Beyond the big four as some people call them, (really Andrew was the spark the inspired Chris to be the guy to set the bar as a writer/performer, Jerry was the complete guitar player that was a top shelf harmony vocalist & song complete writer, Stone & Jeff continued their Mother love Bone & Temple of The Dog sound with Eddie, and Dave & pals were the punk band that blew up) but the roots went much deeper with Hendrix & Heart, and the scene was loaded with a lot of great bands, musicians, and writers with their own unique thing.
One of my first Seattle bands in the early 90's was with one of my best friends, bass player Todd Baker who was like the Eric Avery of the scene, that I clicked with immediately, and used to love jamming on Jane's Addiction songs with. He had a band Disarray that priced down the hall from us, and they had an awesome drummer that was the brother of a good friend Mellissa aka "Sister" who is greatly missed! Jeff Adams was the guitar player in town in the mid and late 90's that I had a friendly competition with for Seattle's best local hard rock guitar player in the scene, which was fun and we pushed each other! Our bass player Scott Ferguson was one of the best bass players anywhere! He was the absolute real deal and a please to work with in the studio and live! His playing really me more freedom as a guitar player and allowed me to do some of the really dynamic funky stuff and I could really cut look and go for it more since his parts were holding down so much! He would have become a household name big time!
I was the Southern California guitar player that had ended up in Spokane after high school to help my uncle build a house to make money to buy a new guitar rig after my Marshall had been stolen in Sacramento, and to save money to move over the mountain pass to Seattle where in the late 80's I was starting to hear had some cool stuff going on in the clubs!
I got there right before things really picked up, AIC was pre Facelift, and Cris was on the local news since they signed a major label deal. I was still a kid in the lat 80's and Seattle became home to me quickly with how artistic and song writing focused it was, which is what I was into. The only real rules being that your band better be doing your own thing, and you had to really bring it, no holding back for a second! I loved that and became a writing maniac, writing constantly, jamming at band practice, networking with my friends bands all around the Seattle and Northwest area.
We had KISW kicking ass for us Seattle bands, the record stores sold our independent albums, college radio and shows for the college kids were cool events, even little clubs were seriously fun to play! We played at an all ages punk club in Renton and a really cool kid with red mohawk that had his arms folded when we started playing, loved the show and him and his friend hung out and it was stuff like that, where there wasn't pointless haters, just other cool people with a high expectation that were not easily impressed and need to see you meant it!
Backing it up every time made shows that much more fun, and writing & recording in the studio on those rainy Seattle days kept adding cooler and cooler songs into the live set, and with all of that cool energy and so many cool friends, I was happy to stay a local independent band that got to control what we did, and we were able to keep what we did, all about the music & our awesome big circle of friends that I have missed big time since those days!
I re-released our album with some really cool bonus tracks, for this Seattle Days release, along with the singles, live videos & pics of the band in those days, etc, doing it for my band mates, my awesome friends, and the city that adopted a teenage guitar player and writer, that was all about the music, and for a decade of amazing memories!
That is something the big labels & MTV never got! We really didn't need them to live our lives doing what we did, in a time and place that had exactly what's missing these days in a lot of ways, and I feel lucky to have had life lead me there, making me a West Coast guitar player that wasn't just from 70's and early 80's Southern Cal anymore, the 90's and decade in Seattle and the Northwest is where I found my sound as a guitar player and writer, and I couldn't have done that in just Seattle or just LA, it took both to unlock my hybrid West Coast style, that even has a little of late 80's Bay Are metal in there for edge, since I did 2 years in that scene also, when I lived in Santa Cruz in my late teens before Seattle, but that's another story!
Seattle days is now live everywhere and is a really cool piece of independent Seattle scene music history, that makes me smile every time I listen to it! If you like finding stuff you didn't know existed, this little slice of Seattle history is a cool story of the independent spirit that was a big part of the scene, with cool labels and a ton of the best kind of creative energy in the air every day I got to be a very cool part of it, staying a Seattle scene independent that didn't need the world, when we all had what we had in Seattle!
https://artists.landr.com/057914528953