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by Mark Baumgarten, July 13, 2012 9:20 AM
 I didn't get into writing for the crying. It just happened. The first time was near the half-way point of my book, Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music. I was writing about the International Pop Underground Convention, a once-only gathering in Olympia, Washington, put on by K Records in 1991 and attended by underground punk bands of widely different stripes from around the world. It was a celebration of the successes won by a scrappy group of young musicians who had built a conversely vast and intimate culture. The first night of the Convention was devoted to women. The organizers — K Records founders and the heroes of my book, Calvin Johnson and Candice Pedersen — proclaimed the night Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now and invited any woman who felt so inclined to take the stage. There, in the old Capitol Theater in downtown Olympia, women from Washington, D.C., Olympia, Sacramento, and Portland gathered in a safe place to play. A few were performing in front of a live audience for the first time in their lives. At this point in the writing process, I had effectively burrowed my way deep into my office, far from daylight. I had no social life, except the one I was constructing on the page while referencing my interviews with the women who were there. These were the people I returned to every day. They were, in the most one-sided manner possible, my only friends. So, I was there when a young woman named Corin Tucker played for the first time ever, beginning what would become a storied musical career. And I was there when she walked off the stage into the arms of fellow trailblazing musician Kathleen Hanna. As they held each other, I wrote, they wept. And then I wept too. I wasn't expecting that. It had never happened before. I chalked it up to a lack of sleep and an excess of coffee (and, of course, good writing). But there was something else going on. While I openly admit in the introduction to the book that this is not my story — that I am late on the scene, extracting the stories of others to construct an untold history — there is a part of me that is deeply connected to what happened on that stage that night. My second big cry showed me what that connection was. It was some months later, after I had finished the manuscript. I was giving the book a dry run, reading a couple brief passages in front of a friendly crowd at a Seattle bar. This being my first book, this type of thing was new to me. I had never presented my work to a live audience before. As I read, my mind would slowly move from the page to what was going on around me, the fact that there were people in this room, listening to me read from a book that I had written. I could feel the emotion welling up in me, but I successfully tamped it down by focusing hard on the words in front of me. My first excerpt went without incident. I started in on a second excerpt, a section I chose because, for me, it contained a quote that captured the spirit of the story. Halfway through this particular quote, I felt the emotion welling up. I focused hard on the words, but it didn't work. The thing I was trying to read as I choked back tears was the same as the thing I was feeling. I was overcome. I stopped. Started. Stopped again. Eventually I got it out, my eyes filled with tears. The quote comes from Bret Lunsford, the guitarist for K's cornerstone band Beat Happening, reflecting on the moment 27 years ago that he was handed a copy of his band's first record, the first full-length vinyl release from the record label. In his words, It was a dream come true. I think it takes a certain amount of bravery and pretentiousness to actually create something like a record. I had been, maybe, conditioned against pretentiousness, but I learned to ultimately rethink that. Yeah, there are a lot of annoying parts of pretentiousness, but without arrogance and ignorance, what gets tried? What attempts get made? I started to understand it as part of the search, part of the way that people motivate themselves to go beyond what they thought was possible. What he
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Guests
by Mark Baumgarten, July 12, 2012 10:39 AM
 No one asks me about literary influences. The assumption, I guess, is that the catalyst for my book, Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music, was the music created by the spirited Olympia label. That makes sense. I can understand a reader or reviewer believing that I am simply a huge fan of K Records, and, therefore, I suffered the slings and arrows of authorship in order to spread the gospel of the label. That happens. But that isn't my story. Words are not a means to an end for me. They are the end. If you were able to jack directly into my brain and download the tangled particulars of songs, musicians, and distribution deals contained in the book, a big part of the story would be missing: mainly, the story itself. I did not write this book because I am a fan of K. There is music I hold in higher esteem. If this project were based on my music fandom alone, my first book would be about Bob Dylan. There are already far too many of those and likely more being written at this very moment. I always think in terms of story. As a music journalist, I have written complimentary short critiques of a band's music to get people to check out a show, but I have generally refused to tell a story about a musician unless I believe the story stands on its own merits. If that story fit into the feature format of a magazine, I would write it. Every once in a while I would come upon a story that was too big and timeless for that. These stories I considered literary. Until recently, I had no way of telling them. The history of K is the first.
What "literary" means to me, I can't quite put my finger on. Except that whatever it is, my entire life spent enjoying books has set up the criteria. I prefer stories that haven't been told, or, even better, the secret history of a story that people believe has been told. The process of dispelling conventional wisdom is key. Legs McNeil's oral history Please Kill Me did this for the '70s punk rock scene, as did Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces for the U.K. punk scene. My favorite bit of cultural excavation, though, comes from Mark Harris's excellent Pictures at a Revolution, which relates the intertwined stories of the five films nominated for the 1967 Academy Award for best picture. Harris manages to make the nuts and bolts of the film-making process compelling, thrilling even, while shedding light on the reason that the "classics" section at your video store ends in 1967. I am also drawn to stories of young people pushed by unknown forces to blaze a path into adulthood. The thrill of witnessing personal revelation is undeniable, but youthful discovery is also a great plot device that keeps exposition light and limber. I can't say this without pointing to the coming-of-age novel, J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, but there are many others. Stephen Chbosky's 1998 novella The Perks of Being a Wallflower (now getting the Hollywood treatment) is a fine example that also happens to use music as the catalyst for emotional evolution. My model for this type of character, though, is Larry Darrell, the restless hero of W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge. The reason I like Darrell so much is not because I understand him, but because he is an enigma in Maugham's book. He appears to the narrator, as if out of nowhere, offers a glimpse of his life, and then recedes from view, only to appear later on a different leg of his journey. Maugham uses one of the great limitations of storytelling — the fact that you can't know everything about a character — to his advantage. Genius. There is more, but these two points in particular were important to me while writing Love Rock Revolution. My hope is that I have succeeded in telling a secret history of independent music, and that I have turned K Records founder Calvin Johnson into the type complicated hero you would like to read about. The fact that you can turn on your stereo and listen to him sing after you put down the book is a
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Guests
by Mark Baumgarten, July 11, 2012 10:35 AM
 Why do we ask each other questions? "To get answers," is too vague a response. There is no hint, in that answer, of motivation. And there is always a motivation, most often self-serving. So why is it that people, like myself, choose to sit down with a perfect stranger, turn on a tape recorder and ask often meandering, sometimes halting, almost always unnecessary questions? There is a belief, amongst journalists, that we are just curious creatures in search of the truth that will set society free. Maybe. Or maybe we have just managed to turn a selfish tick into a payday, and, in defense of that indefensible act, we claim a higher purpose. "Where is my baby?" That is a question that needs an answer. "What music were you listening to when you decide to start this record label?" That is a question that does not. That question could go unanswered, and the world would continue to spin, almost completely unchanged. So why ask it? Joan Didion famously wrote, in the first line of her essay collection The White Album, that "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." If that is true — and given the number of times it turns up in places like this, people must think so — then maybe we ask others to tell their stories because we want them to live. This is not altruism. We are bored and need living friends. There is always a self-serving motivation.
Recently, this very specific question of inquisitorial motivation has become paramount for me. Since a press release was issued announcing the impending publication of my book, Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music, I have been on the other end of the questions, the tape recorder pointed in the other direction, the ticking digital timekeeper I am accustomed to tracking during a conversation, inverted, rendered unreadable. I recently had the great fortune of being interviewed by Heavier Than Heaven author Charles R. Cross about my book. Cross, like me, tends to get out of the way of his subject. His approach, and I told him this, was a great inspiration to me. After taking the compliment he informed me that everything would now change, that no matter how I wrote my story that people would now want to know what I thought about my subject. There was no way to avoid it, he told me. Still, I had tried. Once, I spent the majority of an interview answering questions about my process and my thoughts with anecdotes I was told while researching my book. I felt like a fraud. To use a Seinfeld reference, I felt rather like J. Peterman telling the stories of Cosmo Kramer. "The very same pants I was on my way to return," I might as well have been saying. I have since stuck to my own story, which is difficult. When I am left with my own stories, I feel they are somehow not enough. I know, in my head, that the journalist is not there to be entertained by me, but when he or she just stares at me, the same way I stare at people I am interviewing, I feel the need to perform. Fabrication is out of the question, so I wonder if I should maybe do a little dance, or perhaps display jazz hands to punctuate a thought. I don't. I don't have time to. I'm too busy trying to find the answers. And they don't always come. My mind has gone blank at times as I dig deep for the words. Sometimes I fail, and I babble instead. I laugh and I look at my inquisitor. What, I wonder, do you want from
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Guests
by Mark Baumgarten, July 10, 2012 11:02 AM
 Firsts, by nature, are fleeting. By the time a human being arrives at age 33, as I have, a good many have gone under the bridge. Long ago, I swam in my first ocean, summited my first mountain, set foot in my first foreign land. My first kiss — along with most other romantic milestones — has passed. I have, consequently, already suffered my first heartbreak, smoked my first smoke, drank my first drink. I danced awkwardly at my first rock concert. I cried unexpectedly at my first funeral. These firsts are common, a natural part of most modern lives. Those are the things that make me human, but they don't make me me. There is another tier of firsts for people, specialized to their calling in life. Athletes have a first win. Carpenters, a first cabinet. Priests, a first mass. Writers have their own collection of firsts. Some of these firsts are not unique to writers, though writers are more likely to take note of them. Many people have received a first laugh from a story they have written. Mine was from Josh Abbott, in response to my spoof of Jack London's short story "To Build a Fire." Many people will receive a first compliment from a stranger about their writing. Mine came from a teacher's aid in my freshman theology course after he read a paper I wrote contemplating the voice of God, or lack thereof, in the canonical gospels. Then there are the firsts that only someone attempting to make a living by telling stories goes through. There was my first real job as a writer (editor, actually, for Portland's Willamette Week), my first big mistake (in a news story, transposing a woman's last name from Garfield to Heathcliff), my first big success (a cover feature on Portland's early-'90s music scene). There are two other writerly firsts, though, that I put above all others. One is a first book. Today, with the publication of Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music, I have achieved that most monumental of achievements for a young writer. I am very proud. It is a very good day. The other, less recognized accomplishment, one that is secretly more important than a first book, is the first byline. That first byline predates a book. It is the first step a writer takes towards contributing to the larger conversation. The attendant story — the content of which is secondary to the fact that it appears next to your name — is often only noticed by family and friends. It is also, generally, quite bad. In recognition of my first book, I went back to look at my first byline. It was a letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper, The Tomah Monitor-Herald, written on August 26, 1997. I am holding a copy of the original letter in my hand right now. It is yellowed and torn and, unfortunately, filled with typos. It was written in response to an editorial written by one of the paper's editors titled "Alien Radio Show Abducts Conservative's Credibility." I won't suffer you the details, but in short, I go to bat for the head of the National Rifle Association, Wayne La Pierre, as well as alien abductees everywhere. I am not a member of the National Rifle Association. Far from it. And you'll find me ambivalently leaning against the fence when it comes to aliens. So why did I write this letter? I search my mind for a memory of the trigger that kicked me into action, the moment that I decided, unwittingly, to become a writer. The only answer I can come up with is this: It needed to be written
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Guests
by Mark Baumgarten, July 9, 2012 11:00 AM
 This summer is much different from last. Last summer on this date, I was procrastinating in some way or another. Rather than get to work writing the history of K Records, I willfully entered into draining debates about our nation's debt ceiling. I also went to a lot of baseball games, which, if you know anything about the Seattle Mariners, you'll recognize as a very serious cry for help. And it was around this time that I built two bookshelves for my office. Both are dyed red and hang a foot from the ceiling in my office, a place normal people would never think to put a bookshelf. In order to know exactly which books to put on those two small shelves, I emptied all of our large shelves and piled a lifetime of books on our living room floor. Then I sorted them, first by genre and then by author's last name. Then I methodically pulled out those I deemed "most influential." On one of the new shelves, the one immediately above my desk, I put the books about music that I love most. On the other, behind me, I put the books not about music that I love the most. I guess I thought their genius would cascade upon me. The first draft of my manuscript was due on September 1, and I had done little writing. My interviews with the musicians, friends, and music industrialists who carried with them the story of K Records were mostly finished. A binder of transcription seven inches thick sat on my desk. If greatness were to arrive, I knew it was not going to come from above. It was going to come from that brick of inky leafs. And it eventually did. Inspired by (the film version of) Stephen King's Misery, wherein the writer reserves the smoking of a single cigarette for the completion of his novel, I incorporated a similar carrot method, with a slight modification. When I finished a page, I would grant myself a smoke. Or when I needed to think my way through a thorny transition in what was becoming a very complex narrative, I would smoke two or three. A social smoker whose habit was waning, I became a solitary smoke stack, burning through a pack every day. It was disgusting. But it worked. As the brief, brilliant Seattle summer burned outside, I inhabited my office, burrowing into the story of a small, unlikely and tremendously influential group of artists from Olympia, Washington. In the middle of August, my girlfriend and I had plans to attend a small music festival at a rustic resort on one of the San Juan Islands north of Seattle. But I had only finished half of the story. We went, but I stayed in our cabin. I wrote thousands of words about music each day, as she actually listened to the stuff. I smoked less, the smell of evergreens and the absence of the Internet pushing me instead. Each night I emerged in time to catch the evening's last act. After the show, friends would ask me where I had been all day. I would tell them. I was hitchhiking along I-5, north to Vancouver, where K Records co-founder Calvin Johnson would see hardcore band Black Flag for the first time. I was in Japan with Calvin and his band Beat Happening, dancing with Japanese schoolgirls during an impromptu classroom concert. I was on the Petersen family farm with a young Candice, the label's other co-founder, listening to strange rock 'n' roll coming from the Evergreen State College's radio station, KAOS, trying to imagine a different kind of life.
Telling these stories to friends and strangers, by the light of the moon, I found an eager and interested audience. I returned to Seattle determined to serve that audience. Two weeks later I was finished with my first draft. I had written a book. My first. This summer, as I said, is different. I'm no longer living in a state of avoidance. I am healthier than I have been in my life, my pack-a-day creative habit a distant memory, never to be revisited. Some things haven't changed. I still go to a lot of baseball games that end with the same disappointment they did last year. And I am still waiting. This time, though, I am not waiting to start writing. I am waiting for you to start
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