Sleater-Kinney

as told by Carrie Corin and I met in 1992 in Bellingham, WA. Her band, Heavens to Betsy, played at a gallery downtown. I was too young to be in college, barely seventeen and not too happy about being in a remote town in northern Washington. I told her I might be moving out of there. Sure enough, the next fall I transferred to a different school, one in Olympia where Corin happened to be living. A lot of other folks were there as well; making music and art, recording one another in basements and putting out records on their friend's labels.

1994. We started the band in a duplex. It was brick, held four people, one of us living in the garage. Nutritional yeast was the cheese, was the meat, was the spice. It took us a week to discover that The Smell was a rotting bag of potatoes in a bottom drawer. We pirated cable and concocted a chore wheel that turned out only to be decoration. Corin left a message for me one day saying that we would call ourselves "Sleater-Kinney". Up until that moment it had only been a road in a neighboring town. Now it was us. If band names were like baby names, we had picked a Gilbert or Sinclair or Beatrice. When we said, "We've picked out a name", we always got a "Hmm", or a head scratch, or a comment as soon as we left the room, like "that poor kid will be teased endlessly". Never listen to other people's advice about your band name. Otherwise, you will end up with an Ashley, or a Madison.

Two years and four drummers later and we get the inimitable Janet Weiss. (I'm leaving a lot of the in between out. Props to Misty, Stephen, Lora, and Toni). We met Janet through mutual friends. On a late summer night she came over to Corin's house with her sticks and her cymbals. We went down to the basement. She had learned "Call the Doctor", played it flawlessly, hit hard so that you got a lump in your throat, tamed the long roll in the middle of the song. Next Corin and I played something that we were calling "Dig me Out". Janet made up a drum part, fierce and solid, we could practically bang our heads against it. Then we were three.

Since then it's been what you'd expect. Limos and hot sauce. Mansions and beach balls. Mini golf, mathematics, groceries, cedar blocks, baby pools, and puppies. Or something like that.