At the end of November 1999, the World Trade Organization held a conference here in Seattle. The proceedings lasted several days, and generated huge street protests. Some called it “the Battle in Seattle”. At the time I was working as a pharmacist on Capitol Hill, rather removed from the fracas which was occurring mostly downtown. But several protestor-police altercations happened on Capitol Hill as well. As I recall, I was assigned to work the evening shifts for the first two nights of the conference. Our store stayed open until 9:00 pm.
At around 7:00 on both nights, my manager approached me and told me to shut down the pharmacy. Evidently she had received word from the police that protestors were coming up to Capitol Hill from downtown, and that businesses should close to be on the safe side. I was more than happy to comply and get the heck out of there!
As I recall, the third day of the conference I had off. That afternoon and evening I was going to help my friend Kim schlep gear to the Showbox, a venue downtown he was scheduled to perform at that night. It was a one-off performance called the “No WTO Combo”, which consisted of Jello Biafra, Kim Thayil, Krist Novoselic, and Gina Mainwal, a drummer who had previously worked with Novoselic.
I picked up Kim in the afternoon and we drove to Belltown to a practice space to meet the other members of the band. Loud helicopters circled over the downtown area. Jello wasn’t there, but the rest of us huddled around a small TV which was tuned to a local news program. The vibe on the TV news was tense, as was the vibe in the room. On the TV, images of downtown chaos played endlessly. Kim was close to bailing on the whole thing, as one TV camera located near the Showbox seemed to indicate there was teargas still in the air. It seemed foolhardy to walk right into what might be a genuine riot. None of us were sure that we were even going to be allowed to enter the downtown area.
Krist started arguing that it really wasn’t that bad, that he lived downtown, and that what we were seeing on the TV “wasn’t real”. At this point I began to seriously question Krist’s judgment, as it was obvious from the live TV broadcasts that downtown was still in chaos. I began to wonder if Krist wasn’t like some of the Missoula hippies I was exposed to growing up; living in a new-age fantasy land of his own making, oblivious to the harsh reality around him. My mind was tipped more toward Kim’s vaguely paranoid and cynical risk assessment. Yet we all sat around watching the TV, deciding whether to go to the Showbox or not.
Being that this was December 1, the sun set early that day. The practice room had a western exposure, and we could look out the window towards the setting sun. At least Belltown was calm. Suddenly I had a genuine epiphany: As the sun set, the shadows grew longer in the real world out the window. But the shadows on what was purported to be “live” TV coverage were not! The TV stations were “looping” a few minutes of footage shot earlier, again and again, and calling it “live”! Suddenly Krist’s pronouncements about the TV coverage made complete and total sense. I was seeing the truth of his crazy “new age” viewpoint with my own eyes! The local TV news was lying to us after all!
So we set out to the Showbox. Kim and I took a big loop around downtown, and came up 1st Ave from the South. There were no police checkpoints, no tear gas, no protestors, no chaos at all! We parked and moved his gear into the venue.
Soon enough Jello arrived. I had been a huge Dead Kennedys fan back in the 80’s so it was a trip for me to meet him. He had gained a few pounds over the years, and no longer looked like the hungry hardcore punk of his glory days. I chatted briefly with him, and I remember him telling me that Levi’s had made an offer to use “Holiday in Cambodia” in a Dockers ad. I was most impressed at his refusal to sell out for a few dollars.
I helped move equipment onto the stage, thus fulfilling my “roadie” obligations. Soon the crowd began coming in. I recognized a gal I’d spoken to before, and started talking with her. Neither of us could remember where we originally met. As it turned out, she was friends with local Seattle comedian Cathy Sorbo. We had met some time before at Cathy’s baby shower. For a time she wrote a gossip column for the Stranger, a weekly Seattle newspaper, and had done an impression of Courtney Love for the local TV show Almost Live. We met again in early January 2001, where I made the egregious faux pas of telling her that she reminded me of an old girlfriend of mine. Later I read about our encounter in her Stranger gossip column, where she compared me to a dog lapping up antifreeze. I didn’t quite get the analogy at the time, and I still don’t. At the Showbox she was escorted by a man that I believed to be an out-of-town protestor. I spoke to him only briefly, as he had an overwhelming body odor.
Despite all the alleged chaos downtown, the show was well attended, probably because of the draw of three veteran rock stars on the same bill. Eventually the lights dim, and the band hits the stage. Now to my way of thinking, when an act first hits the stage the audience is primed; they’ve been waiting for hours for this moment, and they want action! Think of Led Zeppelin in the movie The Song Remains the Same; they open the show with Rock and Roll, not Going to California.
So the “No WTO Combo” hits the stage, and Jello begins to talk. Kim, Krist, and Gina wait in place while Jello delivers his leftist spoken-word diatribe. In my mind this was a total buzz-kill, a self-centered and narcissistic indulgence, especially considering who he was sharing the stage with!
But eventually the music started, and it genuinely rocked! If I remember correctly the first tune was a new one, a dig at Microsoft, called “Electronic Plantation”. Jello’s play on words was that Microsoft’s employment policies created “serfs” so he “never wanted to hear serf music again”…
And then a Dead Kennedy’s song; Let’s Lynch the Landlord, I believe. At some point someone in the crowd handed Krist a gas mask. Krist put it on and continued playing.
I think the band played only 3 or 4 songs, but thankfully it was all recorded. I remember Kim contacting me later to ask how I wanted to be listed in the liner notes to the forthcoming CD. “Matt Crowley”, “Matt ‘The Tube’ Crowley”, “Tube”, or something else? Eventually I got a copy of the CD, but I loaned it to a gal at a pharmacy shortly before I quit, and I never pursued getting it back.
All in all, the whole experience was genuinely surreal. I’m glad I was there.
