Moving to the Pacific Northwest from Honolulu in 1984, the first thing I wanted to know about was the music scene. I knew Jimi Hendrix and Heart called Seattle home, I think I was aware of Queensryche back then with their EMI EP, did Rail already win the MTV Basement Tapes? Anyway, on my first visit to Seattle I went to Tower Records and discovered a magazine called The Rocket. Lots of bands and nightclubs, and many reviews, mostly local music. Two labels that were selling new music with ads in the magazine was Popllama and Green Monkey. I know I at least obtained catalogs from both labels, but the label I ended up buying music from was Green Monkey. In the second half of the 1980′s, as attention towards the Seattle music scene grew, and people started praising the output of Sub Pop, C/Z, and eMpTy (and on the hip-hop side, Nastymix), the spotlight on the two other labels dimmed a bit. Yet for me, the few records I bought on Green Monkey showed me a small bit of what Seattle represented, and it was a spirit in their brand of rock that would manifest itself in different ways for the next 20 years.
It Crawled From The Basement: The Green Monkey Records Anthology (Green Monkey) is an excellent 47-song double CD exploring the Seattle music scene as it was, and as it is. Grunge became a brand name, but everyone was in it for the pure rock of it. Well, that and drinking, having a good time, maybe finding someone to go home with, and that spirit can be heard in songs by bands that range from the obscure and unknown to those who have become institutions in Seattle’s diverse music scene.
Even if you weren’t knee deep into the music of Seattle, some of these names have been mentioned in interviews by Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Mudhoney. But for those of us who were a part of the scene or like myself in its backyard, these will bring back some great memories. Artists featured on here include Mr. Epp & The Calculations, The Green Pajamas, Prudence Dredge, The Icons, Liquid Generation, The Walkabouts, The Queen Annes, The Fallouts, Keith Livingston, Slam Suzzanne, Swelter Cacklebush, Al Bloch, and many others. Trying to gather a custom collection of these songs would take awhile, and sound quality would be inconsistent since these were released on vinyl, cassettes, and CD’s. In fact, this compilation was mastered from the original master tapes, so if you still have that worn out tape in storage or an album with seam splits, you’ll be amazed at how great they sound today, especially Tom Dyer‘s own twisted productions, including the obvious ode to Captain Beefheart, “”Van Vliet Street”.
As one listens to this, one can hear people with a need to simply create, whether it was to measure up to what one heard on the college station (in this case, KCMU), or to try to 1-Up what was being passed of as music on the then-new MTV cable network. Or to buy records at the local record store (a trip to Seattle’s University District would reveal many outlets for quality music), taking a chance and discovering new sounds. what Dyer and Green Monkey Records hoped was that people would take a chance on them, and those who did would go home with something uniquely different, but something uniquely Seattle. A few songs often sound as if these guys picked up an instrument for the first time (and in some instances maybe that was true), but then you’ll find those songs that were the indie classics they became in our minds, and the fact that you and maybe a small circle of friends knew about these songs and bands made them feel a bit more special.
As the label moves out of its initial roots, one will hear the development of not so much a label sound, but an obvious shift in trying to improve on musicianship and songwriting. For me, it’s a trip to hear these songs again, or to hear songs I’ve read about and may have kept in my memory bank for years but am enjoying for the very first time. Before mass media wanted to pigeonhole Seattle as having a “sound”, this was music from bands who only knew of one sound: the Puget one. The music on It Crawled From The Basement sounds dated, but that’s a good thing as it shows how much has come and gone since then. Somewhere in Seattle, Ballard, Mountlake Terrace, Everett, or maybe somewhere in Issaquah, there are kids who are about to tune up, plug in, and play in their basements as if it was the end of the world, because it’s a means of curing their boredom. This CD represents what many kids and young men and women were doing over 20 years ago, and in the words of my favorite song on here (Prudence Dredge’s “Problem Child”), “what you see baby is what you get”, followed by a gentle keyboard solo. Historical? Maybe, but it’s good times represented by good sounding music from an era that pushed others to get off their asses and rock out, before coffee and binary codes dominated our (un)consciousness.
