Playin' in a Rock and Roll Band
Read about my off and on history of playing bass in rock bands (which included opening for Nirvana and recording with Steve Albini).
I first started learning the electric bass in middle school in Stage Band. I didn’t take to reading music that well and struggled for the couple years that I did it. I didn’t continue while I was in high school, instead wasting my time on piano lessons. Same problem: I struggled to keep up with reading the notes on the page and therefore never really grasped the feel of the instrument.
I gave up for a while, but when a friend at Hampshire College offered to sell me his terrible, piece-of-crap bass (spray-painted silver!), I figured I would give it another shot. There were a few jams and a brief, probably embarrassing talent show appearance, but still the bass skills would not jell.
Finally Finding My Groove: Grind and Thrillhammer
After dropping out of Hampshire and moving to Portland, I started to meet some folks in the blossoming indie/punk scene (something that was absolutely new to me). I managed to get a band called Grind together with some friends. Lo and behold, once I could make my own sounds and do it with people who provided a good framework to play against, this bass thing started to make sense.
Grind played for a year or two (managing to open for an unknown band called Nirvana along the way), the three of us playing instruments started wondering if the singer was holding us back. He was my first best friend in Portland and I felt really terrible about wanting to ditch him, but we had to admit that Pete, the guitar player, was a better singer.
We did the totally immature thing and told the singer, Josh, that we were breaking up. Then we surreptitiously got another practice space, wrote all new material and started playing shows under another name: Thrillhammer. Like Josh wouldn’t figure it out soon enough. On the other hand, at least we didn’t just kick him out and keep using the songs we’d all written together. Bands have done worse.
Thrillhammer did pretty well for itself. We played some great shows with some awesome bands of the time (including Nirvana…again, plus Steel Pole Bathtub, Melvins, Flipper, Urge Overkill, etc) and managed to work our way up to headlining at Satyricon, the cool local club that I would later wind up booking. We played outside Portland a few times (Seattle, Olympia, Eugene) and also managed to do one self-booked (i.e. I booked it myself) tour down the West Coast, which alas, brought about our breakup. We also recorded an album with the legendary Steve Albini at the controls! More on that in a bit.
The drummer, David Triebwasser, went on to be in Pond, and the guitar player, Pete Krebs went on to be in Hazel, Golden Delicious, Stolen Sweets, and others, as well as having a strong solo career. As of this writing, he’s still cranking away, playing multiple shows a week. Pond and Hazel both signed to Sub Pop and got plenty of attention.
More Rock Travails: Rotor
After Thrillhammer broke up, I started the band Rotor – with Ken Adams, who had been kicked out of Pond to make way for David, and Dale Moerer, formerly of the Oily Bloodmen. We played for a couple years, did some recordings (now mostly lost forever) and broke up when Ken moved to Atlanta. Probably about ten people on the planet remember this band but it was fun while it lasted.
Ken was amenable to whatever Dale and I wanted to do. I really wanted to make noise rock in the vein of Unsane, Helmet, Tad, etc. Dale was onboard with that. (He even got us to cover an Einsturzene Neubaten song at one point.) He came up with the name (picked because it was a palindrome) and he also suggested that we detune the top two strings by a full tone. This made the bass strings D, G, D, G. Heavy on the fourths!
I had used the money Salvation Army had to give me for kicking me out of the Thrillhammer house (it was torn down to make an old folks home) to buy my dream bass rig: a Hartke HA7000 biamped bass head (350 watts per channel!) and two Mesa Boogie road-ready cabs; a 4x10 and a 2x15. I also had a Real Tube preamp (the Blue Tube was lame) and a multieffects unit in a road rack. I would put the rack on top of the 2x15 and then flip the 4x10 (they were on wheels) on top of that. It was taller than me!
I will say that we were definitely a loud band. Alas neither Dale nor I were the best singers. A mutual friend of mine and Dale’s told us we sounded good but that neither Dale nor I were very good on vox and suggested we get a frontman. Dale and I both wanted to write lyrics and sing them though. I’ve often wondered if we would have done better if we had just gotten a lead singer.
We played a bunch in Portland as well as shows in Eugene, Olympia, and Seattle, opening for Jesus Lizard, Supersuckers, Flipper, Unsane, Pain Teens, Cop Shoot Cop, Steel Pole Bathtub, etc. We agreed to record a few songs for a fledgling Portland label started by an LA record exec who had moved to Portland when word got around that it was gonna be the next Seattle. He took us into Musicraft, a 24-track studio south of Portland. He insisted on producing and I chafed a bit at his attempts to make us glossy. I wanted to be raw and noisy. It was still good though.
A while later (memory is failing me) the band went into Smegma Studios in Portland (run by Mike Lastra of legendary avant noise band Smegma) and I insisted on calling the shots. Heh.
I have since lost my only tape of the Musicraft session but I was able to get 2-minute edits of a couple of the tracks from the label dude via Facebook once that became a thing. I gotta say they sound fantastic! It is sad that they fade out just as the songs are really getting going. In retrospect, they are probably more broadly appealing than the Smegma recordings.
I did managed to turn up a couple cassettes over the years. One is a 4-track demo recorded in our basement practice space and the other is the Smega session, albeit duped from a 30-year-old cassette tape. You can check these out on Soundcloud here
There is also a live recording of us at the legendary X-Ray Cafe that local documentarian Dean Fletcher recorded. I have wav files of “flat mixes” (all 8 tracks at the same level). I’ve been meaning to get the multitrack tapes for those and mix/master them myself for years now. One… of… these… days.
And ya know what? My memory has long since deteriorated and I couldn’t remember exactly when we started playing out and when we broke up. I know Ken told us he was moving as we were loading out of Smegma Studios. I thought maybe that was 1994. But looking over the Satyricon Calendars I see the first appearance of Rotor in October 1992 and nothing after September 1993. So I think it was actually Fall of 93 that we broke up. We only played out for a year! Considering all those bands we played with, not too shabby.
A Long Break, Then More Rock: Down Gown
After Rotor broke up, I’d about had it with all the struggles of getting somewhere with a rock band. Plus, I was now booking the Satyricon as well as working as music editor for the local arts paper, PDXS. I’d had my fill of playing. Sold all my gear and switched sides. Over the rest of the 90s I booked bands, mixed bands live and in the studio and wrote about bands. I got to see and hear a lot of great music, even if I wasn’t playing it.
I couldn’t stay away forever though. In late 2012, at the memorial for Sean Roberts (bass/vox in Portland’s awesome 30.06), former 30.06-guitar-player Dave Blunk and I started talking about how we missed rocking out. That conversation led to the forming of Down Gown, which played its first show on my 49th birthday in 2014. For our first anniversary show, February 25th 2015, I put together a show at Star Theater with Last Regiment of Syncopated Drummers (which I was playing in at the time), Down Gown, The Pynnacles, and a reunion show from seminal Portland 90s noise rockers Gern Blanton. That was a blast.
We had a fun few years, playing some fun shows and putting out an album on Cavity Search Records, plus a split seven inch. But that also fell apart in 2018. You can check out Down Gown’s music on Bandcamp. I still have my bass gear but I really don’t see myself ever playing in a band again.
Recording with Steve Albini
I suppose a few people still remember Thrillhammer, or so I’ve been told, but the band is still a minor footnote in Portland rock history. We were officially dead before we even recorded with Albini in April of 1992. The ensuing five or six years brought the Portland music scene international recognition; besides Pond and Hazel, Portland during this era produced Heatmiser, Elliot Smith, Everclear, The Dandy Warhols, and others.
You may wonder how (or why) we managed to record an album when we weren’t even a band any more. We had actually broken up on our ill-fated West Coast tour in May of 1991. But when we got home, we heard from Mike Morasky, our friend in Steel Pole Bathtub (who worked for Boner Records), that he had vouched for us with the newly formed German branch of Rough Trade records.
To make a long story short, we strung Mike and Rough Trade along for almost a year to get this record made. Make no mistake, this was a very shitty thing to do. I have apologized to Mike; and Rough Trade guys, if you’re out there, I am very sorry that we lied to you. I plead youthful stupidity and greed, but really there’s no excuse.
I suppose we did it because we wanted a document of what we had done. I seem to remember that I pushed the hardest for it. Maybe I knew deep down that I, as opposed to my band mates, would never achieve this level of musical notoriety again.
Anyway, various people over the years have expressed surprise that a little known band from Portland managed to record with Albini. Don’t be. He’s a whore. (Sorry Steve, I just can’t ever stop with the Big Black references.) Er, I mean, it’s what he does – or sadly now did – for a living. He didn’t select who he would record; he would accept pretty much any job as long as he was paid.
And back then, he was pretty damn cheap. At least for an indie band, he only wanted $150/day plus travel. I never heard the details of exactly how badly he screwed major labels. Ironically, that was actually screwing the band, since the recording fees came out of the advance. This is actually the band’s money since it is generally fully recoupable out of royalties. But I suppose he didn’t have much sympathy for a band that signed with a major anyway.
The album was recorded in a few days at Dogfish Studios in Newberg, OR (which tragically burned down a few years later). We slept in the studio and got on each other’s nerves. (Well, I remember for sure that I got on Albini’s nerves.) I think we probably needed a bit more direction. Albini has always insisted that he’s not a producer, but is just an engineer…a sonic documentarian, as it were. (Note that the title of this site, “Commence the Rocking” is also an Albini quote. That’s what he said to us through the talkback mic every time the tape was rolling and he was ready for us to start playing.)
So, the result – called Giftless – has some warts. But to this day, when I listen to it, it gets in my head. I suppose this is true of any artist; you can’t ever divorce yourself from your creation. It’s a part of you. I don’t think it’s a masterpiece, or anything like that. But it has its moments, and, well, it’s part of my life.
In the spring of 2012, Portland’s Cavity Search Records re-released Giftless digitally for its 20th Anniversary. So you can find it on your favorite music site like iTunes or Google Play thanks to them. I also uploaded the album to Bandcamp.
Or, if you just want a taste, here are the first couple songs on the album for your listening pleasure:
- Pretty Dead Girl - (2:29 - 26.2 MB)
- Suffocation Time - (3:43 - 39.4 MB)
