Templedragon Times
Seattle Heathen in the late 80's
Heathen on a Jet Plane
Part 3 (I don't have to write this in order, do I?)
Photo Credit: Photo Booth
I was a 30ish Cinderfella!
OK, first off, don't anybody start coming on like I have pretendinitis, I may be hazy on a few dates, but my life is based on a true story. So if someone wants to improve upon my memory I am totally open to that, "bring it on". But don't anybody try to say that any of this is not true. In fact, I am leaving out a bunch of stuff solely out of respect for folks, both living and dead. If there is anyone's ass that is being spared some fire by leaving a lot of shit out it is thine own.
Like many people who have lived a full, exciting life, I have done a lot of stupid, selfish, inrresponsible things in my life. I am not proud of them, but I honestly have always tried to do the right thing. I am weak and dense because I am me. I am a sucker for feminine beauty, like most mortal men, I like drugs more than they like me, and I never got passed the third month of ninth grade.
But I am also strong and clear because I am me. I am a libra, I detest injustice in any manifestation, and I apologize for only those things that I didn't do. I am ashamed at a few things that I ever actually did, but would undo only a couple of them if I could.
Principly, spending my girlfriend's maid money savings on crack cocaine. Well, that's probably the lowest point my ass has scraped against the gutter. I would do anything to take that back. The night it was doscovered was the blackest my soul has ever felt, my head almost unhinged it was so low in shame.
It took several years to end up at that point. Somehow, even in the darkest moments I managed to maintain an outer sphere of productivity. It was usually only myself that I was hurting. That's why that incident still really gnaws on the tender side of my craw. The real me could never had spent that money. Who the hell was (or is) that person who could, and did?
She, being a her trademark loving, forgiving, gentle self of the time, forgave me and enabled me. She was barely more than a child herself, and I could have not been more loved and nurtured, supported and propped up by her. I will always be indebted to her for nine solid years of support for my crazed THC induced hipster schems and pipe dreams. I could never have started up the Peace Heathens without her.
Her support for me was rivaled only by her pure molten beauty. And she was with me from start of the very beginning.
When I arrived in Seattle I had a long purple mop top mullet, I wore eyeliner, a black leather jacket, black stretch jeans and black, silver tipped cowboy boots. I had just moved into a little heroin shack tucked in the back of the alley across from Stella's Cafe by the Metro Theatre in the Univesity District. The little shack was just up the alley from Kinko's, which was in those days, half of the building Kennelly's Key's. I had been the kitchen supervisor at the now defunct Marie Calendars Restraint in Bellevue Square. ffice
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It was 1987, and I was moving to the University District to start the Seattle Peace Heathens Community Action Group. I was driven to create an alternative culture volunteer based community service organization, and I had no idea how many of the original ideas would eventually be realized.
Photo Credit: Camille Barackman
Hello, Halloween, mid-80's. "Hot damn, glittery glam!"
I won a TV, $100 and was asked to dance more than my wife was. She was pissed!
I almost immediately got a job as a cook at a place called the Last Exit on Brooklyn. A diminutive, eccentric man named Irving Sisky owned and operated Seattle's oldest running coffeehouse, and counter culture hang out. I couldn't go wring with what I was doing and having the Exit as my office. Irv liked me, which was very fortunate for me, because Irv could make a tyrant look soft, especially if he didn't like you. But he was a mentor to me, and I am very thankful to him and the entire Last Exit community.
After six months of cooking, I became a waiter there. Within a few years I was a head waiter at the smoke filled brick box, the one huge multi-windowed room where a richly eclectic mosaic of poets, professors, hippies, tourists, writers, alumni, folk singers and Chinese Go players mingled at marble slab tables against the wall, and big round cable wheel spoke tables in the center.
Every Monday night was "music night", and at 7pm the little cafe shut down and the rickety public address system transformed the hazy coffee shop into a performance hall. Many legendary musicians like Jim Page and Robert Cray began their careers playing the Exit.
One of the first people I met when I moved to Redmond, Washington in '86 from California was Layne Staley. He had just formed Alice In Chains, and he had long blonde hair and wore glam clothes. We hit it off right away, and I ran into him throughout the late 80's, until we ended up going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings at TNNA (Tuna) at the Rendezvous, every Tuesday in those days. A lot of the hard core grunge types attended that meeting. That was sometime around 89-91, I am not sure.
Photo Credit: Some dude who hung out on the Ave.
Grunge is the stuff that you scrape off of your bong. This is on 10th, by Interstate 5, below Capitol Hill.
Layne would, years later, overdose on Heroin in an apartment just around the corner from the little heroin shack I lived in to start the Peace Heathens. That little shack is no longer there. But I remember the beautiful mushroom peace symbol decal on the window, and the crooked driveway, and the big green house that was in front of it on the street side. I remember my room mate, who had been a dish washer, smoking heroin in a tin can in the kitchen while my young girl friend and I worked on the first of our thousands of "Crisis Guides" in the living room.
I remember the sympathizer we had working graveyard at that Kinko's for the first 5 years of our existence. I remember a time we had sympathizers in 3 Kinko's in the University area. Those days are gone, but not forgotten. Now we have a Kinko's credit card. In those early days I used to party with Scott and Dave from Queensryche, at my friend "Designer Mike's" place. He had a white Iroc Chevy Camaro, and frost tipped spiked hair, like Bon Jovi.
I used to party down with Andy Wood, pre-Mother Love Bone, when he was Landrew the Love Child and the Alki beach party scene was raging. Then andy, from Malfunkshun, formed Lords of The Wasteland (later MLB). We bought our coke from the same source, and we would run into each other there allot. I remember being high on two hits of acid on the Fourth of July for Mother Love Bone's first show, at the Vogue, I think it was '88, maybe '87. I ran into Andy in the men's room, which was also the Green Room, and they out on a show that would give anybody a mindshaker melt-down. They had two guys using fire extingusihers as smoke machines, and I was blazing, it was witnessing rock-and-roll magick unfold right before your eyes. Everybody in that club, including the cross dressing bartender, Manny, including Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, new that Mother Love Bone was going to be totally fucking successful. No band could perform like that and not make the big time.
Andy was, like Layne, a really sweet, nice guy. Such brilliance in both cases. One died right as he was to about make it big, the other died after he had been on top. Layne was practically still there when he passed on. But it was over. That was kind of obvious to everybody then too.
Earlier the night of the Lovebone show we were partying on top some apartment building roof in lower Queene Anne, at a party with Tommy McConnell's band, The Groove. Tommy was from the older Queen Anne's, and was teamed up with Eastside old schooler Lance Taft (LT) or El Tigre. Those cats have got rock and roll pouring out of their souls and shirt pockets. I spent many great nights getting stoned and jamming with Lance. He is an amazing guitar player and rock and roll vagabond. Tommy is about the best guy in ther world.
I remember my friends Felix, and Jay, who both overdosed on strong heroin during that period. They were both - you guessed it - nice, sweet guys. Felix was in his late twenties, tall, thin and blonde. A really good looking long haired guy with a knock out Euro-sexy looking girlfriend. Jay was a very big man, and always wore suspenders. He hung out at the Blue Moon, and had a big, bushy mane of wiry black hair and beard. He spoke with an East Coast accent, and was one of the first Peace Heathens.
What is it with that stuff anyway? I had about 5 or six close friends overdose to death on heroin during that short period. I always smoked it. Nobody seemed to be dying from doing that. It is a terrible taste, like sucking on an exhaust pipe, that becomes as sweet as the sugar cane mist of a good hit of rock cocaine is first toke, after you have been smoking it for a while. They call smoking heroin chasing the dragon, but it seems more like clogging the lung passage to me. It is all pretty pathetic and sad. Chasin' and draggin' is a more truthful decsription of the condition of any heroin user. What a terrible drug unless you are in extreme chronic pain, then it has its unique merits.
I was playing in Stickerbush during the latter part of this period, and we were playing a lot of the same clubs that Nirvana and Soundgarden and those bands were either playing or had played. The Ditto, The Ok Hotel, The Rendezvous. Later we played places like Under The Rail, The New World, Moe's Rockin' Cafe, The Crocodile Cafe. Years earlier I had played the Prime Rib Palace in Totem Lakes, near Juanita. I hung out at Houghton beach. Those were the days. Nothing sad about that part. It was a gas.
We were a little older than everybody else, and we played blues based hard rock originals, and I was still playing with Johnnie Johnson, it was our 7th band or something, so every guitarist in Seattle that saw us was a fan. Johnnie ended up winning the Guitar Stars Competition at the Backstage, the next year Jay Roberts from the Herbivores Herb's Website The Herbivores were playing the Bistro, around '89. The Ganja Farmers, the Defenders, Alric Forbes and Clinton Fearon played there alot. Brian Ray (Phat Sidy Smokehouse/Stingshark) was in the Ganja Farmers at the time. Alric died of leukemia several years ago, Jim and Share were there for Alric, as usual. That's their style, all Spirit all of the time.
Meeting Jim and Share from the Herbivores that year remains one of the best things that has ever happened to me in my entire life. They are my teachers, my friends and my family. I have never known anyone like them, if they have any secrets to hide, they are about the various people they have helped and then told nobody. Selfless to a flaw.
And Marisande, and Peter, and John the Freak. And of course, Cornflake. I met my family during this period. That is always a good thing. I love them all so much, I'd be lost without them. And I am.
As for dugs, well I don't even like to take percribed drugs any more. My opinion of drugs have changed, when it comes to my own taking of them. I am more of an herbal person now. Drugs bore me. Ok, sometimes I miss them, but I have found that I am better off without drugs. I do not project my own condition onto others.
Politics drifted me away from playing music for a living and for fun. I would love to get back into some musical collaboration. The happiest I have been is when I was playing music. But if you live your life right every day is a song and every year an album. The goal is not to get out with only an EP and a coupla singles.