Hayes Waring: Hello, this is Hayes Waring and I'm speaking with Kathi Wilcox. Today is Thursday, February 2, 2023. Hi, Kathi. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Hi. 

‍

Hayes Waring: For the Olympia Music Project.

‍

Kathi Wilcox:  Yes, very exciting.

‍

Hayes Waring: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Olympia and music today. And I guess I'll just start from the beginning if that's okay. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Sure. 

‍

Hayes Waring: Why did you want to move to Olympia?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: I moved to Olympia strictly to go to Evergreen. I moved there straight after high school in 1987 to go to Evergreen. 

‍

Hayes Waring: From Vancouver? 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yes. From Vancouver, exactly. Vancouver, Washington, USA. You always got to specify. I'm not Canadian. 

‍

Hayes Waring: The Couv.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: So yeah, I moved from Vancouver to go to Evergreen. I was the only student from my high school to apply or go to Evergreen. Literally, nobody had even heard of it. When I told my friends that this was the school I wanted to go to, they were just like, “I've never heard of that. I don't know that. Why do you want to go there?” 

‍

And my high school guidance counselor tried to talk me out of it. He was sort of like, "You know, I've heard things about Evergreen. It seems like people go there, they get a little mixed up." I was like, "I don't know what you're talking about." He's like, "Well, I just think you'd do better at like University of Washington maybe. Look into something like this." I'm like, "I don't want to go to University of Washington. I'm not going to go to Washington State. I'm not going to go to any of these other schools. This is the only school I want to go to." And so I put in exactly one college application. That was to Evergreen. Luckily, I got in. 

‍

The reason that I wanted to go there actually does have a little bit to do with music. But it also has to do with the fact that two of my brothers, my older brother, he's about a year older than me, was at Evergreen. And then my older stepbrother, who was about five or six years older than me had already graduated. He might have been at Evergreen, like his last year at Evergreen when I was in high school. And so I had been to Olympia to visit him. He actually lived in the Martin. This was like 1985, maybe '86. He lived in the Martin. So I slept on his floor. I went to the Smithfield. I like saw the whole downtown scene. 

‍

And I could immediately picture myself there. So I was like, “I could totally see myself living here, going to school here. This totally makes sense to me.” I had no concept really of what it was like at Evergreen. I didn't really understand the brochure. You know where it was like, there's no grades and there's programs instead of classes. It was all really vague to me. It wasn't important. That part really wasn't the important because it's college and it's in Olympia, which was the important part. So I was like, “I can totally do this. Both my brothers go there. They like it.” So I applied there. I got in and then I moved to Olympia and started going to school there. 

‍

It really was because both of my brothers went there, but also, one of my favorite records in high school was the first Beat Happening record. The reason I got that record, again literally none of my friends had ever heard of Beat Happening, was like it was just dropped in from outer space. You know, they were like, “I don't know what this is. I've never heard of this band. You know, how can there be a band in Olympia, Washington? It seems weird.” 

‍

But it was my stepbrother who lived in the Martin, I don't know if he was really friends with Calvin, but he lived down the hall from Calvin or something. So he knew about the music scene. He didn't have a record player, a turntable, so he would buy albums and then when he would come back to Vancouver. He would bring all his albums and a big stack of blank cassettes and he would give me the albums and be like, "Can you make cassettes of these records so that I can listen to them on my cassette player?" So that's how I listened to all these bands like The Raincoats and Beat Happening and Marine Girls. There were a lot. He just had a lot of really great records that nobody that I knew in Vancouver had ever heard of. You know, it's just completely foreign. 

‍

I remember getting that Beat Happening record and like just looking at the front cover. For one thing, it's like school bus yellow, right? It just doesn't look like anything. I mean, up until that point, I've been listening to REM, New Order, The Smiths. You know, so-called kind of underground alternative music but it's pretty pop. Pretty polished. The records look like records. But then you look at the Beat Happening record and you're like, “I don't know what this is.” You know what I mean? It's just bright yellow, has a weird stick drawing of a cat on a rocket. It doesn't look like a record that you would find in a record shop, at least to me up until that point. I was just like, “I don't understand what this is.” 

‍

And I remember listening to it, putting it on to make the cassette for my brother and being like, first, you see the record and it's totally weird looking. And then you flip it over and there's all the pictures of them on the back, right? And they're not glamorous looking. They're not particularly flattering pictures. There’s just kind of like full front, staring into the camera, not smiling, black and white pictures of these three people. I was just immediately mesmerized. I was like, who are these people? They look really cool. I was immediately in love with Bret Lunsford. I was like, “Is that the singer? That guy is so cool looking.” I mean, obviously, you know, Calvin is really arresting-looking. Especially that picture on the back of that record where he's staring straight into the camera with his slightly disturbing intensity. I don't know if you've seen the back of that record, that picture, but it's a pretty intense photo. But yeah, Bret he was like my dream boyfriend. I was just like, that guy is really cute. 

‍

But yeah, so I was really obsessed with that record. And then you know, you listen to it and if all you've been listening to is The Smiths and New Order and REM, and then you put on the Beat Happening record, it doesn't sound like anything. It doesn't really sound like a band. I just remember listening to it being like, “I don't know what this is. Are these nursery rhymes that kind of twisted? They're kind of poorly recorded, but they're really catchy, but then they're kind of disturbing.” I don't know, it really grabbed me. 

‍

And so I made a cassette that was for myself also, that was one side a Smiths record and the other side was Beat Happening. I used to listen to that in my car on the way to high school just flipping it over and flipping it over flipping over. Listening to it over and over and over again. So yeah, Beat Happening was just this kind of enigmatic, fascinating, mysterious entity to me. And so that was another reason that I wanted to move to Evergreen, or move to Olympia to go to Evergreen. Wasn't that I thought, Oh, I'd ever meet these people, because they seemed really, like I would never meet them. But just the fact that they lived in Olympia and Olympia could produce something like that. I was like, that's gotta be a cool place, you know? I don't know. 

‍

Hayes Waring: Wow. [laughs]

‍

Kathi Wilcox: And then I didn't meet Calvin for like three years after that. It didn't even occur to me that he might be hanging around shows or hanging out downtown. It's like I just went to college. I wasn't really going to shows. They would have shows out at the school. Like you know, Nirvana played in the dorms and Mudhoney played I think. I'd see Treepeople and I think I saw Screaming Trees and Danger Mouse. There were just shows going on all the time out at Evergreen but I don't remember ever seeing Calvin at any of the shows. He might have been there, but I don't remember seeing him. 

‍

So that band just still kind of lived on in my imagination as this kind of mythical creature kind of thing. I knew that Calvin was the only one that lived in Olympia. I knew that Bret didn't live in Olympia. I figured that out really quickly. [laughs] Where does Bret live? Oh Anacortes, okay. Whatever. But yeah, so I'm trying to think. That was why I moved to Olympia was to go to Evergreen. Yeah, and I didn't meet Calvin for several years after that, which was probably fine. [laughs]

‍

Hayes Waring: Did you have any teachers at Evergreen that were formative at all? It doesn't have to be music, maybe film or something?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, yeah. So as you know, Evergreen doesn't really have any majors. But if I had had a major, it probably would have ended up being film and media because I did a class that was kind of film and recordings or film and media studies or something. So I checked out a lot of the recording stuff and film stuff. I'm trying to think. I really liked Laurie Meeker. She was a film professor. I don't know if she's still there, but she was my first film teacher. And then I did an independent contract with her for my senior year for film. I liked her a lot. 

‍

I really liked the first program that I took. I took a core program called Great Books that was taught by three of the older, kind of emeritus professors, so like the ones that had been around forever, and they were really, really good. I'm trying to remember, this is really terrible. I can't remember. Charles someone- Well you call them by their first names, right? 

‍

Hayes Waring: Mr. Charles. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, Charlie someone. [laughs] I can't remember who they all were, but 1987 Great Books program, that's who it was. But that was really great. That was like the first time that I had had a teacher who would just talk to you one-on-one. Like, “What do you think about this? What do you think about that?” You know, I'd had good teachers in high school, but high school teachers, they don't really talk to their students necessarily like equals or something. I don't know. That was the cool thing about Evergreen was they would just kind of ask you what you thought about stuff and actually take your opinion seriously. They'd go, “Huh, I hadn't thought of that” or something. That was refreshing for a 17/18-year-old to be taken seriously like that. I can't remember any by name that I really liked particularly.

‍

Hayes Waring: Did any of them connect you to like, you spoke about the Smithfield earlier, are there any other venues that you were connected to or felt a kinship with at Evergreen?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Any venues? 

‍

Hayes Waring: Yeah, like that you saw music like, you know, the Smithfield was a big one.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah. So my first couple years at Evergreen I lived on campus, my first two years at Evergreen. And I didn't have a car. I mean, I left my car in Vancouver. I didn't use it at school. 

‍

Hayes Waring: I was going to ask you about that. And no one else drives.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, so in order to get downtown it was like- Well, so by the time Bikini Kill started, I had gotten that car back because we needed the car. Exactly. Well, Kathleen drove, but I don't think she had a car at that time. 

‍

But yeah, so in order to get from Evergreen anywhere, you had to take that bus for like 40 minutes or whatever downtown in the rain. And you know it's just kind of depressing. So I only went downtown to do grocery shopping or occasionally to see a show. But you know, the shows happened at Evergreen. You know, there'd be shows at K Dorm or shows out at the Mods. 

‍

My first year, I lived in the student housing called The Mods. I don't know if you know Evergreen housing, but it's like, these really depressing little shacks, kind of out at the edge of campus. And supposedly they were built for the workers who built the school. 

‍

Hayes Waring: And families.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: And their families, right. I don't know if they were supposed to be torn down or if they always had the idea that it was going to be student housing, but it turned into student housing and they just kept them. So by the time I got there in 1987, they were pretty gross. You know, they were pretty rundown. I mean, no shade on Evergreen. It's like, whatever. Student housing is all pretty gross, but I wanted to live there. So you could sign up to request certain student housing when you went there. It was like, everybody wanted to live in A Dorm or B Dorm or C, you know, the big high-rise towers because they're nicer and they're more social, and they're closer to campus and all the stuff. For some reason I wanted to live in The Mods. I think it was because my brother had lived in The Mods when I came out to visit him. So I was like, “Oh, this is cool. It's like, all these were little shacks, it's like summer camp or something.” You're in this cul-de-sac out at the edge of campus and it just seemed kind of slightly off the beaten path. Even for Evergreen it seemed kind of separate or something. I don't know. 

‍

So yeah, so I lived in The Mods and that's where a lot of the shows happened. I think it was because it was so far from campus. And the little shack houses or whatever are so- You can set up a band. They're not big or anything, but there's enough space to actually set up. You don't have to carry the equipment up, like in an elevator or anything. You can just load it in. There's a parking lot. You know, it kind of made more sense for bands to play there. 

‍

Although I will say bands did also play at K Dorm. And also actually in the bottom of A Dorm, there's this kind of staircase goes down and I think there's a pool table there. They would move the pool table out of the way and bands would set up and play in this kind of like, it's almost like a pit where you go down the stairs. And so then people could watch it from above. You like look down on them. 

‍

But yeah, so I mean shows would happen all the time out at the school. So I didn't really go downtown to see shows until probably my third year at Evergreen. And by that time I had moved off campus and I had a car so it was easier to go see shows downtown. And that was more on the radar.

‍

Hayes Waring: And that was in 1990?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: That would have been '89/'90. Yeah. I'm trying to think. There was like a venue, I guess it was The Surf Club at that point. I don't remember when that venue- Because it was Thekla and before that it was something else. It's like they just kept changing the name of it. And then I feel like it was called like Bongo Surf Club or something. It had some weird name and then it turned into Surf Club. And then maybe after that, it was Thekla. I can't remember. Anyway, that place we saw shows. Oh also Reko/Muse. We saw shows at Reko/Muse. I would go there. That was the space that Kathleen started with Heidi Arbogast and Tammy Rae Carland, and they had shows a lot.

‍

Hayes Waring: Can you talk anything about that venue?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, it was cool. It was almost like a garage. This concrete building that opened onto a parking lot. And you would go in, and it kind of was just a big concrete room and they had a stage. The shows that I saw there, I don't remember any shows being particularly packed or anything like that. I saw Amy Carter a couple times. That was Kathleen's first band. She says that she started that band just in order to have an opening band because they were the booking these bigger bands to come play shows and sometimes there wasn't anybody to open I guess. So she had just started Amy Carter so there would be another band to open the show. 

‍

That wasn't the first time I saw Kathleen, but that was probably the first time I saw her perform was in Amy Carter. And she was memorable. [laughs] She was memorable from the get-go. She basically was the same as she is now you know, where she gets on stage and she's stands with authority with their hands on her hips or whatever. Then she takes the microphone and she's holding it like she's gonna pummel you with it or something. She always had that kind of vibe. 

‍

It's funny though, because my older brother was still at Evergreen then and he says he has a memory of us going to see some show there. I feel like it was Some Velvet Sidewalk, but I can't remember. Some show there and Amy Carter played and he remembers that Kathleen got up on the stage and before they were able to start the show, she had turned around with her back to the audience and marched in place, like singing some kind of thing to herself. She was trying to like psych herself up or something. Like she was nervous. So she was doing this thing where she was like stamping her feet on the ground and singing out loud to get her confidence up. Then she turned around and started the show. I have no memory of that happening but it sounds like something she might have done. You know, just to claim the space or something. I don't know.

‍

Hayes Waring: Love it. [laughs]

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah. But she was already the kind of person that would just like, look you directly in the eye. She was very direct. You know what I mean? She didn't strike me as someone with stage fright at all back then. Or even now really.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: I realized I didn't really talk about the Smithfield Cafe at all. And you asked about that and I meant to talk about it. So the Smithfield was a coffee shop, obviously. But it was also this really important central kind of hub of activity where they would have shows and people would meet. It seemed like if you wanted to meet interesting, cool people that were doing art or music or whatever, they were always hanging out at Smithfield Cafe. I don't know if that was the first time I saw Tobi was there. We later met at a sandwich job. We both got hired on the same day for a summer job at this sandwich shop called Little Richard's which was right underneath the Martin. That's a whole other story. 

‍

But yeah, so the Smithfield. The first time I went there was before I ever went to Evergreen. I was a high school student when I came to visit my brother and we stayed in the Martin. He would take me over there every day to get like something for breakfast or like, an Italian soda or something that was really exotic. And then he would get a coffee. But I remember we went in there and he was like, “What do you want to get?” And it's like, they didn't really have any kind of menu or anything. Like, I mean, what do they even have? I see a bunch of Italian soda stuff on the wall. I don't know, is there anything else to get here besides coffee? And so I just got an Italian soda. 

‍

But I also remember that the people that worked there were like really mean, really intimidating and kind of standoffish. Just not nice at all and really cool looking. So I remember being kind of freaked out. Like, “Why are we going to this place where the people are just kind of jerks?” They kind of ignore you for a really long time. And then when they come to find out what you want, it's like you're putting them out. You know what I mean? They're just kind of irritated. And he was like, "Well, this is the place you want to go. I mean, this is where everything happens." He's like, "No, they're fine." I'm like, "They're mean. They're totally scary mean people." It's like, "No, no, they're fine. I know them. I'm friends with them. That's just how they are. Don't worry about it." 

‍

But it was kind of my introduction to Olympia. The Olympia scene was like, people being just kind of rude and like, standoffish and can't be bothered. And they act like they're doing you a big favor by getting you a cup of coffee in the coffee shop where they work. You know, I was like, “Oh, man, this kind of sucks.” I don't know. But then everybody else that was there seemed so cool looking. And they were all doing interesting things. 

‍

And I loved downtown Olympia. In some ways it's the same, but it's obviously a lot different. It had way more of kind of Mayberry feel, like kind of wholesome or something. Not really wholesome, but it just felt like a really small town where you walk around the downtown. It's like you see people walking around. I don't know what I'd call the vibe now, but it didn't have that kind of hostile feeling when you're walking around. I don't know. 

‍

So despite this kind of snobby service at the Smithfield, I really loved it there. And so whenever I was downtown I would go in there and get coffee. Or they had soup. That was the other thing I realized that they always had a soup thing going. You could get soup, and they'd give you a piece of bread or whatever with the soup. So that became my thing to go there and get the soup and the bread and a cup of coffee or something. And you could just sit there all day and people would come by. Slim Moon would come in there all the time. And I thought he was really cool looking. Like all these people that I later became friends with, I saw them all downtown, and be like, oh there's that cool person. There's that cool person. And then eventually I met them. I remember thinking, Slim again, was so scary. I was just like, “He seems really mean and standoffish.” He'd walk around with his cowboy hat, and it's so cool looking but he seems really hostile or something. So when people tell me that they thought I was hostile or standoffish, I wasn't trying to be, but I know what they're talking about. Or like, I was just living my life. You know what I mean? I was not actively trying to be intimidating to people. But I know exactly what they're talking about because when I moved to Olympia, I had that same experience with a lot of the people that lived there. Where I was just like, “They're so scary and cool. I'll never be able to talk to them.” And then later, I'm like, “Oh, you're actually a really normal nice person.” [laughs] But yeah, the Smithfield was kind of like, that was the spot. That was the hangout spot.

‍

Hayes Waring: Do you remember any shows in particular at the Smithfield?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: I don't remember any particular shows. Sometimes I would go to shows to just stand outside. I wouldn't even bother going inside and I wouldn't even know who was playing necessarily. That's the embarrassing thing. Looking back I'm like, “Oh, I went to the show at K Dorm and it was Nirvana and Mudhoney or whatever.” And it's like, I went inside for like one song. And I was like, “This is too crowded.” And so I basically just stood outside and maybe smoked a cigarette or something while Nirvana and Mudhoney are playing or Screaming Trees or something like that. I was at that show, but I couldn't tell you what happened. I went inside for a second and then I stood outside. It's terrible.

‍

Hayes Waring: Do you remember what date that was? Or what year that was?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Nirvana played at Evergreen a whole bunch of times. They played in the library building. That was later though. That was after Bikini Kill started. I think there's even a video of that. That one I actually did stay because I went there with Tobi and I was friends with him by that point. And so we went into the show and stayed there. It wasn't like a dorm show where there's a keg and everybody's smoking and drinking and standing around outside. You know, because it was also like the spaces were so small that you could only fit 25 people in there. So once 25 people were in, it was like that was it. You had to stand outside.

‍

Hayes Waring: Smoking room only.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: But yeah, I would say it was '87/'88. Maybe into '89? Somewhere in there were those shows. Definitely '87/'88 because that's when I lived at The Mods.

‍

Hayes Waring: Well '89, that brings us to your coming downtown right?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: I mean I'm sure I went downtown before that, but yeah, so I moved- 

‍

Hayes Waring: You've got a car.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: So I moved off campus. I got a car later after that, when Bikini Kill started in 1990. But I moved off campus not very far off campus. It was this little red house. It was kind of like on the way away from campus but before you get really to the west side. It's pretty developed now, but at the time it was just like fields, fields, fields, fields, and then there would be like an abandoned bus, or someone lived in an abandoned bus and then fields, fields, fields and another house over here. You know what I mean? It was kind of like these scattered little houses around. And I lived in what-

‍

Hayes Waring: Is it like Overhulse or Kaiser or something like that?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Maybe Kaiser. Again, this like 35 years or however many millions of years ago it was.

‍

Hayes Waring: So still kind of farming.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Still kind of farming and also still you're not that far from school. Like you're probably one bus stop away. You could walk to school basically, that's how far away it was. Not very far, barely off campus. 

‍

It was kind of a punk house, but I use that term punk loosely because punks in the Northwest didn't really look like punks. You know, they looked like Nirvana. They just wore lumberjack shirts and boots. Not punk boots, like work boots. You know what I'm saying? Nobody had the like, punk look or anything. But it was a punk house in the sense that they listened to punk music and they were into shows. So my boyfriend lived there. My boyfriend at the time lived there and that's why I moved there. Well, actually, no, I moved there before we started dating. So I moved there because I wanted to get off campus. And I had met him and his friend. And they were like, "Oh, this person who lives in our house is moving out. We have an extra room if you want to move in." 

‍

I was just like, I have to get off campus because by then I was living in A Dorm in one of those dorm rooms where it was a teeny tiny living room and then like four or five really tiny little bedrooms off of a long hallway. I think they call that like a suite or something. But I mean, it was so claustrophobic. The living room, maybe two people could sit in the living room at a time. Then the bedroom was just big enough for the twin bed thing and then the door to shut. So it really was like you were just living inside of a closet. The whole thing felt like living inside of a closet. It's just like I have to get off campus. This is terrible. I can't live like this. 

‍

And so I moved into that house and they had a really good record collection. So this was my boyfriend. This is 1989 I guess? Maybe '88, spring of '88? No it must have been '89. Anyway, somewhere '88 or '89 and I moved into that house and it was my boyfriend and his best friend. They were into motorcycles. They had their motorcycles taken apart and spread all over the floor of the house. They had a Volkswagen bus that they were taking apart and putting back together. They just were kind of like handy people or something. They were always doing like weird mechanical stuff. And they were like chopping wood and making their own beer. They were just kind of like, do-it-yourselfers or something kind of before- I mean, not before people were doing do-it-yourself stuff, but they were just like doing shit. You know what I mean? They were also going to Evergreen, but they were living their life mostly and then also going to Evergreen kind of as this other thing. So to me, that was really fascinating. 

‍

The most important thing is that they had a really good record collection. I don't want it to sound like that's the only reason I was dating him because it wasn't. It was just sort of like a bonus, an extra big bonus side effect. It's like, “Oh, there's all these Fall records. Like I've never listened to Fall before.” So suddenly, I'm listening to Fall and Pere Ubu, and all this stuff. And I was like, “Fuck, there's like all this really cool music that I don't know anything about.” And so I would just spend a lot of time listening to their records. Yeah. 

‍

And then I moved out of there the next year. So I feel like that summer was maybe the summer that I met Tobi. In between school years at Evergreen is this sort of desperate time for most students. You know, a lot of people just moved home or whatever. You know what I'm talking about? Where it's like, if you don't want to move home, which I never wanted to move home, I don't think I ever moved home after I left when I was 17 in high school. I think I went home maybe for a couple of weeks one summer. But to me the overriding goal of everything was to survive the summer in order to get back into school, get your student loan or whatever. Once you're in school, you can survive. But it's like those two months in the summer, it's like, “Okay, I have to find somewhere to live.” You can't live in student housing. If you live off campus, you have to come up with rent money. So it's like, “I have to find some way to survive for the next few months before school starts. And then if I have a job, I can figure out whether I want to keep it or quit it or whatever.” 

‍

That was how I ended up getting hired on the same day as Tobi at Little Richard's Sandwich Shop. That was a desperate, desperate attempt to get a job, make it through until September. I think that might have been what she was doing too. I don't know. I don't know if she was actually going to school at that point. I don't know if she was still at Evergreen at that point or not. But anyway, yeah, that's how we became friends. It took a really long time. She was a hard person to talk to. We didn't have a lot of time to chat on the job, but it was like, we're just standing next to each other, like sandwich station. All the state workers would come in at noon, we'd be like, “Mayonnaise, mustard, no lettuce, cheese,” or whatever. That kind of thing. So it was a lot of standing around. Once those people all came through and have their lunch then it was like crickets for the rest of the day. Nothing. People would come in and get like a scoop of ice cream or something. But yeah, I remember a lot of times trying to talk to Tobi and she was just kind of mute. You know what I mean? I didn't know what her deal was. I was just like she's nonverbal, basically a nonverbal person. So whatever. I tried a couple times to talk to her. 

‍

We eventually became friends, obviously, but she was hard to get it going with. So yeah, she basically wouldn't talk to me at all. Then this one time she told me a joke but I didn't know it was a joke because she'd never really spoken to me before. And then she was like, I probably told you this one already. So obviously, we're always looking at the clock, because we're like, “Can I leave? Is it time for me to leave?” or whatever. So she was like, "What time is it?" I was like, "Oh, I don't know." And then I turned around and I was like, "Oh, it's 2:30." I think we got off at 3:00 or something. "Oh, it's 2:30." And she's like, "Time to go to the dentist." And I was like, "Oh, do you have a dentist appointment today?" I took it literally. She's like, "No. 2:30 time to go to the dentist." I was like, "Do you have to go to the dentist?" I was like, "I don't know what you're talking about." She's like, "It's a joke. Tooth. Hurty." She really had to spell it out. I was like, "Oh my God, you told me a joke. Why would I think you were telling me a joke? You've never spoken to me before." I was like, "Wow, okay. You're funny. You have a humorous side. That is pretty good." 

‍

I think she was dating Al [Larsen] at the time and he came in one time. So we'd get these breaks or whatever, and he came in one time to sit with her on her break, and I was like, "Oh my God, that's the guy from Some Velvet Sidewalk. That's so cool." And then I guess that's when we became friends. We didn't really talk to each other that much but then after that I'd see her around town and then she'd say hi. She'd be like, "Hey." Oh, she said hi to me now. Okay, cool. 

‍

Then when she wanted to start a band, she just called me up on the phone and was like, "Do you know how to play anything?" I was like, "Piano. Violin." She's like, "What about guitar?" I'm like, "No, not really." She's like, "Maybe you can play bass." I'm like, "I don't know how to play bass." She's like, "It's really easy. I'll show you how to do it. It's no big deal." She's like, "You can play whatever you want. We'll switch around." Like, "I can't play anything. I'm happy to try, but I don't really know how to play anything." And then my boyfriend at the time showed me a couple of guitar chords like, E and A maybe. I think. I can't remember. 

‍

Hayes Waring: Those are good ones. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, those are good ones. Those are good ones. And then I learned how to do bar chords, kind of like for power chords or whatever and I was like, “Okay, I could probably fake my way through a couple songs maybe.” 

‍

Bass is so much easier. Once I picked up the bass I was like, oh, one string at a time. I can handle this. You just push it down. No big deal. I don't have to do some weird shape with my fingers. Yeah, all you need is the E and A string, right? Really it seems like you could make your way around a song that way. So yeah, once I switched to bass, I was like, “This is sustainable.” [laughs] I'm not great, but at least I could keep up you know. 

‍

But it was funny because after- I mean, I'm skipping way ahead here. But after we decided we were going to play music, she was like, "Well, you know, I want to sound like this and this and this. These are the things that I want to do like a punk band or whatever." I was like, "I don't know how to play like that. I don't know what you're talking about." And so she brought over some records to my apartment. It was like, The Faith/ Void Split, like a Ramones record, like Minor Threat, all this stuff. I was just like, you know, put on the Minor Threat record and you're like, “I'm not going to be able to play like that. I just picked up the bass. You're basically giving me like Rachmaninoff to play or something. There's no way.” Even the Ramones. You put on the Ramones it's like, No, not possible. I can't play like that. Faith/ Void? Forget it. That's beyond. I can't even decipher what those songs are, you know what I mean? But the Ramones, I could at least be like, okay, I can't play as fast as Dee Dee obviously, but I could find the note. So I started to figure out the shapes. Like, oh, he usually goes from here to here. And then, you know, on the same fret from between the E and the A. So it's like, once you start to realize kind of the shapes of how the Ramones built songs, I was like, oh, I can do that. You know what I mean? And then that's how you build a song. So it's basically how I figured out how to write really simple songs is just playing along to the first Ramones record.

‍

Hayes Waring: It's a brilliant record.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: It's so good. Really fast, though. 

‍

Hayes Waring: Really fast. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: If you're trying to play bass to it, it's very difficult. If you've just picked up a bass, it seems impossible. I mean, it is impossible.

‍

Hayes Waring: Yeah, all those records are very, very fast. What was Tobi thinking? 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Minor Threat? [laughs] Give me a break. I mean, I could practice for my whole life and not be able to play like that. It's ridiculous.

‍

Hayes Waring: Very fast. A lot of changes.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, a lot of changes really fast. Like, changing all together right at the same exact moment, like high bar. She was setting a high bar for what she was aiming for.

‍

Hayes Waring: So was that your first collaboration together? So 2:30 was your first collaboration and then it went-

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, first moment of understanding. Yeah, first connection.

‍

Hayes Waring: I know. It's like, yeah, Martin and Lewis, you know, Abbott and Costello, that's a team. You know, it takes a team for the joke to work.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: It's funny because she has another memory of us at that job that I don't remember. There was this other girl who worked there. She had been working there when we got hired and so she was sort of the expert. She knew how to do everything, make the soup and whatever. She was the only one that was allowed to cut the pie. They would bring the pie out uncut, and it was like only Cynthia can cut the pie. Tobi, Kathi, you can't cut the pie. You don't have the skill set. Only Cynthia can cut the pie because she can cut it perfectly. Okay, that's fine, whatever. But I guess I made- I have no memory of this at all, but I guess I made a mixtape for Cynthia at some point. And I put a Go Team song on it, because I knew Tobi was in the Go Team, but I guess we'd never talked about it or anything. And so I put it on this mixtape for our coworker, and then Tobi found out and she was really embarrassed or something. She was kind of like, "Oh, weird. That girl put a Go Team song on the tape for the other girl. Like she knows who I am or something." I don't know. She's just told me that that was like a weird, embarrassing moment for her or something. It didn't even occur to me. Number one, I don't remember doing it. But it sounds like something I might have done. But I don't think I would have ever thought she would have been embarrassed by it. But yeah, the Go team was great. I never actually saw the Go Team, but I loved them as a band. Singles band. Totally good. Totally Excellent.

‍

Hayes Waring: Do you remember the song you put on the tape?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: No, I don't even remember making the tape. [laughs] I have no memory of it. I used to make tapes for people all the time. You know, I don't know. That's funny. That's another thing. So this has nothing to do with anything but it's just kind of a weird thing that I remember about that period of time. So my brother, my older stepbrother who had given me all those vinyl records to make cassettes of, when he gave me the records and the stack of blank cassettes he was like, "I'm giving you these cassettes and I want you to make cassettes of these records for me. But you can't make cassettes for anybody else." I was like, "Okay, I'm not going to, but why?" And he's like, "Because it's wrong." I'm like, "What? What do you mean it's wrong?" 

‍

Hayes Waring: Piracy.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: And he's like, "Because it's stealing." I was like, "How is it stealing? You own the record." He's like, "I own the record but if you make a cassette and give it to someone else, then they have the record. And they didn't buy the record and they need to go buy the record themselves." I'm like, "Well, can I make a tape for myself?" He's like, "You can make a tape for yourself but if you like it you have to go buy the record." To me this was totally bizarre. I had to really think about it. I was like, "This doesn't make sense to me. You own the record. You can do whatever you want with it. Fuck them or whatever" He said, "No, these are bands. These are people. They put these records out. They are depending on people to pay for the records." And I was like, "This just seems arbitrary." He's like, "No, you can't make a cassette of it." So me making all these cassettes probably was bad. But you know. I wasn't giving people a whole album. I was giving them mix cassettes. If they liked it they could go buy the record. That was my first introduction to the ethics of the music business. It had never occurred to me before. I was just like, “The technology exists, why shouldn't I just do it?” You know? He's like, "Because it's you're stealing from the band." I'm like, "Wow. Okay, that's heavy." [laughs]

‍

Hayes Waring: Prince would be proud. [laughs]

‍

Kathi Wilcox: It seemed overly rules-y or something. Obviously now as a musician who doesn't get paid anything for anything, because it's all free on Spotify, now I get it.

‍

Hayes Waring: You should buy the record if you listen to it on Spotify.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: I didn't even get Spotify until a couple years ago, because I was so ferociously against it. I was like, it's evil. It's destroying bands. It's destroying the music that we all care about. It's making it so people can't survive. But now I have it. Anyway, what were we talking about? I can't remember.

‍

Hayes Waring: It's great. We're into it. We're switching between spectator and performer. We're talking about a collaboration that started with a joke, and now is a phone call where you're getting to play very fast punk music on a bass that you've just learned.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah. So let's see. Did I buy a bass? I didn't buy a bass. I didn't buy a bass. Tobi let me borrow her mom's bass. Her mom had a very cool red Hagstrom small-scale bass, that I think she still has. 

‍

Hayes Waring: I think it's upstairs actually. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Very cool. Oh, is that right? Yeah, very cool bass. Very easy to play. I mean, I highly recommend anybody who wants to learn how to play the bass, get yourself a short-scale bass to learn on because if you pick up a regular bass and you're just learning, it's enormous. The neck is super long. It seems very unmanageable. But if you pick up a Hagstrom, it feels kind of like a guitar. It seems more possible to be able to learn how to play it. So she let me borrow that. 

‍

And then I also had this bizarre amp that my boyfriend had built out of a speaker and a piece of plywood and an old tube amp that he bought at a thrift store or something. It wasn't a guitar amplifier. It was like a receiver amplifier with some other kind of tube amplifier that he basically just wired up for the speaker and an input to turn it into a guitar amp, a very small, not-that-loud guitar amp. He had that set up in my apartment. 

‍

That was when I lived in the Ray apartment building above that pizza- I don't know if that pizza place is still there, but there was like a Pizza Time or pizza something. And so on the side what were the railroad tracks is. I was in that apartment where if you go up the stairs and take a left it's kind of a big corner apartments, it's one big room. Anyway, so I lived there. That's where I lived when Bikini Kill first started. 

‍

And so I had the amp, I had the bass, my boyfriend had a guitar that I was borrowing. I was kind of switching between guitar and bass to figure out which one I thought I could manage, like to play with people. Because the first time you go in to play with someone you have to be able to actually play something, literally play something on an instrument. The guitar, I could kind of make two chords. But I was like, I don't know how I would ever write a song on this. This seems too complicated. 

‍

But the bass, I remember coming up with a couple of bass riffs that eventually turned into "Double Dare Ya" and "Liar" and "Feels Blind." "Feels Blind" and "This is Not a Test" are basically the same song. That riff was just one of the ones that I brought in and ended up turning into two songs but just one's a little faster than the other. [laughs] 

So I had a few things that I could be like, okay, I'm going to walk into this room with these people. I can play this thing and we'll have something to start with or whatever. 

The original idea was Tobi was like, "We should play music together." I was like, "Okay, sure." We did the whole thing like I can't play anything. She's like, "It doesn't matter." And then at the same time, I was friends with this other guy who lived in the Martin, whose name was Brad Sweek. He lived next door to Calvin and he had been in a band. I think he was in that band The Young Pioneers. I didn't know him as having ever been in a band. I only knew him as Brad Sweek, the guy who would make you dinner if you bought him all the ingredients. His whole thing was like, "I'm going to give you a shopping list. You go buy all the stuff and then you and your friend come over and I'll cook you dinner." He got free dinner out of it because we bought all the stuff, but we got dinner because we don't know how to cook. So that's how I knew Brad, super friendly-

‍

Hayes Waring: He'll share- 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Just this guy, just this guy, he'll share Yeah, he'll share his culinary knowledge with you if you buy him the stuff. He's very easy to talk to. I knew he played guitar because he had a guitar in his apartment. And so he was always like, "Yeah, we should start a band together." This is when I was friends with the girls in Calamity Jane too and they were friends with Brad. I think he maybe wanted to start a band with one of them also, but they were in Calamity Jane so they were busy doing stuff. So he was, "You and I should start a band with Tobi," because he was friends with Tobi too. And I was like, "Yeah, that sounds great. Sure." And I remember when Tobi was like, "We should start a band." I was like, "Well, Brad Sweek wants to start a band with you and me. So we should start a band, but the three of us." And she's like, "Okay." 

‍

Then separately she had been corresponding with Kathleen. This is end of the summer of 1990, probably like August of 1990 when all this is going on. I had known Kathleen just because we went to Evergreen at the same time. Everybody confused us with each other. This is the weird thing. You look at me and Kathleen, doesn't seem like people could confuse us, right? Seems impossible? All the time walking around campus, people would be like, "Kathleen!" and I turn around and they'd be like, "Oh, sorry, I thought you were my friend Kathleen." "I know who you thought I was." And then I guess people were doing that to her too. Looking back, I guess I can kind of see because we kind of dressed the same. We both had really long dyed black hair that we would wear on the top like the volcano kind of thing. We both wore combat boots and black and white striped thigh high tights. So we kind of sort of dressed the same, but really not really. And you know there's probably like a six or seven inch height difference. The whole thing seemed very weird to me. But I already knew who she was because people kept confusing us. I'd see her around. I'm like, "There's that girl that everybody thinks is me." 

‍

Also I had seen her fashion show. She was just an unmistakable person. The campus is not that big. It's like 2000, 3000 people maybe tops. So if Kathleen's walking around, you'll notice her. She stands out among all the hippies. [laughs] Like very vividly in relief against all the hippies. 

‍

I knew her from Viva Knievel too. I don't know if it was her second or third band. She had been in that band, Amy Carter and then after that she was in this band, Viva Knievel and they had done a tour of the US. When they finished their tour they ended up living in the house in Portland that I was living in too with my boyfriend at the time. And again, this was one of those times when it's like, summer between the school years, it's just catch as catch can. Everybody just stays wherever they can stay. And you just try to survive it. 

‍

So I was kind of living in my boyfriend's house for a little while during the end of that summer and she had just gotten back from tour and so she was trying to be somewhere before school started. She lived in that house for a little while with her boyfriend. So we were all living in this house with the Calamity Jane girls, our boyfriends, members of Viva Knievel, some other people. It was a big punk house. I feel like it was in northeast right off MLK Jr Boulevard. 

‍

And she was really loud. She was like a really loud person to live [with]. I thought she was really cool but she was also very intimidating. She had this really obnoxious dog. I guess they had adopted a black Labrador puppy without really clearing it with the house. So they brought this totally not trained Labrador puppy into the house and it just started gnawing everything. It just was like a destructive menace. Everybody was kind of irritated with them. They had tied it up to the porch and it would just chew all the posts on the porch. Like Jesus Christ, Kathleen's crazy dog. I felt like there was a little bit of tension in the house, but she and I at some point became friends. I don't remember exactly how, just probably being in the house or something. 

‍

Then I remember at one point, kind of like how Tobi did, she challenged me to play with her in the basement. They had music stuff set up in the basement because Calamity Jane practiced there. She wanted me to go down and practice play with her and her boyfriend Matt at the time. I feel like Viva Knievel had broken up and they were trying to put together a new band that was just the two of them or something and they were trying to pull some other people in. She was like, "Yeah, you should come downstairs and play with us sometime." And I was like, "Okay, sure." And she's like, "If you've got the balls." [laughs] I was like, "If I have the balls to play with you downstairs in the basement? I think I do." She's just so tough, such a little toughie. I was just like, "Yeah, okay, sure. Let's go down to the basement, whatever." And we played a few times. I don't think we really wrote any songs. But, you know, I got a sense of what she was like. She was just singing. I don't think she was playing an instrument. She was just singing, her boyfriend was playing drums and I was playing bass. 

‍

Hayes Waring: Oh, that's cool.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, but she had so much energy. I'm not a person who's ever had a ton of energy. To be around someone like that who's just kind of a livewire or something, it was really interesting. She was like, "You could play anything." And then she would just suddenly start belting something out, just off the top of her head. She'd had this notebook with all these lyrics and then she would just suddenly start making songs out of whatever you were playing. None of them turned into songs as far as I remember. but she just was kind of like, yes to everything. You know what I mean? Whatever you're doing, she was never like, "That sucks," or  "You should play something else," or "I don't know what to do to that." She was just like, "I can work with that. Let's go." That kind of thing. So that was really fun.

‍

I don't really remember what it was like to play with her boyfriend Matt that much but I do remember what it was like to play with Kathleen where it was just like, really positive. Even though she was combative and confrontational and would give you shit all the time, she also was like, "Let's do it. We can do this." Like, cool, you know? 

‍

So I had already met her and then Tobi said the whole thing about we should start a band. We were going to start this band with Brad Sweek and then Tobi was like, "Well, I want to start a band with this girl, Kathleen." I was like, "Oh, I know, Kathleen. I'll totally start a band with her." And then we were like, "Well, maybe we can just combine these bands, and it'll be you and me and Kathleen and Brad Sweek." And then Tobi was like, "Yeah, okay, maybe. I don't know." So then I remember talking to Brad Sweek and being like, "Hey, you know, so we're thinking about doing this combo band with Kathleen." And he was like, "I can't be in a band with Kathleen." [laughs] I was like, "Why not? She's so cool." And he's like, "Yeah, I don't want to do that." I don't know what the deal was. He was like, "Yeah, I don't think I could do that." I was like, "Okay, well, we're going to do that other band. And not the band with you." We weren't being rude or anything, but we're like, that's the one we're going to do. So if you don't want to be in the band with Kathleen, then that's fine. But we're going to do that one. And then that's how it started. And then we just started. 

‍

We went out to Tobi's parents' house. They had all this stuff set up and they had this garage that was separate from the house and behind the garage was this built in, I don't know if it was supposed to be like a root cellar or for canning or I don't know what it was. This really small kind of wooden paneled room separate from the garage, separate from the house, that they had turned into a practice space. It was all soundproofed, it had drums, had some amps. 

‍

So that's where the three of us would just go out there and mess around and come up with stuff. I'd play the three baselines that I came up with and Kathleen would sing. It sort of turned into where it was like we'd switch around because obviously, Tobi had been in bands before, Kathleen had been in bands before. They had their thing. Tobi primarily did drums. Kathleen primarily sang. But they would switch around and do other stuff. Tobi played guitar, she had songs. Kathleen played bass. She would sometimes write songs on bass and play them and then I'd have to figure out what to do on guitar. Or we'd switch around and I would play drums. We were just trying to figure out what was working. I didn't really know how to play anything, as I said before, but I could kind of muddle my way through a little bit. I was kind of just like, whatever they want to do. I'll just try to figure out a way to fit into whatever they're doing. And Kathleen came in with some songs too that she'd already written on bass. 

‍

Hayes Waring: Oh, cool. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: But yeah, we just had a whole bunch of practices like that where it's just the three of us before we ever had a guitar player, like separate guitar player. I remember we were talking about we probably should have another guitar player come in, and then it was sort of like, well, what about the songs were Kathleen plays bass? Then we're going to have two guitars. We were just trying to figure out how to make the whole thing fit together. Yeah 

‍

We played with a bunch of other people too. Tobi really wanted it to be all girls and so we brought in- I remember I knew this girl from Evergreen who played guitar. She was more like, country singer or something and she had these folk country songs and she played acoustic guitar. So I was like, well, she plays guitar. I can bring her in. I don't know. So she came in. It didn't really work. Really. Her name was Esther. And we're like, can you play electric guitar? And so she played electric guitar. It just didn't really click at all and she never came back. 

‍

Then there was another girl that we played with whose name I can't remember. Maybe Kathleen or Tobi would remember, but it didn't really click with her either. She was kind of hostile a little bit, like she thought we were too girly or something. I remember she was like, "You guys are just Barbie dolls." [laughs] I was like, "Barbie dolls?" If you look at pictures of us from then it's like, pretty much definitely not Barbie dolls. Not like we ever looked like Barbie dolls in any era. But yeah, so we're just like, "I don't know what that means, but it's probably not going to work to play with you." So she didn't come back.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, yeah. So that didn't work. And then it was at that point that Tobi suggested her friend Bill, who had been in the Go Team. I had never met Bill, but I knew about him in the Go Team. I knew who he was and he's a great guitar player. But he also seemed a little scary to start a band with. I mean, he seemed cool but I didn't know him and it seemed like kind of a big question mark, maybe a destabilizing factor. I was like, "I'm not really sure that that's going to work." You know? She's like, "No, he's the best guitar player that I know. He's the best guitar player I've ever played with. I really think it's going to work. I think it's going to be good." I think Kathleen, maybe already knew Bill from before. So she's like, "Yeah, that's fine." 

‍

So we brought him in to play. Immediately it sounded 1000 times better. Immediately. It's like all the songs immediately coalesced, even in their rudimentary form. It suddenly sounded like a band rather than people kind of trying to make something sound like a song. He's just such a good guitar player. He's so intuitive, and he can just follow along with whatever you're doing. He can come up with something really cool to do on top of it. So it was just a lot easier to play with him. 

‍

Communicating with him was a challenge because he was sort of like Tobi when I first met her. Didn't really talk, at least to me, he didn't really talk. Kind of nonverbal, but we didn't really have to talk in practice. We didn't talk that much in practice. We would just go in and play. Sometimes Kathleen would talk but mostly we just played and she had her notebook with lyrics. It worked like that. I don't know, it just seemed to flow really quickly once he joined the band. 

‍

It's funny because I've been doing some interviews lately, and people are always surprised that Bikini Kill was my first band that I'd ever been in. It's not like it immediately became a big thing, but it was like the first band did eventually become a big thing. The way I think about it is sort of like those three other people were sort of like indie rock vets. You know what I mean? They had already been in bands. All of them had already toured around the country. So it wasn't like we were just starting this band. It wasn't like it was just a bunch of people who had never been in a band before. It was like three people who absolutely knew how to be in a band and book shows and go on tour and make T-shirts and do all that stuff. And then me. I kind of lucked out. I just kind of dropped into this band with these three people who totally knew what they were doing. So that helped a lot.

‍

Hayes Waring: Can you tell me a little bit about the zines that were going on at that time? The Jigsaw and the Bikini Kill zines?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, so Jigsaw predates Bikini Kill. Tobi was doing Jigsaw way before that. I already knew about Jigsaw before Bikini Kill started. There were lots of fanzines going on at that time. The house that I lived at in Portland, the guy that lived there did a fanzine called Vicious Hippies from Panda Hell. I don't remember. There were just a lot of fanzines around. Kathleen had done a thing that I wouldn't really call it a fanzine, it was kind of between a fanzine and a book. She had done two printed things. One was called The Most Beautiful Girl is a Dead Girl, and the other one was called Maggie Fingers, or I can't remember. There was another one that she did. So it was like people just printing up stuff down at the print shop and stapling it together and handing it out. That was just going on all over town. 

‍

So Tobi was doing Jigsaw. When the band started I think that was one of the reasons why Kathleen wanted to play with Tobi is she had read Jigsaw. They had been corresponding through the mail. I don't know what they were talking about in the correspondence, but I think it was sort of like I really like your fanzine. So then they were like, oh, we should probably play music together. So then that was sort of how they came together, was around Tobi's fanzine Jigsaw. 

‍

Then when once the band started, I don't know whose idea it was, it was probably Kathleen's idea to do a fanzine around Bikini Kill. Like a Bikini Kill fanzine. And so she was the one that basically put that together, then we contributed parts to it. And by 'we' I mean Tobi. [laughs] I think I wrote one thing, or I gave her a picture or something. I was like, "I don't write. I don't do fanzines. I'm not going to do that. I'll make film. If you want me to make a film I can make a film, but I'm not going to write anything for your fanzine." 

‍

Basically Kathleen put together the first two Bikini Kill fanzines, and those came out after the band had started. It wasn't like the zine came out and then the band happened after the zine. I feel like there's different histories, understandings of that, but they definitely came out after the band.

‍

Hayes Waring: Please set the record straight. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, I'd like to set the record straight. The band predated the fanzine. Not by much, you know, as they kind of started right around the same time, but it was the band. We struggled with the name for the band for a long time. We couldn't figure out what to call it for the longest time and then Tobi was like, "Well, there was this project in Olympia that was like a one-time project.” I think it was Stella and Margaret Doherty and Lois. I might be totally wrong about that. But this is my memory it was kind of a one-off project with those three people and it was called Bikini Kill. I think it was called Bikini Kill. Tobi was sort of like, "Well, I mean, they just did it for that one thing and it doesn't seem like they're ever going to do anything with it. Maybe we can just take that name." I remember thinking, I don't think you can just take someone's name. Maybe you should ask first before we do that. And I think Tobi did ask, don't quote me on that. I'm not 100% sure she asked. [laughs] 

‍

Hayes Waring: This is being recorded. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, this is being recorded. My memory is that she asked and was told it was okay. That might be incorrect. It could be that we just straight up stole it and never asked. In which case, shame on us. But that that is basically where we got the name. Someone else came up with it and then we took it from them. 

‍

Once we had the name then I feel like that's when the fanzine- Because yeah, if we didn't have the name the Bikini Kill fanzine didn't exist because it didn't have a name. The fanzines were pretty much back-to-back. I feel like the first one she put together right after the band started. And then the second one she put together I think right before we went on tour. 

‍

Everything happened really fast. It was like we wrote up a bunch of songs and then pretty quickly after we played a few shows. Then pretty quickly after that, Tobi was like, "Well, let's record." And I remember thinking, I'm pretty sure we're not ready to record yet. She's like, "No, no, no. We definitely have enough songs to record. We should definitely record." Our friend Pat Maley said that he would record us at his house. In the basement of his house, he had a studio. That was the first cassette that we recorded and we recorded that just a few months after we started. I feel like we started in October and we recorded that maybe in January or maybe it was in the spring. It was definitely like, less than six months later. It was really pretty quick and Billy had only been in the band for not that long when we recorded. I think we'd only played a few shows with him. We actually played shows without Billy, before we had a guitar player. We played at least three that I can remember. 

‍

Hayes Waring: Do you remember where they were?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, so our very first show was in Portland opening for a band called Gas Huffer. The reason that we played that show is because I think some of us were friends with the guy who ran X-Ray Cafe, which was also called UFO Cafe for a time. I think it was called UFO before. But that guy, I think his name is Trey, he was setting up the shows and Gas Huffer was playing and he didn't have an opening band. I think he maybe asked Calamity Jane if they would open and they couldn't do it. Maybe Gilly called one of us and said, "You know, they need a band to open for the show. Do you guys have anything? Or do you want to do it?" And then we're like, "Well, we could probably do that.” Opening for a show at X-Ray. It's pretty small. 

‍

So that was our first show was opening for Gas Huffer and just the three of us. And I think we probably played five songs maybe. I think Tobi remembers we played like five songs and then played them all over again or something, which that sounds possible. [laughs] 

‍

I remember Calvin was kind of pissed at us because he had already set up this show in February that was like a Love Rock show on February 14. It was going to be Some Velvet Sidewalk and us and maybe Bratmobile. There was someone else that played that show. It was supposed to be our first show. I think he had this idea that it was Bikini Kill's first show. It was one he set up, A Love Rock show February 14. Then he found out that we were playing this other show and he was kind of like, "But I had you first. I set up your first show. It's on February 14." I was like, "Well we're playing this other one on January whatever. So, sorry." And then I think we even played a party before that February show. I think we played another party in Pat Maley's basement. That's my memory is that we played in Pat Maley's basement. We played a whole bunch of shows in Tinuviel's basement. Tinuviel was this woman that did Kill Rock Stars with Slim when it first started. She would have shows in her basement all the time. We played there a few times. But again, my chronology is really fuzzy in there. Like I don't know when- Was that spring? Was that winter? Was that before we recorded? After we recorded? I don't know. It's all in there somewhere.

‍

Hayes Waring: What was your first tour?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: The first tour was the tour that we did with Nation of Ulysses across the country. That was within a week of me graduating from college. It's like I graduated from Evergreen, had the graduation ceremony, the next day I packed up all the stuff in my apartment, my parents took home all the stuff I wanted to keep and I gave away everything else. Then I took a suitcase and got in my car and we took my car on tour. 

‍

[Correction by Kathi: “I was wrong about the car I drove away on the first BK tour right after graduation. It wasn't my car, it was James Canty's sister's car that was the same kind of car as mine (early '70s Dodge Dart). We called it 'Agnes McNulty' because that was the name on the registration in the glovebox.”]

‍

And we went on tour. Nation of Ulysses showed up in town and we just left on tour with them and drove back across the country. It was pretty crazy. It was a crazy tour.

‍

Hayes Waring: Was that before Hawaii?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Oh yeah, it was way before Hawaii. Hawaii was after we had already gone to DC, you know on that tour. Then I went to Europe that summer. That's when riot grrrl started and then we all met back up in Olympia at the end of that summer for the IPU Festival. That was in August of 1991. Then we went on another tour with Ulysses across the country and then we basically all moved to DC starting in early winter '92. Hawaii was spring of '92 so Hawaii was after we already lived in DC and that's why it was so exciting because we were like, "Oh my god. We're going to get out of the freezing cold northeast. We're going to go be on a beach in Hawaii and they're going to pay for our plane tickets? Oh my God. Yeah, we totally have to do this." Yeah, this was way before all that.

Hayes Waring: You said something that a lot of people have asked me to ask you about. You talked about that first tour and it went to DC and it was with Nation of Ulysses. Is that the start of a big DC connection with you?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Well, I personally had already had a DC connection because my aunt, my mom's sister, lived right outside DC in Virginia. When I was 15 I had gone to visit her for the summer, not for the whole summer, but for a long time during the summer. So I already knew about the DC scene. I'd read Maximum Rock & Roll and stuff like that so I knew about the music scene there. 

‍

I didn't know anybody in the music scene. I didn't know where the shows were happening. I didn't know any of that stuff. I didn't know how to connect with it. It was sort of like Olympia, where I knew this thing was happening because of fanzines or records or whatever but there was no way to actually access those people the way that there is now. [Now] you can just follow someone on Instagram and figure out what they're doing and then just go to the show or something like that. There was no way for me as a 15-year-old in the mid '80s- There probably was a way, but I didn't know what it was, how to find those shows. Like I tell Guy that. I'm like, "You know, I was there in 1985." He's like, "You totally could have seen Rites of Spring." I'm like, "Yeah, I probably could have if I'd known how to do it." I didn't know how to find that stuff out. 

‍

Like I knew I needed to go to Georgetown. That much I knew. I told my aunt to drop me off in Georgetown. She dropped me off in Georgetown and I'd just wander around all day. You know what I mean? I went to like, Commander Salamander, and you know, the record store or whatever but it wasn't that easy to find things out if you were only there for a very particular amount of time. If you didn't bump into someone that looked like a punk and you didn't know anybody and you didn't know where to look, it was just way more like needle in a haystack. Kind of like you'd stumble across one little artifact of something and you'd just hold on to it and be like, there's evidence that something's happening somewhere. And then you'd try to follow it. It was like following clues and like a mystery or something. You'd be like, I know that there's something cool happening here somewhere, but I don't know how to find it. 

‍

So I already had a DC connection. And I loved DC. I'd been there. So I went there when I was 15 and then I went back when I was either 16 or 17 because my cousin got married. So I had already been to DC a couple times. I totally loved it. I thought I wanted to go to school at Georgetown and then I realized that there was no possible way I was ever going to get into Georgetown. Even if I got into Georgetown, I would never be able to afford it. And so that's when I just dropped down and was like, well, it's Evergreen or nothing. But I toured the campus.

‍

So DC was already kind of in my head as like this very, very cool place that I could see myself living. So when Tobi was like, "Well, Nation of Ulysses wants us to go on tour with them and then we're going to spend the summer in DC." I thought, That sounds great. Even though I knew I wasn't going to spend the summer in DC because I had just graduated from college and my parents had said, "When you graduate from college, we're going to get you a plane ticket to Europe and a Eurail pass if you want." And I said "Yes, I do. I want that." [laughs] So I was like, as soon as I get to DC, after this tour is over, I'm going to fly to Europe. I'm going to go do my Europe trip. 

‍

Tobi always says in interviews that I was backpacking around Europe. I'd like to set the record straight. I was not backpacking and there was no backpack involved. I wasn't camping. Okay? [laughs] Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I was not backpacking. I was taking the train. I was sleeping in hostels. I did not own a backpack. I had like just a bag that I'd brought with me. 

‍

So the tour ended and then basically the next week I just got on a plane flew away. I was gone for the whole summer. Then when I came back- And there was no way to get in touch with anyone. I had no idea what was happening with the band, riot grrl, none of that. I didn't know any of that stuff until I got back in Olympia at the end of that summer in August. It was basically like the plane landed in Seattle, Nation of Ulysses and Bikini Kill came to pick me up at the airport, they picked me up, drove me to Olympia and then we had to play a show like three days later or something like that. It was like within less than a week we had to play that show at IPU. So I was out of my mind. The video record of that show, audio record, [is] pretty shaky. I just want to say I had just been on a crazy trip and my headspace was not prepared to be playing a show. I just immediately got thrust into playing the show. 

‍

The whole IPU festival was so overwhelming. It was like, you know, there's Thee Headcoats walking around, and there's Fugazi walking around and just like every band that you could think of that you like idolized or whatever, they're just all wandering around downtown Olympia. Yeah, so it's just really super overwhelming. I didn't have any place to stay so I was sleeping on people's floors. For me personally, it was a very bizarre period of time. That period of time. 

‍

But yeah, so I was gone for that whole summer. So when people ask me about the origins of riot grrrl, I'm like, I have no idea because I wasn't even there. I was gone. I got back and it was like all hell had broken loose. So you're going to have to interview the people that were there.

‍

Hayes Waring: Do you want to talk any more about IPUC?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, so that was really cool. That was really fun. Calvin conceived of it with Candice. Maybe some other people I don't know. But it was kind of just like a big- I mean, it was called a festival. It didn't really feel like a festival. It felt like just a series of shows and then just kind of a mass hangout downtown. Almost like an ongoing party or something. The downtown as you know is not very big, so if you have all of these bands in the downtown at the same time, it just was really an exciting period of time. It seemed like there was something fun happening all the time. It's just like, man, we gotta go over here because they're doing this. And then Kathleen's doing like a standup poetry-like spoken word thing at the Smithfield. So then you'd go over there. And then oh, someone is doing something over here. And then you'd walk around. It was like an art fair, music fair kind of thing that just went on forever. I guess that's what a music festival it is but I've been to a lot of music festivals and this didn't feel like any of those. Yeah, this felt pretty unique. 

‍

But again, I was kind of out of it. I was a little bit out of my mind. I was super jet lagged. I had been traveling all over the place. I mean, I went to Morocco by myself. There was this English girl that was traveling with me, but she was kind of on her own trip. And then after Morocco, all this crazy stuff happened and then I ended up in Czechoslovakia by myself. So my headspace was very unfocused when I got back. 

‍

And I had an English accent. [laughs] Yeah, fully aware of it. I was fully aware of it. I didn't know what to do about it. I was totally embarrassed. I had traveled through all these countries where no one spoke English and the only person that I knew was this girl who I had met in Pamplona, Spain, who was English. And we were both traveling. We were both solo travelers. I mean, I went there because Steve Gamboa was like, "Oh, man, you gotta go to the running of the bulls in Pamplona. It's so cool, man. The running of the bulls." I'm like, "Running of the bulls? That sounds like a nightmare. That sounds horrible." He's like, "No man, it's really cool. You gotta go." I'm like, "Okay, fine." So I went there. Nightmare. I don't recommend it if you're a solo female traveler, or really probably anybody. Don't go to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. It's like a bunch of drunk men. And they will just like throw food at you if you're a woman walking around by herself. Talk about fucking street harassment. Off the chart street harassment. Totally insane. Totally insane. Anyway, so we kind of bonded. We kind of grabbed on to each other. And we're like, you speak English? We need to stick together. We're gonna stay up all night. We're gonna get the fuck out of here. This is a nightmare. We're in hellscape. And then we basically wandered around town and sat in the train station until the first train came and we're like getting the fuck out of here. And then we left. We left there. 

‍

Guess where we went? Morocco. [laughs] Talk about street harassment. I don't know. I was super naive. I just was like, I can go wherever I want. I have a Eurail pass. But like, you know, maybe read a book or something. Kind of figure out what the culture is like in the place you're going. I didn't do that and it was a bit of a culture shock. Morocco in 1991 was not super hospitable to single women travelers or even two women together. Again, you walk around the streets, all men. Men everywhere. And so we were either invisible, like people just would not acknowledge our existence or we were a curiosity in a negative sense. You know, like people following us down the street, throwing stuff at us. It was really weird. It was one of the weirdest things I've ever experienced as a traveler. I was just like, can we stay here? Are we going to get murdered? Like, should we leave? 

‍

Anyway, there was a whole saga where we ended up making friends with these guys on the beach and then one of them was a doctor and he took us to stay in his beach villa and then he just left us there. He actually kind of kidnapped us. Anyway, I don't want to get too much into that because it gets really insane but we somehow made it out of there. 

‍

So yeah. So basically my point is I was traveling around with this girl who was English. I just soaked up her English accent just a little bit, just a little bit, just enough to where you'd notice it. It had more to do with the lilt, like going up at the ends of sentences and putting weird little question marks on things. You know what I'm talking about? Like dah dah dah dah? Like that kind of thing. So when I got back to Olympia and those guys picked me up at the airport, I didn't know how I was going to communicate with them without kind of getting busted and I did immediately I got busted. They're like, "Oh my God, you totally have an English accent." I was like, "I know. I don't know what to do about it. Sorry. It's so embarrassing." 

‍

There was also some mix up where those guys all came to pick me up and then Calvin also came to pick me up even though I'd called Calvin from Czechoslovakia and said, "Don't come pick me up. Ulysses is picking me up." There was some kind of mix of where like all these people came to pick me up at the same time. So it was really weird.

‍

Hayes Waring: That sounds nice.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: I don't think they thought it was nice because driving from Olympia to SeaTac is kind of a nightmare. I think all of them showing up were like, what the fuck man? I could have stayed in Olympia and hung out with thee Headcoats. Why am I up here picking you up when there's these other people picking you up? 

‍

Yeah, so I went from that whole crazy Europe experience straight into IPU. Intensely social, just people and people staying up all night. There was like, Planet of the Apes all-night movie thing at the theater. It just was like people were on all the time and I was super exhausted and super jet lagged. I was trying to engage but it was difficult. It was very clunky. My memories of that period of time are just me trying to cope and trying to stay with it enough to be social. 

‍

I don't think those memories got very firmly encoded in my brain because I just remember bits and pieces of stuff. Like I don't remember that show at all. I've seen a video of it. I have no memory of it. Really, zero memory. I think we practiced once before we played that show and I don't know what happened. But the Mummies were really good. I do remember that. The Mummies were really good. Fugazi was incredible. There was like a girl night thing where a bunch of people played. I think that's where Heavens to Betsy played the first time. That was great. 

‍

The whole thing had this really kind of can-do vibe. Where everybody is like welcoming and very supportive. It just had a very kind of like community- Even though a lot of the people I'd never met. I'd never met The Headcoats before. I think maybe Galaxie 500 was there. There was a whole bunch of bands there that I'd never met. I didn't know them. But it was sort of like just having them all wandering around downtown, it felt like we were all part of the same scene. I don't know. It was a really nice feeling when I was enough over the jetlag that I could appreciate it. I remember thinking that it was really special. A special event kind of thing. 

‍

Hayes Waring: Do you think things changed afterwards in Olympia? Did it feel different?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: No. I mean, Olympia has always been kind of a special supportive place. Even though I said that whole thing about people being standoffish at the Smithfield. It's a combo because it always has had that duality where people come across as really standoffish but then underneath it once you get to know people, they're really supportive. It's like when the band was first starting, people would lend us equipment. If we needed to record Pat Maley would be like, "I'll record you." People kind of step in to support you but you have to put yourself out there a little bit too. You kind of have to make a little bit of an effort to get to know people and be part of the scene. 

‍

I remember later when kids would move there and Bikini Kill had already been a band for a while and we'd hear them grumbling or whatever. Oh, everybody thinks they're a rockstar, and everybody's so standoffish and stuff. And it was sort of like, well, you have to try. You have to talk to people. You can't just expect everybody to run up to you and be like, what are you doing? Who are you? It's like people are people. Olympia's small and you run into the same people every day. It's like you need a little bit of private space so people aren't just automatically going to be trying to reach out to one another necessarily. Sometimes you're in a bad mood. You know what I mean? We're all human beings. But it's like if people show up and they are doing stuff and they're positive, and they don't show up with a chip on their shoulder, then everybody's very supportive. I don't know.

‍

Hayes Waring: You talked a little bit about people thinking you were rockstars. Is that something that you felt happened in Olympia where you guys were seen as you know, the Second Coming or something?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: That happened to us a little bit, yeah after we moved away to DC. We weren't gone that long, we were gone like a year probably. Some of us were gone longer than others. I'm not talking about the first tour with Ulysses because then we just stayed for the summer. And again, I didn't stay at all. I was just off on my Europe trip. And then when we were back in Olympia, the second tour with Ulysses in the winter where it switched '91 to '92, that was when we packed up our van and moved away. We left Olympia at that point. 

‍

That was right after Nirvana's Nevermind had just come out and we played a show with them on Halloween at the Paramount with Mudhoney. It was them and us and Mudhoney. 

‍

Hayes Waring: That was filmed, wasn't it?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: And the next day- I think it is filmed, yeah. It was weird because it was being filmed- Obviously we saw the cameras at the time because we're, you know, standing on the side of the stage and there's people running around the stage with cameras. Pretty obtrusive. Definitely had never seen a punk show where there's three guys with cameras running around the stage. But they were already huge. I mean that was right when the record was blowing up, so that was just part of the whole weird, bizarre thing that happened to them. 

‍

That was the beginning where we're like, oh, this is fucking weird. This is already turning them into like Top 40 radio or something. I don't know. We played shows with him before. We played several shows. We played parties with them. We played at the OK Hotel with them and stuff and they were always popular. In the Northwest kind of punk scene level of popularity, they were super popular. But this was different. This was like normal people liked them all of a sudden. You'd look out at the audience and it wasn't punk people. It was just like normal people. People in high school who wouldn't have been listening to punk rock. Kind of like jocks or something. You'd look down, there’d just be a bunch of jocks. I don't know. 

‍

That's when we realized that something different was happening was their audience. And it started at that show. I remember looking out at that show from the side of stage and being like, I don't know who those people are. Those people look like regular people that might not have ever come to our shows before, or their shows before. I don't know. 

‍

But yeah, so after that show we drove away and all our stuff was in the van. Our first show with Ulysses was I think in Massachusetts or something, so we basically drove straight across the country. From that Nirvana show at the Paramount the next day we just started driving. I think we stopped at our friend's house in Chicago. Then we drove straight from Chicago to Massachusetts and started the tour with Ulysses and went down the east coast. Then when that tour was over, we just moved to DC. Various ones of us stayed at different group houses until rooms opened up and then we just lived there for that year. 

‍

I think Tobi was the first one to come home. I think she was sort of homesick and she didn't really like DC. I mean, she liked it, but I don't think she liked living there really. There was no coffee. That sounds trivial but it-

‍

Hayes Waring: It's a big deal. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: It was more impactful than we thought. And when we moved there, there really wasn't any coffee. There was no coffee anywhere. There was 7-Eleven coffee, but that was it. There was no coffee shop culture at all. Zero. Nothing. I remember when the first Starbucks opened there. It was like this huge, big deal. And there was no independent coffee shops for years. So when we moved there, we all kind of immediately went into withdrawal. Literally. Literally, we went into coffee withdrawal. Tobi's mom would send us these care packages with like Batdorf & Bronson coffee beans so that we could survive. But I think that she was really homesick. And you know, she's always lived in Olympia. If not Olympia, she lived in Eugene for a little while. I think it's just where she's supposed to live, right? That's just her home. 

‍

So she was the first to move back. And then I loved DC and I wanted to stay there forever. So it was like, okay, you guys can move back but I'm going to stay here and then I'll just go back whenever we need to do something. I managed to do that for a little while but eventually I had to cave in and move back too. I think Billy and I were the last two holdouts. We were roommates in a group house called Pirate House, which was where Guy lived, from Fugazi. And the guy from Jawbox, J. from Jawbox lived there. A whole bunch of people lived there. Billy and I were roommates there, right up until the bitter end and then we had to move back because it was sort of like we couldn't do it. We couldn't do it from DC, we had to go back. 

‍

Hayes Waring: And when was that? 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: That was '93. I'd say spring of '93. It was right before we did the Huggy Bear tour in England so we had to go back and practice for that. So yeah, we moved back, we practiced for that, we did the Huggy Bear tour and then we all went back to Olympia, pretty much. But then I kind of ping-ponged back and forth between Olympia and DC. 

‍

The Olympia-DC connection is pretty deep. I mean, Kathleen was born in Portland, went to middle school and part of high school in Maryland right outside DC because her parents moved there when she was in middle school or something. So she had the Olympia-DC connection. And then she came back to the Northwest in high school and then she went to Evergreen. So she already had kind of an Olympia-DC thing. Calvin is an Olympia-DC person, right? Because his family, he has like some kind of Maryland-Olympia thing. And then I sort of had an Olympia-DC thing with my aunt. I feel like there was a bunch of us that already had this kind of connection. 

‍

And then of course, the two music scenes are really connected. I don't think that's coincidental either because Calvin came from the DC music scene. I feel like he brought a lot of that with him to Olympia, among other things. I feel like that was the main connection it seemed like, was him.

‍

Hayes Waring: Who was the first connection with Ulysses?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Tobi was the one that was interested in Ulysses and she heard about them from Guy because they were pen pals. Tobi was a big Rites of Spring fan and she used to write letters to Guy. They were pen pals. And so he was like, I'm pretty sure I'm the first person to tell Tobi about Nation of Ulysses because they had just started. And Guy was really into their music. There's this great band, you're totally going to love them, Nation of Ulysses, blah blah blah, and told her all about it. So I think that's how she heard about it. And then of course the "Sassiest Boy in America" feature in Sassy Magazine came out. So then we all got to see Ian and how cute he was and how funny he was and all that stuff. I was like, Yeah, okay, we can go on tour with that band. Sure. [laughs] 

‍

Hayes Waring: So that was it? Pen pals? 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, yeah, pen pals. Exactly. And then I think maybe Tobi wrote to Ian and I think they were pen pals before we did the tour. And then she was like, I've started this new band. You should have us open for your shows. I don't remember exactly how that whole thing happened but Tobi was definitely like- After Bikini Kill started, after we'd played a few shows, at some point in that winter, she was like, "We have to go on tour with this band Nation of Ulysses." I was like, "Go on tour? There's no way that we can go. I don't even know what that means. We're not ready to go on tour. There's no way." But she was like, "No, this is what's going to happen. As soon as you're done with school, Ulysses is coming out here on tour. We're going on tour with them. It's just what's going to happen." She would have the plan and then make it happen. 

‍

Between her and Kathleen it was always like one of them had the plan and then they would just drag all the rest of us along. I don't think anybody else wanted to move to DC except for maybe me because I love DC, but I don't think anybody else was like dying to move to DC or dying to go on tour with Nation of Ulysses. But then once we met them, we loved them and so I was happy that we were going on tour with them. They were super fun to hang out with.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, you asked me if we ever got called rock stars and that did actually happen. That's why I started talking about Nirvana and then I kind of got sidetracked. 

‍

So after Nirvana blew up, of course everybody knows what happened. And they started getting called rock stars because they were rock stars, you know? But I think they were getting called rock stars in the pejorative sense of like, oh, they used to be cool. And now they're just big rock stars whatever. But it's like, I'm sorry. They got popular. People liked their band. Is that a crime? You know? 

‍

So it became this weird kind of thing of like underground/overground. Like, oh, they're now different or whatever. They did actually leave Olympia. You know, Curt and Dave used to live in Olympia and then they didn't. So sort of like they did, they were gone. And so there was that kind of alienation thing. But then it became sort of a thing of any band that got a little bit popular got put into that framework or something. This is not novel. This isn't new. I'm sure this happens to bands. It's been happening forever or whatever. Anytime you get a little tiny bit of popularity, there's this kind of backlash-y thing that happens or something. It happened to like all the bands in Olympia I feel like. Or most of them. 

‍

And it definitely happened to us. We moved away and then in the intervening year there was a lot of media attention about riot grrrl and we got written about. And of course, Nirvana blew up so then anything that was adjacent to Nirvana in any way got attention. So you know, we were in magazines or whatever, not because we were doing profiles, but just because they would write about us or something. So then when we moved back to Olympia, there was a little bit of an awkwardness of like, Oh, now you guys are back and now you think you're so big or whatever. There was a little bit of a slight chip-on-shoulder vibe. 

‍

And of course there were a bunch of new people that were moving there, maybe because of Nirvana or because of us or whatever. That's when that started is people moving there because of the music scene, or Unwound or whatever. There were all these bands in Olympia, or associated with the Northwest, that people really liked. And so then they would move to Olympia and then they'd see you around. They'd be like, oh, you're such a rock star or something. But they just didn't know you. And they moved there in order- Like they were participating in that whole thing by moving there because they liked your band but then they were punishing you for it because they saw you through this one kind of prism or something. I don't know. It was really bizarre, but it really sucked. 

‍

We struggled with it, I think to varying degrees. We just tried to be normal and go to parties and whatever. But you know, people would get drunk and then they'd come up to you and they'd say a bunch of weird shit and you'd just have to deal with it. It's not the worst thing in the world certainly. It's not like we were oppressed in any way, but it did make living there kind of awkward because it is such a small town. It is such a small town. And if you live downtown it's even smaller. You know, if you live in the Martin, which a lot of us lived in the Martin or right around there, you can't really escape it. You always feel like you're in kind of a fishbowl. As soon as you leave your apartment to go get a cup of coffee, you pass 25 different people and maybe 5 of them have a certain idea of who you are and they treat you weird. I don't know. It was like, very easy to get inside your head a little bit. We obviously didn't think of ourselves like that at all, but we definitely did get treated a little bit differently I feel like as soon as we moved back. It was a bummer.

‍

Hayes Waring: Was it just other musicians or people in the scene? Or was it like, oh at Ralph's?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: No, it wasn't. It was definitely not other musicians. And it definitely was not people in- It wasn't our friends. Our friends were just like our friends. It seemed like it was more like the younger generation of people. It was people who were moving to Olympia because of the bands that lived there. I don't know who they were, but they would come up to me at parties and say weird stuff. It was a younger generation of people that none of us really knew very well. I don't know what it was all about. It was weird. And then we were trying to just ignore it and just hang out with people we knew or like, whatever. I don't know, but it was kind of weird. It was weird. It's just such a small town, I don't know how Tobi lives here. [laughs] 

‍

I love Olympia. I'll always love Olympia, but I don't know how you live there if you are known in any kind of way. And it's not like we're super famous. I mean, we weren't like Nirvana or anything, but it's like, you know, I don't feel like you needed to be very well known for it to be extremely awkward living there unless you're able to just completely go into some kind of mind zone where you'd just do a lot of meditating and shut it all out or whatever. Sometimes you have a really strong friend network and social network, where you can just shrug all that stuff off, but we didn't. We just had each other and all our friends who were in bands were always on tour. So to the degree that the four of us were getting along or not getting along, that was our scene. We might have had a couple other friends that were in town, but you know, Unwound was always on tour, Sleater-Kinney was on tour. The other bands were usually on tour. So it was usually us and whoever else lived downtown unless we were on tour. We were pretty dysfunctional for a lot of our band, so we weren't really on tour that much. We had a lot of downtime.

‍

Hayes Waring: What were some of the places that you played at that time in Olympia?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: We played at the Surf Club lots of times. Let's see, where else did we play in Olympia? It feels like mostly parties and people's houses and the Surf Club. At that point after we moved back, I think it was pretty much the Surf Club and the backstage of the Capitol Theater. Until we played these last shows at the front stage of Capitol Theater, I didn't think that we had ever played the front stage, but then it turns out that we did play the front stage. I think we played the front stage maybe opening for Fugazi one time. I don't really have a memory of that but you'd think I would, right? [laughs] I remember them playing Olympia lots of times. I remember us playing Olympia lots of times. I don't remember us playing with them but it's possible we did. And supposedly we did play the front stage. 

‍

I do remember that we played the backstage a lot of times. I remember even at the time being like, come on, you guys. Can't we play the front stage? Can we get a little- It's like this weird thing of the younger people calling us rockstars and then the older people not giving us any kind of respect by being like, no, you guys can play the backstage. I think our last show in Olympia was the backstage. It was like 1997 or '96 or something. I was like, for fuck's sake. Just let us play the front stage. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know.

‍

Hayes Waring: I think Jawbreaker's last show was at the backstage too, wasn't it?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Really? Yeah, I don't know why they just really didn't want to do front stage shows. I don't know if it was more insurance or they had to work harder to clean it up. I only remember a handful of front stage shows like maybe the Melvins. There was barely any. Big bands would come through and they'd have to play the backstage at the Capitol Theater. Not cool. Not friendly.

‍

Hayes Waring: Are there any shows that you remember from that time that really stuck out? You know, as like, oh, wow. This is something that maybe turned my head a little bit. Tobi talks a little bit about the Babes in Toyland playing.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, we bonded over that when our band first started because that happened right as our band was starting, I feel like it was that fall of 1990. We all went out to that show. It was in like, a mobile home out in the middle of a field or something. You know, shows would just happen wherever. I think Pat Maley lived there maybe. It was way out somewhere and it was kind of raining so everybody was tromping through the mud and came in and it was all steamy and gross and wet. Then they set up and just like overhead lights, no stage lights, nothing glamorous, just some mobile home overhead lights. They're setting up at the other end of the mobile home and then everybody shoves in there. And then no stage obviously. They're just on the ground. 

‍

Then they just started and it was like you were in a hurricane. I mean, it wasn't just that they were loud. It was just immediately they had so much energy, just came pouring off of them. It was totally insane. I'd seen bands obviously, and I'd seen other girl bands. I'd seen Calamity Jane. I knew them. They were hugely influential on me, but it wasn't like- This was like of a different order of energy and impact. It wasn't just Kat. That was when Michelle was in the band. So Kat and Michelle, the two of them, they just were immediate. It was like you were at a Black Flag show or something. Like immediately it was just the whole thing was like-  

‍

You know, people talk about transforming the room or something, they immediately transformed the room into this super exciting, energetic place. And then of course, Lori's incredible. And yeah, that was an amazing show. That was really impactful. I feel like we all kind of were super stunned by that. And then afterwards we ended up talking about it a lot because we were starting our band. It was sort of like aspirational. You know what I mean? Like, oh, that's what a band could be like if you practice and all the energies line up correctly. It just was really impactful. That one for sure.

‍

Hayes Waring: Just because it was like, a musical force or, you know a-

‍

Kathi Wilcox: It was a musical force but it was more though. It was like the performance. When she would play guitar and sing it was kind of like she was possessed. I mean, she was like that later too, but especially early Babes in Toyland shows. It was the visual too, because she's this tiny little person with her Rickenbacker and her hair's all scraggly down in her face. Before the show we saw her. I think she borrowed Calvin's amp or something. She was just really soft spoken and talking to Calvin, plugging her amp in and everything, just seems totally normal, mild mannered. And then as soon as they start the show, she just completely turns into this different person where it's like she's possessed. That's what it was like. Same with Michelle. Totally normal person, setting up her amp, tuning or whatever. Seems like it's just going to be a normal rock show. And then as soon as they start, she's like she's possessed. Hair's in their face and they're just freaking out and jumping around and doing hair whips. It was just super authentic too. It didn't feel performative. It wasn't like, oh, we're in a rock band so this is what rock bands do. It felt like they were channeling something. And I'd never seen a girl band do that before. I don't know if I'd ever seen any- I mean, Nirvana would do that. Nirvana would be like that too. Like you would see them play and it would feel like Kurt was channeling something and Dave was channeling something, but I'd never seen girls do it before. So for me, that was eye opening. 

‍

I hadn't seen that many girl bands at all. I'd seen Calamity Jane. I saw Amy Carter. But yeah, I hadn't seen very many girl bands. To see women get up on stage and just turn into these other creatures, it was kind of incredible. It's like I knew girls could be in bands, obviously. You know, there was the Go Go's and whatever. But by the time I knew about the Go Go's, they were just a pop band. By just a pop band I don't mean just a pop band. You know what I'm talking about? They were pretty polished. 

‍

Hayes Waring: They belonged to everybody.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, they belonged to everybody. They were very consumable, very commercial, very understandable, very presentable. I had never seen a band where the women looked like Butthole Surfers or something. They were like, possessed. I'd never seen that before. So that was cool. I don't know. That was new for me anyway. I'm sure those guys had seen people do that before, but I hadn't been on tour. I hadn't seen that many bands at that point. So yeah, that was a big show.

‍

Hayes Waring: Well do you mind if I segue that into another big band?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Sure. Go ahead.

‍

Hayes Waring: I'd like to hear a little bit about this band called the Frumpies.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: [laughs] Another big band. So the way I think about the Frumpies is it was a vehicle for me and Tobi to amuse each other and keep from sinking into despair when we lived in DC. After we moved there, that winter living there, we didn't have any money. We didn't have any network, no support system besides our friends in the Nation of Ulysses and Fugazi, a few other peripheral people. So we kind of felt like we were in outer space and just floating around and at risk of sinking into serious depression. Starving, like literally starving. We'd steal people's bread and peanut butter from out of the fridge. Really not cool. And we weren't getting along as a band super well. I feel like probably as a result of us all being really alienated in the place that we were and not feeling tethered anywhere and not having the money. And all of that. There got to be this kind of alienation where we weren't getting along with Kathleen. Nobody was really talking to Billy because Billy was off and being weird. It's just all this stuff going on. Bikini Kill wasn't really functioning for a long period of time. Kathleen was doing her two, three other project bands. 

‍

So it was basically just me and Tobi laying around her room in the Embassy trying to figure out what to do to keep from going insane. We were really into the Gories. We were really into bands that just had guitars, like Beat Happening and Go Team. There's just lots of bands from Olympia that just have guitars and no bass. We were kind of thinking we should just have a band that's just us playing guitar. And then Molly from Bratmobile was in town a lot because her dad lived there. So she would be there a lot. And so we're like we'll just get Molly to play drums if she wants to. And she did. So then she came over. And then it was just three of us. Then since Billy also lived in there, we all lived in this group house called the Embassy, he ended up coming down and playing third guitar. So then there were three guitars and Molly. 

‍

All the songs were just totally, I mean I don't want to say stupid, but like, I'm speaking for my own songs, I'm not talking about Tobi's songs. But they started off being pretty-

‍

Hayes Waring: Simple.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: [laughs] Stupid. I was going to say they were really dumb. But they made us laugh. You know, we would write them and then we would just be laughing the whole time. Even though they're not really that funny but like all these stupid in jokes that we thought were hilarious. And so it was like scream therapy is really what it was like. 

‍

We'd go down in the basement. You had to sign up for the practice space because, you know, Christina was starting a band, Christina Billotte from Slant 6 was starting a band. Nation of Ulysses practiced there. Bikini Kill was supposed to be practicing. There was just one practice space. Everybody wanted to be playing in it. Kathleen's project bands were all trying to practice there. There was this signup sheet and you had to sign up for blocks of time. So we're just like fuck it. And so we would sign up for blocks of time and we'd go down there and just play ridiculous guitar rock. And then it ended up being a few songs. Then our friend Donna wanted to record it. I think we played some shows, some parties. We ended up playing some parties. And then Donna was like, oh, I want to record you guys. So then she recorded the first single and then we just started recording singles. 

‍

It just it became something that Tobi and I would do in between Bikini Kill functional eras when Bikini Kill was actually able to work. Whenever things would fall apart, we would just go back and do Frumpies stuff and that just kept going on for years and years. It was like our fallback songwriting vehicle. 

‍

That was like the first time when I actually sang, never wanted to be singer, don't want to be a singer, don't like singing, hate singing in fact, actually totally, totally dislike it. But it was like therapy at that point. At that point in time it was like therapy. So I did it. And then we had to go on tour because Tobi made us go on tour. [laughs]

‍

Hayes Waring: Where did you go on tour?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: We did the whole US. We toured with Huggy Bear and that was a totally crazy show. The reason we did that tour is because we sort of owed Huggy Bear a tour in the US because we had done a tour with them in the UK. They were sort of like, well, we want to tour the US. That was during a period of time when Bikini Kill- It was right after the England tour. The England tour was in spring, and they came over in the fall. So that summer, there was a summer in between but Bikini Kill was basically not functional. We're like, well, we can't set you up a tour with Bikini Kill because we're not speaking to each other but we have this other ridiculous band that will totally go on tour with you if you want. We don't know how the tour will go but we'll totally set it up and go on it if you want to go on tour. It'll be fun. And they were like, sure. 

‍

They definitely did not know what they were getting into. I think it was way punker than they were expecting. It's like long drives across the desert and showing up in a laundromat and playing to 20 people. It was that kind of a tour. But it was super fun and super crazy. But yeah, so we did that whole tour from Olympia down the West Coast, across Texas, up through the middle states, and then the East Coast, and then we ended in DC. 

‍

That was another thing where it starts off as one idea and then it gradually gets dragged into being something legit. Which is actually how I thought about Bikini Kill too where I was like, I'm finishing school, this is my last year in college, I'll do this thing. I wasn't thinking, I'm going to join a band that's going to go on tour and make a record and blah blah. I was like, I'll just do this thing while I'm finishing up college and doing my independent contract. It seems like it'll be fun. I'm just gonna say yes to stuff. That was my period of just saying yes to stuff. As soon as you started that, then Tobi's like now we're going to record, we're going to put it out as a cassette, and then we're going to book this tour. They were definitely like the next step kind of people. Where I was just like, really? Are you sure? I don't know, it doesn't seem like it. Then before you know it, you're in the van driving across the country. I was never really ready for all that stuff. Again, I was in this period of like, just saying yes to stuff because it seemed to be working out. So I was like, okay, yeah. Frumpies can go on tour with Huggy Bear across the US. Yes, sure. Even though I hate to sing. I don't want to be in the front at all. Let's do it. Sure. Yeah, that's how that panned out. [laughs] 

‍

Hayes Waring: Do you have any favorite Frumpies in Olympia memories or stories? Recording maybe?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: I loved recording the singles that we did on the prison islands. I don't know if we're allowed to talk about the prison island or not.

‍

Hayes Waring: This is what I wanted to talk about. [laughs]

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, so wait, something's popping up. Are you still there? 

‍

Hayes Waring: I'm still here. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: So the prison island. Yeah, I'll just talk about it. Fuck it. I'm not going to go to jail. [laughs] Put me on the prison island. I don't think Tobi's dad will get in trouble at this point. 

‍

So Tobi's dad worked as a warden of a prison on McNeil Island, it's in Puget Sound, north of Olympia. He got this job so her parents moved to the prison island. They lived in this house on the prison island. And by prison island, it's like you take a ferry to get there. Everybody that's on the island is either in the prison, like an inmate, or the family members of the people that work at the prison. So it's like just a very select group of people that are on the prison island. But Bikini Kill practiced there. We would drive all of our equipment out there, put it on the ferry, went over on the ferry, they'd come down to meet us at the dock, load it in the back of her parents' car, and then we'd just drive it up to the house and load it down into the basement. We had all the stuff set up there. We practiced there. Weren't supposed to be practicing, that's why I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be talking about it. Definitely not sanctioned by the state. [laughs] Probably would have gotten in trouble if people had known. They saw us loading all the equipment off so I don't know what they thought was happening. 

‍

Hayes Waring: You've got to have a life, you know. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, exactly. You got to play music in the basement. So the Frumpies played there. And actually, Tobi and I moved on the prison island for at least a month. I had my room and she had her room and they were adjoining. It was like the Brady Bunch. It was really weird. We had a shared bathroom and we would just be in there writing Frumpies songs and then we'd go downstairs and practice. We had a four track and we would just record the songs. I feel like that was "Be Good," "Intertube Tomorrow." I think it was that single. I mean actually we recorded a lot of songs there that ended up on other singles. But those recording memories are my favorite just because it was just us doing it and it was so bizarre the circumstances of the recording. 

‍

And then the house. Have you heard about that? I mean, whatever. I'm recording this for everybody so they haven't heard about the house. It's like this four-story kind of Gothic, maybe built in the '20s. Not Gothic, but like it's a mansion. It was like a four-story mansion. The top floor was taken over by bats. The basement is huge concrete, has a stage on one side of it. So Bikini Kill would practice there on a stage. [laughs] The other end of it was just a concrete room with a door. You'd go in and be like, echo, echo echo. Totally great. So we'd go in there and do vocals. Sometimes we'd record guitar in there and sound totally crazy. So yeah, that was fun. Recording down in the basement on the prison island was fun because it was immersive and strange and we could just practice experimenting with different recording techniques. Putting mics over in the corner, putting it in a garbage can or whatever. It was fun to do that. I'm trying to think of any other weird recording stuff.

‍

Hayes Waring: Trash cans?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, you put the mic in the trash can. That's a good one. [laughs] I feel like there was another thing I was going to say about Bikini Kill but I can't remember. Oh, well. I'm sure it was really good. [laughs] It's gone. Lost to the mists of time. Yeah, I don't know. Prison and all of that. That was a good era. 

‍

That's when we wrote all the Bikini Kill singles like "New Radio," "Demirep." 

‍

Hayes Waring: Oh really?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: All those we recorded, not all of them, but most of the ones we recorded on the prison. Not recorded. We didn't record them on the prison. We wrote them while we were on prison island. Tobi, and I lived there but Billy and Kathleen would drive up and take the ferry over and we would practice there.

‍

Hayes Waring: You should have brought Joan Jett there.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, we should have. We should have. I took Guy out there one time and he was like, "This is really weird. Your guys' life is really weird." We took him there kind of in the middle of the night because I think you weren't supposed to bring people out there. It wasn't really like a hangout kind of place. So we took him over on a really late ferry or something and then showed him the house and walked around. He was like,"It is so bizarre," and then he had to get on ferry leave. Yeah, we never took Joan out there.

‍

Hayes Waring: You have to understand this if you're gonna understand our songs. [laughs]

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah. Anyway, all right. I can't think of what I was going to say. I don't know.

‍

Hayes Waring: Well, any other Olympia things that you want to talk about? You left in 1998 right?

‍

Kathi Wilcox: I left in 1998. Yeah. I don't know. It was a really great town to start a band in. Very supportive, lots of people doing stuff, lots of places to play, built in audience. People would go to shows. People would go to any show even if they didn't know anything about it. You would just go to the show because it was a show that was happening. Definitely one of the most supportive music scenes I've ever lived in. Like, definitely. 

‍

Maybe because it is so small, it felt more supported than DC even though DC was very supportive. The people that lived there, like Ian MacKaye offered to record us. Those guys let us move into their house. The Ulysses guys were actually very supportive. But living in DC was not, it did not feel supportive. It's pretty hostile. You know, especially in early '90s it felt like a struggle. Whereas Olympia felt very nurturing or something. I hate that word. But it's like it didn't feel hostile. It felt like you could totally make a life there and feel supported and it was sustainable. Even though it was small and eventually it felt like a fishbowl for us and I felt like I had to leave. It did definitely have a feeling of nurturing people starting out. 

‍

And that was the other thing is, there was a feeling of like, whatever you were doing was okay. At whatever level, just go ahead and start. It's okay to play a show, even if you don't really know what you're doing. I don't feel like that's necessarily the case in every music scene. That there's not automatically a bunch of people being kind of judgmental. Like, well, you guys suck. You need to practice more, or something like that. It wasn't like that in Olympia. People would get up and do shows without practicing really at all. Or people would just get up with a guitar and do stuff off the top of their head. That felt kind of unique to Olympia in particular. 

‍

I feel like that came from Beat Happening because you listen to the Beat Happening record, the thing that you take away from that record is that it sounds super off the cuff. They obviously don't care that they're not perfect or polished or anything. It's just the idea that that's enough to be a band. You can just do whatever it is you're doing and that's enough. It's enough, you know? Whatever it is you're doing. You don't have to be perfectly presentable in this particular way. It's like you can just kind of get up and do your thing and it's fine.

‍

Hayes Waring: Almost the most important part. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah. 

‍

Hayes Waring: Well Kathi, this has been so beautiful.

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, I feel like there's so much more to say. I wish I could remember that what that last thing was because it was really good, but-

‍

Hayes Waring: What do you think? Was it about the end of Bikini Kill? Was it about being in Olympia? Was it about-

‍

Kathi Wilcox: It probably was about the end of Bikini Kill but I can't remember. I don't know. It's gone. If I think of it, I'll let you know. 

‍

Hayes Waring: All right. [laughs] I think it's been- 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: Yeah, but Olympia is a very special place, you know? It just is. And it's interesting that there's this music project going on, because I feel like the same thing is happening in DC where there's this kind of looking backward. It's not nostalgia, but it's like, oh, we'd better document this thing and get it down or whatever. 

‍

But it's like at the time, it didn't feel like- It was nurturing and supportive but the city itself, I don't feel like the city itself gave a shit at all about the music scene. I could be wrong about that. It just didn't feel like it was. The two things were kind of on parallel universes or something. It wasn't like the city was trying to support the music scene, but I might have been totally wrong about that. There might have been some support in the city. But it feels a little funny and ironic now that 30 years later, they're like, wait, can we can we interview you about the music scene? But no, I'm really glad it's happening. 

‍

My experience was such a tiny sliver of time. There was a whole '80s thing that laid the groundwork for everything we were able to do. I probably would have never moved there if it hadn't been for Beat Happening. How did Beat Happening come into existence? Whole scene that they started or whatever or that predated them even. I feel like there's a very long continuum of which I feel like I'm like this part. But yeah, I'm glad I lived there. I'm glad I moved there and said yes to stuff. [laughs] That's my advice to young people now whenever I get interviewed. What advice do you have to young people? Or what advice do you have for your younger self? It's always just like, just say yes to everything. You know, I mean, unless it's like hard drugs. Say yes to stuff. Even if you don't know how to do something, just like, just do it anyway.

‍

2:07:33

Hayes Waring: Well that's perfect. I love that. This has been Hayes Waring and Kathi Wilcox for the Olympia Music Project. I had a wonderful time. Hope you did, too. 

‍

Kathi Wilcox: I did indeed. 

‍