous Experience Music Project, a monument to rock music on par with anything else the world has to offer. Its bizarro-futuristic, Frank Gehry-designed exterior opens across the postcard-famous Seattle Center Monorail, and its exhibits house some of the most iconic artifacts in rock history: Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein Kramer guitars, Jimi Hendrix’ hand-written lyric sheets, and Angus Young’s stage-worn schoolboy outfits.
To the south is The Funhouse, a bar with a severed clown head keeping watch from the roof, its inside quite small and very loud, every inch of the place blasting all varieties of punk into the wee hours. From the stage in the back, the Funhouse has for decades offered safe haven for groups like Gas Huffer and Steaming Wolf Penis — groups whose legacy may not be as monumental as of those enshrined in the EMP, but whose stature, for an evening, may have been just as enormous.
Beyond geography the two have nothing in common — EMP is also home to the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, the world’s premier collection of sci-fi memorabilia and tributes to luminaries of the craft; the Funhouse is home to punk, booze, and not much else — yet both represent equally important of facets their home city’s musical vitality and, for all intents and purposes, the two in their diametrically opposed tandem symbolically illustrate the city’s musical history as well.
A lot of people don’t know this, but Hendrix was born and raised in Seattle. He had to leave town to realize his dreams, and his fame and legacy are more commonly (and logically equated) with England, but all told he remains the most famous Seattle musician of all time, even though 99 of 100 people would never refer to him as such. A lot of people also know Heart, who earned respect as a folk-influenced hard rock band in the 1970s but never found earth-shaking success until their transformation into 1980s sex mavens. They, like Hendrix, went along with some huge career shifts and for them it paid off, although in considerably different fashion; where Hendrix’ move was more practical, the choices of sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson brought huge commercial dividends but ultimately became short-lived, as the pair returned to their hard rock and folk rock roots after 1993‘s mostly forgettable Desire Walks On.
Of course no discussion of Seattle music is complete without at least touching on the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, when flannel-clad lumberjacks invented alt-rock...well, actually, the real story is a lot more complicated and a lot less glamorous than that. The bands that made it big at the time — Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains most prominently—were more commonly byproducts of other, lesser-known local bands but as is typical of Seattle, even those bands were always pointing to someone else as their superior: Nirvana to Soundgarden, Kurt Cobain famously and repeatedly photographed wearing that band’s t-shirts; Pearl Jam to Screaming Trees; Screaming Trees to Alice in Chains, Mark Lanegan calling the latter “the best band at making music, ever”; all of the above to Polygram glam darlings Mother Love Bone, who The A.V. Club famously described as the "legendary precursor to Pearl Jam with so much cred that nobody noticed how much they sucked."
The specifics may be personal but the sentiment holds: for most Seattle bands of the day, perception and memory eventually won out over actual musical output. People remember Nirvana as torch-bearing punks, but really they just wanted to be the love child of R.E.M. and The Pixies; Pearl Jam’s legacy may be one of flannel and small club riffs, when in reality their debts were less to Black Flag and more contextually (and often quite blatantly) to The Who.
Ask a Seattleite about any of this and you’re likely to have the following conversation:
Non-Seattleite: So do people here actually still listen to any of those 90s bands?
Seattleite: [scoffs] No.
Non-Seattleite: Is it because they were too popular here?
Seattleite: What kind of question is that? How popular can you be in a city of 500,000?
Non-Seattleite: So people do still listen to those bands?
Seattleite: Yes, of course we do. Didn’t you hear what I said before?
Not rudely, of course; just ironically and, outside of barstool chit-chat, this pervasive sense of running irony and educated sarcasm is nowhere more fully-developed than in Seattle metal: the area’s two biggest metal bands, Bellevue-raised Queensrÿche and Olympia-spawned Wolves in the Throne Room, show active resistance to being labeled metal and sing not of demons and death but of politics and the environment, respectively, although Wolves in the Throne Room tend to dabble in the mystic when need be — which should normally be the province of a prog-leaning outfit like Queensrÿche, except the Seattle in Queensrÿche forbids them from such obvious, expected fare.
One could normally chalk this up to the general weirdness and self-aware eccentricities of metal groups, except no other city in the world produces metal bands with social agendas as varied as their sonic possibilities; the end result is less one of adventure and more one of distance and informed eccentricity - not so much any one scene but actually several groups going it alone, together. Queensrÿche's mid-song rants about law enforcement spending and Wolves in the Throne Room's irreconcilable worlds might be more famous examples, but the city has created a metalverse where 2 Headed Chang will chug their way through "Fuck Your Core" alongside the aspiring power metal of Universal Measure and Maiden-esque dragon-slaying of Fused; the metal in them says they should scorch the earth, but the Seattle within says to replant the trees when they're done.
Or take the monstrous art-rap/punk of Wild Orchid Children: one could hear such experimental work (and the subtle dig at pop queen Fergie's old group) and marvel how Seattle's punk scene sure sounds fresh, but that person would then have to learn the sheer volume of bands and fairly limited number of venues thins out the herd, turning 7 Year Old Blind Girl, Potty Mouth Society, Poverty Bay Saints et al into something more closely resembling a syndicate (the first two of those coincidentally not just interdependent but actually interlinked by virtue of having Endo Cock on drums).
But it's not just the usual fringe genres struggling for identity, as even the city's pop royalty finds itself walking the line: on one hand you have Modest Mouse, who are weird and mostly respected, and the other you have Death Cab for Cutie, who are talented and just kind of liked. Both wield significance (for different reasons) and both continue to find new types of relevance (of different sorts) — not unlike those two venues staring at each other across Broad Street.
The Experience Music Project both begins and ends in a large, open room called the Sky Church, where lights dance up the rafters and a mammoth video screen measuring 40 feet by 70 feet. Displays vary between archival concert video and classic albums, but and most visitors tend to take a few seconds’ notice and move on. The exception to this, without fail, happens when film of Hendrix’ Woodstock performance lights up the wall. Visitors, in awe, find themselves drawn in and hanging onto every bend and wail of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Hendrix’s dive-bombs and one-man apocalypse painting the room with the kind of audio myriad only he could create.
But that’s only natural. As he proved elsewhere first a good forty years ago, in the world, as in Seattle, everyone stops for Jimi.
Image from Bjørn Giesenbauer on Flickr.
