Calvin Johnson

The K Records label boss and Beat Happening front man talks about his favorite music documentaries, small-town artist collectives and how the Internet has transformed access to underground music scenes

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Published: April 6th, 2006 | 11:19am

Whenever I go driving with my friend, she always plays me the mixtape that Calvin Johnson swapped her for a zine years ago at a Beat Happening show. Needless to say, most of the bands are unknown to both of us, but the tape is incredible. It’s an eclectic compilation of underground bands from middle-of-nowhere towns somewhere in America. Bands whose recordings are probably only preserved on this tape, representing strains of a music scene lost and forgotten, if ever discovered by anyone other than Johnson in the first place.

“I like supporting small-town music scenes and artist collectives in remote parts of the country,” Johnson says on the phone from the K Records offices in 2006. “It’s neat to see people sustaining a creative community in places where they are building their own infrastructure rather than relying on one that already exists.”

If anyone should know about constructing a creative community from the ground up, it’s Johnson, front man of bassless art pop band Beat Happening and founder of K Records. The scene that Johnson has been building in Olympia, Washington, since he was a teenager helped establish this state capital as an epicenter in the indie world for innovative independent music. Since the inception of K Records, and also the Kill Rock Stars label founded by Slim Moon, artists and musicians have migrated to Olympia in droves. As a community, Olympia is ostensibly a retreat from the attitudes of mainstream America; it’s a liberal island in a predominantly Republican climate. Although it hasn’t always been that way.

“When people refer to Olympia as liberal, that isn’t the Olympia I grew up in,” Johnson says. “I suppose that you could exist in Olympia now without coming into contact with a more mainstream viewpoint, but certainly when I was a teenager, there was no infrastructure that would shelter you from that.”

At 16, he started DJing on Olympia’s local college radio station, KAOS, and in 1980 he contributed to Bruce Pavitt’s fanzine, Subterranean Pop, which later became Sub Pop Records — home to Nirvana and Mudhoney. The impetus behind Sub Pop was to “decentralize pop culture,” an idea that Johnson took seriously when co-founding K in 1982, at age 19. When Johnson started DJing at KAOS, a DIY aesthetic was already starting to take hold, revolting against a mainstream that was dominating music.

“When Calvin started at KAOS, it was during a time of transition at the station with new management,” recalls former K artist and Up Records founder Rich Jensen. “They decided to promote a mostly 'independent music' programming policy, meaning music neither manufactured nor distributed by the five or six largest record labels.

“In 1979 these station managers founded OP, a music magazine dedicated to ‘independent music' from all over the world,” continues Jensen. “Contributors to OP and local Olympia residents, station volunteers, and students at that time included Bruce Pavitt [Sub Pop founder] and Steve Fisk [seminal Northwest punk, rock, and experimental producer and recording engineer]. I met Calvin in the autumn of 1981 during his first or second year of college, where, despite many extra-curriculars, he was a serious student of organic farming.”

Through K, Johnson has helped document a musical underground spanning more than two decades that would otherwise remain obscured, largely due to his almost academic attitude toward discovering new music. Each recording serves to pinpoint a different moment; a new and exciting scene uncovered. In lieu of this, I asked Johnson about his favorite documentary renderings of a music scene onto film.

“I don’t remember the name of the film but there is a documentary about the Isle of Wight festival in 1970, which is really illuminating,” Johnson says. “I think it perfectly captures a scene that has gone wrong. All the tensions and conflicts that take place around this festival are the same kinds of tensions and conflicts that I have witnessed in smaller, underground scenes. And on a bigger level, it’s about the hidden agendas and the unrealistic expectations that fans and performers have. It’s a fascinating study.”

While simultaneously introducing the world to the likes of Some Velvet Sidewalk, Mecca Normal, the Microphones, and Mirah via K, Johnson fronted Beat Happening, as well as playing in Dub Narcotic Sound System and the Halo Benders, with Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch. At 43, he has a seemingly exhaustive musical knowledge, and he continues to utilize this knowledge to introduce new generations of indie kids to the bands and records that continue to excite him.

“Getting into music was a process for me,” Johnson says. “I think it was mostly self-education, just making connections between bands and music genres. It’s different now. The Internet is a very valuable tool for communication and networking, so people in isolated locations who may not have access to a print fanzine would still have access to the same kinds of information, although maybe not in the same form.

“In the ’70s, being isolated geographically meant an isolation from access to music itself,” Johnson says. “Now, people are connected immediately to the underground. Bands can put out their own records; they can make a Web site, and there isn’t the necessity for the intermediate steps of a record label. That’s totally exciting.”

<b>Photo's from top:</b> Calvin Johnson (Daniel St. Laurent) Calvin Johnson (Krista Kay) Dub Narcotic Sound System (Krista Kay)