Tag: Chris Newman

A momentary reflection on the narrative and my research to date

Contrary to the narrative pushed so hard by nearly every medical provider and law enforcement officer I’ve had to interact with over the past decade or more, I don’t possess a set of “fixed beliefs” (delusional or otherwise). In fact, I’ve spent my whole life involved in developing research abilities. It’s the only way I’ve ever managed to achieve anything. I definitely did not have someone telling me what to do and handing out favors as a reward for obedience, not to mention malfeasance, thank God. I would find it very difficult to live with myself, were this true.

I backed off of writing about Chris’ history while he was alive because he was experiencing social and psychological pressure from family members and from trusted members of the community that he believed supported him, and this pressure made him uncomfortable. He didn’t like disapproval. The biomedical mind control technology in use seems to be really good at controlling certain things, and that includes “obsessive” or habitual behaviors (including those linked to addiction – but also things like training, guitar practice, etc) – and it includes pattern recognition. Chris was able to listen to a song once, hear the instrumentation and chords, and instantly play it on guitar – but he was literally unable to recognize what to me were very obvious patterns of unusual phenomena or malfeasance. When we came into conflict over these things he tended to get triggered and to revert to black and white thinking. He couldn’t see the reality of the situation. I don’t think the damage done by so many people promulgating and refusing to let go of a lie of this magnitude can be overstated. It is a big lie made up of millions of “little” lies.

Since I’ve come back to the project, there is a bit more information available, and certain things are coming increasingly into focus, and that includes that not only was I correct about Chris’ music being deliberately buried by what can accurately be called a well-financed global conspiracy – and this is increasingly supported by evidence – but that there were actually a number of people in our orbits who were targeted for destruction, and some of them, like Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith, and Bret Bowman, were particularly significant.

At this point in the process, I have lots of information about Bret Bowman, and I know that there are links to Sub Pop. I have an increasingly solid grasp about Kurt Cobain, and Elliott Smith is coming into focus. With Kurt Cobain, there also seems to be a solid link to malfeasance by Sub Pop. With Elliott Smith, there may be a malfeasance link to Jackpot and Kill Rock Stars, but there also is a link between Elliott Smith and Sub Pop as well, in the form of a band called Crackerbash, and specifically founding member Sean Croghan.

Boo Frog’s drummer Doug Naish was also an original member of Crackerbash. His brother, Brad Naish, had played drums with the Wipers. Doug played with Chris from 2012 until the pandemic shuttered live music. Chris liked Doug’s reliability, his willingness to follow Chris’ musical direction, that he would help Chris with moving equipment, and the fact that he had a van. But it is clear to me that Doug was always deceptive and his intent was always destructive. He readily took part in a plot to destroy Boo Frog and to set Chris up in a situation where he could be manipulated and controlled.

After Chris died, Doug tried to keep his amplifier.

Chainsaw Music

1982 Portland AM NW “punk scene” segment (excerpt)

What you see throughout the full video are people struggling to capture what their scene and sound is about in a TV soundbite, as well as complaining their music is being ignored by the local music press.

Chris used a lot of fuzz tones. Someone says “chainsaw music” – when Chris is asked “what is chainsaw music?” Chris says “I don’t know, you have to ask these guys.”

Satyricon 1984

Going through images I just found these screenshots I made from viewing a post shared through Chris’ Facebook account back in March of 2019. The original post was made on January 28, 2018. Courtney Love has had a habit of popping into Satyricon related Facebook accounts, leaving a couple comments, then disappearing for a few more years. In this case, she comments about Napalm Beach letting her “sleep on their couch” with what looks like maybe an implied comment to Chuck Arjavac. Reading that, Chris commented to me that actually she lived in the band house and had her own room (1981). I don’t know if I’m reading too much into this but elsewhere I’ve read there was someone in the 1980s Portland punk scene named Eric Couch.

I count three people in this thread who were fine when it was posted and have since died of cancer: Matt Loomis, Chris Newman, Sam Henry.

Music equipment theft as catalyst 1967, 1982

Valarie, Sam Henry, X, Sean Croghan

Canyonville Bible Academy – 1967 – 1971

From Chris’ biography – My ninth grade year was a bizarre culture shock. I had gone from being adored as Pugsley in Mississippi, to the ridiculed and strange chubby flower child that wandered the halls of Olympic Junior High carrying flowers with my new found girlfriends Patty and Sharon. All the jocks and squares taunted me with “Hey Flower Boy,” and “Faggot.” There was the occasional shoving and threats when the girls weren’t around.

This all changed later that year when some of the bad kids heard I played in a band with Ed Banning, who was known for living at his Mom’s doing what he ever he pleased, being kicked out of Jr. High and he knew where to get pot. A couple of the more influential popular kids asked me to hook them up with some weed. I half heartedly agreed and then I panicked, not really wanting to ask Ed to help me out.

I ended up giving the kid a bag of oregeno and he seemed okay with it, since it was free of charge and he had no idea what the stuff looked like. Eventually I was in the position to get a joint now and then, but this also brought the riff-raff out. This one hoodlum kid showed up at my house and tried to sell me a Vox bass amplifier he had stolen from the school gymnasium along with a couple of the school’s microphones.

I knew the kid who the amp belonged to and I had jammed with him at my house. He had a band called Green Square, and they were really advanced players for fourteen year old kids.

I got my friend on the phone and told him who had his Vox bass amp and his dad was right on it. My school principal called me and my folks into the office to hear my part in it. This caused the entire school to look at me as a dirty rat fink! Not cool!

Everywhere I went that summer I was accosted by these assholes. What was I supposed to do? Let the jerks rip off my friend for his equipment? After getting hassled and ridiculed all the time, I decided, “Hey Mom? You know what? I might be interested in going to the private Christian high school that you and your sister’s and brother attended.” C.B.A. Canyonville Bible Academy. Nestled in a peacful Southern Oregon mountain valley, almost four hundred miles from Seattle, I could start a new life.

On my own, away from home at fifteen.

X – 1983

Something I realized now, going over this history with a fine toothed comb, that I’d somehow managed to miss before was that it appears that the notorious X and Napalm Beach show at Euphoria may have occurred on the same tour where I’d seen X perform at an all ages show at Mojos in Arcata. It was one of my first concerts, and the first show I can remember seeing in a club setting. I was 15 years old – Erika

Chris: I first met Valarie at Sam’s apartment in San Francisico in the Tenderloin district. Sam’s girl Kathrine had a fatal overdose in San Fransisco while Napalm Beach were gone to Portland recording Rock N Roll Hell with Greg Sage in the Summer of 1983. This all had happened just six weeks before we all met Valarie and her friend.

Valarie was an obvious speed freak. Sam met her and this punkrocker chick in the park down on the street below. He brought them up inside his apartment where I was smoking my killer bud. I was thirty then and they were only eighteen. They were up all night folding clothes, tweaking on what ever could keep their fired up brains busy.

The next day Valarie informed us the other chick was planning to rip off Sam for his guitar, practice amp, and anything else of value. She and a couple of dudes were going to break in by climbing the fire escape.

This foiled their plan, and Valarie stayed around to party with us. She was Sam’s girl for a couple of days. She mentioned she lived in San Jose with her Grandma Caldwell most of the time. It turned out to be a couple of miles away from my Dad’s store on the Alameda Expressway.

We all went to see X play at the Kabuki Club. It was weird to see the expression on Exene and Johns faces when me and Sam were standing there in front of the stage. Our little incident at the Euphoria club had only gone down a few months before. This was September 1983.

The Euphoria was a one thousand capacity venue. Napalm Beach had played the night before in Seattle, and we were pumped up for the show with X. We ended our rousing set with a tribute to Jim Morrison and the Doors, and a song much like “THE END”, called “LAST DAY”. It brought the house down, the audience was on its feet and cheering. Even John Doe and Exene were up front banging their heads. A standing ovation for a local opening act is almost unheard of. It was the kind of show a musician dreams about.

Afterwards John and Exene invited us up to their dressing room. Mark was the sensitive martyr, but he was my right hand man and and I should have grabbed him out of respect, especially when Sam and Gwartney came up on their own. Mark was in his low self esteem mode, acting as if he was nothing more than a glorified roady. He had Gwartney help him load the van with our gear. This was before X had even hit the stage.

X invited Napalm Beach to come and play some shows in LA. John Doe tried to beckon me to get to the Big City. LA or New York. He was right. You can’t get anywhere here. Things did change ten years later in the great northwest.

X went on to play a rowdy inspired set that night. By this time I was fucked up royale. It was time to load out and split but Mark had already done that. Then… I blew up like an Atomic Bomb! Someone had broken into our van and stole my Marshall amp head and a few of Sam’s drums. I was livid and caused a huge scene there in the alley behind the club. Gwartney joined in the rage. Shaking and pounding the dumpster and primal screams making X’s skin crawl, I’m sure of it!

John and Exene looked horrified as I gazed into their vehicle with a crazed look in my eyes, and started to tell Exene how I could go for her if she was available… They took off with haste, and I soon recieved an official letter from their management and booking agency in Los Angeles.

“Napalm Beach, we cannot work with such unprofessional behavior. Do not come to Los Angeles. I repeat!!!…”

A few days later, two young kids told me the name and address of the boys who stole my Marshall and the drums. I called the cops with the information. They said they couldn’t do anything about it. Those Montoya boys were trouble.

I got a posse of four huge dudes to go with me. We got up to the door, and a little fifteen year old red headed kid answered.

“Here’s your drums, and our friend has the Marshall head in Tillamook. We will meet you at the corner of 39th and Powell tomorrow at 3:00 PM.”

They were there with ten other boys. They quietly handed over the amplifier, and I sincerly thanked them. It was amazing. We howled with laughter driving away with the equipment.

Years later a local musician and man about town, Sean Crogan of Crackerbash, told me he was one of the skater kids who helped out by giving up the Montoya boys as the thieving culprits.

The Beginning of Snow Bud and The Flower People 1985-86

by Chris Newman

When I used to work part time at the sign shop, I would take an hour lunch at my buds house, Greg Slyter. Slyter was a real character. He reminded me of Dennis Hopper or Ed Norton the goofy neighbor on the Honeymooners. Slyter was a jazz nut, and a Hendrix buff. He played guitar and he always had the best pot in town. He wasn’t a dealer, but he would help out close friends. We got to be close. He didn’t hang with the chicks, ever. He camped, jet skied, and did moto cross racing, until he busted his jaw.

We had the Jam for Lunch Bunch, and others would join us too. We even became room mates for a while, but Kim couldn’t be trusted. The first week she was fucking my drummer Tim Pederson.

One Christmas vacation, I believe it was 1985, I decided to record a tape to amuse Slyter when he returned from his ski trip. I had a record called Drum Drops, it had studio recorded drum parts with fills running the average length of a typical song. They had Hard Rock, British Rock, Blues, Punk Rock. It had a lot of beats with fills and endings.

What I did was write down some silly song titles.

BONG HIT
KILLER BUD
MARY JANE BROWN
RAT FINK
BAD TRIP
SPACED OUT
PEAKIN’
SEEDS FOR THOUGHT
SPACIN’ MASON

I then played bass along with the desired drum drop beat, and hit the record button. What ever came out was the basic track for the song. Then I had three more tracks open for guitars and vocals.

When I finished that night, after about six or seven hours straight, I listened. I got scared. What I heard happened so effortlessly and naturally, I felt like it was guided by the hand of the Devil himself. Of course i was stoned out of my gourd, and exhausted from working straight through the night without a break. Nothing fries the brain like recording, overdubbing, and mixing.

This of course was me still dealing with the remains of my religeous upbringing, which someone like me can take a lifetime to re-adjust to a normal mode of thinking. Even now at almost 60, I sometimes feel traces of guilt over my silly outdated childhood beliefs.

Needless to say, my tribute to Marijuana, and the music I grew up smoking it to, turned out to be a big hit with a lot of local kids.

Matt Loomis nabbed a cassette of the original recording. I called it SNOW BUD AND THE FLOWER PEOPLE, referencing a note I had left on Slyters door a few weeks before this recording. I had been wanting to obtain one quarter ounce of the new frosty white pot he had acquired called Snow Bud. My note was cryptic, so as to throw off any law enforcement officer happening to stroll by and read the note’s contents.

I need the new quarter inch tape of Snow Bud and the Flower People

That was where I came up with the goofy name. Matt told me all his friends and their friends want a cassette of Snow Bud and the Flower People. It was music styled from the mid 60’s early psychedelia we both grew up on. A naive time. The world belonged to the youth, and we were going to change some things. Slyter and Roth joined me in Gregs living room. We set up the oversized blue vista lite Ludwig drums, on loan from Tim, my sisters husband. Me and my Teac A-2340 4 Track and Roth’s keyboard, Twin Reverb amp, Fender Stratocaster, and my 1980 Gibson custom white Flying V. The Mig Muff Fuzztone, and Cry Baby Wah-wah pedal, and a MXR stereo Flanger, Boss echo pedal. That’s all I needed.

Jeff Roth was originally the drummer, and he could play the best fake jazz ever. He can play some cool Latin type beats too. I would play the caveman pounding drum parts,like on Bonghit and Killer Bud. I called myself TUMBA on drums. I was also FUZZ ROCKMAN on guitar and SNOW BUD on vocals and Ukelele.

When Roth heard the bizzare noisy sped up vocals and backwards masking on BAD TRIP he really freaked out. He was scared, and said “This is wrong, we can’t do this!” It was worse than my initial reaction.

Snow Bud cassette side A

That first cassette became an underground regional hit.

My friend Hippy Brad bought over one hundred cassettes from me and distributed them and sold some to kids on Haight Street in San Fransisco. He travelled there a lot. He owned the Pied Cow, a cool coffee shop on Belmont Avenue in Portland. He said kids were wearing jackets with Snow Bud and the Flower People on their backs. It was so great. I had complete control of this product. I would put together cassettes outside of 2nd Ave. records, and sell the owner twenty cassettes at $60.00, and they would double their money and sell for $6.00.

We hit Seattles Vogue nightclub. Mark Arm of Green River was there. He was digging the wah-wah and Big Muff fuzz pedals. He seemed to like the goofy retro buttons I had made and the beaded peace sign. Arm talked about Green River splitting up. He claimed some of the guys wanted to go the MTV route and the big bucks.

Pearl Jam became that band.

I told Mark Arm I admired him for sticking with his initial desire to play music he loved first and secondly for the fans, and hopefully some money.

The first couple of Mudhoney records were exciting and edgey. They were channeling Iggy Pop from the Rolling Stones inluenced RAW POWER stage in the Ig’s carrer.

When Napalm Beach was touring Europe it was the same club circuit that Mudhoney, Tad, Hole and Nirvana worked. I saw some cute graffiti left behind on the dressing room in a Hamburg venue. Courtney Love had left a message for Jerry A of Poison Idea, reminiscing about their practice space parties with 40 ouncers of Old English 800. I was a little hurt she never mentioned me on the walls. I did see the message from Mudhoney on the dressing room table in Stuttgart I believe. It said “HELLO NAPALM BEACH – Greetings from MUDHONEY!” with a drawing of a dripping syringe carved below.

Sub Pop was a new label. They started out as a fanzine and developed while Bruce Pavitt, Mark Arm, and Poneman worked at Muzac. Some other future label mates worked their too. That night at the Vogue in the Spring of 1986, Pavitt approached me in the backstage area. He was excited about the show and the cassette. He expressed interest in Snow Bud. I loved the Snow Bud music, but dreaded the thought of forever playing the cartoonish character the rest of my days. The music was inspired by the Cramps, Jimi Hendrix, the Stooges, Velvet Undergriund, and Gun Club. This was the music I was engrossed in and studying at that time.

As usual, I didn’t follow through. I wasn’t paying attention. I heard promising talk all the time. I didn’t realize these Seattle dudes were actually onto something. I could have grown with the SUB POP label, or possibly been buried by the label. They went on to become huge in the music industry, changing the whole playing field, and some of the the rules.

Music is competetive. They have the sleazy underhanded stuff going on. People ripping off ideas, and squelching and dousing the flame of their rivals.

Mother Love Bone was the first spin off of Green River. Andrew Wood was a little gypsy Steven Tyler type rock star in the making. I met him at the Satyricon the one night they headlined. He was friendly and respectful to me. He made me feel important, and that always endears a person to another. I was waiting outside the stall in the Satyricon Men’s room. Wood was on the single toilet, obscured by a crude curtain since the door had long been broken off. I was waiting to fix myself. I realized as I saw him stick the needle in his arm through the shabby curtain’s gaps.

Andrew Wood went on stage before a packed house and you could see him pointing to the bleachers at the top back row of the Kingdome in his mind. He was going to be the old school rockstar reborn.

It was sad when he overdosed a few months later, right on the verge of stardom. Eddie Vedder took his place as the Pearl Jam frontman. He is the “Every Man” frontman ala Bono.

I felt that these Seattle bands were getting every kind of break a band could wish for as far as exposure and good press. The trouble was 90% of it was mediocre bullshit.
There are potential Kurt Cobains and Elliot Smiths out there even now, but they will go unnoticed with the distractions and slight of hand drawing any attention away from the true and the beautiful. The bottom line is party bands and hate fuckers get on your nerves after a few listens, but a well crafted beautifully delivered song will tame the savage beast and make the little girls cry everytime.

Snow Bud Sub Pop single 1993
1993 Snow Bud Sub Pop single

Snow Bud did eventually get a Sub Pop release with the Single of the Month club series.

It was Killer Bud, (4 track version) and side two was “Third Shelf” from Green Thing, 24 track and Drew Canulette produced. It included a twelve panel cartoon, “Snow Bud in Hell” 1,000 in print. It was an honor and a delight to be on the label at the time. I recieved a few copies, and got paid a few hundred dollars, which I generously split with Jan Celt.

Slowing the roll – Portland, Seattle club scene breakdown in 1983 and appearance of Satyricon

I can parse the series of music-related set ups in Chris’ life going back to 1967. However, right now I’m focused on the 1980s, especially the Sub Pop era.

I’ve been trying to think of Pacific northwest punk bands who were touring early before 1987. The only ones I can think of are Wipers, Beat Happening, Go Team, D.O.A. – and Pell Mell? Green River toured beginning in 1985.

Pell Mell with Wipers at Evergreen Experimental Theater 13 July 1984

A lot of times people don’t include D.O.A. with these other bands maybe because they were from Vancouver B.C. or because, generally speaking, artificial divisions are made in the northwest music scene where they shouldn’t be made, almost certainly to misdirect attention.

D.O.A. – like Black Flag, the LA band with whom they shared a member – was a popular hardcore punk band on the move.

Wipers, from Portland, was Greg Sage. Sage was linked to the all ages punk scene, to Pell Mell (Steve Fisk, Bruce Pavitt), and Napalm Beach. I don’t know, but I suspect Sage was linked more generally to K Records, Evergreen State College and the all ages punk scene. Wipers was one of the Portland bands who were liked in Olympia. (Dead Moon was another.)

There are things about Greg Sage that tell you he has some kind of background in, for lack of a better term, mind control activity (hypnosis, covert manipulations, etc). It’s in his sound (hypnotic drum loops, etc) and in the messaging he conveyed. This is true of a lot of people around Chris and me – especially those closest to us. How these people were trained to handle us, and who trained and/or handles them, I don’t know. The mind control activities do seem to be linked to bigger record labels and movie studios (I.E. the Hollywood entertainment business), and financial activity. Part of Greg Sage’s job was trapping Chris (thus the hidden in plain sight name of his first label – Trap Records) in the local scene. To this end, I suspect he coordinated with a number of other people and financial entities.

Beat Happening (Olympia) was of course linked to K Records, KAOS Radio/Evergreen, Pavitt/Sub Pop zine/label, and the all ages scene. Go Team (Olympia) was linked to Beat Happening, K Records, Bikini Kill zine/band, and the all ages scene. Part of the misdirecting used by bands like Beat Happening (and all of these bands, really) was an overt eschewing of anything corporate or “sell out.” That seems to have been a psychological technique to make it seem like being small and unknown and not standing out was “cooler” than being successful and “corporate”, and it was also a form of misdirection. I suspect all of these acts were involved in a number of subterranean financial transactions.

Peter Gabriel - Big Time - 1987

D.O.A. (Vancouver, B.C.) was linked to Black Flag (L.A.), the Dead Kennedys (S.F.) and the Seattle club scene. Chris remembered Joey Keithley from D.O.A. giving him a hard time because Untouchables formed in 1980 and therefore were latecomers to punk (D.O.A. were hardcore punk) – this is part of an ongoing pattern of psychological baiting that dogged Chris his whole life. Again with the arbitrary divisions – are you from Portland or are you from Olympia or are you from Seattle? Did your band form before or after 1979? Are you pre-grunge, proto-grunge, grunge, or post grunge? And so on.

It is not clear to me how Wipers, Beat Happening, etc managed, financially, to tour.

One thing about the situation around Chris and me is that it is highly controlled, and in fact our families have been highly controlled for generations. It’s done in such a way as to give people a modicum of power as long as they provide support to the system overall. The system works by tempting, enticing, entrapping, enslaving, threatening, coercing, baiting, lying, deceiving, changing the rules, etc – whatever it takes. There are layers of power/authority and layers of protection. One of the means of protection is financial connections. Another is getting as many people involved as possible in the various schemes, and then convincing them that the system is their only protection and salvation.

So our lives have been a series of set ups, usually involving lots of people in different roles (cut outs), with a bigger plan (world domination) at work in the background. In the early 1980s Chris was playing a lot in Portland and Seattle.

1983 Rock and Roll Hell cassette
Trap Records

During 1983, when clubs were closing in Portland and Seattle, Sam and Chris moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, but my recollection is that they decided to move back to Portland after Satyricon opened. They’d come up for a visit and had so much fun in Portland Chris said “let’s move back.” I now think this was all set up ahead of time, that they (the architects of his life) wanted to introduce Chris to Valarie who, even though she was much younger, already had a drug habit, and they also were going to introduce him to heroin. Chris met Valerie through his drummer Sam Henry, and he was introduced to heroin by his bassist at the time, a former member of SF band The Cosmetics, who was at that time driving cab in San Francisco. Chris was actually the last member of that lineup of Napalm Beach to try heroin. That was 1983, the same year Napalm Beach made a record with Greg Sage (Rock and Roll Hell), and drummer Sam Henry’s first serious girlfriend died of a heroin overdose.

Valarie must have returned to Portland with Chris and Sam or followed after them.

In Seattle, both Golden Crown and Gorilla Room/Gorilla Gardens seem to have had issues with under age drinking on the premises. A co-owner of Golden Crown, John Loui was killed along with 12 others in the Wah Mee Massacre, February 19, 1983. The 3bands3bucks calendar for Golden Crown ends after December 1982. It’s a bit chilling that one of the last listed shows is Napalm Beach and Next Exit (12/17/82) and currently the last show listed is Visible Targets (12/31/82).

In Portland, The Met, an all-ages club located where Dante’s is now, closed, I think also in 1983.

It sounds like the similarly named Seattle Metropolis (also sometimes called the Met) had been a favorite of Chris’. It was an all ages space run by Gordon Doucette, Hugo Piottin, and Susan Silver. Silver worked with Jonathan Poneman and later went on to manage Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Screaming Trees. She became co-owner of The Crocodile. According to 3bands the last show at Seattle’s Metropolis was March 6, 1984 and featured Alien Sex Fiend from London, with Red Masque and 3 Squirrels From Hell.

Violent Femmes at Mediterranean Tavern - May 18, 1983
Violent Femmes 1983

What I find interesting about this is it is just about exactly when Satyricon started. It’s actually not clear to me exactly when Satyricon made it’s debut as a rock club as I’ve heard a couple of different stories, and it probably depends on what you consider the first show to have been. Was it a Violent Femmes show at Mediterranean Tavern in May 1983? Or was it Theatre of Sheep? Or was it The Jackals? If I had to guess based on trying to remember the dates of reunion shows, I’d guess Satyricon marked their birth date as October 1983. Is it possible there was a link between the closing of Seattle’s Metropolis and the opening of Portland’s Satyricon?

In 2002 I made and updated a website for Satyricon and then around 2005 or 2006 I created a MySpace fan page for the club which had shut down after 20 years, in 2003. One of the things that several old-timers mentioned on that MySpace page was the song “I Walk The Line” by Alien Sex Fiend as being “the favorite song” on the Satyricon jukebox. I’d never heard of the band or the song before. In any case Satyricon soon became Chris’ new favorite haunt and place to play, and from what I can tell, for several years he headlined there twice a month, and drew calendars for Satyricon and advertisements for Taki’s Souvlakis next door. Chris played other clubs around Portland and Seattle as well, as well as the occasional festival and/or small town gig, but it looks to me like Chris was playing fewer shows in Seattle after the 1983 transition period, and especially after 1988, especially if you compare to how prolific he was in the early 1980s. Under normal circumstances, someone who was doing what Chris was doing as well as he was doing it would have caught the interest of a label somewhere. But there was already a plan for Chris, as there was for me, and both plans were basically a series of traps, along with, it appears, plans/intents/set ups intended to harm us and endanger our lives. I believe that Sub Pop took advantages of opportunities that presented themself within this context. Specifically, in order for them to be successful with their selected group of artists, they would have to help make sure Chris and I stayed put, stayed on track. In order to do that, it seems that everyone around us – friends, family, etc – was instructed/bribed/coerced to keep us in certain locations, and out of other locations – but not to be obvious about all of this. So there is tempting bait (Satyricon as sort of an ad hoc family and artists playground), enticing us to stay close to home, along with messaging warning us away from moves towards financial/professional success. It was a pattern of luring, honey traps, sabotage, psychological warfare. The idea was to make our failures seem like bad luck or our own fault. Meanwhile, terrible reports are sold in hopes that FBI/CIA black bag ops will retaliate with assassinations, because apparently, that’s what they do. It does seem like there are people in these communities who habitually and maybe even as a tradition pick out people (or offer up people) to be marked for death. Audacity is one way the crime hides – the idea being that the nature of the crime is so audacious, no one will believe your story.

Napalm Beach 1987

So 1983 was a very transitional year, and it was a year in which a number of personalities who would appear later, associated with grunge, were becoming established.

One question would be, did the establishment of Club Satyricon in late 1983 have something to do with the origins of Sub Pop and possibly also K Records? And I think that the answer is yes, especially with regards to Sub Pop. What I think was happening is that Sub Pop was making deals specifically at Chris’ expense, and at my expense as well. And while following the money would be ideal, if you can’t see the money, you can see the flow of wealth in the form of material goods and other benefits, and even more so, you can see the matching of dates and movement of people in key positions at key moments. Generally speaking, I think Satyricon served both as a holding cell for Chris, and a transition point for Seattle bands making their moves down the coast and beyond.