Slowing the roll – Portland, Seattle club scene breakdown in 1983 and appearance of Satyricon

I can parse the series of music-related set ups in Chris’ life going back to 1967. However, right now I’m focused on the 1980s, especially the Sub Pop era.

I’ve been trying to think of Pacific northwest punk bands who were touring early before 1987. The only ones I can think of are Wipers, Beat Happening, Go Team, D.O.A. – and Pell Mell? Green River toured beginning in 1985.

A lot of times people don’t include D.O.A. with these other bands maybe because they were from Vancouver B.C. or because, generally speaking, artificial divisions are made in the northwest music scene where they shouldn’t be made, almost certainly to misdirect attention.

D.O.A. – like Black Flag, the LA band with whom they shared a member – was a popular hardcore punk band on the move.

Wipers, from Portland, was Greg Sage. Sage was linked to the all ages punk scene, to Pell Mell (Steve Fisk, Bruce Pavitt), and Napalm Beach. I don’t know, but I suspect Sage was linked more generally to K Records, Evergreen State College and the all ages punk scene. Wipers was one of the Portland bands who were liked in Olympia. (Dead Moon was another.)

There are things about Greg Sage that tell you he has some kind of background in, for lack of a better term, mind control activity (hypnosis, covert manipulations, etc). It’s in his sound (hypnotic drum loops, etc) and in the messaging he conveyed. This is true of a lot of people around Chris and me – especially those closest to us. How these people were trained to handle us, and who trained and/or handles them, I don’t know. The mind control activities do seem to be linked to bigger record labels and movie studios (I.E. the Hollywood entertainment business), and financial activity. Part of Greg Sage’s job was trapping Chris (thus the hidden in plain sight name of his first label – Trap Records) in the local scene. To this end, I suspect he coordinated with a number of other people and financial entities.

Beat Happening (Olympia) was of course linked to K Records, KAOS Radio/Evergreen, Pavitt/Sub Pop zine/label, and the all ages scene. Go Team (Olympia) was linked to Beat Happening, K Records, Bikini Kill zine/band, and the all ages scene. Part of the misdirecting used by bands like Beat Happening (and all of these bands, really) was an overt eschewing of anything corporate or “sell out.” That seems to have been a psychological technique to make it seem like being small and unknown and not standing out was “cooler” than being successful and “corporate”, and it was also a form of misdirection. I suspect all of these acts were involved in a number of subterranean financial transactions.

D.O.A. (Vancouver, B.C.) was linked to Black Flag (L.A.), the Dead Kennedys (S.F.) and the Seattle club scene. Chris remembered Joey Keithley from D.O.A. giving him a hard time because Untouchables formed in 1980 and therefore were latecomers to punk (D.O.A. were hardcore punk) – this is part of an ongoing pattern of psychological baiting that dogged Chris his whole life. Again with the arbitrary divisions – are you from Portland or are you from Olympia or are you from Seattle? Did your band form before or after 1979? Are you pre-grunge, proto-grunge, grunge, or post grunge? And so on.

It is not clear to me how Wipers, Beat Happening, etc managed, financially, to tour.

One thing about the situation around Chris and me is that it is highly controlled, and in fact our families have been highly controlled for generations. It’s done in such a way as to give people a modicum of power as long as they provide support to the system overall. The system works by tempting, enticing, entrapping, enslaving, threatening, coercing, baiting, lying, deceiving, changing the rules, etc – whatever it takes. There are layers of power/authority and layers of protection. One of the means of protection is financial connections. Another is getting as many people involved as possible in the various schemes, and then convincing them that the system is their only protection and salvation.

So our lives have been a series of set ups, usually involving lots of people in different roles (cut outs), with a bigger plan (world domination) at work in the background. In the early 1980s Chris was playing a lot in Portland and Seattle.

During 1983, when clubs were closing in Portland and Seattle, Sam and Chris moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, but my recollection is that they decided to move back to Portland after Satyricon opened. They’d come up for a visit and had so much fun in Portland Chris said “let’s move back.” I now think this was all set up ahead of time, that they (the architects of his life) wanted to introduce Chris to Valarie who, even though she was much younger, already had a drug habit, and they also were going to introduce him to heroin. Chris met Valerie through his drummer Sam Henry, and he was introduced to heroin by his bassist at the time, a former member of SF band The Cosmetics, who was at that time driving cab in San Francisco. Chris was actually the last member of that lineup of Napalm Beach to try heroin. That was 1983, the same year Napalm Beach made a record with Greg Sage (Rock and Roll Hell), and drummer Sam Henry’s first serious girlfriend died of a heroin overdose.

Valarie must have returned to Portland with Chris and Sam or followed after them.

In Seattle, both Golden Crown and Gorilla Room/Gorilla Gardens seem to have had issues with under age drinking on the premises. A co-owner of Golden Crown, John Loui was killed along with 12 others in the Wah Mee Massacre, February 19, 1983. The 3bands3bucks calendar for Golden Crown ends after December 1982. It’s a bit chilling that one of the last listed shows is Napalm Beach and Next Exit (12/17/82) and currently the last show listed is Visible Targets (12/31/82).

In Portland, The Met, an all-ages club located where Dante’s is now, closed, I think also in 1983.

It sounds like the similarly named Seattle Metropolis (also sometimes called the Met) had been a favorite of Chris’. It was an all ages space run by Gordon Doucette, Hugo Piottin, and Susan Silver. Silver worked with Jonathan Poneman and later went on to manage Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Screaming Trees. She became co-owner of The Crocodile. According to 3bands the last show at Seattle’s Metropolis was March 6, 1984 and featured Alien Sex Fiend from London, with Red Masque and 3 Squirrels From Hell.

What I find interesting about this is it is just about exactly when Satyricon started. It’s actually not clear to me exactly when Satyricon made it’s debut as a rock club as I’ve heard a couple of different stories, and it probably depends on what you consider the first show to have been. Was it a Violent Femmes show at Mediterranean Tavern in May 1983? Or was it Theatre of Sheep? Or was it The Jackals? If I had to guess based on trying to remember the dates of reunion shows, I’d guess Satyricon marked their birth date as October 1983. Is it possible there was a link between the closing of Seattle’s Metropolis and the opening of Portland’s Satyricon?

In 2002 I made and updated a website for Satyricon and then around 2005 or 2006 I created a MySpace fan page for the club which had shut down after 20 years, in 2003. One of the things that several old-timers mentioned on that MySpace page was the song “I Walk The Line” by Alien Sex Fiend as being “the favorite song” on the Satyricon jukebox. I’d never heard of the band or the song before. In any case Satyricon soon became Chris’ new favorite haunt and place to play, and from what I can tell, for several years he headlined there twice a month, and drew calendars for Satyricon and advertisements for Taki’s Souvlakis next door. Chris played other clubs around Portland and Seattle as well, as well as the occasional festival and/or small town gig, but it looks to me like Chris was playing fewer shows in Seattle after the 1983 transition period, and especially after 1988, especially if you compare to how prolific he was in the early 1980s. Under normal circumstances, someone who was doing what Chris was doing as well as he was doing it would have caught the interest of a label somewhere. But there was already a plan for Chris, as there was for me, and both plans were basically a series of traps, along with, it appears, plans/intents/set ups intended to harm us and endanger our lives. I believe that Sub Pop took advantages of opportunities that presented themself within this context. Specifically, in order for them to be successful with their selected group of artists, they would have to help make sure Chris and I stayed put, stayed on track. In order to do that, it seems that everyone around us – friends, family, etc – was instructed/bribed/coerced to keep us in certain locations, and out of other locations – but not to be obvious about all of this. So there is tempting bait (Satyricon as sort of an ad hoc family and artists playground), enticing us to stay close to home, along with messaging warning us away from moves towards financial/professional success. It was a pattern of luring, honey traps, sabotage, psychological warfare. The idea was to make our failures seem like bad luck or our own fault. Meanwhile, terrible reports are sold in hopes that FBI/CIA black bag ops will retaliate with assassinations, because apparently, that’s what they do. It does seem like there are people in these communities who habitually and maybe even as a tradition pick out people (or offer up people) to be marked for death. Audacity is one way the crime hides – the idea being that the nature of the crime is so audacious, no one will believe your story.

So 1983 was a very transitional year, and it was a year in which a number of personalities who would appear later, associated with grunge, were becoming established.

One question would be, did the establishment of Club Satyricon in late 1983 have something to do with the origins of Sub Pop and possibly also K Records? And I think that the answer is yes, especially with regards to Sub Pop. What I think was happening is that Sub Pop was making deals specifically at Chris’ expense, and at my expense as well. And while following the money would be ideal, if you can’t see the money, you can see the flow of wealth in the form of material goods and other benefits, and even more so, you can see the matching of dates and movement of people in key positions at key moments. Generally speaking, I think Satyricon served both as a holding cell for Chris, and a transition point for Seattle bands making their moves down the coast and beyond.