Beat Happening - Year Zero of Lo-Fi

Beat Happening, Calvin Johnson's brainchild, rode blissfully through the second half of the Eighties, disrupting the indie music scene with their irreverence, forging a new rock aesthetic, celebrating nothingness, stripping music of all the ballast that had been strapped onto it over time. With their spontaneity and ineptitude, Calvin, Heather and Bret unwittingly sponsored and officially sanctioned the birth of a genre: lo-fi. Among the forefathers and godfathers, we certainly shouldn't forget Half Japanese, who with their "Calling All Girls EP" were pioneers way back in 1977, and the storyteller Jandek, rock hermit and standard-bearer of musical anti-aesthetics. But while Half Japanese never had the kind of distribution needed to institutionalize a genre — remember, their EP was sold by mail order, and even when they got around to their debut with the triple 1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beast in 1980, it was hardly put out by a major label — Jandek refused to represent anyone or anything but himself, faithful to his own existential orthodoxy, which led him down a deeply personal musical path far from the spotlight, and indeed from the world at large. Reserved and indifferent as he was, Jandek was never going to be the one to herald the arrival of lo-fi music.

That task, with all its responsibilities, joys and honors, fell instead to Beat Happening, who — thanks in no small part to Calvin Johnson's personality and their acknowledged indie influence — managed to bring the discovery of the decade straight into the bedrooms of young Americans.

Unable to really play, the three of them swapped instruments like candy, and the results never changed much. It doesn't matter how in tune you are or how many strings your guitar has: what counts is the racket you manage to make, the fun that comes out of it. Music thus reclaims that primal sense of carefree abandon, going back to being fun for fun's sake, brushing aside all the pompous talk of technique that bores, and bores, and bores. There's no room for that here anymore; here and now there's only room for three friends spending their time writing history. But to write your own paragraph in the Bible of music, you need genius — the kind capable of carrying an innovative idea through the sound waves of a stereo. And genius there is, with a first and last name: Calvin Johnson, a songwriter of the highest order — we're talking McCartney and Costello territory here, no exaggeration — with the knack for wrapping up a song, an idea, a melody in barely two minutes, because anything more is unnecessary, anything extra is just repetition. And so here are Beat Happening: essential, fast, punk in rock's truest sense of the word; never more than two minutes long, making music with minimal effort. As noted, technique hardly matters; the song carries its own primitive force in melody and voice — a voice that Calvin and Heather use so badly it becomes artistic, because even ugliness is art. And art, if not the Beat Happening brand itself, is exactly what Johnson's guttural cacophony and Lewis's funereal atonality represent: the guiding principles of a band's aesthetic built on turning "can't play/won't show off" into something more than just a way of life.

Olympia, Washington State, tucked away in the far northwest of the United States; beyond it there's only the ocean, the awkward neighbor Canada, and that Alaska the Russians sold off half a century earlier for its oil. Here, amid the forests and the cold, Calvin and Heather spend their days, finding ways not to get bored. And boredom is the last thing on Calvin's mind, brimming with ideas as he is, eager to do something for himself and for those around him. Maybe it's just youth talking, glib teenagers, kids who want to change the world, hearts and minds overloaded with desires and illusory hopes. Some of them actually pull it off, though, and Calvin perhaps did too, not least because his project had roots going back further, to when, precocious in everything, at just 17 he became one of the writers for the fanzine Subterranean Pop — later Sub Pop, founded in 1979 by Bruce Pavitt — which ten years later would become a record label and a touchstone for alternative rock.

Things start to fall into place: Calvin Johnson is enrolled at Evergreen State College — clearly a place with healthy air, given that Matt Groening, father of the Simpsons, also spent three years there — he works for the college radio station and is happy enough with what's going on around him that he decides to start his own record label, K Records, to spread the gospel of Olympia and its sister bands across the whole state. The role puts him right in the thick of the local underground scene, leading him to forge his first relationships with bands and sketch out, behind the desk, the first outlines of his own musical future.

Calvin Johnson loves music, loves indie music above all, and what he plays on the college radio is the music he'd like to make himself, the music that should become the new sound of youth. He plays it on the radio and then distributes it through his K Records. Still not satisfied, he decides to put together an entirely improvised musical project with a couple of friends, Heather and Laura. Our story, the story, really starts to take shape right here, in 1983.

January: the first school gigs, the first makeshift recordings, a world out there that doesn't want to listen to them. Laura then leaves Olympia, and leaves the band too; but Calvin remembers a guy, a friend of friends, whom he'd met by chance in Arizona during spring break, who had expressed his strong appreciation for the ramshackle music of his band. That was Bret, and from that moment on, Beat Happening took shape.

Things moved along a bit unevenly for the band — they were certainly having fun, but very few people were having fun along with them. Few copies of their early cassettes sold, few shows played. To spite fate and hope, who knows, for some stroke of luck on the wheel of life, Beat Happening took off for Japan. Calvin, in fact, remembered a guy who'd studied with him at university for a while before heading back to Japan. One contact, and off they went, on the first flight to Japan. Why Japan, one might ask — and the answer comes from Mr. Johnson himself: "According to the rumor mill, Japan was the last place on earth where Americans were liked. It was almost as a joke that Beat Happening ended up in Japan." They stayed for a while with their Japanese friend's family and in the meantime managed to play in plenty of local venues. They remained in the land of the samurai for a few months, during which Calvin stumbled upon an Australian music fanzine, sent them a Beat Happening demo, and became friends with the editor. The name Beat Happening started to circulate in the southern hemisphere too. The decisive step was still missing, though: the debut album, the introduction to the whole world.

Beat Happening (K-Sub Pop, 1985) hit the shelves in 1985, two years after the band's formation. Few seemed to believe in it, but Calvin Johnson could rely on a thorough knowledge of the scene, the right connections (the album's production was entrusted to Greg Sage of Wipers), and a remarkable dose of musical instinct. A truly singular instinct, one that led him, already with this first record, to lay down the guidelines of lo-fi.

An essential album, Beat Happening is a black-and-white sketch, unfinished and fragmentary, yet at the same time perfect and organic. "Our Secret" is the entry ticket: in front of us, a messy room, a guitar on the bed, drums in the corner, and the nonexistent bass leaning against the wall. A couple of open bottles on the table, a dozen empty ones on the floor. That's the air you breathe here. The college dorm room, the basement turned recording studio. In just a couple of lines, the whole Beat Happening world is sketched out. What strikes you is something familiar, nothing excessive, nothing superfluous. If anything, what stands out is the urge to strip away, to eliminate, to simplify.

So here comes the monotony of a drumbeat in the background, a guitar line repeated endlessly, and Calvin Johnson's anti-voice: keep these elements in mind, because they're the hinges of much of the record. You might reasonably fear 50 minutes that all sound the same, but you're spared that thanks to one of indie music's greatest talents: Calvin Johnson toys with his audience, playing at who plays/sings worse, handing out unforgettable songs like "Fourteen" and "Bad Seeds," for instance, both of which appear in double versions on the record. The former sends Johnson's voice off into a minute-and-a-half-long nursery rhyme with a chorus as simple as it is dazzling and singular. "Fourteen" is one of those songs anyone could play, and no one could play quite like this; a couple of handclaps on the guitar's body (actually Lewis's tambourine, to be precise) and off it goes, chasing three chords, three, and a loose, makeshift fingerpicking finale. "Bad Seeds" is dirty garage-rock, punk in the original sense of the word (there's also a live recording of the track here, decidedly better than the studio version). "Bad Seeds" is a tribute to Iggy Pop, to the Stooges, and to all society's bad seeds. Another nod to Iggy Pop, this time in more mature form, is "What's Important": listening to it, it's hard not to think of "The Passenger." A reference, nothing more, since the song runs on different tracks, heading in the opposite direction. There are variations too, like Lewis's teenage moments: "Down At The Sea" is a little tune bordering on childish, sung half-heartedly with her mind clearly elsewhere, while "I Spy" is the darkest, most claustrophobic episode on the record, an early sign of a musical direction that would find fertile ground in their later discography.

Beat Happening is an album worth an entire career.

The years go by, Johnson stays busy in music, but takes his time before putting the Beat Happening name out there again. There's a fear that the project may have already run its course with the first album, almost as if the shove they'd given the music world had already satisfied the Olympia trio's artistic needs. Instead, 1988 brings Jamboree (K-Sub Pop, 1988), and you can sense that something has changed. Just a casual glance at the track lengths is enough to notice the difference: some run past two minutes, a couple even break the three-minute mark. No longer 25 sketches, but 11 songs, half of them fully formed, deliberately complete. The other half of the record, the middle section to be precise, reminds us who we're dealing with, made up of raw bursts of music lasting no more than a minute and a half (among them the fifty seconds of "Ask Me" or the flat one minute of "Jamboree"). For this second album, Calvin Johnson brings in the co-production of a certain Mark Lanegan (already, by then, three years into his role as the mastermind behind Screaming Trees).

Jamboree manages to surprise pretty much everyone. Although the musical imprint doesn't stray too far from the path laid out by the debut, Beat Happening now has a more powerful, rockier, noisier sound. The "strip away the superfluous, and the necessary too" dogma that was non-negotiable on Beat Happening is partly sidestepped here, as the band builds songs with more immediate impact, searching for — and partly finding — more refined solutions. To be clear: no concessions to the market or to sales, just a new musical path.

The record is short, barely 25 minutes of music across 11 tracks ranging from 58 seconds to 3 minutes, Guided By Voices territory, Beat Happening territory. "Bewitched" opens things up: a garage-style electric guitar riff, repeated endlessly, with Calvin Johnson toning down the flatness of his voice to match the track's rock atmosphere. These 3 minutes alone would be enough to get a sense of what's new in the Beat Happening camp. Leaving Calvin aside, let's follow Lewis now: she too shows up in slightly revised clothes with the steady pop-rock groove of "In Between," less raw and rough-edged than the performances she'd previously accustomed us to. Introductions made, Calvin Johnson immediately launches into "Indian Summer," the band's signature song, among the best-known and most covered in their catalogue. "Indian Summer" is a ballad stripped of any emotion, a bone picked clean. No taste, no flavor, yet a charm all its own, almost impossible to resist. A shared manifesto of low-fidelity music, the voice of an indie movement shouting its own existence out to the world.

Rounding out the batch are the apathy of "Hangman," the garage-rock of "Crashing Through" and the return to the paradigmatic modus tollens of "Jamboree," which curiously also gives the album its title, despite being closer to the masterpiece of their debut and not perfectly aligned with the band's new sonic direction. Mysteries of bizarre minds. A surprise finale, and it goes out with a bang. Punk aesthetics, sure, minimalism, sure, indie-rock, sure, but "This Many Boyfriends Club" is also, and above all, noise-rock. We're in Sonic Youth territory; it's Sonic Youth as interpreted by a Calvin Johnson here grappling with the zenith of his vocal cacophony.

This closes out Beat Happening's finest body of work, two albums that left their mark, born out of nowhere yet so deeply rooted in the indie musical substrate that they became archetypes of a new genre, forerunners (certainly not the only ones — think also of Half Japanese, for example) of a musical movement, of a new rock aesthetic, of a new, brazen do-it-yourself approach to making music. Their 35 songs recorded between 1985 and '88 were committed to memory by every band that, in the late Eighties/early Nineties, set out on the path of indie-rock/alternative-rock. From Nirvana to Sonic Youth and everything in between, before and after. Calvin Johnson sowed the seeds, he founded something damnably irritating and unpleasant, simple and perfect. His music rattled the ears of critics, listeners and musicians alike. Without Beat Happening, the entire lo-fi movement would have been different. Beat Happening are the Beatles of lo-fi — you cannot help but pass over the bodies of their songs to grasp the essence, the very essentiality, of an entire genre.

The bond between Calvin Johnson and Mark Lanegan is by now well established; during the year the two organize an American tour together, playing mostly across the western states. They shared the studio for Jamboree, and it's from this same period that the split Beat Happening & Screaming Trees (Homestead, 1988) dates. The result is uneven, much as the reactions to it were uneven: some prostrated themselves before the two heroes of American indie, others stayed lukewarm toward a project that was born ephemeral.

In fairness, it must be said that this EP showcases all the usual tropes of Beat Happening's music — scattershot guitar chords endlessly repeated, a Heather Lewis in splendid form fronting all the vocal parts — just as it does those of Screaming Trees' music: the "fuzzy" wall of sound that is their trademark, and a gorgeous vocal turn from the usual Lanegan on "Polly Pereguinn." It adds nothing to either band's discography, and remains exactly what it is: a split between good friends, nothing more, nothing less.

The following year, 1989, brings the sudden arrival of Beat Happening's third album: Black Candy (K-Sub Pop, 1989). An oxymoron, Black Candy is an oxymoron: dark sweetness, dark little treat, licorice. An oxymoron that repeats itself cyclically throughout the album's 30 minutes: the title of the track "Pajama Party in a Haunted Hive," happiness mixed with fear, positive vibrations interrupted by sadistic paranoid nightmares, while in dark, alienated tones a storyteller recounts the bullshit of a teenager. Laughing at the tragic, cynicism or childlike superficiality. Children who come back and sing, who dust off their toys from the closet, headless dolls weighed down by dust and disuse. And so here are Calvin Johnson & friends tackling quotations of video-game jingles, toy drums played with zero sense of rhythm, and finally that rare beam of light finally shone on Bret Lunsford's bass. With Black Candy a new musical chapter opens: distant Cramps-ian echoes had already been heard in the past, but never as much as on this occasion does Lux Interior and Poison Ivy's band become the undisputed muse of the Olympia group.

The entire mood of the record is painted black. The program calls for a Calvin Johnson who is ever more the domineering patriarch, and a Heather Lewis increasingly in search of her own space, her own identity. It would seem like the prelude to a two-headed monster, were it not for the fact that this very record contains the first duet — elsewhere exceedingly rare — between Johnson and Lewis. Let's start right there, with this collaboration: "Other Side" is a fully realized song with a well-defined musical structure, or at least more defined than usual. The track quotes the melody from the computer game Red Rover, a memory and tribute to a childlike world entirely in keeping with Beat Happening's musical approach. A guitar riff repeated for a full three minutes, funereal, worn-out tones, weighed down by threats of depression that have painted both the album cover and the songs within it black. To be cynical about it, though, "Other Side" also carries with it a notion of paranoid divertissement. Where (dis)harmony itself had once yielded shining gems, here the meeting of Calvin Johnson's and Heather Lewis's voices is spontaneous and fresh: they remain, as ever, two automatons, fogged by their own paranoias, halfheartedly grappling with a melody, yet somehow it works all the same. "Black Candy" is the record's black pit: "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate." You dive in, curious, and fall into the sick delirium, with no way out, of a man — Calvin Johnson — who seems to recite his own last will and testament in three minutes. As if at a masquerade ball, he dresses up as a priest of the apocalypse, sardonically mocking the role and whoever has musically embodied it, even ending up imitating the raven-voiced Lou Reed, softened by the diabolical catechisms of late-period Morrison. Calvin Johnson imitates no one; he borrows, reassesses and mangles, transforms and weighs everything down, granting himself the absolute maximum of his own cacophony. "Knick Knack" is Heather Lewis's only solo outing: her musical path is the one already laid out, and at most it lends itself to endless fading variations. So here, too, "Knick Knack" is the usual punk little march, upbeat, fast and childlike, in the name of a forced musical continuity between toy-pop and adolescent punk posturing. The album's middle stretch is occupied by "Pijama Party In A Haunted Hive," "Gravedigger Blues" and "Bonfire," the perfect soundtrack for any horror B-movie. A different record, a different anthem: this time it's "Cast A Shadow"'s turn, which alongside "Indian Summer" stands as the eternal hymn of Calvin Johnson and his Beat Happening (which Yo La Tengo covered beautifully), the soundtrack of every indie kid there is.

Black Candy somehow marks the end of Calvin Johnson's experimentation, as he opts instead to settle into what had been built up to that point. The album's twee-pop, however, was absorbed by the entire indie-pop scene that followed, influencing both Belle & Sebastian (if we consider the record's more pop-leaning songs) and CocoRosie and toy-pop (pop music played in an adolescent style/mood).

The Nineties arrive, along with grunge, with Seattle as music's new capital. Sub Pop, the label of reference. It's the backlash. The hippies return, but this time they're not strumming acoustic guitars and preaching peace and love; this time they pick up electric guitars and scream out their depression. They are the storytellers of adolescence for the whole world, and as history would have it, the starting point, the spark for it all, was a remote logging town lost somewhere in the geography of the 50 states.

1991 is the year of "Nevermind" — the definitive crowning of youth rock — but it's also the year of "Spiderland," of "Out Of Time," of "Loveless," of "Screamdelica," of "Yerself Is Steam," and of another twenty or so albums — to put it conservatively — of more or less epochal stature.

There was clearly a wind of renewal in the air, and the muse of the arts was blowing her inspiration more often than usual. Amid this genuine rock revolution, Beat Happening's new album fades and loses the comparison with almost everything else. Then again, their masterpieces had already been carved into historical memory five years earlier, and they had secured their own little slice of Eden; let the Muses, then, help the others too.

Opening Dreamy (K-Sub Pop, 1991), yet another autistic anthem from Calvin Johnson, is "Me Untamed," which gets by on a couple of guitar scratches repeated to the point of tedium, accompanied by a few distracted drum hits. Johnson's baritone voice is followed by Heather Lewis's by-now-familiar de-emotionalized vocal delivery ("Left Behind"), right at home in that little pop corner that winks at teenie-pop dressed up as a funeral for the occasion. "Dreamy" is the band's attempt to strike a balance between a newly attained compositional/artistic maturity and the naive stamp that still sets them apart. The feat, an arduous one, succeeds only halfway, even if the attempt itself is commendable: the result is lukewarm water, at times unable to strike and engage heart and mind with the same crude weapons as before. Even the dark setting of "Black Candy" is abandoned; a window opens, and a flash of light begins to illuminate the darkest corners. Sure, we're not in a garden in full spring bloom, but "Fortune Cookie Prize" and "Cry For A Shadow" are timid attempts to open up to the world, to shake off some of the depression that clouds everything, and to hint at a smile. The eyes, though, remain sad, and Calvin Johnson finds the time, the way and the joy — a sadistic joy — to wallow once again in his depressive paranoias with "Hot Chocolate Boy," in which he reworks the same melody for two minutes, and even more so in the two minutes of "I've Lost You," the cyclical repetition of something that's miles away from anything you'd call melodic. Hints of garage-rock.

Beat Happening too benefited from grunge's explosion, and for the first time their songs went into heavy rotation on radio stations at colleges across America. Capping off 1991, that summer brought the Lollapalooza circus to town, born to celebrate alternative-rock and to celebrate itself in the process. An immense traveling show, crisscrossing the United States, a casual-wear parade of the most beloved bands, a reference point for every future festival, a reward vacation after a season of excess with friends, and friends of friends taking turns on a gigantic stage in front of massive crowds. All of it orchestrated by the glittery, ingenious mind of Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction. Calvin Johnson wants no part of it — it's all too big, too trendy, too mainstream; something alternative is needed, an alternative to Lollapalooza, which is already the national-popular bastion of the alternative. It really takes very little, and in 1991, in San Francisco, Calvin Johnson organizes the International Pop Underground and stages his own show, rallying not only his own Beat Happening but also Fugazi, The Fastbacks, Thee Headcoats, Nation of Ulysses, Mecca Normal and another 50 bands besides. It was a massive success, proof of just how much people craved living music, coming together, sharing. It was also the definitive coronation of Mr. Johnson as king of indie. His K Records became the new reference point of the underground scene, endlessly expanding its roster of artists.

By this point Calvin Johnson's interests are growing ever more demanding, K Records is no longer just a matter among friends, and his drive to find new things to do is unstoppable. The Beat Happening experience, meanwhile, is dying, pushed into a corner and nearly abandoned. The magic times seem to be over, the artist appears to have completed his cycle; it's time to stop, say goodbye, farewell and thanks for everything. The band's exit from the stage, having changed so much of rock music in the Eighties, is You Turn Me On (K-Sub Pop, 1992), the master's classic parting shot. Aware that he's said everything he could and knew how to say within lo-fi, Calvin Johnson bids everyone farewell with the album of maturity: gone are the adolescent racket, the orgasmic speed, the all-at-once urgency, the punk; Johnson celebrates his years, his popularity, his adulthood with drawn-out, unexpected running times for Beat Happening fans. The seven minutes of "Tiger Trap," the six of "Bury The Hammer" and the nine of "Godsend" can only be explained by a desire to be definitive, to end things fully and completely. An album of considerable complexity, You Turn Me On weaves together all the themes of the band's career, revised and corrected through the eyes of a mature man. Heather Lewis herself is almost unrecognizable on "Noise," galaxies away from the punky little marches she'd accustomed us to. The sound, however, is recognizable: the guitar still played with the same lack of technique, though now deflowered by years of practice, because through sheer repetition even Beat Happening have incredibly managed to perfect their style.

In 1991 Nirvana became the most famous band in the world, their leader a kind of guru; among that madman Kurt Cobain's merits, we shouldn't forget his successful attempt to bring back into the spotlight bands that had worked in the shadows throughout the previous decade, paving the way for the alternative explosion of the Nineties. Alongside the likes of Meat Puppets (celebrated with a string of covers on "Mtv Unplugged") and Sonic Youth (who pushed Geffen to sign Nirvana), we also find Beat Happening. After all, Olympia, in the state of Washington, wasn't such a big city, and Calvin Johnson was one of Kurt Cobain's heroes.

The media and commercial backlash, however, didn't hit our heroes, who instead left the stage ahead of time, raised a hand and said goodbye. End of story. With two albums essential to understanding indie-rock, Beat Happening had already done enough.

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