Jason Traeger

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Anyone who knows me knows I've never been one to revel in the past. I'm the last one to cast a misty-eyed glance back at the "good old days". In my experience the people who take this angle are usually the ones who weren't there. Whatever mistakes, false starts and missed opportunities I've had the pleasure of having, I was wherever I was for better or worse.

This blog is not meant to romanticize any choices I made or any particular era. It's simply a place where I share stories and take stock of where I've been as a way to figure out where I might want to go next. I'll celebrate some people along the way, some of them you'll know or know of, others will be new to you. I'm glad to have known every one of them.

The posts are in no thematic or chronological order. The date at the end of the post's title refers to how the content of the post relates to me personally. I make no claim about the accuracy of my recollections I only promise that I'll be as honest and accurate as I can be. If you were there and you remember things differently than I do, or you find evidence that contradicts my memory (I wouldn't be surprised or upset) feel free to let me know.

Rather than editing the posts for historical accuracy, I'll put ( * ) next to any parts that have been challenged or updated for that reason.

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May 2, 2013

INTERVIEW WITH CAROL GATES ON CORPORATE RADIO REJECTS PORTLAND 2013.

This is the first interview I’ve ever done about the Punk Rock era. Carol and I cover a lot of ground in this conversation.

https://soundcloud.com/corporateradioreject/corporate-radio-jason-traeger

Photo: Me onstage at YoYoAGoGo Olympia 1997.

November 28, 2012

MY BEDROOM WALLS TACOMA 1982

I don’t know why but I remember that at the moment this photo was snapped I was play-menacing our house cat, a cat whose name escapes me now.

I mention this because that same cat would later take a voluminous piss in the middle of a huge stack of my Punk flyers when I was in the process of rearranging my walls one weekend in 1982. This incident ruined half of them, sending them to the trash heap of history. I am glad I have this photo so that the image of some of those dead flyers can live on. After I discovered the pool in the middle of my precious paper I wanted to drop kick that cat but it was probably curled up on my lap the next day. What are ya gonna do, ya know?

As this photo suggests, I was a voracious collector of flyers in my Punk Rock youth. After moving to San Diego in 83 I also gained something of a reputation as a flyer artist myself. You can search the archives of this blog for evidence of my artistic contributions to the So Cal Punk aesthetic of the 80’s if you’d like to take a look.

When I was a kid I combed the streets and studied every telephone pole of Seattle for any Punk or Punk-like flyer I could find. I was also very forward about ingratiating myself with the jaded record store employees of University Ave. in an effort to get a hold of any posters like the ones I’d see hanging on the walls of the shops I visited every weekend. I still have that Dead Kennedys In God We Trust, Inc. poster you see behind me rolled up in a tube somewhere.

The other major source for amassing wall art was my compulsive pen pal and mailorder activities in that era. Half the time I received a letter from a kid in Detroit, LA, Texas or wherever there were flyers stuffed in the envelope too. The backs of show flyers were often themselves used as stationary. The people who ran my favorite record labels like Touch and Go, Dischord, and many, many more were also really just a little older than kids themselves and they were almost always responsive when I asked if they could throw in some local flyers with my record order.

I remember being particularly jazzed when Jeff Nelson from Minor Threat sent me that beautiful three color mini poster from the band’s Wilson Center show with Government Issue. That’s another one I still have around somewhere. It’s down in the left hand corner of the photo.

One other thing I want to mention is my Motorhead shirt. I loved that shirt. It’s funny to think back now from the vantage point of our hyper merchandised, consumer minded era but back in the early 80’s most Hardcore and Punk bands didn’t even sell t-shirts or anything at shows as far as I remember. Bands like Black Flag just set up, played, packed up and left. It wasn’t until around 84 that bands really got into the apparel business. Back in 81/82 you kinda had to look to the metal side of things to hit screen print gold.

How times change.

(Photo of me in my room in Tacoma, WA. 1982 from my personal archives)

October 21, 2012

LETTER ART FROM TOM NIEMEYER OF THE ACCUSED TACOMA/SAN DIEGO 1982/83

Once upon a time, in a far away land before Googles started Googling and no Tumblrs had ever Tumbld there was only one way for young Punked Rawkers to share their thoughts and images with other such youths in far away corners of the Kingdom. It wasn’t done with a click, it wasn’t done with a mouse, back in this time they had to leave the house…and go to the Post Office.

In some previous blogs I’ve written about the crucial role the Postal Service played in allowing the Punk Rock virus to spread, morph into a social network, and infiltrate all corners of the globe back in the 80’s. I’ve written about the pleasure of waiting for a package to arrive and of the delayed gratification inherent in these exchanges. Another viscerally delightful aspect of the written communications of this time that I can’t emphasize enough was the physicality of the exchanges.

When you read a letter a kid sent you from another town, state or continent you weren’t looking at a computer screen. You were looking at their handwriting written on a piece of paper that their hand had pressed on, that paper was from somewhere else and it was carried to your door from another city by people. The envelopes had weight, and texture, and they were often covered in and filled with drawings, band logos, and stickers. This handmade, tactile reality was a big part of the experience that was the Punk Rock social network of the early 80’s.

Looking through the shoe boxes of correspondence from my prime Punk Rock pen pal years of 1981-84 reminds me in a visceral way that Punk Rock/Hardcore was a user-generated folk movement. It was a mostly handmade, totally non-corporate, non-commercial, spontaneous burst of art and attitude made almost exclusively by kids for kids. After looking through a bunch of my letters from that era I realized that many of the heavily adorned envelopes were themselves a form of folk art.

One of the best envelope folk artists I corresponded with in the early 80’s was my pen-friend Tom Niemeyer of the now-legendary Splatter Rock, Grind, Thrash, Punk/Metal pioneers The Accused. I think I first met Tom at a Black Flag show in Seattle in 1982 though after 30 years I’m a little foggy on the what, where’s and when’s. All I know is he and I continued to correspond for few years after I moved from the Northwest to San Diego in 1983. He was and still is a super cool dude, whose music and artwork defined a whole wing of the Seattle hard and heavy music scene from the Hardcore days through the Grunge period all the way to today. Martha Splatterhead Lives!

Tom Niemeyer envelope art from my personal archives.

9:17am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zl8DhvViaQhG

(Notes: 3)

Filed under: the accused martha splatterhead crossover thrash metal thrash metal seattle fartz black flag punk hardcore

March 30, 2012

FROM BMX TO BLACK FLAG LOGO DRAWING FROM JUNIOR HIGH TACOMA 1981/2

In my pre-teen and adolescent years I loved drawing logos.

I vaguely remember drawing this Black Flag logo for some art project in Junior High (based on that of the insecticide of the same name, it was almost as popular a version among punks at the time as the classic “four bars” ). This would’ve been in late ‘81 or early ‘82.

It’s kind of surprising I didn’t go into graphic design considering my early obsessive fixation with logos. If I had I probably would’ve ended up earning some money from making art. Now wouldn’t that have been awful?

Before discovering punk in the early 80’s I was a huge BMX enthusiast. I competed in races around the Seattle/Tacoma area in the late 70’s but as much as I liked riding and racing I was always just as interested in the look and feel of BMX: the bikes, magazines, and gear.

Oh, and by the way, for all you whipper-snappers under the age of thirty-something who might be reading:

In the BMX era I’m talking about racing in races was the only game in town. “Freestyle” at the time was a term known only in the world of competitive swimming and, speaking of swimming, I didn’t see anyone riding a BMX bike in a swimming pool until I moved to So. Cal. years later. I can’t recall ever even seeing photos of anyone doing that in the BMX magazines in the late 70’s/early 80’s either. Of course in Washington State there are no pools.So aside from riding around the neighborhood or jumping your bike over a hastily erected wedge of a ramp to catch air, racing is what you did.

Though I lived in Washington I had a decent grasp of what was happening in So. Cal. because I subscribed to and carefully studied publications like BMX Action and BMX Plus! almost obsessively. I’d spend hours with felt tipped pens trying to draw perfect reproductions of the logos of my favorite brands of bikes and components. Brands like Cook Bros. Racing, Diamondback, Torker, Mongoose, JMC, Hutch, Kuwahara…the list goes on and on.

There was something magical about the logos and all they symbolized to me. They represented something that was rare, expensive, and very specialized. In that era where I lived you were forced to travel to often out of the way places in order to get to the specialty bike shops that carried the good parts by the right makers.

BMX was a semi-underground sport that you had to seek out if you wanted in.

Like Black Flag and many other hardcore bands I would soon come to love and whose own logos I would soon be studying and drawing on my clothes, most of the BMX manufacturers and racers I admired hailed from the promised land of Southern California. Racers like Stu Thomsen, Anthony Sewell, and Harry Leary to name a few. They raced at tracks with exotic-sounding names like Azusa, Devonshire Downs and Soledad Sands.

I used to imagine what it was like at these places and what these racers must’ve looked like wearing the graphic uniforms of their big factory teams, flying around the track, catching air, and crossing the finish line. It all seemed so far away, so sunny, and spectacular to me living as I did in the rainy, grey Pacific Northwest.

As much as I dug the look and feel of the sport I also really liked that BMX felt like it was my thing. It wasn’t something everyone else knew about. Going to a race with my mom and my stepdad or with my dad and my brother somewhere outside of town on the weekend expanded my world because the races drew kids like me from all over the area. Only a couple times did I run into another kid from my school at one of these races and I didn’t especially like it when I did.

What’s he doing here? this is my world. Of course it wasn’t. It was for anyone who wanted to be a part of it. Just like punk rock.

BMX wasn’t a school sport and it wasn’t a team sport like little league or football, neither of which I had any interest in at all. It was an individual activity that took time, some money, skill, and technical knowledge if you wanted to participate in it. All these things took a lot of work and effort for me to acquire them. There were no coaches involved and there was nobody to tell you how to do it, which meant you had to figure it out and do it yourself.

I found this self-directed aspect of it to be personally empowering and it gave me a sense of belonging to something cool. I didn’t analyze it or think about it that way at the time, I was too busy having fun. Looking back though, I can see that BMX gave me a sense of self-esteem of the sort that all kids need, and hopefully find, if they are to have the confidence to survive and thrive in the wider landscape of adolescence. I think it might’ve been my experience in the world of BMX that later helped me find the guts to strike out into the uncharted and unsanctioned do-it-yourself world of Hardcore Punk.

The parallels and overlaps between Punk Rock, skateboarding, and BMX are obvious and have been written about and documented widely. I don’t have a whole lot to add to their history beyond my own personal experiences moving in, around, and through them.

In the interest of giving credit where credit is due, I’d like to say that I know now how lucky I was to be blessed with parents and step-parents who openly supported, or simply didn’t stand in the way of me following my interests back then. It couldn’t have been easy watching me do all this potentially dangerous stuff. Their skilled and artful hands as my guardians and stewards helped instill in me a decent sense of judgement and helped keep me safe and motivated throughout my early years. Big thanks to them all.

I still sometimes marvel when I see BMX on television or in The Olympics, or when I hear a punk song on the radio or see a Black Flag shirt for sale at the mall. I know I shouldn’t be surprised, it’s all so ubiquitous in the culture now.

I can’t help it though, I still marvel.

Black Flag logo by me from my personal archive.

5:14pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zl8DhvIpoeJz

(Notes: 7)

Filed under: azusa black flag bmx cook bros. racing devonshire downs diamondback hardcore harry leary mongoose punk soledad sands stu thomsen torker anthony sewell

March 27, 2012

AC/DC, RACE RELATIONS, ANGUS YOUNG and ME TACOMA/S.F. 1981-1991

AC/DC was the biggest band around in 1980 when I was in the 7th grade in the very white suburbs north of Seattle. Their logo was everywhere and their album Back in Black was truly inescapable. I was not a huge hard rock fan but I loved that album and all their earlier ones like everyone else seemed to.

I should not have to argue the case that AC/DC’s no-frills, four-on-the-floor, blues based hard rock kicked and still kicks serious butt. Sure their lyrics ranged from not-very-deep to downright dumb but who cared? If you wanted poetry you can read a book right? They wrote catchy songs full of power and attitude, had swagger, a sense of humor, Angus mooned the crowd and wore a school-boy uniform, and the rest of the band wore jeans and t-shirts. That was all very cool.

When I got into punk just after the Back in Black craze I was sure half the AC/DC fans out there would soon see the light and cut their hair too.

Didn’t happen.

Instead they yelled “DEVO!” and threw sh-t at us from their muscle cars. They stalked us mercilessly like prey through the streets. I’d play Black Flag, Minor Threat, and Bad Brains for the more sympathetic rockers I knew but they only cringed. They hated it. I’d play them D.O.A., the most hard rock-sounding of the punk bands I dug but they only complained that the band “couldn’t play their instruments” Ugh.

When I moved to Tacoma for my 8th grade year, I attended a school that was very economically, culturally, and racially diverse. Jason Lee Jr High School at 6th and Sprague was located near the working class, mostly black, Hilltop neighborhood but since it was an academically respected band magnet school, it drew a lot of well-to-do white kids from the stately homes in the affluent North End as well. I lived with my Mom, Stepdad and brother right by the school.

The black kids I knew at school listened to all kinds of music but in the pre-hip hop era the biggest acts were the likes of Kool and the Gang, Rick James, Michael jackson, Teena Marie, and Prince. I liked a lot of that stuff too. I could definitely see a relationship between punk and stuff like Rick James and Prince in particular. If these kids didn’t dig my music they at least seemed sympathetic to my style. They might have had differing opinions about whether the punk look was ridiculous, funny, or maybe even “fly” but the one thing they all seemed to agree on is that it was harmless.

My nickname among some of the black kids was “Spider-leg” because my spiked up, dyed black hair looked like…yeah you guessed it.

When I pierced my ear it was scandalous. The whole school was aflutter about it. I was big for my age and I was well-liked so I wasn’t abused too badly about it but my sanity and my sexual orientation were questioned more than once that’s for sure. That is until the biggest, toughest kid in the school followed my lead and pierced his own ear too!

He was a fair skinned black kid named Raven who had a faint mustache and big biceps one of which had a crude homemade tattoo on it. He thought my earring was wild and told me it reminded him of a pirate. He thought I was cool for not giving a sh-t.

Looking back maybe I was cool.

Whatever the case, no one called me a fag behind my back for having a stud in my ear at school after that. Out on the streets was a different story…

When I talk about being harassed and attacked for looking punk I’m exclusively talking about white, redneck, rocker dudes doing the attacking. The black kids in my neighborhood certainly possessed fighting skills that were no doubt equal or superior to the rocker-types, they were just never seriously inspired to f-ck with us.

I do remember being challenged by black kids a number of times but being invitedto fight is a lot different than being assaulted and terrorized by dudes twice your age and size as was often the case with the knucklehead, long haired, rocker a—holes.

As much as I hated those idiots and most of the music they liked, I stuck by AC/DC through the years. So much so that the first real guitar I ever bought years later was a plain brown Gibson SG just like Angus Young’s.

I had my revenge on those troglodyte heshers ten years later when I found myself hanging out backstage after an AC/DC concert drinking Heinekens and talking with Angus flippin’ Young (!) about all his houses around the world. The ones he told me he never got a chance to visit because they tour all the f-cking time! Hahaha! (raspy nicotine laugh)

A friend of a friend of mine who worked for ATCO Records had gotten me and my friend Rene Van De Meer (ex-singer of the super intense Dutch hardcore band BGK and total AC/DC freak) tickets and backstage passes to meet the band after their show at The Cow Palace in San Francisco.

Revenge is sweet and as I found out… so is Angus Young!

The black and white picture is from my Jason Lee Jr. HS 8th grade year book “Best Dressed” section. I’m pictured with my classmate, the beautiful and very stylish Ms. Sharon Stewart, who was only slightly put out (look at her expression) by being voted into the section along with the joke winner…me. I remember her saying something to the effect of “you gotta be kidding me, what’s up with putting my fine self in a picture with Punk Rock?” Punk Rock was another affectionate, if not terribly creative, nickname I was called by the kids at school. She had a point.

Backstage pass sticker signed by Angus Young and (AC/DC’s drummer on that tour) Chris Slade.

R.I.P. Rick James, Bon Scott, Teena Marie, and Cliff Lippman, the friend who set me up to hang with Angus Young. Thanks Cliff.

Both items from my personal archive.

(Source: jasonotraeger)

March 23, 2012

BAD BRAINS at THE METROPOLIS SEATTLE 1983/4

To say I was excited to see Bad Brains live for the first time would be like saying…well I don’t have a clever metaphor on deck to express how excited I was so let’s just say I was VERY excited. Bad Brains and Black Flag were my two favorite bands at this time, in fact they are still two of my faves to this day.

I got to the show early, maybe with my brother Gavin (?), and when I saw the BB’s setting up it was almost surreal. Keep in mind this was pre-Grunge Seattle, a time when Starbucks was a coffee shop at the Pike Street Market, and Bill Gates was upper middle class. Very few hardcore bands bothered coming to our corner of the country aside from L.A. bands and ones from Vancouver B.C. like D.O.A. and The Subhumans. The East Coast and Midwestern bands that I loved were only known to me through 7”eps that I’d mailorder from labels like Dischord and Touch and Go and through black and white photocopied zines that arrived in the mailbox from punk rock pen pals. So a chance to see the best East Coast band of all had me really wound up for weeks with anticipation.

When Bad Brains took the stage and played a reggae song I was cool with it. I actually liked their reggae tunes and I was happy to hear it. When the second song was also a reggae number I was thinking that maybe the set would start off reggae then lead into their mind-blowing, prophetic sounding, swingy, technically jaw-dropping hardcore stuff. Then came the third reggae tune, and the fourth, then the fifth…until the whole crowd of punks was getting restless, bummed and pissed. I just got worried and almost sick to my stomach. Then H.R. said something sh—ty to the crowd and the band launched into their classic song “Destroy Babylon” in all its brilliance and fury! It was 1.5 minutes of cathartic exuberance. I was going to hear the songs I loved so much played by the masters at the height of their powers!

Then…reggae song number 6, 7, 8…show over. Sigh,sigh…whimper, whimper.

Before leaving I told Earl Hudson that I liked the show. I lied to Earl Hudson.

It wouldn’t be until a year or so later after moving to So. Cal. that I’d get to see Bad Brains in their full power. I wasn’t disappointed again. They were as great a live band as I’ve ever seen.

5:53pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zl8DhvIShnau

(Notes: 1)

Filed under: bad brains metropolis reggae hardcore seattle destroy babylon dischord pike street market starbucjs microsoft grunge black flag

March 21, 2012

BLACK FLAG SUBHUMANS SACCHARINE TRUST NORWAY CENTER SEATTLE 1982

Thisis a flyer for the Black Flag show I was talking about in my post about Alex from Green River. I remember this show for a few reasons:

1) I was a 14 year old kid seeing five-piece Black Flag in 1982 for christ’s sake!

2) Ron Reyes (BF’s old singer) did a song with them. I had recently watched The Decline and was way stoked about this.

3) Nig Heist nearly started a riot. I’d never seen that kind of mayhem.

4) Vancouver Subhumans were also one of my fave regional bands and were awesome.

5) I met Henry, Dez and Ron Reyes at the show. They were actually nice to me.

I’ve since heard that also attending this particular show were: Buzz Osbourne, Dale Crover, Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, Bessie Oakley, Jone Stebbins, Calvin Johnson, Mark Arm, Lois Maffeo, Bruce Pavitt, Tom Niemeyer, Duff MacKagan and as I mentioned Alex Shumway and many more. There were probably only a couple hundred kids there. I hope I still have a copy of this flyer somewhere. I got the image seen here off the web.

4:29pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zl8DhvIMMulS

(Notes: 1)

Filed under: black flag melvins nirvana saccharine trust sllly killers subhumans seattle kurt cobain duff macKagan Calvin Johnson Imperial teen mudhoney grunge lois maffeo accused

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