AVALON KALIN/TONY RETTMAN: A CONVO PT.I
Avalon Kalin is an artist, musician, and educator who makes social and documentary art. He describes his music as “hard ambient”. In the 1990s, he was a member of Christopher Robin and Patterns Make Sunrise. He resides in the Pacific Northwest. Please check out his Bandcamp page and website.
Tony Rettman has written three books on the history of American Hardcore punk and is a regular contributor to The Wire. He also briefly flirted with punk academia by co-teaching a class at NYU, but let’s not get into that axe-grinder of a situation. Nonetheless, people think he knows what he is talking about.
This is the first installment of a transcription of a conversation that occurred between Kalin and Rettman in the late morning of Tuesday, February 13th, 2024
Tony Rettman: How did you get into punk?
Avalon Kalin: I had a best friend who was really cool and I followed him around as a skater. So, I was a skater punk and had all those tapes like the Misfits, Black Flag, Minor Threat, and Dead Kennedys. But what attracted me to hardcore I think, looking back, was a kind of depressing home life because my mom was really sick, and a need for more connection and that intense expression attracted me.
My first show ended up being Subvert, a Northwest political hardcore band. That was an entry into a whole new world that I was really enamored by, fascinated by, and scared of too. Because there was definitely still violence at shows when I came in. In 1990, there were still skinheads at my high school. But after that Subvert show, I was trying to get to any all-ages shows I could.
I'm from Everett, Washington, a small town north of Seattle. At the time it was a dying old mill town but now it’s a commuter feeder for Seattle. We would go down to Seattle every chance we could get because there were all-ages shows at the OK Hotel and a really important venue called The Party Hall. Our parents would drive us. I never got to see any shows at The Party Hall but it was really important for being a part of the Hardcore Punk scene. I didn’t get to see bands like Brotherhood because I was younger by a few years than my friends, but I got to see early Sunny Day Real Estate at the OK Hotel. There was a woman named Meg Watjen who was consistently booking all-ages shows at the Velvet Elvis, a theater in downtown Seattle. That was instrumental in creating the backdrop for our whole scene to thrive.
TR: I was at the Velvet Elvis in the summer of 1994 on the first Rye Coalition tour. I want to say The Peechees and Track Star were on the bill.
AK: You were a roadie for Rye Coalition? That’s cool!
TR: I barely carried anything, but if you need to give me a title to validate being on that tour, then I’ll take it I guess. All I wanted to do was buy records and meet people. The ‘roadies’ on that tour were me, Charles Maggio, and Mike Simonetti. I remember a party after the show where I met someone from Christopher Robin. Whether it was you or another member, I don’t know.
AK: It might have been at the Goat House or the Radio House or someplace in Capitol Hill. You mentioned Charles from Rorschach and they played with Born Against in the Northwest and that was an important show in Bellingham that my bandmate Kelly Ockinga put on.
TR: I remember when Rorschach came back from that tour and Charles had a pair of Aspirin Feast sweatpants. We were all very jealous.
AK: Aspirin Feast! Now that’s obscure!
TR: I kept both of their seven inches and still listen to them. I guess I’m still an angry person. But that sort of raw, political hardcore still holds up for me. I guess the kids call it d-beat.
AK: I think that stuff holds up more than anything else out of the hardcore scene.
TR: I grew up in the late 80s and was a part of the Straight Edge scene back then. So the two formulas for hardcore I’m always open to hearing are a generic Youth Crew-styled band or a generic D-Beat-styled band. Both ‘styles’ are extremely codified, which I began to feel stifling in my early 20s. But now, I find it strangely comforting.
AK: It’s a template that works, so that’s why there are so many bands that sound that way. But if it’s good, it’s good. You know right away.
TR: The codification happens with all music. The scene Christopher Robin was associated with felt like that after a while as well. A year of quiet-loud-quiet got just as boring to me and I wanted to move on.
AK: Time moves really fast. Youth moves really fast. I’d chalk it up to saturation. Our whole scene was affected by hearing Slint’s Spiderland. It was played constantly as it should be because it’s a masterful album. I’d say that album and Moss Icon were the two examples of records constantly being rotated and people were getting exposed to it. So that cohesive template you’re talking about began to fall apart because people were being pulled in every direction. That’s when Maximum Rock ‘N’ Roll got weird about what they would review. I tried to submit a record to review there fifteen years ago and they wouldn’t accept it because it had drum machines. They let me advertise it in the magazine, though.
TR: To use a popular present-day term, Tim Yohannon seemed to be acting as a gatekeeper of punk back then due to it expanding beyond whatever barriers he put on in his head. That diversity was bleeding into the gigs too. In the ‘90s, you could see Drop Dead, Ordination of Aaron, and some Youth Crew revival band all on the same bill. The definition of hardcore became very fluid for some people. I feel the main reason all those bands played on bills together was due to the music being something you couldn’t get away with in a regular nightclub. If a bunch of skinny kids went on stage at a nightclub and had some angsty outburst, adults would be confused. But, if that same band did that in a church basement surrounded by a bunch of other angsty kids, the response would be, “Right On!”
AK: Do you remember what attracted you to Hardcore? Did you find it to be a refuge for you?
TR: It was kind of convenient for me because I had an older brother. In high school, he was into heavy rock and then went to college and got into New Wave and then Punk and Hardcore just as it was coming into fruition. So he was my guide through the whole thing; it wasn’t something I just stumbled upon. Having said that, it’s pretty abrasive music, so I don’t think I went along with it just because my older brother was into it. I identified with the anger and confusion in the music, but there was a commitment to it that bothered me as a child. I remember looking at a Discharge record and how they were dressed and feeling that was something I couldn’t commit to as…you know…a child! But it was when he brought home a Minor Threat record that it all clicked for me.
I was the youngest child of five kids growing up in the early 80s, and that Dazed and Confused vibe was still hanging over youth culture. My parents would go out of town and my sisters would throw some huge party and the next day was a big clean-up where they had to figure out where to throw away all the beer bottles. As a 10-year-old, it all seemed like a lot of work for just a couple of hours of partying. So when I heard Minor Threat and the song “Straight Edge”, it made perfect sense in my mind because punk rock was just the opposite of what normal people did, and normal people drank and smoked.
AK: I like that you said anger and confusion. I feel there’s a sense of mystery to a good performance and hardcore really has that. A good example is the first time I saw Fugazi. They played in the Seattle suburbs at a high school gym and were completely mesmerizing. I also saw Fugazi at the Oz with Nation of Ulysses and Beat Happening, which was an interesting overlap. Beat Happening almost got spit on for playing an acoustic guitar and not playing hardcore and not screaming. When Fugazi began to play, you could tell what they were doing was important to them. You didn’t need to know the songs, it was that energy, wasn’t it? That’s the thing about Hardcore. The level of emotional investment is off the charts. I think that’s what keeps people coming back. It’s almost like performance art or shamanism. I remember seeing Unwound perform the Fake Train material for the first time and felt like I was being transported somewhere. The Heroin 12” had the same effect on us. It was super powerful and flew out of the speakers to shake us. If you listen to that record now, it’s still incredible.