Most American band ever might surprise you

I can be as political as the next guy, but when I write on the pages of AudioPhix, I keep political opinions in check. We all do. It’s not our job. Sure, I may note a particular political leaning of a particular band when writing a review of an album or concert, but I do my best to keep my own opinions out of it. So I hope you will forgive me for this one-time exception. Don’t worry, this opinion has nothing to do with the current political climate.

It concerns a mostly forgotten band from a small town in the upper northwestern corner of the country. “Mostly forgotten” may be inaccurate because, in truth, most music fans never even heard of Beat Happening, so it would be difficult to forget them. Yet the trio had an outsized impact on indie music through their own performances and through the work of the label started by band frontman Calvin Johnson while he was still a student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

I would humbly suggest that Beat Happening is the truest of all American rock & roll bands. How’s that for politics?

Beat Happening might be a surprising choice for the most American band ever

Let’s start with the regionalism. Originalists like to point out that the USA is not a pure democracy. It is a republic that set out to ensure the rights of local communities – the states – over the rights of the federal government. As a nation, we may have abandoned that concept with increasing frequency over the years, but it was there in the beginning.

Beat Happening was profoundly regional, and that region was Olympia. Not even Seattle. Olympia – the small-town capital of Washington state with fewer than 60,000 residents. Calvin Johnson, founder and frontman of Beat Happening, was born and raised in Olympia. Guitarist Bret Lunsford came from an even smaller northwest city – the fishing village of Anacortes, a couple hours north of the capital. Drummer/singer Heather Lewis may have grown up in Westchester County, New York, but she didn’t become a musician until she enrolled in Evergreen State and eventually met Johnson.

Beat Happening never attempted to replicate what bands in other regions were doing. Of course, they were influenced. Every band is influenced by what they like. But they never tried to copy. And Johnson never insisted that the globe-spanning bands he signed to K Records – most of whom came from similar small, out-of-the-way towns – try to change their sound to fit with what might be popular at the time. Beat Happening championed regionalism.

But it wasn’t an isolationist brand of regionalism. George Washington may have cautioned against foreign entanglements when he bid farewell to the nation in 1796, but that quote came in the context of a revolution that relied heavily on the help of foreign nations. Washington was warning against permanent alliances. He was not suggesting a complete withdrawal from the world stage.

To wit, K Records and Calvin Johnson were forever looking for like-minded artists regardless of their nation of origin. He developed working relationships and friendships with bands from Canada to Australia, from Ireland to Japan. He recognized that shared values were much more significant than differences in languages or cuisine.

Finally, there was the sense of individualism that is at the core of an American identity. Beat Happening’s origin story isn’t all that different from most punk bands. What makes them rare is that they genuinely adhered to that punk ethos throughout their entire career. They certainly weren’t the first band to adopt the DIY attitude at the heart of punk rock. They weren’t the first band to start playing shows when they could barely play their instruments. They weren’t the first band to not even own a drum kit or bother with a bass player. They just embraced it all more than most.

They never saw any of those things – even their amateur musicianship – as being at odds with their vision of what a band should be. Therefore, even when they had the chance to “improve,” they simply demurred. Their playing did improve, as did their songwriting, but that wasn’t why they were a band.

So why were they a band? That is the most American element of Beat Happening. They were a band because they wanted to be a band. They willed themselves into existence. This mostly came from Johnson’s vision, but Lewis and Lunsford bought in.

Johnson, who began DJing at Evergreen State’s KAOS radio station when he was 15, looked out at the landscape around him and figured he would enjoy being in a band. He played the music of other amateurish outfits like the Slits and the Raincoats, so he figured he could do something like that. Then he made it happen.

Those bands were comprised of women so he felt it was important to have a woman or two in his band. Eventually he convinced the stage-shy Lewis to join him along with guitarist Laura Carter. When Carter left, he recruited Lunsford and the lineup was set.

What Johnson and his new bandmates did next is fairly astonishing, even for a DIY champion like Beat Happening. They decided to go to Japan because, as Johnson said, it was the one place in the world “where being American was still cool.” Johnson was able to work it so that he could get college credit from the progressive Evergreen State as part of the trip. But the real reason for hopping a jet to Japan was to try to become rock stars.

That didn’t work out. Beat Happening was a bunch of nobodies who couldn't even really play their instruments. But the trip wasn’t a complete failure. Johnson discovered other like-minded bands hiding in the shadows in Japan. One of them was Shonen Knife. A year later, K Records would release Shonen Knife’s first album.

What Johnson was doing was looking to the horizon. He was seeking the best and brightest in other cultures and bringing them home to his tiny corner of the USA. There is nothing more ambitious, audacious, and entrepreneurial than that trip to Japan. There is nothing more American.

And, with that under their belt, the trio realized nothing was off limits. Soon they released their first album, a self-titled 10-song set produced by Greg Sage, friend and frontman of the seminal punk band Wipers. It featured one-of-a-kind minimalist tracks like Johnson’s haunting “I Spy” and Lewis’ garagey ode to adolescent fun in the sun “Down at the Sea.” The songs were decidedly lo-fi, but they had something to say, and they had a love of old-school guitar-based rock.

Beat Happening was the counter programming to the northwest sound that was about to explode. Johnson made his statements by being entirely his own person. He was punk rock, but he was as far from the head-banging Black Flag style of punk as you would find. He wore an aura of fey romanticism.

Other crucial members of the indie movement, like Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye and Kurt Cobain, marveled at Johnson’s ability to carve out such a unique niche in the rough-and-tumble world of indie punk. Cobain carved his admiration into his left arm. His “K” tattoo is for K Records.

By their second album,1988’s Jamboree, Beat Happening was fine-tuning its sound. “Indian Summer” was a profoundly wistful earworm about lost youth, sold by Johnson’s barely-in-tune baritone. Lewis contributed several songs, including the virtually a cappella “Ask Me,” which recalled Maureen Tucker’s songs with the Velvet Underground.

There would be three more studio albums before Beat Happening officially called it a day in 1992. Each grew somewhat more professional, but they never abandoned their original sound. Simple, catchy melodies and vocals that sounded more authentic than almost any band with far more talented singers. Above all, they had a passion for sounding like themselves, even if that limited their financial potential.

Johnson’s crowning achievement came in 1991, just as the world of indie music was about to change forever. He organized the International Pop Underground Convention, something of a Woodstock for the worldwide community of true indie-rockers. Bands like the Melvins, Fugazi, Bikini Kill, and L7 all showed up. So did about a thousand kids who just liked different kinds of music from what was being offered by the major labels.

Olympia, Washington, and Washington, DC, had an unlikely symbiotic relationship at the time. Johnson, like Kathleen Hanna, another Evergreen Stater, spent some adolescent years in the DC area. That’s where he and Hanna met MacKaye and expanded their understanding of punk rock. On the first night of the IPU Convention, DC’s Bratmobile performed as part of a show focused on female musicians. Hanna’s Bikini Kill and Bratmodile were among the original Riot Grrl bands, and they both had ties to Olympia and Calvin Johnson.

Maybe the most remarkable thing about the IPU Convention was that Johnson never felt the need to stage a second or a third version. It wasn’t a monetized cash cow like other, larger festivals, but there would have been support. But to Johnson, there was no need to do a carbon copy. He had already done it. Now it was time to move on and do something else.

If any other entrepreneur had the vision to do their own festival, I have little doubt Calvin Johnson would have provided support. That’s the way it is supposed to work. Do your own thing – help others do their own thing. Keep looking to the horizon for another new thing to try.

You might love or hate Beat Happening’s music. They inspired actual hatred on stage, which is hard to fathom given the lovely nature of most of their output. But people don’t like bands that are different, and Beat Happening was different. So were the B-52’s down in Athens, and Husker Du in Minneapolis, and Minutemen in San Pedro. They all fought against the odds to put their music in front of an often disinterested pubic. But they all kept at it.

Shortly after the IPU Convention, Nirvana released Nevermind. Within a couple more years, Green Day had Dookie. The DIY punk movement was growing too big to remain independent. It was about to be fed to the nation as Grunge and Pop Punk. Many bands got rich signing with major labels.

I suppose the most American thing Beat Happening could have done was cash in themselves. But that’s the America of today, where corporate earnings trump all others' concerns. Johnson, Lewis, and Lunsford weren’t interested in that. They wanted to pursue their dreams and not become beholden to a label that would maximize their profits while minimizing their freedom.

They put out one final album, 1992’s You Turn Me On, and called it a day. On that final album, they released what might have become their anthem had they chosen to stick around. On “Teenage Caveman,” Johnson sings, “Guitar starts spinning, rock and roll starts winning – We rise to the top, we’re the cream of the crop.”

I learned a lot of what I know about Beat Happening from Michael Azerrad’s sensational book Our Band Could Be Your Life. The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt, another of the countless musicians influenced by Beat Happening, narrates the chapter on Johnson and the band. The book is full of fascinating stories. But you don’t need to read up on them if you don’t want to. Just give a listen to one of their albums. You will be hearing a true American original. Perhaps the truest.

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