After a recent interview for The Guardian with Beat Happening, I thought about how we self-hypnotized a positive kind of "suspension of disbelief" to make room in life for our creative project. Saying “what the heck, I’m gonna do it” and then someone sees your efforts and says “what the heck do they think they’re doing.”
My avenues for independent self-expression in the 1980s were fanzines and mixtapes and magical gatherings of friends and strangers at unlikely venues … more of a moonlit path than the information super-highway that sped us into the 21st century. Isolation back then left room for movement into the mundane, navigating the stresses of doubt and locally-sourced imagination. Harder to choose the dull route today when it’s so easy to fill any void with entertainment via voice command. Swept up in a dreamlike flood of information omnipotence/omnipresence, relatively … when a few decades past it seemed like wandering through deserts in hope of someday finding an oasis.
Our interests in social conjuring led to a loose collective being formed near Anacortes. Know your own derived its name from an altered states guessing game. It suggests maritime “local knowledge” of navigational hazards, or when and where to find a certain kind of mushroom, or simply to always bring along a flannel shirt for when the clouds inevitably block the sun. The name naturally fit as a “label” for short-run, raw-fi, DIY creations emanating from islands in the Salish Sea and inspired by the K cassette revolution, Sub/Pop audio fanzine and Op Magazine. All of these were rooted in Olympia’s KAOS-FM green line policy (requiring DJs to air 80% non-major label music), sustainably fertilizing the grassroots in Puget Sound’s backyard. These organizations demanded that independence in music be a functional principle rather than symbolic camouflage. Sound Out Northwest! Let’s Together. “We will make this world a place for us.”
Back in 1987, Sore Optimists was the first compilation tape on the “hyphen-happy” Knw-yr-own project, with a snarly liner note declaration: “Anacortes was founded about a hundred years ago and nothing much happened until 1981 when a band called The Spoiled got together & began assaulting teenage ears and small-town complacency with a barrage of punk rock hits & otherwise rebellious antics.”
Why dismiss history in the name of punk? Even at the time it was written as a lie … a humorous poke at poses of tradition. It was an exercise in refocusing … shifting the burden of the past/inertia to allow creative expressions from those afraid of their own voices. Fertile ground for the earthly, profane, and vulgar senses of the word mundane. Ordinary too, but odd below the surface. So much to gain by caring to listen and attempting to understand. The next KYO anthology tape used a Pounding Serfs song for its title: “To Go Nowhere” is an anthem of the staycation ethic.
It is not lost on me – the place-bound biographer – that the story of Harry Smith’s early life was told more fantastically by him. All of the so-called facts now assembled do what for the yawning historical record? In Sounding for Harry Smith, was I building a trap to catch a wizard? Dreaming of a portal between creative communities? Excavating Oz on the shore of Guemes Channel? Or just making another mixtape … a hardcover scrapbook to explore the previously discarded and dismissed with a magic lens.
When I was a kid hanging out at the library, I somehow wandered into the basement room where they stored the old copies of the town’s newspapers. I later learned that the room was literally the morgue of the old Anacortes Hospital, a resonant atmosphere for the imprint of history. Now these publications and many more are available online, and I’m still in the habit of going downstairs to the morgue.
“Did You Know That?” I’m a sucker for stories of other kids from the past with weird interests, like Harry Smith, or his family friend, Geoffrey Venables. Geoff was a preacher’s kid in Great Depression Anacortes, who had “a unique hobby of collecting odd bits of information from newspapers all over the globe,” and created a column in the Anacortes American by that name: “Did You Know That?” Yet interspersed with interesting facts about luxury liners and the Great Wall of China were neighborhood offerings like this in the spring of 1936:
“A bantam belonging to Mrs. Robert Smith of 1610 Sixth Street laid two eggs on the same day.”
Flip the switch between the different senses of “mundane” and “morgue.” Give yourself the permission of “what the heck.” With our every contribution to creative community we may fear that an egg has been laid. Punk is debunked. We are going nowhere fast.
Welcome the yolk of history.