“Good spot to piss?” asks a lanky guy rearing up between freight cars as I vault through.
“A fine location,” I tell him. He hoists himself across the gap to land between long stationery trains of the Burlington Northern rail company and anoint the ground beneath Seattle’s 1st Ave bridge.
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Legs dangle and sway from rooflines of the railcars. Other folks in these mobs of teens and twentysomethings wander in clusters, spray-painting here and there or simply taking in from on high the sound and glory of the whirling, grinding, cranking, blurring circle of mosh.
It’s quite a vision: generators hauled into this light industrial railyard backlot, speakers wheeled across rubble and grit, a man to the side boiling crabs over fire, a frenzied drummer and convulsive guitarist, an ecstatic circle of dance.
The spinning punk dervishes here at this multi-band guerrilla gig conjure from the ground a choking cloud of dust, which plumes north in the twilight.
“Need a mask?” asks photographer Luciano Ratto, pulling a neck gaiter over his nose and mouth as he readies to penetrate the fray with a battered black Nikon.
“Got one,” I say. He nods and moves in.
The mix is off, and the buzzcut lead singer of Electric Head might as well have his head jammed in a cistern, but he works the guitar hard and the trio’s pounding thrash carries the crowd.
A memory comes to mind of Steel Worker, a brute force at a guerrilla gig in a disused cannery of Melbourne, Australia, except for one thing—the punters here seem conflict-averse. The Seattle moshing gets fast tonight, but these punkoids seem to look out for each other: smiling instead of sneering, raising the fallen rather than putting the boot in, generally exuding appropriateness and consensualness even as they flail at speed in shredded glam gear and studs. Where are the knockdowns, the leg sweeps, the elbows and stomps? Why don’t these people hurt each other? What the fuck is wrong with them?
It’s a question I raise with Ratto when he circles back behind the band. “I don’t get it,” I say. “Where are the fights? Why no blood?”
“What? Where?” says Ratto, peering around. “Is someone hurt?”
“No, that’s what I mean. And, like, why isn’t someone puking or smashing stuff or collapsed drunk? How come there isn’t some jealous shit going on with people trying to stop a fight or dragging someone off?”
Ratto is confused. “Why isn’t that happening?” he asks.
“Yeah—I don’t get it.”
“It’s a Seattle thing,” he says. “Punk here is a very nonbinary scene, and people support each other.”
I’m not sure why being queer or queer-friendly means you can’t have a laugh knocking some cunt flat, or why you don’t get fucking crazy and jealous when drunk. And then make a scene. And then throw up or smash shit.
That might be it—they’re not drunk, and it’s a weedy wind that blows so unsanguinary. The smell is everywhere. These are cannabinoid punks—a different breed: an inclusive subspecies of performative introverts.
Ratto, 26, is from São Paulo, Brazil, by way of Orlando, Florida, so he knows other ways to play, but he rates the considerateness evident in the Seattle underground.
Me being the loathsome reptile that I am—a creature with more of a bottle-chipped rictus than a warm and genuine smile—the lack of toxic punkchismo is something I need to acculturate to. And when I do slow and soothe my appetite for stupid, animalistic indulgences of flesh and fury, another world opens: Seattle’s sweetly sublimated punk realm that somehow blends libertarianism and communitarianism.
It’s libertarian in its impressive DIY ethos: This gig under the 1st Ave bridge exists independent of regulation and control. There are no goons in SECURITY jackets, no cops, no city officials checking paperwork and conducting risk assessments. And I guess this parallel, autonomous entertainment world thrives in part because of a lack of assholes like me whose experience and expectation of punk is one of de-sublimation, of rending things, of kicking against the pricks.
Looking at a nearby warehouse wall, I imagine smashing empties against it in a fit of destructive freedom and joy.
But I’m not sinking liquid disinhibitors. Not to any triggering extent, anyway. All I’ve had are a couple glasses of a middling Syrah at the recording studio of Jackson McKagan, the young and eminently well-behaved nephew of Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan, a Seattleite not always known for his refined, temperate ways.
I first bump into the young McKagan at Evil House, another politely raucous manifestation of Seattle’s happening underground punk scene. Sporting a crop top, long black latex gloves, and a big blonde bouffant, Jackson eyes proceedings from the second story VIP-balcony-cum-green-room of the University District student rental that hosts Evil House.
And proceedings are very eye-able—packed to seething capacity with all manner of glammed-out costumery, cosplay, and punk fashion. As the Beautiful Freaks quintet goes berserk, one guitarist rubbing her instrument neck across front-row faithful to muster true fan-feedback, mid-yard a woman opens wings of electric light. The delicate LED array is sublime, spreading as she spreads her wings to a full, celestial span of exquisite gold and blue, and now she gently sways. No boor grabs her magnificence. No fool gets sleazy. The assembled ease back and revere the angel of Evil House.
Ratto, meanwhile, is even higher, climbing the pitched roof for angles unseen—introducing danger not for malicious pleasure but to better see and capture the pleasure dome.
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