Jason Traeger  00:02

Okay. It is December 12- 

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Pat Castaldo

2022-

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Jason Traeger

2022. I'm in Portland, Oregon speaking- this is Jason Trager- speaking with Pat Castaldo.

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Pat Castaldo

This is Pat Castaldo.

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Jason Traeger

This is the way you start an oral history recording, documenting. Where were you from? Where were you raised and what was your circumstances like growing up.

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Pat Castaldo

So I grew up outside of Boston, in the suburb of Reading, Mass. When I decided to go to college, all I had was the big book of colleges, back then it was this catalog you’d buy of every list of every college everywhere. My requirements were to go out west somewhere, get away from the East Coast, and it had to be a public school, it had to have a 24 hour computer lab, that was really important back then. It had to have a radio station, some sort of theater program, and maybe a political science program. I whittled all down the list, and Evergreen [The Evergreen State College] was on the list. I thought Evergreen literally was on the coast, because the map I had was so small. They said they had a beach, so I assumed it literally was the West Coast, not part of the [Puget] Sound [Salish Sea]. That's how sort of blind and dumb I was going into Evergreen. It's a cheap, affordable school, it seems to have cool things. I got the program, and what's funny is- they can't see it on the thing but- the other day, I was looking through the history of Evergreen, and I found this flyer that was from 1991 or 1990 for the computer science program. It was this trifold brochure, so I made it into a t-shirt, and I'm wearing it right now. My Evergreen- because that's what ultimately made me go across the country to a place I'd never been till the day I moved in. I didn't visit or anything and just showed up and was like, Okay.

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Jason Traeger

Had you ever been to the Pacific Northwest?

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Pat Castaldo

No. I just was like, I'm going as far away as I can. Gonna go start over or whatever. 

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When you're a high school kid, you think everything is so set in stone and maybe everyone hates you because you're a nerd, or you said embarrassing things, or they remember the time you wet your pants in the fun run in third grade. All that stuff you bring with you and I was like, No, I'm gonna go be cooler. I don't know that I ever got to be cooler, I'm still the same nerd I always was. But that was sort of the impetus for going where nobody knew me. It was also cool at the time. Most of the people in that upper middle class suburb I grew up in all went to Ivy League or schools in that area. The furthest they would go would be New York State to go to Columbia or NYU. Those were the places they went. Nobody really went to the west coast. So I did.

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Jason Traeger

You were a computer science major?

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Pat Castaldo

I did computer science, and journalism is what I ended up doing. I knew I could get a job in computer science. So my dad was like, “Oh, do computers.” Because I was already good at computers. Which is such a funny thing to say, but then it was even more important to be good at computers. I came out to Evergreen, the first time I ever set foot in the Pacific Northwest, my second cousin picked me up at the airport. I lived with him up in Woodinville for a month to try to get residency, and somehow that worked in ‘91. So, I was paying residency tuition at Evergreen, riding my bike between Woodinville and Seattle to explore the city thinking it's all amazing. I had never bicycled around a city before, so even that was new and exciting. I'd never been on a bike path. In New England, you just take the train everywhere, you take the bus. It was a different experience for sure. He dropped me off at Evergreen opening day, and that was it.

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Jason Traeger

1991?

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Pat Castaldo

1991. I was 17.

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Jason Traeger  03:58

What were your first impressions of Olympia and Evergreen?

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Pat Castaldo

Evergreen, when you first get out there, you drive up through the loop, you're like, Where the hell is this? It's in the middle of the woods, like woods you've never seen growing up in New England too, and you feel like you're traveling forever. At first you're like, What am I doing? Then you pull down this long road, because we went straight to the dorms, which is that long road down Cooper's Point and you're like, There's nothing out here. Then you take a left. You see a parking lot on the right, and you’re like, I guess that's where people park their cars. I don't know, I don't have one. Then you pull up, and ‘A’ dorm is huge. It sort of opens up on this 10 story, modern looking building. I went in and got my room and went up to the seventh floor. 

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Evergreen was really busy back then, so they were overfull in housing. There were three of us in a two person studio. Two bunk beds, and another one. One dude had this huge beard, and I was like, Oh my god, I'm with someone who's 30. He's like, “Oh, no, I was born a month after you. I just can grow a beard.” [laughing] Then this really skinny dude with facial earrings and stuff- stuff I never seen. I was like, This is awesome. It was like, you know, no kitsch. 

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I didn't know what to expect. I did not do my research. I didn't know you had to go to the grocery store to buy your own food and use the community kitchen. I had actually never had a bean burrito before until I got to Evergreen. Growing up in New England, all we ate were subs, pizza, and fast food. There was no Mexican food. I had never had a bean burrito until that first week of school. 

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Jason Traeger

How was it?

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Pat Castaldo

It was great. I went back at one point, and literally was at a friend's family, I was like, “I gotta make you guys something. It's so crazy.” And I made them burritos. As if I had brought back something from the New World that they had never seen.

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Evergreen was great. To me, it was like I'm at this summer camp with supposedly a bunch of smart people and interesting people. There's cute girls. Everyone seems sort of cool. There's someone playing guitar. It was a hippie paradise for a person who had never touched a piece [cannabis smoking device] before. Who had never seen that type of thing.

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Jason Traeger

You weren't ever exposed to the hippie subculture.

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Pat Castaldo

I really wasn’t. The most bohemian thing for me in high school was going to Harvard Square and kind of just hanging out. But, that felt more like what I had read in [Jack] Kerouac or whatever. You fancy yourself more of a beat than a hippie when you do that kind of stuff. You're like, Yeah, I'm gonna smoke or look like I'm smoking and hang out at a coffee shop.

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Anyway, Evergreen, the first thing was like, wow. It was funny, because I remember clearly getting in the elevator. My cousin- who was probably only 30 at the time, but felt so old to me- we're in the elevator, going to the seventh floor with a cute soccer player who was there already. And he just gives me this nod of like, hey, like, this is going to be okay. The funny part about that same person is we did end up making out seven years later. So it all was very Olympia in that way too.

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Jason Traeger

When did you first become aware of the Olympia, underground, indie, punk subculture?

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Pat Castaldo

The gateway was definitely through the [Olympia] Film Society. There were posters for the film society, and I was like, Oh, what's this? The first time I ever even was downtown was on an Evergreen tour where some person already there. I remember the tour, being so enamored with the other people in the tour, like, Oh, who's this cute girl who's talking to me? I walked into a parking meter.

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In downtown Olympia, I was just wide-eyed, like, What is this small town? It was originally walking on the tour, and then finding out about the Film Society and going to the film festival that first year. I did remember later- I had a friend who was hip, who was into indie rock at the time in Boston in the 90s, and she was like, “You're gonna probably get to meet Beat Happening.” And I was like, “Yeah, I love the English Beat.” I didn't know.. Till later, then go on and spend an Easter at Calvin [Johnson]'s. No clue that that was the thing when I got there. 

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You end up volunteering- so the theater was the place. Getting to go there and be part of that just by showing up was this crazy rewarding thing. Shows were $5. These aren't bands you've ever heard of? No. What do you do? You just go back and you’re like, Who are all these people? Who's this crazy person dancing like a crazy person? Oh, it's Karl Steel. Who's that guy with the headphones? Oh, that's Calvin. Who are all these people? For me, I was like, I want to be a part of this. Volunteering at the film society was the way to do that. I went down and became a projectionist. Someone else was like, “Oh, we should go do it. We’ll volunteer,” and they didn't show up. So I was there with seven other strangers who ended up becoming your friends forever.

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Jason Traeger

Can you think of any of those names?

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Pat Castaldo 

Jeff Bartone is the one who took me under his wing for sure. In terms of giving me a home, a second home at the theater, it was Jeff. At the time, Patty Kovacs was this grouchy lady who seemed, well it felt like you were watching a movie about the 90’s almost, especially in my mind now, because she seems so cranky, but was somehow nice enough to me. 

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I became one of those fixtures at the theater just because it seemed like another place. Other people in that day, in that film festival thing, in the projection booth: Amber Alberty was there. Ed. Xelaju [Korda]. There were a bunch of other people. What’s funny is, years later—we took photos of that training and I think what I thought happened every year at these projectionist trainings, was really one more of a one off type thing because there was this core of us who got our Polaroids taken and that was the main crew for basically the next 10 years. Other people would come one at a time, but there was never a huge cohort of projectionists. I mean, you were there. There was those projectionist dudes and some of us would be there two or three nights a week, like every Sunday for 10 years. I built the films and showed them, hanging out with Jeff breaking down the films, and then playing Fitz of Depression on the loudspeaker to tell everybody to go home at the end of the night, then going over to Thekla and getting drunk. That was on repeat for so much in my life.

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Jason Traeger  11:00

What was the first show you remember seeing?

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Pat Castaldo

I went to a bunch of shows but there's two or three sort of events I remember. One is like being blown away by Fitz of Depression. That was this amazing- this man has so much energy. This guy is crazy. And Mikey [Dees] was crazy. 

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It's one of those things where Mikey then became this like character in my own life. I had gotten a speeding ticket and didn't have insurance, and hadn’t had car insurance in forever, so I had to go and beg to please don't give me this giant ticket. When you do that you're actually in with everybody who's been arraigned that night before. And Mikey was there like saying, “The joint wasn't mine, judge.”  It was kind of this amazing-  seeing Mikey in a jumpsuit, and also knowing him. It's one of those things you say it now, and it sounds fake. It doesn't sound real that Mikey was busted for possession the same day I was there for not having car insurance. So Mikey and Fitz, and that whole- Fitz was one and that obviously bled into KARP [Kill All Redneck Pricks, band] because that was the other double bill that we probably saw 100 times. 

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It feels like every weekend. In my mind, at times, it was every weekend. So there was that side. Then there was the pop punk side or whatever. The girl I was dating at the time was like, “You gotta come and see these bands.”  Air Miami, and well all the TeenBeat [DC Record label] bands. So all the TeenBeat bands had come. They were on a tour. And it was like, whoa. It was my brain putting stuff together. These are the same types of bands, but different from DC. So that was this awakening of like, Oh. At the time, I thought this was everywhere, like every town had a set of small traveling bands. But I think in the ‘90’s it was DC and it was Olympia that were leading sort of the charge. There was Dischord much like in Olympia there was K and Kill Rock Stars [record labels] and then even smaller labels orbiting around that. In DC there was Dischord. Teen Beat was started by Mark [Robinson] in his high school. 

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That was the other epiphany of, oh, indie rock has this community, pre-Internet of touring and tapes and shows. I think that's one of those things that instilled in me, just show up. Show up and you'll see what's happening, and you can be a part of what's happening. I'm still friends with Mark to this day. Those are two big- going to the Fitz shows and the KARP shows, and then seeing that from a different place where it's like, Oh, there are other things.

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Jason Traeger  13:45

So besides your work with the Olympia Film Society, What other things did you do? Were there other ways you participated in the Olympia scene?

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Pat Castaldo

Yes. The film society  was the biggest one. I also worked at the Washington Center [for the Performing Arts] doing- the film society I was a projectionist, but also did the weekly or the monthly program of films. Designed the layout. Through that I got to work with the film selection side of the committee. So there was that but then I also worked selling tickets at the Washington Center. That was a whole different- and knew those guys, both the backstage guys and the nice people in the front of house. That was a whole other Olympia angle. 

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Once I started participating and really doing stuff- when we had the whole debacle, or not debacle, but people wanted to have chickens in Olympia. I don’t know if you remember, it used to be illegal to have chickens. Everyone was like, “We gotta go to the planning commission meeting and we got to tell him how important chickens are.” and I was like, I will never have a chicken but this sounds fascinating. I don't want to take care of a chicken. I love the idea of free eggs but- so I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna show up. I'm gonna go. Seeing the sort of participatory democracy that can happen on a small scale. People would always be like, “Oh, the city did this. And the city did that.” And I was like, “Twenty of us showed up and got chickens legal.” So that started my interest in that element of it. The city is not outside our control, it's not them. 

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Moving to Portland, it did feel more like the city was a professional thing outside of the people who lived there. But I found in Olympia that government to be incredibly accessible. So I ended up joining the Planning Commission, and then within a year was the chair, and then served on the planning commission for four or five years. In fact, when my son was born- it was back when you had pagers- I got a page that's like, “I think I'm going into labor.” And I was like, “Meeting almost over.” So I was like, “You're gonna have to wait to be born until this Planning Commission meeting’s over because I'm the chair and we've got some very important fence height issues that need discussing; how high a fence should be.” 

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That experience was born for me out of punk rock and just showing up and being like, Wait, we can do this, we can run the city too. There's no reason we can't. I don't know that everyone always got that, because there was a like, “The city won't let us do this.” There's definitely a bureaucracy in place that prevents that. But one of those lessons, one of those takeaways of punk rock, is show up. 

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When I say punk rock, I mean the whole indie scene. Show up and you get to decide. You get to be a part of it. It's the same thing with government in a town that small. Portland, the same thing doesn't happen. There's a lot more money. Maybe I was naive, maybe that moneyed sort of decision making happens there. But seeing some of the people that made it to city council, over our tenure. You're like, “That guy who was stoned at the party is going to make an important decision?” And you're like, “I could probably help with that or do better.” That was another way I got involved. 

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The other one was helping record labels. Because I was always a computer nerd, I was the first one with a scanner, and a CD-ROM [Compact disc read-only memory] burner. It was in the right place at the right time. I ended up doing, and by doing I'm making air quotes right now, doing album covers meant- I mean we did your album cover together [Jason Traeger and Pat Castaldo]. People would have an idea, and I would basically be in charge of the mouse. I would give my input of what I think looked good or better, or here's a font I might recommend. My designing of those albums changed based on whoever was sitting there and their ideas. 

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Nowadays graphic designers and designers are almost their own mini rockstars. There were some of those at the time, but they weren't as widely known. They weren't like cultural as they are now. I looked up to the people who work- I looked up to Jeff Kleinsmith and Jesse Ledoux who were doing- and Art Chantry, the old guard and the peers of mine who were up at Subpop [Seattle record label] or Up Records I was like, Oh, well, these guys are doing real album covers because they're on a real label. I'm just helping out. It's like a diss because I feel like we put out- Olympia, for our size and the size of that community, the records that got put out and the cultural change that happened… When you listen to them now, some of them aren't great musically, but they connected with you. 

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Some of them [Albums from the 90s Olympia] are not engineered well at all in terms of an album. But it's like we were just doing it. Pat Maley was in the back of the Capitol theater. He had wired up stuff and was recording those. Is he the best engineer? No. But if he wasn't there, what would have happened? That's not a diss to Pat. I love him with all my heart, but we didn't know what we were doing. Some of us were better at some of the things we did than others. It was that idea that you would do it and you would show up and you're like, “Sure.” 

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I think the biggest thing then, I think about a lot now, is money. We didn't have expensive rents compared to income. I was making $17 an hour then at the state, at school or whatever. My $450 apartment, it all worked. You're able to volunteer all your time on doing album covers or the film society because having to hustle 24/7 for money wasn't part of the objective, at least for me it wasn't. I figured I'd just do this stuff because it's fun. It's a way to participate. I had a bass, I couldn't play at all. There was never going to be a band Pat Castaldo was in that was good. There just wasn't, unless I got to play a simple thing on the keyboard and sing in the background, low. But I wanted to help and be a part of that anyway. For me it was helping with covers and engineering backstage shows when no one else could. I know where everything is like, “You want the volume louder? Okay, I think it's this one.” That was some of the stuff that I found myself doing all the time.

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Jason Traeger  20:19

You said you had a bass. Did you play in any bands?

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Pat Castaldo

Yes, there was one band, and it was me, Joanna MacIver, and Sharon Franklin, and we were called Shame. We only played once. I think we opened for- what was Paul Schuster's band?

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Jason Traeger

P.E.Z.? 

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Cataldo

Yeah. We open once at Midnight Sun [venue] for P.E.Z. That Paul Schuster and what's his face, who's now a famous British hillbilly guy-

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Jason Traeger

Seasick Steve.

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Pat Castaldo

Yeah. [laughter] But it was just Steve Wold back then, and he was really mellow and chill. The funniest thing about Steve is just remembering how- I think the first Modest Mouse record is amazing, and that's also Steve pushing them into something they weren't, necessarily. But to me it was the coolest record ever. Then to get to do the cover for their next big record. I was like, It's all working. This band’s great.

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Jason Traeger

I specifically remember you listening to that album while you were working with me on my album cover. 

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Pat Castaldo

Oh, really?

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Jason Traeger

Yes. I remember you singing along to it. [laughter]

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Pat Castaldo

I remember that one, too. Isaac [Brock] didn't have the lyrics written down to any of those songs. So when I was doing the sleeve, I was listening to try to type them up and would get stuff wrong. I would just get stuff, because I didn't know what he was saying.

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Jason Traeger

What album was it that you did the cover for?

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Pat Castaldo

Lonesome Crowded West was the big one. That's the one that's like, they're touring right now doing that album-

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Jason Traeger

In its entirety.

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Pat Castaldo

Yeah. I don't know if the future generations will get this sweet Gen X nostalgia hit that we can get from something like that, but when I talked to other people over 40, they're like, “Yeah, if there's no opening band, and they're just playing that album, I would pay $100. That sounds great.” It's funny how your tastes change, because it's like, “Oh, maybe this opening band will be good and I'll find out a new record.” To now it's like, “I would love to be home by 10:30 if that's at all possible.”

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Jason Traeger  22:23

So when did you start Buy Olympia? And what was the impetus of that? What was the inspiration?

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Pat Castaldo

The job I got at Evergreen after I graduated- I stayed on at Evergreen working for housing. They decided- it was at the beginning of the “internet was going to become a part of everybody's life” type era. So we were wiring the dorms for high speed internet. 

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When you and I went to school, there wasn't the internet in that way, you had to go to the computer center. It's why, to me, a 24-hour computer- I imagined being up all night writing a paper, I'm gonna do it in WordPerfect 5, and we're gonna live in the computer center, it's gonna be awesome. I'm gonna get a good seat. 

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By the time ‘99, ‘98 rolled around, or ‘97, I’m bad with years, but around then that's when the internet started really taking off, we decided to wire all the dorms and I got given that project. So there I was, a 22 year old kid, in a way, who would still drink every Sunday night at Thekla and the rest of the nights at the Reef [King Soloman’s Reef, diner and lounge]. I was in charge of a million and a half dollar project of wiring the dorms. I went ahead and did all that. What was your original question?

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Jason Traeger

What led you to start Buy Olympia?

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Pat Castaldo

I had to hire four student helpers. One of them was Aaron Tuller. All four of the people that I ended up hiring became lifelong friends because I was 22 and they were 18. I'm the boss ostensibly, but we all had ideas. Aaron Tuller had originally been an intern at Sub Pop. He lived at his cousin's on Bainbridge [Island] and took the ferry over and was, I think, Sub Pop’s first intern. He loved these bands. We loved those bands that played in Olympia because they were our friends and we saw them everywhere. I remember Corin Tucker working at the camera store in the mall—

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Jason Traeger

KITS Cameras.

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Pat Castaldo

Yeah. And you're like, “Oh, okay.” and then you're like, “Oh, now I live next door to her.” It's one of those small worlds where we had a mall but somehow the people there also were punk and the Thai food at the mall was somehow fancier. It was a scene. Aaron was an intern at Sub Pop and liked the music. He ended up doing stuff at Kill Rock Stars at the same time as me. 

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Star Seifert and Tina Herschelman had done Catch Of The Day, which was a mail order catalog. Aaron was like, Kill Rock Stars is going to want to get on the internet. So we should build them a store. At the time, there was no Shopify. PayPal had sort of started, but it was more of a just eBay thing. So there wasn't e-commerce per se. Aaron and I were like, Well, we know everybody, and we also know all these people in bands who are making things that weren't just music. 

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Ostensibly, Nikki [McClure] was a musician at the time. She was doing the papercrafts, oh, we could sell that calendar. I had been helping her on the calendar, much like I would help someone on an album, where it's like, Here's how to take your paper cut and turn it into something we can take to press. 

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How I got good at press, and this is another shout-out to Evergreen, was the Cooper Point Journal. I learned how to take things to press every week at the CPJ. So why I was good with scanners, how I knew to make photos look good on press, was experimenting at the CPJ, where we would literally lay it out paste up style and drive it out to Shelton once a week to get printed at the Shelton Mason County Journal. That's the same place we had the film festival guide printed. So that was how I hopped over to do that at the film festival too, or Film Society, was Oh, I know how to do that already. Just like I know how to scan and print and all that stuff. 

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Aaron and I were talking about it at work, and he's like, “We should start something.” So, we did. We built a shopping cart and in ‘99 sold- we had to go to the bank and even at Wells Fargo out on Black Lake, they were like, “So you want to sell things on the internet? Are you sure? You might need a different account.” And we’re like, “No, we need a merchant account, here's what it is, here's a printed page from your website telling you how to do it.” So we set up the merchant account, and then we sort of launched it in ‘99 with just Nikki's calendar. I think we sold like 40 of them. One to her mom, one to Aaron's mom. That's how it started. And then quickly, while I was still working at Evergreen and he was finishing up, we quickly started building other websites and e-commerce stuff for people.

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We decided on the name Buy Olympia, which I hate, but it's what it is because we were there. That's where we thought the business would always be, and what we would always be doing is selling stuff. But that first year ended up being, as we added more products to the site, literally would be Aaron driving to everybody's house and picking them up, bringing them back to my apartment where the server was- the server was just a cheap Dell we had leased for $30 a month sitting on my table next to where- I think Vern [Rumsey] accidentally shut it off once while he was over with beers and we were working on an Unwound cover. It’s one of those lo-fi things. All the inventory was in the shelves behind me in that apartment above Drees for a long time. 

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Then we just went bigger and bigger. We started powering people's record stores. That was the other one. We wrote the first download thing where you could download mp3s. So we did all this sort of stuff first not realizing giant companies would come out of it. We were good at Buy Olympia and doing the stuff Aaron and I do but we were never great at like, “This is a product everyone should use.” There's no reason in some ways- like why didn't we think of Bandcamp? We did. We did stuff like that. But we were never these people who are like, ‘Let's turn it into a giant business.” Which is one of those things I reflect on, like, is that the Olympia in me? Is it reading the screed against the corporate overlords over and over again on the wall of the Capitol Theater? What was it that was like, “let's keep this manageable.” We would never add someone to the site even to this day that we don't have some sort of relationship with because we don't want to be a walk up service. We don't want to be a company that's anonymous. We started with all the people we knew around town making stuff and it's obviously changed a lot in the last 23 years, but it's basically still that. 

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We started in ‘99, and it's still going strong because the pandemic was crazy. I'm old now, but it's still going. It still works. We have six employees. We add new stuff all the time. We're still selling Nikki's calendar. That part just worked. That's a tribute to us coming out of that DIY- I owe it all to the labels that I saw doing it every day.

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Jason Traeger

I was gonna ask, was your primary inspiration, in terms of starting a business, the record labels you had-

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Pat Castaldo

Yeah. That's the thing. Aaron ran Punk In My Vitamins for a while and worked at Kill Rock Stars and I did a ton of work for K. I was never an employee anywhere. Do you know what I mean? Aaron was technically an employee at Kill Rock Stars. I did tons of album covers and did tons of everything, but I never was an employee at any of those places. But seeing the model of like, “Here's what we do.” We try to make something together. We'll help you make it. Like Nikki's calendar. We’ll help you make it, we'll buy a bunch, or we'll invest, and we'll build it together. Like literally, she would come over, and we would make it over the course of a week, lay it all out and do all that stuff. Then we'll sell it, and then we'll split the profits, which is the record label sort of way to go. So many people now, like license stuff, “We'll give you 75 cents a calendar, and we'll make 19 [dollars].” That never made sense, and it still doesn't to me. You can see people be exploited kind of in real time. 

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There are better models. I don't know if the record labels inspired us as much as like, this was something we could do that's different than the labels. It's not working with the labels, and it was, at first, not to sell music. It was to help everybody be in the small bands that didn't make any money. It's like Sarah Utter and her “Reading Is Sexy” shirt. That was one where it was like, “We'll split the profits on that shirt.” It was funny because someone else in town who was screen printing shirts was also trying to sell shirts he designed. He's like, “I don't want to do that one.” Alright, well, Buy Olympia guys do. We did, and we ended up selling- I don't know, it was on TV, we ended up selling like 50,000 of those shirts, or whatever. It was Sarah's income for a while. During the high time, it was a huge- it was how she was able to be in The Bangs and do other stuff that wasn't making as much money. 

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I love when those things happen. They don't happen as much now as they did back then, because the internet is such a different place. We were one of the only stores like that in the year 2000, or even still by 2005. When you get Etsy and you get other people like “Oh, just walk up and do a store.” Nowadays, instead of a brand like Buy Olympia that was almost like a record label there's a bunch of- if you look at Kill Rock Stars, you have Elliott Smith on one hand, and KARP. There's nothing in common with them from a listener's perspective. Much like on Buy Olympia, there's Nikki, and then there's Sean Tejaratchi’s Craphound [magazine]. Those are not the same. I mean, they're the same because they're both indie punk rock things that Aaron and I know the people from. It's the same way in that label where a label doesn't have to be all electronica or whatever. The Kill Rock Stars catalog was incredibly diverse, but they were united behind this idea, I guess. I don't think the Decemberists has anything to do with the music of KARP, but they are, in spirit, the same. Whatever Slim [Moon] saw in them was the same thing. I don't give myself as much credit as Slim. There's obviously a connection and stuff here. There's something we can do together, whether it's put out records or not. 

‍

In terms of inspiration, the indie rock scene and putting out records was huge. I also saw a ton that just didn't work. How many of the fifth Yo Yo compilation are still in Pat's garage? I did the covers and helped and did everything I- I'll make the website. I'll do it, everything I could. To me, those compilations are as much Olympia as anything. You listen to them now and it's like- some of the bands would not even still exist by the time the compilation came out. You're like, “This is an amazing song. Where are more of these?.” I don't know what they did. They went and got a job in Seattle or something. So yes, the music was a huge part, obviously, in what it was. 

‍

The music and the film society are the two creative engines in that, I think. Everyone who was in those bands would go see movies. The people who stayed- I know Tobi [Vail] goes every week to whatever is playing. Everyone who's still there- Nikki and JT still go to the film fest. I know, because they text me that they're going like, “Wish you were still announcing movies.” Okay. Those are the two engines, I think. And then the affordability was a huge part. That's the thing where it's like, “How do you get that back?” I don't know. 

‍

25 years ago very few people had a second house that they maybe would rent to punks, but those who did rented them and they were just trying to cover their mortgage. Now there seems to- an extraction of wealth across the whole board that means that it's so much harder to do those things. In some ways, it's easier than ever to put out your own music, to record your own music. The way that technology's advanced, even within our own lifetime. It used to be hard to design a cover and put out- you could not afford to print four color. That's why you had to know all these techniques. But now, people send JPEGs to a print on demand thing and they get shirts like the one I'm wearing. Legible, good. You can do that on your phone. So in some ways, there's so many more ways to do it. But also, everybody's doing it. Everybody's trying to make money renting- everybody, but I mean, there's a larger percentage of people trying to do rent extraction across the board. 

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You look at things like Spotify, and that's just rent extraction. They're not providing any value. They're not. Well, everybody's already on it. It's like, yeah. This whole spend a ton of money till everyone's on it, we're seeing those collapses happen. It's frankly, great. Twitter imploding will be wonderful. It'll suck for people getting these audiences for free kind of thing. But, it'll be wonderful in terms of a decentralization of so much of this stuff that was punk rock. I don't know how there was a DC Olympia connection for a music, but there was and it worked, and it was really great. The centralization of those things is not great. But anyway. Rant.

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Jason Traeger  36:18

What year did you move to Portland, and what facilitated that change?

‍

Pat Castaldo

I think on one level, I would have been happy in Olympia forever. I grew up in Olympia, right? From 17 to 35 is when I lived in Olympia. So, I didn't know any better. It's still a great place, but for Aaron, who was a bit younger than me, not able- I was married and had a kid by the time we moved, but Aaron wasn't able to find anyone. The scale of Olympia can be constricting on single people. Just in terms of, how do you meet people? The pool is so much smaller. If you don't get past the zone where it's okay that everyone I know has also dated everyone else I know. If you can get past that you can probably do fine. But if you can't, and it's a valid thing to not get past I guess, then the small town doesn't have enough for that. 

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We would come down to Portland all the time to see shows and do other stuff. But then we were at this point where it's like, “Well, is this the next stage?” We had to grow- that's the mailman- We had to grow- who also listens to punk. Whenever he delivers a record- this is how Portland and how Olympia is- but whenever he delivers a record he asks me what it is, and tells me- we talk about it, and recommendations and stuff. So in two thousand- right when Obama got elected, a lot of our people were moving down already, and that's when we decided to move down. Aaron wanted to change. For me, it was like, “Yeah, let's try it. I would like to see other stuff.” 

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The thing is we can always move back. You can still always move back. I have had fantasies at times in my life where I would, quote, “retire to Olympia,” which means I get a job at Evergreen again, or the state and just live a much more relaxed life. I had worked at the state before I quit. When my son was born, that was when I was like, “I can't do- I can't work 60 hours a week anymore. A full time job and Buy Olympia. That was the big risk taking in my life because I had a job. I was the Associate Director of an agency that has since changed names, but it was the Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board. So my job was in IT, supporting all the financial aid in the entire state for all the schools. I ran the systems that helped generate all the Pell Grant checks, that kind of thing. I had a great job. I was on track to be an IT director at some agency forever. People I left in 2008 of the crew- the person who was like, “I'm not ready to be an associate director.” or whatever. He's now the director and still there because it's one of those things where you're like- if you're a careerist in Olympia, there is no- there aren't too many better jobs than that. It's not easy, but it's comfortable. 

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You go to work every day, you know what’s expected of you, you come home and you can walk around and play with the kids. You aren't checking emails. Are we out of stock? Or what happened with this? Or why isn't someone done with this? All the things of running a business every day do disappear in a nine to five job especially a state job where there's multiple redundancies and accountability. Someone else is accountable for you getting a paycheck ultimately. You have to do your part, but- that's an interesting aside. People in jobs don't always get what independent creators or people are like. When you ask for someone who doesn't have a job’s time, you're actually asking them for money. Which people don't think of, but it's like, “Hey, could I spend an hour and pick your brain?” It's like, “Okay, that's an hour I'm not going to be able to make money.” Which is fine. But even when companies do that, they're like, “Well, we're just gonna have a meeting.” It's a three hour meeting. You know how much I could have got done in three hours? So it's an interesting perspective- anyway, I had that job. We decided to move down here. When Vinnie was born, when my son was born, decided I can't do it all. I was also the chair of the planning commission at the time. I quit that job and I had enough leave built up so that I had basically six months of paternity leave. Then I went back and was like, “I don't want to do it at all.” I worked halftime for another year, and then resigned from that job and just did Buy Olympia full time. That was around 2006, 2007, that I went Buy Olympia full time.

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Jason Traeger

And that's when you move to Portland?

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Pat Castaldo

A year or so later, we moved down here. We had outgrown the warehouse. The business then looked a lot different than now. We were also a shirt business for a long time. We sold tons of T-shirts. We kept Mike from godheadSilo-

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Jason Traeger

Kunka.

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Pat Castaldo

Yeah, Mike Kunka in business for- he only had a couple of clients. It was us, Kill Rock Stars, and then a couple other bands. He was able to support his growing family from that outgrowth of punk rock and shirts and stuff.

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Jason Traeger

Mike is married to Tina Herschelman who did the zine you were talking about. The original catalog with Star Seifert. 

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Pat Castaldo

Yes.

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Jason Traeger

Which was called?

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Pat Castaldo

Catch of the Day.

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Jason Traeger

Catch of the Day. 

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Pat Castaldo

Yeah. CotD. Which, in a way, would have been an even better name for a website than Buy Olympia.

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Jason Traeger

So you see this net of businesses, all coming from this community, supporting one another, working with one another. Is that the type of- all that that sort of color- is that what led you to ditch the secure state job and go with the all encompassing life of a business owner?

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Pat Castaldo

I wasn't gonna stop participating in all those other things. So it's like, if I can make a living doing this thing, then I will. The other thing, just like I feel like I could always move back to Olympia. I can always, I mean maybe I couldn't, my skills are outdated or not whatever state things are looking for. But at the time, I was like, I can go back. I might not be a director level person again, but I'm happy just programming. I could get another state job. At the time- we talked about this before we got “on air”- my house cost $80,000 when I bought it. Our mortgage was $600, or 650, or 750. It was one of those things where we would have paid that house off in 15 years. So that gave me some freedom. A few months of rent or mortgage payments was easily stashable. 

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Buy Olympia hadn't been paying us up til that. So we had money that we kept investing in the business. For the first six or seven years of the business, the only thing Buy Olympia ever bought us was dinner. We weren't taking money out of the business, we are always putting it back in. Which I think let us look a little bigger than we ever were. We had ads in all these magazines that don't even exist anymore, like Bitch magazine, or Venus magazine. Bust still exists, and we still advertise there. We had all these magazines, so people thought we were big, not me leaving my state job during lunch, stopping at Old School Pizza, getting the “Pat Special,” which was: I would just look at them, and if there was a line, they would hand me two cold slices, and I would pay when there wasn't a line. Rich Phillips was like, “Yeah.” 

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I would eat two cold slices of pizza every day for lunch, grab them from Old School, drive over to the warehouse, pack orders for 45 minutes while I ate pizza, and then go back to my state job. That was why that kind of flow couldn't exist with a baby, but as a single person with way too much energy, it was great. 60 hours a week was fun. I was being part of everything. Obviously, it's not sustainable.

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Jason Traeger  44:25

So now from your vantage point today, looking back, what do you feel like you have learned or that the world, this culture, could learn from this world that you came from?

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Pat Castaldo

It's funny because I think about it in a different way. What I've always tried to instill in Vinnie is, show up, just show up and see what you can do. Be nice to everybody. Always be nice to everybody, even if you don't like them. If they're annoying you, just don't be rude, just try to be nice to everybody. Because you never know. 

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There's frenemies from that era that because you would share the same girlfriend as someone, they would not like you later or whatever, or partner or whatever, but they might have needed you because you worked at the Film Society or they ran a record label and needed it. It was that whole idea. There was a lot of weird tensions where now, in retrospect, I respect the hell out of a lot of those people for what they did. The accomplishments were huge, but they were also doing it every day. So I think the big lesson is show up. Then you think, well, that's a personal level. I encourage people to show up like. You want to make change? You want chickens in your backyard? Literally show up in meetings you'd be surprised. It's just other people on the other side. I think about, in terms of other Olympians from that time, I think about Larry Levine and his Co-op bicycle store [OlyBikes] on the corner there for so long, the corner of State [Ave NE] and something [Washington St. NE]. He had that bicycle store, I don't know if he still does, that he ended up turning into a worker Co-Op, or maybe it always was, but Larry was such a strong bike advocate. I didn’t always agree with Larry, but you respect him and he showed up. He showed up every day, and he was part of the planning commission. 

‍

Showing up and listening and that kind of stuff, it really does pay dividends. So show up. 

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Do stuff you love, if you can. If you go in money seeking first it's not necessarily going to pay off. Most of the bands we know that are some of the funnest were because they were just having fun.  I feel like Chris from Gene Defcon represented some of the best of later-day Olympia of like, “We're just going to have fun.” Sure, we can try to sell all these records we keep making but we're gonna to have fun, and we're gonna make it fun. 

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From a city's perspective- because I think about this as someone who was involved on the city side of things and then this project [Olympia Indie Music History Project] being funded through city dollars- what can the city do to encourage it? It's almost never the stuff that's decided in meetings. It's never like, “Oh, we could provide grants or what if we do this.” It's often about being a little bit lax on some of the things that- ultimately, it's providing a space. In this case, in the case of Olympia in its heyday, the community provided the space and the city in some ways actively tried to stop it. If the city had maybe not been as harsh about what was the punk club that the next wave of kids did? Manium or whatever. 

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When it wasn't the theater and it wasn't Midnight Sun, it wasn't Arrowspace. Arrowspace should have been shut down. That was upstairs, one stairway. I remember seeing this new hot band, it's like a brother and sister, maybe a couple, the White Stripes or whatever, at the Arrowspace. There were probably like 100 people in a space that should fit 20, up a flight of stairs. People blocked- we should all be dead in that way… light a cigarette, and that place would have went up. 

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In some ways the city did step back a little bit for whatever reason. OPD [Olympia Police Department] was doing something else that night, and on many nights. But on other nights, like when the kids were trying to do that punk rock club, metal club, on the corner right by the Pizza Time. At Jefferson and 4th [Ave], there was an old abandoned garage. You come at it with, “Well, this isn't safe for people.” I get that to a degree, but part of it is giving those people the space. The idea that you can have professionally managed spaces like the Washington Center [for the Performing Arts] for punks, never works out. I was part of productions that happened in the Washington Center black box, and ostensibly that's the city trying to do the right thing and provide a space and stuff but it's never going to be the same as like you and me and Carrie [Brownstein] and Lois [Maffeo] in the South Capitol Players doing- I don't even know what it was, but it was like “Oh, we need one more person, maybe Pat wants to do it.” I don't remember why we were all together but-

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Jason Traeger

Explain what the South Capitol Players was.

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Pat Castaldo

You should explain what it was all I-

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Jason Traeger

I'm interviewing you.

‍

Pat Castaldo

All I remember is you and Carrie maybe wrote a script, or Lois did? There was some play- there was something ridiculous that was happening and I got looped in because someone was- I think you needed somebody else and I was like- oh Pat will do it. Pat will do anything. He can sort of act or whatever. But what did we do? What was that? That's the part where my memory’s lost. 

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I remember Lois and I doing other things like- whoever put on the Star Wars thing at the theater. That's another case of, whoa, all these people- it's weird to say but like hootenannys and variety shows are the living embodiment of those compilation CDs that Pat- Kill Rock Stars or- that Yo Yo recordings- Pat Maley or Kill Rock Stars would do. Those were the living embodiments of that. 

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One year there was this Star Wars spectacular. I don't know whose brainchild it was. But basically, there were a ton of us doing different skits in the thing. Mike- what's Mike's last name? He was like Mike Dynamo, is how I remember him online. But, Mike was a fellow projectionist, and he did this one that was like, he was the translator for the sand people, or whatever. It was the funniest thing you ever saw. I think Lois and I did a joke where we were Scully and Mueller pretending The X-Files were Star Wars. We did like a cold open for the whole thing. Then KARP did the Imperial March.

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Jason Traeger

Oh yeah, I remember that. I remember all of this. 

‍

Pat Castaldo

It's just one of those things where it's like, “How did that happen? Who did that?” But, the key parts were, one, there was a creative community that was willing to go outside its normal. Mike Dynamo at the theater might not have listened to KARP. You know what I mean? He was in the theater nerd group that had that wonderful- it was called the [Olympia] Film Ranch. They had this wonderful space, up in the theater that was like, we're all interested in making, for lack of better words, stupid art movies. We're gonna scratch on 60 mil, or we're gonna film stupid stuff. We were able to gather the equipment and maybe Trish Able wrote a grant to get a tape recorder. However it worked, all those people came together. 

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It wasn't racially diverse, because it was Olympia, but it was culturally diverse in terms of the different groups of people who participated in that Star Wars thing is such a cornucopia of weirdos. It was a true showcase for how many subcultures in a town so small already existed, who were willing to do something together in this greater- I mean, it was just to have fun. The other key part of that is, I remember being on stage, the audience was full, there were 1000 people. It's the same thing with the Film Society. Every opening night was an excuse every year, for the 16 years I was a part of it, every opening night was a night to get dressed up. I would rent a tux from Bartel’s. They're gone now. Greg, one of the employees, ended up running a men's store after that. But he was like, “Yeah, every year, I'll give you a tuxedo for free.”I was one of those things where everyone saw the value of doing it, because there were 1200 engaged Olympians showing up to watch, and then so many more through the rest of the year. I think the romantic version of that is, “Well, Olympia is this gray, rainy place, 300 days a year, and we need something to do.” I think that's the narrative that's been told a lot, and I think it's accurate. It just is way more romantic when we describe it that way of like, “We just had to make our own music because no one else would.” It's true, though. 

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The Film Society came together- this is before I was there- came together because they wanted to show weird movies that they didn't want to drive to Seattle to see. We had to create our own spaces and did. So when you talk about what can people do now, it's like, well create your own space. That's easier said than done when everything is so expensive. This is a town that happened to have three theaters for a town of 33,000 people. We were rich in that way. We had the dollar movie theater. A theater troupe able to buy a movie theater, like Harlequin buying the State [Theater]. What? How did that happen? That's an incredible amount of community support. That's one of my favorite things about that is for $200 I got my name on a star that is still there today on the sidewalk. I've taken Vinnie there. I took Sylvie there, my brand new baby, and it's just like, “Look, this is your dad 20 years, 23 years ago.” 

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You can build these communities of support. There was Harlequin and their place, and they would sell out those shows. How is that possible? It's a community theater group. Then room for us weirdos to do our own thing. The performances- I think of Elizabeth Lord and her one woman shows at Midnight Sun. Barbara Zalano was a key player in that figure who has left Olympia. She started the Midnight Sun. She managed the box office at the Washington Center. That's why I worked at the Washington Center. Barbara is another one of those people- I think she saw whatever potential in hard workingness in me and was like, “You would be great at this. Come and do that.” And it's like, “Okay.” She opened the Arrowspace and was able to fill it. Not Arrowspace, Midnight Sun. Who started the Arrowspace?

‍

Jason Traeger

Can't remember.

‍

Pat Castaldo

I know Kanako [Wynkoop] was downstairs. Anyway, what do you do now? That's the depressing part to me. How do you jumpstart that? I don't know. You need almost abandoned theaters that need reclamation. You need a $1 movie theater. I remember Sarah Utter working at the dollar theater, and everybody in that theater, she had let in. It was a dollar theater [laughter]. There was no way financially the theater was going to survive selling popcorn. That lasted for- that's such an iconic part of our lives too. I think she was in high school at the time, too.

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Jason Traeger

The whole staff there were punk.

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Pat Castaldo

Yeah.

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Jason Traeger

Vern [Rumsey] KARP guys. Sarah. 

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Pat Castaldo

Yeah. I remember bringing in wine and cheese and having a picnic in one of the upstairs theaters. Getting drunk watching Babe: Pig in the City or whatever. That stuff can't exist now in some way, because there isn't that downturn that led to Olympia feeling sort of abandoned, but coming back to life. 

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These things have natural cycles. Portland is a great example of a victim of its own success. The 2008 rush culminated in- I mean the irony of Carrie, our friend Carrie Brownstein, doing a TV show about how ridiculous we all were in Portlandia, helping in a way to make Portland over is kind of like, whoa. But also, how did Carrie get a TV show? She's a phenomenal guitarist, and her band did great. I always think about any of the other peers in high school who wanted to go be famous. They went to LA and tried to be famous. Somehow, we were able to make famous people in our small town by just doing it. In some ways, they had an advantage living in Olympia than you would have if you went to LA and were lost in that sea of people also trying to make it. Because we were just making stuff to entertain ourselves that other people- what's missing now is a lack of magazines. Do you remember those people from Japan who would come- so impressed with what we were doing in those four square blocks that they would write entire magazines about it? There's no culture like that now, because magazines-

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Jason Traeger

That’s a good point about people that you were talking about staying in Olympia, rather than leaving to go make it somewhere else. That Olympia was a magnet for people from around- like Carrie and Fred Armisen. Fred came to Olympia on tour with his band. I actually introduced him to Sleater-Kinny's music while living with Lois and he was staying with us. It's that draw that Olympia had,the magnet of all the people that came through town.

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Pat Castaldo

That's what's funny talking to you. If this was an interview and we were trying to do the map, you have a whole different piece of the puzzle in the map than I do, even though we obviously ran in very similar- I mean, we overlapped a lot with friends. Tae [Won Yu]’s one of my best friends in life. That was an Olympia person you overlapped with. Lois is- people I still talk to, not regularly, but if I'm going to Olympia I'm going to stop and see Lois and Eric. That's the thing about the Star Wars thing as another example. That almost was the entire map of people doing stuff creatively in town at that time. But, even those types of connections- I never met Fred in Olympia, but I met a ton of other people. Hanging out with Beck and Diana, doing nothing but playing with yo-yos.

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Jason Traeger

Diana Arens.

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Catsaldo

Yeah, Diana Arens. How did that happen? That was that magnet, that pit of Olympia. The fact that K [Records] put out that Beck record with Sam Jayne is really a testament to like, oh. Because he didn't even need to do that record. Beck didn't. But, he wanted to be a part of whatever was happening.

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Jason Traeger

He came to Olympia.

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Pat Castaldo

Yeah, he came to Olympia, and what do you call it? “Loser” was already on the radio.

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Jason Traeger

It was just beginning. I lived with Calvin [Johnson] when he [Beck] was staying there and recording in the basement [Dub Narcotic Studio]. Yeah, “Loser” was just- he was abuzz.

‍

Pat Castaldo

Yeah. That's a testament to, whatever, that network of people and connections. The DC connection is a whole different- those were similar punks. We brought people from different areas. If anything, Tae is New York punk imported, there are DC people that went back and forth and relationships that spawned those two places. It was this weird sort of traveling summer camp. It had a summer camp vibe. 

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Nothing's like being at the Reef at 1AM on a Tuesday. It's both a summer camp and a gossip thing. It’s like, “Oh, so-and-so is with someone else who's not his girlfriend.” You would know that and it would be gossip. But also where would you go? I remember once, I went on a date with someone and I was like, “Let's go to the China Clipper instead.” And they were like, “Alright.” We were at the Clipper like, “Why are we at the Clipper?” It's because you don't want people at the Reef seeing [laughter]. You turn red, and you're like, “I just- yeah, I mean- I don't know- I just didn't want.” [laughter]. But there was no place to go. If you want to go out for a drink, there's four places. Maybe Ben Moore’s, doesn't- no. 

‍

Every place had someone you knew except them. That was before Sarah started bartending and the Clipper became hip. It was one of the few places that nobody was there in those other circles. The Reef was our bar. It makes sense that the pizza guys bought it. That was our bar. The Eastside [Club Tavern] was more of the hippie Evergreen people. You also had friends and all those groups. 

‍

Anyway. If there's one regret, I mean, it's not a regret because it wouldn't be the life I live now. But, I drank way too much in Olympia. I did. I left the apartment every night and went to a different bar. If I’d walk the streets, I’d go looking for people, because that's all there was to do, in my head, was go to bars. If it's the weekend, yeah, there's shows and stuff. But if it's Monday through Thursday, and you wanted to- and Sunday, there was dancing at Thekla- and you want to do something, then you walk around and see who's out doing stuff. If you weren't invited to parties or whatever. Or it wasn't the one night you go see a movie at the theater, a double feature. It's not a regret, obviously I loved being there and did it every night. But, my memory would probably be better if I hadn't taken advantage of dollar happy hours at The Reef as often as I did, as a prequel to whatever else happened that night. I can't imagine drinking that volume- obviously, I’m closer to 50 then I am 20—I can't imagine the volume that we used to drink. 

‍

Part of it was that was more of the scene, in one way or another, which is a shame. You talked about, what can the city do? What can we do for these kids? I don't know. These kids have computers and stuff that we didn't. They can be out with their friends in a chat room that we didn't even have. We had- the funny thing that came later was- do you remember OPIUM? The Olympia Punk Underground Music mailing list I think Slim started? It was this email chain letter basically, that everybody was on for a while. I think it was short lived, because I think inevitably there was fighting or somebody imploded. 

‍

But, this is all pre that kind of communication. It's all before cell phones. The only way to find out what your friends were doing was call them at home or show up. I remember once wanting to go hang out so I called Tae. I was like, “What are you doing?” He's like, “Oh, well, I'm hanging out right now with my friends.” It's like, who are your friends that I don't know. He's like, “Yeah, I'm hanging out with my friends right now. Joey and Chandler.” I was like, “Joey and Chandler?” He was watching Friends. I was heartbroken. I was like, “You have friends you're hanging out with and I don't?” It was the one time Tae almost made me cry by just like, “I'm hanging out with friends. I don't want to hang out with you.” Like what? And it was a television show on a VHS probably, I don't know..

‍

Jason Traeger  1:03:25

Right. One thing that's interesting looking back at Olympia, from my perspective, is how all TV from that era, I don't have any experience with because I never watched television or any shows for 10 years.

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Pat Castaldo

People think you're lying when you’re like, “I never watched Seinfeld.” They’re like, “What? How? That was the most popular show.” From ‘91 to ‘99 I didn't have a TV. It sounds like bragging, maybe it is, it was great for what we did. We didn't have- one, cable was expensive, but two, it just wasn't what we did. We didn't watch TV. I feel like Calvin didn't even have a VCR at one point, and came over one night with a tape of something he wanted to watch at my house. I was like, “What?” “Well, you're the only one I know with a VCR” A VCR [laughter]. CD-ROM burner, sure, but not like, “I really want to watch this on a big TV. It wasn't even a big TV. It was a 19 inch Trinitron or whatever in the corner, sitting on the VCR.

‍

Jason Traeger

I think that's a good place to stop.

‍

Pat Castaldo

Alright, thanks.

‍

Jason Traeger

Thank you so much, Pat. 

‍

Pat Castaldo

You're welcome.

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