10 Pacific Northwest Records Heatmiser Think Every Music Fan Should Own
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The post 10 Pacific Northwest Records Heatmiser Think Every Music Fan Should Own appeared first on Consequence.
Crate Digging is a recurring feature that takes a deep dive into music history to turn up several albums all music fans should know. In this edition, Neil Gust and Brandt Peterson of Heatmiser share 10 essential albums from the Pacific Northwest.
For decades, the Pacific Northwest has been a hotbed for indie rock, punk, and all things alternative — and it extends far beyond the so-called “grunge explosion.” From foundational rebels like Greg Sage and his band Wipers to the melancholic beauty of Elliott Smith, something about the majestic but gloomy atmosphere of the area breeds astounding, deeply moving art.
Smith, in particular, stands as shining example of the Pacific Northwest’s artistic community. Before his solo career took him to places like the Academy Awards, he was deeply intwined in the local scene, fronting the punky, folky, indie rock outfit Heatmiser.
Rounded out by members Neil Gust, Brandt Peterson, and Tony Lash, Heatmiser was Pacific Northwest through-and-through. Their sound was a cloudy, left-field take on early ’90s indie rock, they collaborated and toured with figureheads of the community, and they boasted members who previously had stints in other now-legendary bands from the scene.
The last time fans heard from Heatmiser was Mic City Sons, their 1996 swan song. Fortunately, the band has a new, extensive compilation of rarities, demos, and live cuts on the horizon. The Music of Heatmiser arrives in full tomorrow (Friday, October 6th) via Third Man Records, offering a further look into story of the underground heroes.
So, who better to provide a listening guide for the Pacific Northwest than Heatmiser’s Gust and Peterson? We connected with the two musicians to chat about 10 of the most essential albums, complete with stories of old friends, community building, and buying groceries with stolen credit cards.
“Obviously, we could have come up with a hundred records we love,” Peterson tells Consequence. “But we were not only thinking about records we love, but records that maybe aren’t on everyone’s radar if you’re not in the Pacific Northwest, [albums from] the Portland music scene that we wound up inhabiting and to the Pacific Northwest more generally.”
Check out Gusts and Peterson’s full deep dive into the crates of the Pacific Northwest music scene below.
Wipers — Is This Real?
Peterson: I think this is at the top of most for anyone interested in Pacific Northwest punk, guitar rock, new wave, etc. It certainly should be. I’d moved to Portland from Denver the summer before eighth grade and wound up hanging around downtown a lot after school, waiting for my mom to finish work so I could ride home with her. I listened to radio rock and started getting drawn to punk somewhere in there. In ninth grade I heard Is This Real?, and it simply changed everything. They were from my town! I bought my copy at Park Avenue Records (record store and also label for this record), along with a 7” (“Better off Dead” b/w “Up In Flames and Does It Hurt?”). The music is raw and urgent. The lyrics are sharp jabs to the body from a small town Oregon kid railing against smothering norms. The musicianship is brilliant — listen to the transition from the solo to the break down in “Up Front.”
Gust: I think I found out about this record from you. I loved it because I found out Greg Sage was gay, and that meant a lot to me, and the record just rocks. It’s super, super good, and I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of it. And I love the record cover.
Neo Boys — Neo Boys
Peterson: Most under-recognized band in the Pacific Northwest? Maybe not now, but for many years, absolutely. I bought their self-titled 7” at the same Park Avenue records at about the same time as the Wipers stuff. You can hear them now on a compilation K [Records] put out 10 years ago, but before that, it was a couple of 7”s. They were important for a lot of reasons, maybe most obviously because it was all women. If Greg Sage was a cornered fighter lashing out at oppressive conventions, the Neo Boys were giving it all the finger over their shoulders while they casually set off to make their own place. I got to know Pat Baum, the drummer from Neo Boys, pretty well when I was in high school, after Neo Boys broke up. Pat was effortlessly cool — no leather jackets or funny hair, just always on the scene, taking pictures, supporting bands, organizing events. She had a radio show on KBOO called “The Autonomy Hour,” and I would tape it to hear about new music.
Looking back, it’s clear that the Wipers and the Neo Boys were making community as a refuge, building the social and aesthetic infrastructure that later bands, artists, and misfits would be drawn to. Like, at those early shows when I was in high school, I remember seeing GBH at some tiny club. That’s where I met Sean Croghan, who would go on to be in Crackerbash and played in the DEVO band with Elliot, and who is also still making art and music in town today.
I read an interview with Neo Boys, and one of the women in the band was an out lesbian in her teens in Kansas in the mid ’70s and moved to Portland just to get the hell away from that. I think that that is kind of emblematic of what was really important in these scenes.
Napalm Beach — Rock ‘n’ Roll Hell
Peterson: I played this endlessly early in high school. Hadn’t listened to it for years, but found it online the other day and I still know every word. Rainy-noir-surf-rock and more Northwest-y angst, but Chris [Newman] was a lyrical storyteller and Sam Henry’s drumming is subtle and conversational, unlike a lot of punk drumming.
“Summertime Again” is a perfect guitar rock song — its lyrics sparse yet beautifully cinematic. I listen to the tune and I feel like in my head like I’ve watched a movie, and it’s a perfect movie about how people in Portland, at least disaffected kids who got into punk rock in the very early ’80s, would live through this shitty endless winter and be really excited about summer but still being moody. Like, it would still be raining all summer.
Chris and Sam both died in the last couple of years, each from cancer. After Napalm Beach, Chris formed Snow Bud and the Flower People, whose first record [I believe] was one of Elliott’s favorites.
Gust: I remember Elliott came back to college after a summer away with the Snow Bud cassette, and he thought it was really funny because all of the songs are about smoking pot. Hampshire College was definitely a pothead place. We weren’t really like that, you know, just not a lot. But what he really loved about it was the guitar playing. I remember him sitting in his room playing along with the cassette trying to learn how to play like that because that guy is incredible.
Smegma — Glamour Girl 1941
Peterson: Experimental noise legends. Along with Neoboys and The Wipers, I think Smegma helped build the scene, and certainly blew out the boundaries, even if very few people we were playing music with in the early ’90s would cite them as a musical influence. They moved from LA to Portland and really brought something new. They supported more conventional bands, which was certainly any other band in the Pacific Northwest, playing shows with them and helping to shape the arts and music counterculture community.
They had a disabled member, Amy (aka Amazon Bambi), rare enough today. Another member, Mike Lastra, has been an influential and visionary recording engineer and producer in Portland for ages, and I think he deserves an enormous amount of respect from all of us for that. Amy and Mike still perform today in an ensemble called Dr. Amazon, although Amy contends with serious health problems. My best friend from eighth grade also plays in Dr. Amazon. Mike has some very cool stuff up on YouTube, including an interview with Eric Dolphy’s parents.
Poison Idea — Feel the Darkness
Peterson: Incredible musicianship; the loudest, drunkest, punkest, most relentless, dark, hilarious, and rocking fuck-the-world in Pacific Northwest music history. A group of gigantic men, except for little Charlie [Nims] on bass, each of them a sweetheart when it counted. Tony Lash from Heatmiser plays piano on one tune on that record.
Side story — I remember sitting in Tom Pig’s living room in high school, which was long before this record came out. The only furniture was a shitty couch and a recliner in the middle of the room — the perimeter was lined with 2’ deep stacks of LPs. Tom sat in the recliner with an enormous bottle of whiskey all night as the party moved through the house. I was simultaneously awestruck and scared straight. Jerry’s a crooner now. He has a lovely voice.
Gust: Slayer, Steve Hanford, was the drummer in Poison Idea for Feel the Darkness, and he ended up producing the first two Heatmiser records. Tony recruited him after working with him. He was like, “He’s amazing, but I have no idea if you guys are going to like him.” But he was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. He would take the piss out of you so fast. He was a sweetheart. He was also sketchy. Unfortunately, he’s no longer with us. He’s got a long, colorful story, but he was also someone who I really loved.
Peterson: I think every single person, every one of the four of us in Heatmiser, had a different relationship [with Steve]. Tony was close to Steve from way back, but for [Neil] and me and Elliot, I think we all had sort of different relationships with him, but still loved him.
Gust: The last time that I saw him, I was shopping for groceries, and then suddenly there’s Slayer, and I’m like, “Oh my god.” And he’s like, “Let me buy your groceries.” And he fucking buys my groceries with a stolen credit card. Like, he’s got this Discover card and he flips it over and he just kind of signs it and the poor girl at the cashier is just like, “This is so obvious.” And I was just got the fuck out of Fred Meyer as fast as I could. But that’s the kind of guy he was: he’ll buy your groceries with a stolen credit card.
Oily Bloodmen — Old Men Have to Talk Tough
Peterson: There has never been a re-release of this. I asked someone in the band if he had a digital copy of it. They said, “No, but I could make one. I think I have a cassette at my mom’s house.” What [that] means is that there is no recording of it. No one has master tapes; it’s just this cassette.
A deceptively (I mean this seriously) normal looking bunch, Oily Bloodmen were a great hardcore band in the PI tradition. It was a short-lived band, with some tragically short-lived members, and maybe it’s worth mentioning here that, starting at the end of the 1970s, Portland had a serious heroin thing going on, and that left a mark on the music scene of the day. The lineup on this cassette includes Charlie Nims, who would gain fame as bassist Myrtle Tickner in Poison Idea, and John McEntire, later of Tortoise and The Sea and Cake, on drums. John moved back to Portland a few years ago, and we’ve both seen Charlie walking on the same stretch of SE Belmont Street. If you have Charlie’s number, please pass it on. I’d love to catch up.
Spinanes — Rummy/Hawaiian Baby
Peterson: I knew Rebecca [Gates] as a high school friend of my sister, and Scott [Plouf] as the younger brother of Steve, who was drumming with the Wipers in the early ’90s. They were both kind of quiet and seemed self-contained, and perhaps a bit on the periphery of what I thought was the music scene. Suddenly, there’s The Spinanes and the center kind of shifted. They gave us this sweet, wonderful, quiet music with a guitar-drums duo that was completely unlike all the boy-rock in Portland. The music is just so good, and so independent of genre handrails the rest of us used, and beyond Portland provincialism from the very start. This and the second 7” were mixed with Mike Lastra at Semgma Studios, which I think is emblematic of something very special about Portland’s music community at the time. This music never sounds dated to me.
Gust: It’s funny you say quiet. I don’t remember it being quiet at all. I remember it rocking really hard. And the fact that it was just two people was so weird at the time. This is before The Kills; I’d ever seen that before. And, like Brant said, it really did shift what was happening in Portland.
Calamity Jane — Martha Jane Cannary
Peterson: There are a bunch of bands called Calamity Jane, but there’s really only one Calamity Jane, and that’s Portland’s Calamity Jane.
Gust: Calamity Jane was started by Gilly Hanner. She went to school with Kathleen Hannah and started a band that Kathleen Hannah was like, that’s what I want to do. So, Calamity Jane is Riot Grrrl ground zero. They were primal and ferocious, fierce as fuck and all women. I saw them open for Swervedriver and they scared the fuck out of me. I ended up playing with Gilly in my second band, No. 2, after Heatmiser.
But that’s a legendary record. That should be in everybody’s collection.
Peterson: Did I say Poison Idea was the punkest band around? My mistake.
Yeah, it is an amazing record. I think it’s also worth mentioning that Gilly was really important to the connections. She was part of that network of rhizomes or roots that kept everybody together. She was just cool, and is today still cool as shit.
Treepeople — Just Kidding
Peterson: However overlooked, isolated, or left out we felt in Portland is nothing compared to being from Boise. By the time this record came out in 1992, Treepeople really owned their sound, channeling Minutemen influences and British pop-punk vibes into a fuzzy, psychedelic, very Pacific Northwest sound. The guitar sound on this record is just lovely, shaping tunes that were like clean, precise, sharp-lined modernist buildings taken over by feral cats. Doug Martsch has continued to make great music with Built to Spill. The Treepeople stuff absolutely merits revisiting.
The Gits — Frenching the Bully
Peterson: The Gits were one of lots of great bands in an early ‘90s Seattle music scene that could never be contained with the odious term “grunge.” They were disaffected graduates of a small liberal arts college; they were steeped in classic rock; they were riotously funny (I hope there’s video of Joe Spleen on stage somewhere); they were punk as fuck; and they were really kind. This is a great record, and for me it’s a time machine as powerful as that first Wipers record. A lot of music I listened to endlessly 30 years ago sounds dated to me today; this one doesn’t, in large part because the lyrics are so strong.
Gust: The song “Second Skin” is a total classic. It’s timeless and ferocious. Unfortunately, the story of The Gits is so deeply entwined with what happened to Mia [Zapata].
Peterson: Heatmiser were in Boise when we learned of Mia’s death, which, for a lot of people in Portland and Seattle, marked the end of the fun era in Pacific Northwest music more sharply than the descent of the major label vampires, and certainly more horribly than anything else.
Gust: It’s also kind of part of the Pacific Northwest darkness. It’s in all these other bands. You lose them to heroin addiction or they just kind of fall off the edge. You know, the clouds blot out the sun. So, there’s a vibe to a lot of these really deep picks that have a current running through them that’s just characteristic of the Pacific Northwest. I don’t want to say I love it, because I don’t. It scares me. The darkness and the drug addiction is really something I don’t want to celebrate or whatever, but it did make some fucking cool art.
Brandt: And just to clarify, drug addiction had nothing to do with The Gits. Mia was murdered by a random person. It was many, many years before DNA located her murderer. She left a bar and was killed by someone who — I don’t know if it would be counted as a serial killer — but it had a lot more to do with misogyny.
Listen to this record to celebrate Mia and The Gits, loud rock and beer with friends in a grimy club while it rains outside.
10 Pacific Northwest Records Heatmiser Think Every Music Fan Should Own
Jonah Krueger
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