Olympia Ladystyle

By Benjamin Nugent/Olympia

Drive south from Seattle on Interstate 5, through the outer suburbs and Tacoma and a steady stream of Burger Kings, and you'll know you've nearly hit Olympia when you see exit signs for Sleater-Kinney Road. Here three women once paid their dues lugging amps and guitars to a storage space where they practiced. It was the mid-'90s, when talent scouts still scoured Seattle for the next Nirvana, handing out record deals to young men in flannel with evocative band names (remember Candlebox?). Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, Sleater-Kinney's singer-guitarists, lacked the commercial ambition to come up with a moniker that didn't glare at them from the highway. "Our friends gave us a lot of flak," says Brownstein, "naming all the other roads in Olympia that we could have used." David Geffen's ear was not glued to the wall of their cube.

Five albums later, Sleater-Kinney (Sleater rhymes with crater) is out of storage. Village Voice critic Robert Christgau declares that "they could no more make a bad album than the Rolling Stones in 1967." Journalists routinely describe them as the world's greatest rock-'n'-roll band, a tag once reserved for the Stones. Big record labels have vainly courted them for years. Their new album, All Hands on the Bad One, contains some of the best songs of their career. For all the band's exposure on MTV's 120 Minutes and MTV2, Brownstein is in even heavier rotation as a guitarist in William Shatner's backup band in the Priceline.com ads--can one imagine higher honors? And aside from the rain, it's hard to imagine a town less like London circa 1967 than Olympia.

Hard, for example, to imagine Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull putting on this week's Ladyfest, Olympia's six-day festival of female bands, artists and speakers, open to both sexes. Workshops range from guitar lessons to basic auto mechanics, "girls only." Besides Sleater-Kinney, other nationally known Olympia acts performing include Bangs (a blissful marriage of the Go-Gos and the Ramones), the Need, and the Gossip. The bands from out of town are also formidable (Cat Power, the Rondelles, Bratmobile), but it's no coincidence that it's happening here.

Olympia's rock scene used to be Seattle's unpopular sister, sequestered in a state capital of 40,000 with a Norman Rockwellish downtown specializing in hiking gear and Italian sodas, and a local college, Evergreen, that is one of America's most left-wing and unconventional fonts of higher learning. While Seattle's bands headbanged on MTV in the alternative-rock heyday of the early '90s, Olympia was locked in her bedroom reading postmodern gender theory and writing songs on her eight-track for college-radio cognoscenti. Now that Seattle's grunge empire has been sacked and burned on the charts by Kid Rock and his rap-metal hordes, Olympia's homework is starting to pay off.

In the early '80s, Calvin Johnson, a native Olympian and recent Evergreen grad, didn't follow his musical friends to Seattle. "I was like, 'What? Are you going to be able to wash dishes better there?'" he says. "You can do what you're doing just as well here, and you won't have to spend as much time washing dishes to survive." With help from fellow Evergreener Pat Maley, he launched a catalog through which he sold cassettes of bands he liked, most of which he had recorded himself. He dubbed the outfit K Records. "I was always taken by the concept of regional labels with regional sounds, like Stax," says Johnson, who over the past 15 years has built a reputation for touting local music.

Kill Rock Stars, another Olympia record label, founded in 1991 by Slim Moon (who still owns it), shared K's penchant for signing local talent and took in Sleater-Kinney in 1996. Sleater-Kinney's records are now its bread and butter. By making uncompromising but accessible postpunk, Sleater-Kinney has become Kill Rock Stars' resident rock-star band.

Listen, and it's easy to see why. Sleater-Kinney's contribution to pop has been to invent and perfect a new formula: lyrics worthy of discussion in a Women in Modern Media seminar, '60s girl-group-style vocals backed by two harmonizing guitar riffs, drums--and no bass. It would be hard to find a Sleater-Kinney cover band to play at your wedding reception. Brownstein and Tucker can belt on key and play lead guitar at the same time, and drummer Janet Weiss doesn't need a bass player to stay on beat. It's a style indebted to Olympia riot-grrrl bands like Bikini Kill and to bands from out of town that recorded on Olympia record labels, like Portland's Tiger Trap and Vancouver's Mecca Normal.

Olympians acknowledge how deeply they influence one another. As Maggie Vail of Bangs puts it, "We're very incestuous here." In the town's tight-knit scene, collaboration is the rule. "Someone comes up with the seed of an idea," says Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, whose second album, You Think It's Like This but Really It's Like This, was released on K in June, "and the rest of us are poised for action."

Newcomers sometimes benefit from this kind of closeness. Members of the Gossip are living an Olympia success story. They all arrived from Searcy, Ark., in the past two years, formed a band last fall and played local house parties until Calvin Johnson invited them to cut a record in K's Dub Narcotic studio. The band's self-titled, four-song EP is anchored by the thundering, bluesy vocals of Beth Ditto, while Kathi Mendoncha on drums and Nathan Howdeshell on guitar pound home a sense of languor and urgency born out of Southern heat and teenage boredom. As the opening act for Sleater-Kinney's spring tour, the band earned nationwide buzz, but that hasn't killed its appetite for things Arkansan. "I still like things like okra, and I love my fat Southern grandma," says Ditto, who's still only 19. Adds Howdeshell: "We want to play a tour of weird places in the Midwest, where only 15 kids will show up."

Speaking of the gossip, everybody in Olympia's scene seems to have heard just about everything about everybody. At parties, young men and women stand on the porch and the lawn, drink beer, flirt and discuss, among other things, who is sleeping with whom. Then they go inside, watch one or two astonishingly good local bands, comment on the performances and return to Topic A. "If you do something stupid here," says Ditto, "the next day everybody's talking about it."

But living in a small town has its advantages. People you meet on the street strike up a conversation, and cheap rents allow for a casual approach to making money--something sorely missed by musicians in big cities like New York, where bohemian neighborhoods quickly become too pricey for bohemians. Plus nobody minds if you make a fool of yourself in public. At a karaoke party in the back room of the Voyeur cafe, kids sporting tiaras made of Christmas lights delivered unorthodox performances of Jefferson Airplane's Somebody to Love and Guns N' Roses' Sweet Child o' Mine and whooped and hollered like being cool was so very last year. Olympia may get claustrophobic, but it's friendly.

And ambitious. The Transfused, a rock opera written by the Need and fellow Olympian Nomy Lamm, is another testament to the town's capacity for organizing large-scale productions. The elaborate score mixes thrash-metal riffs with Gilbert and Sullivan-style patter, in which characters deliver lightning-fast, tongue-twisting lyrics to dainty, speeded-up musical accompaniment. With help from Donna Dresch (former guitarist for Team Dresch) and keyboardist Scott Seckington, the Need (Radio Sloan and Rachel Carns) played all the music at the opera's eight performances at Olympia's Capitol Theater in July.

The Transfused pits a gang of vaguely humanoid animals against a corporation that has ruled the world for 100 years. A huckster's "People's Army" promises salvation from the regime in return for obedience. Some creatures pledge allegiance to the bogus army, and some choose to find other means of battling "the Corporation."

Rock's ambivalent relationship with corporate record labels is, naturally, a big issue in Olympia. Will Sleater-Kinney ever make the leap to Billboard stardom, turning Olympia ladybands into the next big thing? Probably not. "The major labels give you a bank loan," says Brownstein. "You have to pay it all back." The band, she says, has always been fairly sure that's not what it wants. "We've always been almost 100% sure that we wouldn't sign with a major label."

On Kill Rock Stars, Sleater-Kinney's songs may not make it to MTV's Buzz Bin, but they're perfectly accessible to the band's audience of hundreds of thousands on 120 Minutes--and even at Wal-Mart. "Better to burn out than to fade away," Kurt Cobain allegedly wrote in his suicide note, quoting a Neil Young song. What a choice. How about a third possibility: don't get rich. That's choice C, the Olympia option.