Beat Happening

Talking about Beat Happening and their twee pop means first of all taking stock of the music scene of Olympia, Washington, in the 80s and 90s, tightly bound up with the riot grrrl movement that emerged at Evergreen State College (Bratmobile, Heaven So Betsy, Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney), with post-hardcore (Unwound, Karp) and with indie songwriting (Microphones, Elliott Smith). Since 1975, the college has been home to radio station KAOS, run by John Foster, champion of the policy of broadcasting 80% independent music and founder of the Lost Music Network and the fanzine OP Magazine, which played a key role in the cassette culture of the underground world. Among KAOS's DJs – besides Bruce Pavitt, who launched Sub Pop in 1979 – was Beat Happening frontman Calvin Johnson, a devotee of the Slits and the Modern Lovers, who founded K Records in 1982, one of the most prolific independent labels of the American underground, through which he released – first on cassette and later in other formats – his own projects (besides Beat Happening, Halo Benders and Dub Narcotic Sound System) as well as those of numerous indie pop-rock musicians (including: Girl Trouble, Lois, Tiger Trap, Modest Mouse, Built To Spill, Some Velvet Sidewalk, Mirah, Seaweed).

Even at Dub Narcotic Studio, where Johnson works as sound engineer, bands from across America's underground scenes cross paths, making Olympia — also home to indie label Kill Rock Stars — a fertile, politically charged DIY scene, where there's not only the time and space to pick up instruments and realize any musical fantasy, but where everyone cross-pollinates each other. The Washington State capital is regularly frequented by Kurt Cobain with Nirvana, who had a relationship with Tobi Vail (Bikini Kill), by Isaac Brock (Modest Mouse), Beck, Ian Svenonius (Nation of Ulysses, Make-Up) and Beth Ditto (Gossip). An authentic portrait of this scene and its most uncompromising DIY code — as well as of how America's trans-local network of independent music actually functioned — is captured in the documentary film "Songs for Cassavetes" (2001) by Justin Mitchell, in which the first figure to guide viewers through Olympia is none other than Calvin Johnson, from K Records headquarters.

Beat Happening's indie pop-rock, later dubbed twee pop or love pop, is built on elementary chord structures like the Ramones', distorted and melancholic with simplified rhythms like a Jesus & Mary Chain song, awash in playful melodies with jangle-pop guitars carrying a sixties flavor. We can find the last romantics of Anglo-American underground rock in the catalogue of Olympia's K Records and in that of Bristol's Sarah Records, a catalogue rich with female presences, which Beat Happening's music had encouraged to express themselves, unlike that of contemporary hardcore bands.

The trio made up of Johnson (vocals and guitar), Heather Lewis (drums, vocals and guitar) and Bret Lunsford (guitar and drums) debuted in 1986 with a self-titled album self-produced with K. In the sentimental, picturesque twee spirit, Johnson and Lewis write lyrics that mirror moods, loves and wordplay which, rather than concealing insecurities, lay them bare, aided by a singing style full of imperfections. The music is stripped-down lo-fi pop-rock, described by Michael Azerrad as "retro-pop style", conveying the feel of being played live, direct-to-tape, in an unprofessional manner, rejecting any form of virtuosity or technical polish, even in the recording process.

The Olympia band mainly released five studio albums, ranging from the ground zero of their sound on the first ("Beat Happening") to their most refined record with the fifth ("You Turn Me On", Sub Pop, 1992). "Jamboree" (K and Rough Trade, 1988), though it was their second album, lands somewhere between the two in terms of results, yet still fatally close to that innocent, sentimental aesthetic laid out as a manifesto on the debut — particularly beloved by fans, who recognize in these first two records the purest, most authentic side of the Olympia trio's music.

The record was cut in Ellensburg, Washington, by Steve Fisk — who would go on to produce Nirvana's Blew Sessions, the Afghan Whigs and Unwound — together with Mark Lanegan and Gary Lee Conner of Screaming Trees. Three tracks, however, following the "live" philosophy, were recorded separately in concert and dropped into the tracklist, a method that had already been used extensively on the previous album.

The tracklist kicks off right away with one of "Jamboree"'s sexiest songs, "Bewitched", a preview of the dirtier rock tracks on "You Turn Me On": a ragged burst of feedback morphs into a smoldering rock'n'roll riff, followed by drums as frantic as Johnson's desire, untamable in its "non-macho" style:

I see you hang in the crowd

Staring me down

With that ice cream cone

Still I'm all alone

You've got me caught

Let go my heart

Or give me a sign

That you’ll be mine

I've got a crush on you

I've got a crush on you

You won't let me through

I've got a crush on you

"In Between" immediately serves as a counterpoint, with Heather's voice, carrying the same urgency but in a flatter, sing-song tone, recounting a fleeting romance in the form of a children's nursery rhyme:

I heard you talk last night

Couldn’t even speak a word

Love has got me by the tongue

It’s nothing you haven’t heard

In between what’s true and false

In between what’s loud and soft

"Indian Summer" is among the peaks of Beat Happening's output, as well as one of their most famous songs, later covered by dream-pop band dream-pop Luna and by Ben Gibbard for the soundtrack of AJ Schnack's Cobain documentary "About A Son" (2007). It's a bare, sentimental ballad, with Johnson singing right on the edge of pitch and backed by a little marching-band drum pattern over a guitar arpeggio straight out of à-la Velvet Underground:

Breakfast in cemetery

Boy tasting wild cherry

Touch girl, apple blossom

Just a boy playing possum

We’ll come back for Indian summer

We’ll come back for Indian summer

We’ll come back for Indian summer

And go our separate ways

"Hangman" goes back to a Cramps-inspired rock'n'roll/psychobilly sound, opening a circle that runs through the lopsided chant for voice and percussion of "Jamboree" (Calvin) and the a cappella track "Ask Me" (Heather), closing on the same dirty rock-punk mood with "Crashing Through". The danceable groove is the key that carries Johnson's doubts in "Cat Walk" ("I wonder now what does it matter?") and "Drive Car Girl" ("Still you drive that boy around/ Drive that boy around/ You could be driving this boy around").

Johnson described "Jamboree" as a "dark and sexy" album, and the last two tracks sum it up perfectly, with the mesmerizing surf rock of "Midnight a Go-go" and the grotesque noise of "The This Many Boyfriend Club", off-beat and off-key:

Lori, Lori what’s the story?

Let’s go do some apple coring

We will bake an apple pie

Maybe that will dry your eyes

The oven’s warm

How come your hands are so cold?

Lori, Lori what’s the hurry?

So they think they’re judge and jury

The reason we cause such a flurry

Is they’ll never love so purely

Cut short by the microphone toss.

“Jamboree” won many admirers, including Kurt Cobain, yet for a long time it remained a small hidden gem of the underground world. Several elements on display characterize the overall style of Beat Happening, which can be compared to what Rem had been doing since the early Eighties in Athens, Georgia, under the aegis of Irs Records: the hand-drawn artwork; the photos in the booklets and the videos shot by friends – like Lois Maffeo (Lois) – in Olympia, along the river and the railroad tracks, in the parks and through the streets of the city; Johnson's gender-fluid style, marked by a look of light jeans and a white or pink t-shirt; performances that sought to dismantle the poses and physicality of the male rockstar and make room for shyness, play, and everything deemed marginal or invisible.

The record came out on two pillars of indie music, K and Rough Trade, the same year Rem released their first major-label album, “Green” (Warner, 1988), ideally mapping out two paths for the American indie scene to come: one of underground independence from the world of corporations, as with Fugazi and Dischord, and the other of mediation with the majors while still preserving a certain authenticity of content, as in the case of Hüsker Dü, Replacements, Rem, Sonic Youth and Nirvana.

Johnson and K's DIY modus operandi, grounded in diversity and in an idea of socio-cultural community and localism centered on the peripheral town of Olympia, would not only come to be seen as the antithesis of the nearby Seattle grunge scene, but would also have a huge influence on DIY production right up to the present day.

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16/08/2020