Gordon Raphael
I started recording a lot of bands in Seattle 'round 1985 after coming back from Europe for the first time. I was living for a while in Corfu, a Greek island, where Alan, Lisa and I assembled a pretty cool studio, based on an eight-track reel-to-reel, two synthesizers, some microphones, a stratocaster, and Fender Bass - all in this amazing mansion in the middle of an olive orchard. No neighbours for a mile, which meant we could drag the PA outside and blast the distorted guitars out across the hills and into some nearby caves. Our house had marble floors and balconies, with orange and lemon trees as well as the ancient twisted olive trees which were really gnarled up and important looking. Neighbouring natives brought us eggs and herbs so as they could look at the strange foreigners with Yamaha DX7 keyboards and Oberheim DMX drum-machines, clattering away into all hours of the morning. In between swimming in the Ionian Sea and hiking through charming little villages, I wrote sixty songs in that three month period, some of which I still like to jam on these days- and one of which (Ring Of Gold) we have perfomed in London with my new band Crystal Radio.
Back to Seattle. After a certain point I thought I had recorded enough amazing bands -Bundle of Hiss, Feast, Janus, The Goblins, Colour Twigs, Serious Dark Angels, videotaped a live Halloween show of a young band called Soundgarden- and had a suitcases full of cassettes (yes, we used to mix to cassettes in the old days!) so I dreamed of starting a record company called Ars Divina Network. I began recording the first Green River single with Mark Arm, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament - later of Mudhoney and Pearl Jam fame - but was replaced by a young fresh dude named Jack Endino, cuz they weren't sure I really knew what I was doing. Anyways, I tried to get Jonathan Poneman, a local DJ, friend club promoter and musician, to help me get some funding together for this label of mine, and he thought it was a good idea. Several months later, as chaos and the Seattle drug explosion set in, he started up Sup Pop with Bruce Pavitt, and I was left feeling a little slow on the draw.
Me and Walter and Debe got evicted from Apartment F on Capital Hill because the landlady thought the constant strobe light emanating from my living room and the fact that we had esoteric clairvoyant catholic ceremonies meant we were devil worshippers! We moved into an empty old church in Ballard, near Seattle - a building from 1917 with a stage, 150 wooden pews and a fully built-in recording studio in the basement, complete with about ten bedrooms. It seemed like an ideal record-company headquarters, recording facility and rockstar lifestyle centre. Our first fund-raising concert was attended by 200 of the most friendly and dangerous punk-rockers in town, and after blatant pissing in the streets and destroying a lot of neighbouring properties, we were promptly busted as cops of the most curious and blue nature were swarming all over our new luxury rockstar lifestyle centre. I remember the cops showing me big muddy bootprints proving that kids were jumping off the neighbours' garage roofs onto the roofs of parked cars and down the windscreens. In the church was one chamber, a former priest dressing room, with a huge mirrored cross, and black and white velvet filagree wallpaper with a gorgeous purple shag carpet. We called this drug-central. That night of the big first party, I had cut up my hand really bad on some glass, was supposed to be running sound for the six outta control punk-rock bands and was somehow negotiating with the police while tripping my brains out, holding this little improptu bandage on my hand.
After a year of mayhem and what could have been perceived as a serious 'learning opportunity', the damn church burnt down right before a band practice (I was reforming The Colour Twigs for the third time). One cat and one housepet rat died, the Hammond Organ, Arp Odyssey Synthesizer and Solina String Ensemble burned up into nothing but fine and smelly ashes... Just some scary little wire claws reaching into what used to be walls were left of my instruments and big dreams of art and music... Debe and I decided to move from Seattle to New York City, after getting our full reimbursement from the Red Cross Disaster Relief, which bought me one pair of Levi's 501's and a pair of cheap K-Mart cowboy boots. I remember at the Sea-Tac airport in Washington the look on the official's faces when they asked Debe, 'Why are you bringing a rat to Manhattan? Aren't there enough rats there already?' They almost stopped us, but her long face, vampire make up, dayglo dreadlocks and little girl charm got pet 'Rattie' through security check and into the big city of dreams.
The first time I moved to New York City with Debe, was in 1987. All my friends from Seattle - the ones with dreams, rock and roll talent, super good looks and tendencies towards rapid self-annihilation - already had tried to move there, achieved almost instant stardom, and returned home to Seattle the same year with massive drug dependencies and bad diseases. They were in bands called The Fags, Sleeping Movement, Scarecrow, The Berserkers, and Soldier. My good buddy / drummer Bennet went to clown college in Florida, and was so loved in NYC that he lapsed into an altered persona, fueled by abject poverty, china white, blood drinking and displays of candle wax consumption at nightclubs, calling himself the 'King Of New York' as did his friends and admirers kissing his rings and buying him more free drinks then he ever imagined.
Upchuck aka Charles Garish was a flamboyant young man wearing a blue satin sailors suit who asked me to join his band in 1978. He got me into punk rock through his great band Clone, his mansion and his generous sugardaddy. The mansion was full of young gay hustlers and music-fans. I was lured there by the promise of getting "any equipment you want to get, my sugar daddy will buy for us". So I went to town getting a huge PA system, Digital echo machines (the first ones in Seattle!) and buzzing, hissing Flangers for every instrument in the band. For our first gig at The Bird club, Chuck made me tuck my very out of fashion long hair up into a sea captain's hat while I wrapped my body in clear celophane and some plastic jacket, wore a mini bong around my neck full of water from which I smoked continuously through the limo ride to the gig and onstage as well. We opened our set with Bowie's Station to Station, an excellent version- then launched into Chucky's original tunes. At the mansion we had a very flashy press conference before our first show! I remember his swimming-pool, the hilarious trial for his soliciting of an undercover policeman for a blowjob on the infamous Penny's corner- so we could get home from downtown Seattle when we ran out of bus-money. He sang with me for my first original band Mental Mannequin in 1980 and later, after he worked with some of my best musician friends, I competed with him and was bit jealous though I did love him alot . Upchuck fucking got AIDS, and was really sick till his death in Seattle round 1991. He was really visible and involved in many scenes of the early, and in retrospect, powerfully spiritual days of punk rock in Seattle that spawned so many longlasting friendships and artistically brilliant careers...
And, of note: Lee Lumsden, Bill Rieffelin, Mike Davidson, Mary Edwards, The Fag House, Paul Soldier, Elliot Crimson Maranger, Pony Maurice, Randy Hall, Black Randy, Jeff from Clone, The Bird Club, Showbox Theatre and Modern Entertainment crew, Wrex / The Vogue, The Telepaths, Homer Spence, Lori, Satz and The Lewd, Chatterbox magazine, Neil Hubbard, Time Travellers comics, Erich Werner, Triangle Studios, Miki Haas, Gordon Doucette, Dahnny Reed, Phillipo, and a hundred others who defined a scene and, looking at what lame impersonal scenes have existed since then, we showed ourselves (even in spite of ourselves) what music and community have the potential to be.
In the 1990's I was part of a very incredible "tribal space rock" group called Sky Cries Mary. We were a seven piece band with male and female singers Roderick and Anisa Romero, TR, a vinyl DJ who made beats, drummer Bennet Ireland, Bassist Joe Bass, (later Juano) me on synths/ samplers/guitar, and Mike Cozzi on guitar. The first guitarist when i joined was Ivan Kraal- legendary member of the Patti Smith Group. The second guitarist was Mark Olsen, apioneering mastermind who also fronted his own Seattle phenomenon called SAGE (When he wasnt playin' banjo on the street-corners of Capitol Hill) We had a travelling super psychedelic lightshow originally manned by Cam Garret called Stray Voltage, and toured the US, Canada and Japan for about seven years, releasing an EP and 3 albums. This was my first ever experience with record deals, publishing deals, lines around the block to get in to see us...collecting instruments while on tour....good times!!
GORDON RAPHAEL - by Toby L (rockfeedback.com) Ever one of personal preference over sell-out career furtherance, Gordon Raphael's unusual production-technique has marked a substantial blow to the corporate-minded conventions of music-presentation in the past few years. Always a spirit in belief of 'let the music speak!', where live-impact of recording takes a precedent over a blindingly clichéd sheen of mundanity, in spite of constant offers to record work with 'safe' name-acts to enhance their credibility-status, Raphael prefers to nurture new talent, as well as work with solely those that continually inspire and invigorate his outlook on music on a regular basis. ... And that's all without having highlighted GR's own solo and group-related endeavours, inclusive of understated 80's act The Colour Twigs, and 90's, dark synth purveyors Absinthee... Clutches of music and plastic to subvert and excite, if only for their sheer balls and awkward unwillingness to conform.
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