Markly Morrison:

All right, this is Markly Morrison, I'm speaking with Pat Maley on March 5, 2023, for the Olympia Indie Music History Project. Hello!

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Pat Maley:  

Hello. So nice to be with you.

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Markly Morrison:

Nice to be with you as well. So I would like to start this conversation by asking you to- well, first of all, don't hold back about giving me long winded answers. You can be as elaborate as you feel you need to be.  If you can, try to put my question into your answer, because I'm going to be largely removed from the equation. And other than that, I’m just going to let you unload, try to find out some stuff.

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Pat Maley:

Okay. Cool.

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Markly Morrison:

So I was wondering if you could start by telling me a little bit about your youth? Maybe something about your folks, and if there's any correlation to that that's poignant, and and how you wound up in Olympia?

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Pat Maley:

Sure. So the, the pre-Olympia backstory of my life encapsulated, related to audio and music and that kind of thing… I think the first thing I would mention is that  back in the 70s, they had these Panasonic cassette recorders that were very colorful, and I really wanted one. But my father who was very practical said “Now I'm going to give you this really big Sony” that had a cassette machine that had a speaker built in, and it looked like an office dictation machine. And I was like, okay, and then he tried to sell me on it because it's like, it's got this great microphone. He's talking about this condenser microphone, and it was really good, but I just kind of wanted to walk to school and listen to John Denver “Sunshine on my Shoulders” in seventh grade. But I did haul it around with me, so that was my first tape deck. I think another thing that I was doing probably before that was he had abandoned his- not really abandoned, but it was sitting around the house, he only pulled it out for Christmas- was his Bell & Howell Regular 8 movie camera. And it was [with] great features, like it had focus. And I was into photography, so I started messing around with this thing. And I figured out that I could put it on tripod and just hit the shutter once and make stop motion animation. And I was animating sticks and stuff moving around on the ground like that. So I started making movies then as well. So then, fast forward to just my teens. I had some friends who  played music and I wanted to play, and nobody was playing drums.

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Markly Morrison:  

Where are you living at? Where were you born, and where are you living in this story?

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Pat Maley:  

I was born in Philadelphia, and I grew up in New Jersey in the Pine Barrens, outside of Philadelphia. The town I lived in when I got to be five years old was called Medford Lakes and it had been a summer resort town with a log cabin theme. So like the cop station, the churches, the hotel, they're all log cabins. The house I lived in was a big log cabin. So that's when I was started hanging out with my friends there, it was the 1970s. When we were 12 we went to Halloween as KISS- you know, the face makeup and everything. KISS was my second concert. My first concert was Yes and Peter Frampton. It was very loose back then, you could just be like, “Yeah, we need a ride to the High Speed line.” And that got you to the Broad Street subway in Philly. And then you'd go down to the Spectrum and see shows down there. So anyway, my friends were wanting to play music. And so I had like one friend- I had a couple of friends who played guitar really well. Nobody was playing bass. But one guy built a modular synthesizer, a Paia synthesizer. So he had a synthesizer and a Hammond B3. And then a college buddy of my older brother’s said “I'm moving. I'm done with college, I gotta move. Can I store these drums at your house?” And I think they're still there, in the house. The set of Sonors that were built in the 60s in Germany. So that was my first drum set. And I wasn't a very good drummer for a long, long time- didn't take lessons or anything like that, but I started to get better. And then, as I got to be a little more of a teenager I went from being into “rock stuff” to being into “hippie stuff.” My first girlfriend was kind of hippie vibe. And so that's kind of what I was doing too. Y’know, sleeping out for Grateful Dead tickets, that kind of thing. At that point, I started to get really into- like, nobody would have talked about cultural appropriation back then, but I was buying tablas, and I was buying bongos and mbiras and stuff like that because [there was a] place in Philly on South Street that sold that stuff. So I started to carry around bongos at high school, and play bongos.

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Markly Morrison:  

You were that guy!

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Pat Maley:  

I was that guy with the hair down to my butt and the dashiki or the tie dye. And I'd get out of bombardment ball games by saying I was a pacifist- “Sorry, you can go to the weight room,” like that. And so, of course, when I was getting towards the end of high school, two things were important: one, I wanted to get the hell out of New Jersey, because it just seemed bad. And the other thing was, I wanted to go someplace alternative and hippie. So my girlfriend at the time, Kimberly, handed me this thin, orange book called Guide to Alternative Colleges and Universities. And I looked up addresses and I looked up application processes, and I filled out a couple of those and then Evergreen accepted me. And, you know, I had no idea what I wanted to do... my older my two older brothers who were twins, Rick and Kevin, were both scientists. I thought, oh, maybe I'll do science, they got science there, I'll do that. I did one quarter of science, really poorly, at Evergreen when I got here. I got here in October- no, September 30 1981. Olympia was kind of- downtown was kind of scary, like there were no awnings over the sidewalks and locals still yelled “fucking Greener” at you from their cars, and it just seemed kind of spooky down there. Merchants weren't nice to you if you were a Greener. So I mainly hung out at Evergreen, and as soon as I discovered that they had an animation stand and video studios, recording studios, that's what I wanted to do.

I was living in the dorms... So when I got to Mod 303B at the dorms there was a Fender Twin in the living room, and I was like, “Oh, that's my roommate’s.” So I wonder what's going on, and he never showed up for a while, but then he finally showed up. And he's like, “I found another place to live off campus.” I’m like, “Oh, hey, you ever want to play music together?” And his name was Mark Hastings, he still lives in town. We started to play music together, he and I- I would play tablas and he would play a 12 string guitar. And we would like to do shows at The Corner, which was the little on campus restaurant. And the thing that was really kind of “hippie cool” about those shows is we would light candles. And the whole room would be like lots of candles around the room, and all be lit by candlelight. And we would get like very sort of trancey and what we were doing. Mark wrote the songs. But like people would sort of like be blissed-out to a point where they wouldn't clap at the end, which was kind of cool. And then, he started a rock band thing. I think I was playing congas in that, and then I forget what happened with that band.

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Markly Morrison:

Did that band have a name?

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Pat Maley:

Oh, right, we were called Daybreak. And then the joke later was “day broke up.” [laughter] And then I didn't play with Mark for a long time, which I was really disappointed about. But I was kind of immature at the time, and that's kind of why I think they didn't want to play with me anymore. Later, Mark Hastings, Phil Post, and Heather Lum and I would be in a band called Big Idea. And Big Idea, we made vinyl that came out in ‘87 and there's like 500 copies of that in the world. So, I also used resources at the school to make music videos. And so one of them we shot on- there was a Bolex, which is a 16 millimeter Bolex. And so this is, you know, I'm eight years old using Bell and Howell to do stop motion- I get this Bolex. And then that's from Media Loan, but the science lab has an intervalometer that you screw on to it. And so it's a little clock, little trip, one frame of the shutter, whatever interval you want to set it at. So we made this video for one of our songs that was- well, I'm getting ahead of myself, I'll finish that- so we made a video for one of our songs that ended up on MTV’s Basement Tape Competition, we came in third but it was kind of fun, I think that was in ‘87. But I want to back up to- I'm in school, I'm studying audio and making music video stuff there. And one of the things that I do in like 1984 is I squander a small bit of inheritance on a recording studio. I had been reading in Musician Magazine about Eurythmics and how they recorded their first album, it really didn't go anywhere... and how- Dave Stewart I think is the guy's name in that band- he said, “for the amount we spent in the studio, I could buy a studio.” So he got a banker to give him the money for it, and he went out and he bought a Tascam 38 Reel to Reel 8-track, half-inch. And he bought a used mixer, I can't remember what kind, probably some English thing. He bought a synthesizer and a drum machine and a couple of good mics, and they located themselves in a loft apartment in London. There was an apartment being refinished next door, and they convinced the people who were doing the work there to let them use the piano that was in the room. So they would run tie like mic lines and headphone lines across the hall or something and then [lit] candles and they’d do piano parts in there. And they it was all very- like really simple, innovative things- like in “Sweet Dreams Are Made of These” you can hear them striking milk bottles with water, different levels of water to tune them. And at one point, they described how they were breaking up as a couple. And she [Annie Lennox] describes lying on the floor in a fetal position. And because they're not saying anything, he just says “Well, I'm just going to program the drum machine.” And so he gets up, and he programs the drum machine and she says that the beat was so inspiring she just got up and started playing this line on the keyboard and singing. He threw a mic in front of her and rolled tape. And so when you hear her singing “Sweet Dreams Are Made of These,” that's her ad-libbing. And I thought, “Oh, there's the value of having the studio, you can just walk in and do it anytime you want.” And I had this idea of like, “I'll buy this studio and I'll have it for myself, plus, I'll make money with studio time.” And I tried that a bit, it was awful... to turn this thing I loved into this thing I hated. The first recording studio experience I had- I want to go back to that- in probably ‘81 or ‘82 I went to what was called the mini studio at Evergreen. And this guy Michael was the engineer. I can see his face, but I can’t remember his last name. And I was with Mark Hastings and a couple of other people. And we laid down some percussion and guitars, Gulfstream guitars kind of like I was describing before. And then Connie Bonnier- who's a longtime jazz person in Olympia, was around for a long time- was going to play flute on it, but they realized that they hadn't tuned the guitars to the flute. And so Michael said “just play an E,” and then he played the tape and he took the variometer on the four track and he just tuned the tape to the flute. And when he did that, it was like a light bulb went off in my head. I said “Oh, this is what I Want to do. This is my calling.” That was the call right there. So yeah, I ended up squandering some small bit of inheritance on this recording studio and I bought a Tascam 38, I bought a Tascam- I forget what it was called, but it was an eight bus 12 Channel Mixer. It was a good companion for the 38. I bought a pair of Audio Technica 813’s.

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Markly Morrison:  

What is that?

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Pat Maley:

Audio Technica 813s are just a pair of $100 (at the time) condenser mics. And I bought a couple of other mics. I bought digital reverb, a compressor... I don't think I bought an EQ, I thought I would just use the EQs on the board. I bought a DX-7... no, I bought a DX-9 synthesizer. And I bought a Sequential Circuits drum machine. And so I was off to the races, making stuff. But as the stuff was being delivered via UPS, the UPS driver was like, “what is all this?” and he was just like a local guy, he was just kind of friendly. And I was describing and then somewhere along the line where as I was getting the studio, my friend- It's not David Miller- I can't remember David's last name, not David Miller, someone else. David said, “Hey, have you heard of this band Beat Happening? You might like them. And so I stopped Calvin in the in the CAB building at Evergreen and said, “Hey, I've got this recording studio. Did you think you might want to record there with me?” He's like, [impersonating Calvin Johnson] “Okay.” And you know, he had that like really kind of minimalist affect that was really present for him back then. And I asked him to give me- “Okay, well, can I get a tape of your music so I can hear what it's like to record it?” He's like, “okay,” and he gives me a Linda Ronstadt tape that he's recorded over with some Beat Happening stuff. And I listened to it. And I don't have any clear memory of what I thought. But I said, “Sure, come on over, let's make some recordings,” because I wanted to see what I could do. And so they all show up on the day, and they're like, “Oh, hey, this is Greg.” And Greg is just like, looking at his feet, smoking a cigarette, and he just kind of gives me a glance up and goes “Hey.” And I'm like, “who's Greg, what's Greg doing here?” And we walk in, and he sits down behind the board. And that's basically how they tell me that Greg Sage of the Wipers is going to record their album, not me… which is fine. My feelings were a little hurt, obviously. I was in my 20s, I was pretty sensitive. I was also grumpy that he chain smoked in my studio. But as it turns out, it was perfect. It was like a really great moment. And I got to like- that's the funny thing, too- I invited the UPS guy there. So it's me, it's Beat Happening, it's Greg Sage of the Wipers… and it's this guy, the UPS driver, who's just like “Oh, that's interesting!” You know, a very curious kind of guy. And then I had I think my first sort of, “Oh, hey, what about this for this song?” And it was “I Spy” on the kitty-in-the-rocket record. I said, “I've still had my bongos from high school. I could play like a [imitates bongos sound] So I played bongos on that. I wasn't quite quick enough, so we took the variometer and I think we slowed the tape down, so it sounds a little fast on the recording. But yeah, that session that they did that day, was the A side of the kitty-in-the-rocket record, those five [songs].

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Markly Morrison:

The self-titled?

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Pat Maley:  

Yeah, the yellow one. The line drawing. We made that recording, and it was like, “Okay, that was fun. That was interesting.” And I started going back to my synthesizer and my drum machine. Then I'm in a West Side grocery store somewhere and I'm waiting in line and I pick up Spin Magazine. And I'm just thumbing through it- in the back of Spin magazine in those days was their version of 120 Minutes, the alternative stuff, the indie stuff. I opened it up, and there's a little picture of the kitty-in-the-rocket record that had been recorded at Yoyo! I guess this was a while afterwards, I contributed one recording to the B-side. But after I saw that picture in Spin magazine, I just called up Calvin. I said, “Hey, listen, I know you’ve got this record label, and you don't have any money, you could just bring people by, we'll just record them.” And I just said I don't need to get paid for it. I'll just figure that out somewhere else and we'll just try to make recordings. So that's when Some Velvet Sidewalk came in- I'm sure I'm gonna forget other other folks and be disappointed because I'm so old now... Go Team with Tobi Vail, and a rotating cast of characters. This one guy who played guitar in that band was really nice and added a lot to it, and I really loved those recordings. Those made me really happy. And that was the thing where- Go! Team was the thing where they recorded the instrumentals, then they gave those instrumentals to different people, and they came up with lyrics, and then those people would come in. It was kind of like- I can't think of a good reference other than the Sixths which is Stephin Merrit’s thing where he has a variety of singers come in. So it was kind of like that. And then Oklahoma Scramble was a thing- I forget her name [Jenny Seymore], and his name is Argon Steel. Maybe. Anyway I'm sure I could look it up and then...

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Markly Morrison:

Yeah, I can reference it.

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Pat Maley:

Okay. Yeah, that recording really stuck with people, like a small niche of people, but they were very- they were like, “Oh, those recordings, those were amazing. Those are really great.” And so what I loved about the early K recordings was- I noticed that when I tried to put my five piece new wave band on there, which eventually showed up as Big Idea, that a five piece was a bit much for eight tracks, but two and three piece were great. It really kind of get everything on there the way you want it and have a little room to move with it. So yeah, I did a lot of those kinds of recordings. And then other bands started coming around like this band Craion who recorded... Brad from Craion came in and his guitar was so loud and he insisted on being really, really super loud. And he really wanted vocals on- not overdub, live. He wanted vocals live. And I didn't really have the isolation- the studio was in a building that had been a chicken coop on what had been a farm on the westside of Olympia. And if you're going down 14th Avenue between Kaiser and Cooper Point, at the top of the center hill is a driveway for what's called Grass Lake Park now, and that was my driveway. And you would pull in and the chicken coop was off to the right. And it had been refinished inside to be a quality building. But it had been a Montessori school, so it had a three foot high door and had a sink that was like a foot off the ground kind of a thing. And it also- oddly- had a window. Or, what it actually had- a two way mirror, so they could like spy on the kids. But that was a good control room mirror. And so my studio was in the front section, and what had been the office of the school. And I had gotten the equipment so recently that when the Beat Happening recording was being done, I was like trying to hang a blanket up over the doorway because the door didn't fit quite [right]... to give a little bit of isolation. So yeah, so I did a lot of K recordings, and then other bands come.  Oh, [back to] Craion, sorry- so Brad’s amp was super loud, and he wanted to do vocals at the same time. I said okay, and so I recorded the vocals and said, “Why don't we just try singing overdubs just so you get to see what it's like.” And he was like, “I don't know.” And then his band was like, “come on, let's do it,” Sean was like very much like, “c’mon!” And so we did it, we're listening to it back and he kind of leans up to me and he goes, “Um, is this how Beat Happening and Some Velvet Sidewalk do it? I'm like, “yeah.” Because he wanted to do it just like them. So I was like, “oh, now the studio has a little bit of a reputation in the sound” and that kind of thing. I had that studio in that space from… like fall of ‘84 to sometime towards the end of 1998.

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Markly Morrison:  

Wow, in the chicken coop?

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Pat Maley:

In the chicken coop building- where I also had my bedroom. Oddly it had two bathrooms. That's not odd that it had two bathrooms because it was school. But what was odd was I decided, “oh, I can take the toilet out and fit my bed right in there.” Like it fit wall to wall in there. So that became my little sleeping nook.

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Markly Morrison:  

Oh, wow. Okay, so a room with just a bed.

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Pat Maley:

Yeah, and a sink because I didn't take the sink out. The other thing that was great about the farm was there was this beautiful old barn right next to it. Like it totally leaked, you know, the roof was shot- but in the summer, we would put bands out in the barn as a second- it had its own foundation, so it was a separate, isolated thing, and did a lot of recordings out there... I think, Girl Trouble’s first single, which is instrumental, that has “Tarantula” on it, was recorded there. And they brought Cheetos and Coca Cola. I used to joke that that’s how I got paid, was in Cheetos and Coke.

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Markly Morrison:  

Were you mostly doing singles compared to albums, EPS, or...

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Pat Maley:  

Well, I mean, it's mainly doing K recordings. And mainly they had been doing cassettes so a lot of stuff showed up on cassette compilations, and that kind of thing. Oh, I recorded Jan Brock, and she was married to Timothy Brock, the composer. She wanted to do an album of standards and K released a cassette by her. And at that time, K was just touting the cassette revolution in their newsletters. So it was all cassettes for a while, but then they started to put out singles. And I think it was Steve Fisk who joked something like “Oh, hey, Calvin, what happened to the cassette revolution with all these singles?” He goes, “Didn't you hear? We won.” [laughter] And so then they started putting out a lot of singles including-I remember Calvin and Tobi silk screening the empty B-sides of seven inch records where they were putting out one-sided seven inches and that kind of thing. I think I still have a few of those somewhere.

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Markly Morrison:  

So just artwork on the flip side?

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Pat Maley:  

Like, just graphics, really. You'd get it with the graphics on one [side], it was trying to be super [low] budget. I remember Calvin talking about the kitty-in-the-rocket record when- because he went down to K Disc Mastering to get it mastered. And because each side timed out at seconds under 10 minutes, he got a better deal on it. You know, because the songs were so short, he’d save $150 or something, which was a big deal back then. So anyway, I was doing mainly stuff for K and wasn't really releasing anything on my own at this point. And that's when I eventually ended up in this band, Big Idea. So we made an album and we put a lot of work into it- like really got specific. Big Idea was me on... I had my DX-7, but I also had a sampler at this point, an Akai 612, which is a 12 bit sampler, so it's super grainy, and it would record a second and a half of sound and you would load it on these discs. They were like little floppy disks but smaller. But the thing that I actually played was what was called an Octopad- a MIDI trigger that had eight pads on it- and if you hit it, it would play a note on whatever was MIDI that you had it plugged into. So I wasn't playing drums. I was playing keyboard parts, but hitting, so percussive steel drum sounds and marimba sounds. And in the case of the song called “Go Ahead,” which Mark Hastings wrote, that was the music video that got on MTV, I played a sample of a band going, “bam!” So it was like “Bamp Bamp Bamp Bamp Bamp Bamp Bamp Bamp Bamp Bamp Bamp” so it gave us a really chaotic cacophony of a sound.

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Markly Morrison:

A big sound.

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Pat Maley:  

Yeah, but it was a bit like a thin-ness to it because it was thin, 12 bit tinny sample. That's when we got the intervalometer, and it's just like the swirl of us moving around. And there's like a moment where you can see a mock- it's a spoof on a Beat Happening video that Lois Maffeo made called... [searches for title] oh, “got a crush on you,” I know it's called something different but that's the main line, [singing] “got a crush on you” [The song is “Bewitched”] So we had a little spoof of that moment in there. And it was like a two and a half minute song. But it was all in black and white. And I'm sure you can find it online still. So we made that. But when we made the album, I also had a Commodore 64 computer, and not the not the desktop, but the portable, which- imagine you have a very small cooler with bricks in it- it was like that. And when you took the lid off, the lid was the keyboard and under the keyboard lid was a you know, what's that four or five inch color screen with a big floppy place to put floppies. In the handle was the stand. And then I got a MIDI adapter, so we put a timecode onto one of the tracks of the eight track and then recorded all the MIDI parts into the computer. So any keyboard or percussion thing that had MIDI got recorded into the computer. And then when you played the tape, the timecode on the tape ran the speed of the computer. And so when you mixed down the other seven tracks of acoustic instruments, like the drum- I think...the tracks were bass, guitar, Heather's keyboard, my keyboard stuff, vocal, vocal, and then something else would go in there. And then at one point, we even had- the drum bit so it'd be like snare kick and overheads. But at one point, we even had the kick and the toms come from MIDI controlled triggers. And then it was just the snare and overhead... So everything went on to the Commodore. And then when you would do the mixing, you'd set the Commodore up with the tape deck and all of the keyboards, and you plug all of the keyboards into the mixer. And you could even pick the sounds at that point. You didn't have to have picked the sounds initially, just like, “Oh, we're gonna try marimba instead of a steel drum there.” And so you could do that kind of stuff.

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Markly Morrison:  

That's great...very high tech in the 80s. Yeah, like cottage industry kind of operation.

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Pat Maley:

Yeah, the drummer Bob at the time, his name is Moses now, he said “You were a clever hippie.” [laughter] There were points where I checked out almost everything from Media Loan. I was going to try and record bands playing at a party and do a three camera shoot. I had all the equipment but I didn’t have the people. I always got a little overextended at times. But I was really ambitious in that way. Like I really just wanted to do that. And I remember- you know, that energy you had in your early 20s that you could use now for parenting?

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Markly Morrison:  

Yeah, nothing's impossible.

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Pat Maley:  

Right. That's my baby, was this thing I was doing with my studio and I would wake up, bolt right up at seven o'clock “Okay, what am I going to do, to do something with this?” up until midnight. And, like, going to bed? “I guess I have to fall asleep now.”

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Markly Morrison:  

Like, begrudgingly, yeah. Yeah. Just remembering that, I can really feel it, which is really nice.

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Markly Morrison:

Why Yoyo?

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Pat Maley:  

That's a great question... they're all great. [laughs] Let me say it this way: I appreciate being asked why Yoyo, because it allows me to tell this story. So the place that we lived, the farm that we lived on was a student house, and whoever had lived there before us had a sign out that said “yogurt”, and so we called ourselves The Yogurt Farm… not that anyone had yogurt…  and people would sometimes stop by and ask us, because we’ve got this sign out that said the Yogurt Farm, “so what, do you sell yogurt?” “No...” And my friend Mark Hastings, just to be sarcastic and try to be funny, he called us the yo-yo farm. So that's where I got the name Yoyo Recordings. It was Yoyo Studio at first, but then when I started to put out releases, I started calling it Yoyo Recordings. And the reason why I called it Yoyo Recordings is because my father- when we lived in New Jersey, he had his office on the Delaware River, and he was a scuba diver. His company did marine salvage and pollution control before the oil companies didn't spill every week on the Delaware River and didn't have someone to clean it up themselves. Plus the naval shipyards were there. So he was a diver, and his company was called Underwater Technics. So that's sort of like “Thing” and “Thing.” With the recordings, the “Recordings” covered both the studio and the record label and any other video kind of stuff that I was doing.

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Markly Morrison:

So, the label then- how did that come to come to be? Because you said you were mostly [recording] K records.

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Pat Maley:

Basically the label was invented when Big Idea put out the first record. And, so the way that I made that record was… Stoughton Printing? [searching] Basically I went to Calvin, I said, “How did you make your record,” and he said, “I mastered it at K Disc, and I pressed it at Bill Smith Custom Records, and I did the cover printing at Stoughton Printing.”

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And there are all sorts of tricks. Like if you see an original version of the Beat Happening kitty-in-the-rocket record, and you look at the back, it's just a swath of yellow over the photograph in one section. So it was two color- it was yellow and black on white. And it was that kind of inventiveness that he was doing- we'll just make a frame that's just the black here, and that'll line up with the photo in this way so the top part of the photo will be yellow. Or the bottom, I can't remember, the top or bottom part. And then later, somebody when they reissued it, somebody went through and like cut a line around them. So the background was yellow, the sky was yellow, and not that kind of [original concept]... so I was looking at the way he did the layout of the graphics. And I would go to- there was some art studio or art supply store in Portland, and locally that had press-on letters where you put the thing down, you rub the letters off. I was doing my other type layout that way on the records and on the cover of it. Like getting the 8 point to put into the spine. And if you look at the Big Idea record, I'm not very good at it. It's kind of jaunty, it's not really in a perfect line, it's kind of moving around a little. And then I did that kind of thing- We did four colors, but not four color composite. We didn't pay for the like photo’s color separation, negatives, that was a bundle of money, so it has four colors on it. And we got somebody to do the photography for us. The photo on the front of the Big Idea record was a photo that Pete Sendelbock took… or, I'm not sure if Pete took it, but it was a picture of a friend of his kid. His name was Pat. Never met the people. But it was this interesting picture, just this blurry kind of picture of a kid. But yeah, so that's how the label came about. And I didn't know what the cover would look like in color until I opened the box of the delivery, which was a nice, really exciting reveal back then. So we made 500 pressings, and then I think we printed 1000 covers because you might as well print the covers. And Bill Smith would do- as the name implies, Custom Records would do as few as 100 pressings. And you could get about 2000 pressings out of a stamper, or I don't remember exactly how that works. But I think it was you would do the master and then they create what could be stampers, or they could be the thing that then creates the next mold to make stampers, but we didn't bother because we weren't going to make more than 2000. So we just wore out the initial thing and it would sound better anyway. And so I got in my cranky car and drove to LA. Because to send your tape and then get a reference tape back was 150 bucks. Back then that was gas money that would have gotten me there and back. So me and my girlfriend drove down. I sat in- I forget her name, but she was there was John Smith, who later would be John Smith… [correcting self] John Golden, who would later be John Golden Mastering on his own, who worked at K Disc.

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And there was a woman there, and I got her... she was the mastering engineer, I can't remember her name, but I think it's on the album. So I could look it up that way. But, it was great to see like, sit and say, “yes, that transition sounds good.” And then like she had to solve this problem on that record wherein I had used sibilance reverb, which is where the feed you send to the reverb gets EQ’d in this way so that all the s & c sounds really get enunciated. So they kind of go [“pow” sound effect] into the reverb in that way. And she's like, “vinyl can't handle that much high end,” like super high transient frequencies. So she had to really tone it down. That was really fascinating to learn about that, and be right there. And then for a long time, I just I like tried to put out more Big Idea stuff and put out live cassettes. And I did recordings of Calamity Jane, who I guess- Gilly [Gilly Ann Hanner] just played in town, downtown in her in her band, I just saw something on Facebook about that- but anyway, I put out their cassette. And then… it sort of got into this thing where I would record a band- like I'd say, Oh, you want to record?” and then they’d do first recordings with me. And then they'd go on to K or they’d go on to Kill Rock Stars. Because it used to be [that] K was the big and only label, and then I was doing a little bit, and then Kill Rock Stars blossomed. Then, it was the three of us, and I was the third tier, so to speak. And then came the International Pop Underground Convention, and I still have a fire in my belly. And I go to Calvin and I say, “Let's record this thing.” And he's like, “go ahead.” And I'm like, “can you give me any money for tape?” “Nope.” Like, okay, I'm gonna record it anyway. Because I knew at this point that it was a big to-do.

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Markly Morrison:  

Yeah. So you kind of had a spark for archival work all along.

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Pat Maley:  

Yeah, I liked the part about making the recordings. I wasn't so good at labeling the recordings. And I definitely have struggled with keeping the recordings. I mean, I have a bedroom full of tapes right now. But I don't know what to do with them. Like the whole archiving thing seems to- [sighs] I just have these tapes I can't play. But yes, I was very much into- this is a historic moment, because at this point, it's 1991 and I've done I've partially done sound for Nirvana before I knew who they were. So Big Idea lasted into, I think to about ‘90, and then that just fell apart. So I was kind of looking for something to do. And that's when I tap Lois Maffeo who I’d become acquainted with through Calvin, and said, “Do you want to play music together sometime?” And initially she was lukewarm about it. But later, it turned out really great. We both really loved it. And you know, originally I thought “Oh, I'll play bongos with her” and she's like, “What about something else?” And so I pulled out my Ludwig floor tom from my second drum set, and I had just a floor tom and a snare. I don't even think I had a cymbal. I would play the floor tom with a brush and the snare with a stick. Like I said, I wasn't a very good drummer and I hadn't really played a full on set in a while, but what I would do is, I would use the brush to like- and I tuned the floor tom down low because Lois was just playing acoustic guitar and singing- and I was like, okay for the recordings- which was the main thing I was initially in interested in, but live shows were great too- for the recordings, I wanted to fill out the low end. So I let the floor tom be the bass drum and let it ring out a lot. And I think I got that idea from when I was back doing the K things, recording the Pounding Serfs who were from Anacortes, and later some of those folks were in Burl. So in that band, I forget his name, but he was confined to a wheelchair. And he was the drummer. So he had a snare on top of a box. And he would hit the side of the box with a mallet, and the top with a stick, it was boom, boom, boom, ba. And I dropped a mic down into the box and got one of my favorite bass kick drum sounds that I'd ever gotten at that point. Because there was a condenser mic, and it was compressed. So yeah, so I used that idea. That's probably where I got that idea for how I played in the band with Lois. And so I would use the brush- I would do a part where I'd hit the floor tom, let it ring. And then in time, I would mute it to give the variants of like [imitates drum sounds], which is a technique I learned from tabla. [imitates tabla sounds] Because all the strokes had names. So like, and the names are onomatopoeic, they sounded like the sounds the strokes made, like “ta, te, teem,” Because I took tabla lessons when I first got to Evergreen from a guy who played tabla. And reciting, your mouth has more dexterity, so if you speak, you can speak the pattern before you can play it and it helps you ingrain the pattern, because the sounds are onomatopoeic, like that [imitating tabla] “boom, bop.” And I never really even thought about where I got the idea for doing this until just this moment, as I'm telling you the story, which is nice. Thank you. So yeah, I would do that. And then we ended up making recordings for K. we put out three seven-inches under the band, Courtney Love was our name, and we put out our first release before Courtney [the person] ever released anything. And the thing that Lois would say to me about the name, she said, “this is somebody else's name, and it could be problematic to use it, but if you're okay with that-” and I was like “yeah, I’m game, that's cool. We'll just use it.” And you know, we didn't really dispense the story of why we use the name or why Lois wanted to use the name, and that's not my story to tell. So I think that story is out there somewhere but I'm not gonna tell it.

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Markly Morrison:

Did Courtney Love [the person] ever attend one of your performances?

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Pat Maley:

Oh, no... but we did get a cease and desist from her after she started putting out Hole records and had enough money to hire lawyers and such.

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Markly Morrison:  

And you were still a band at this point?

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Pat Maley:  

Yeah. And she was actually okay about like us putting out our third record. We put out two, she didn't like it. We put out one on K, we put out one on a label called Feel Good All Over, out of Chicago. And then we put another one out on K, The Highlights. So there's Crushworthy, Bonfire… yeah. Crushworthy is the first on K, Bonfire is the second, it’s the Feel Good All Over [release] and then Highlights -like the kids magazine, and the cover looks like Highlights. They were each two songs on each side of the seven inch, and they were lovely- just loved recording them, had that whole thing about a two-piece really being able to fit in and have a great sound on an eight track and yeah, it was just fun to make those. And Lois ended up moving to DC but I would visit family on the East Coast and borrow a couple of drums and then go play shows down there... I think we opened for Fugazi or something, we played CBGBs and the Knitting Factory, we played… that place in Chicago at the time was kind of a famous indie place... So we did some shows, we put out those records and from the end of Big Idea to the International Pop Underground Convention was the Courtney Love span.  And the IPUC was Courtney Love’s last performance until- I think Lois and I ended up doing those songs at the second to last Helsing Junction show.

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Markly Morrison:  Oh, wow.

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Pat Maley:  

Just because I was like, “Hey, Lois, they're not gonna have any more Helsing Junctions eventually, and I've never played, would you want to go play some songs?” and she’s like, “sure, we can do that.” So that was fun to have one more moment like that. But then- so where does that land me... So that lands me at the International Pop Underground Convention. At this point, I've moved into the ABC House because I've left the Yogurt Farm. And so briefly, the recording studio was in the basement there. And what had been the TV room for a long time was the control room. So I was set up there for a long, long time.  I recorded- we would have shows there, and I would record. The recordings I did of Bikini Kill were done there, including a live show that’s somewhere, I think sent that to Kathleen. And then Mecca Normal played there. And at this point, I'm starting to pick up again on shooting music videos. I'm kind of into that thing again. Because initially, back in the 80s, I had shot the video for “Indian Summer” by Beat Happening where the idea was we'd have them walking from three different spots in town towards downtown and meet in Sylvester Park. That was the whole premise of the video. And I didn't have enough footage, so I had to keep reusing footage and running it backwards and that kind of thing. But then into the 90s- I can't remember when I started- of course I think I made five Big Idea videos, so I guess I was making videos all along. I made a Beat Happening video for “Indian Summer” and I made one for “Crashing Through” because I shot black and white footage of them at a Grange Hall out on Steamboat Island Road and when they opened for Billy Bragg at the Moore Theater in Seattle, I shot black and white on both of those and cut a video for that. And then I did four or five Big Idea videos. Then I did a Mecca Normal video- the instructions there were “we don't want it to be representative at all of the lyrics, and we don't want it to be in time at all. We want the cuts to be…”

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Markly Morrison:  

Unrelated?

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Pat Maley:  

Yeah, unrelated and somewhat non sequitur, as cuts go. Yeah, there was something I was just thinking- so I did a lot of recordings of Mecca Normal, who at first I was like, “Calvin, why don't you go ahead and roll the tape,” because it was a little- for my New Wave pop ear, was a little much at first. But by the time I got to the last recording that we made, which was Dovetail, I was really enthusiastic and really wanted to be there, because they at that point had become my favorite band and remain my favorite band ever. And I don't do favorites. Like when somebody asks me what's your favorite (da-da-da-) Like if you asked me five favorite albums I couldn't tell you. Like, maybe 25. But Mecca Normal just hands down remains my favorite band ever. And I really feel great that I got to make those recordings with them, so it was great to be able to make that video for them as well. I made a Tiger Trap video, I helped Lois edit the Halo Benders video. Who else did I do one for... I think there's a video cassette out there somewhere that Lois and I put out called Handheld that has her Beat Happening video, my two Beat Happening videos, the Halo Benders video she made, the Tiger Trap, the Mecca Normal, oh and I made a Beck video when Calvin was recording One Foot in the Grave. I showed up with my Super 8 and there's a couple of shots I did for a song called “Forcefield.” And so one feature that, there's like a little- I took a fine point Sharpie and I drew a little red forcefield around Beck in the recording so it has that…

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Markly Morrison:  

On each frame?

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Pat Maley:  

On each frame, trying to make, like to do animation. So yeah, I did music videos like that for a long time and then I stopped a lot of stuff when I had kids, but I'm not there yet... So International Pop Underground Convention came along. I set up my track reel to reel in the green room of the upper hall [of the Capitol Theater] and much to Andy Crow’s dismay, I cracked a hole in the wall between the upper hallway and the theater to get my snake through, and just recorded all the bands that played on the stage. And Calvin has a stack- I hope he still has a stack of reel to reel 8 tracks that has all that recorded. And then the shows that were at the Surf Club were recorded on a four track quarter inch reel to reel, as were the shows at the Capitol Lake, which included Shadowy Men from Shadowy Planet and the Melvins. And a lot of that stuff ended up on that double live album that came up, those recordings that Stella Mars made the beautiful cover for that layout for, and included the linoleum block print of blackberries that Nikki McClure had done for the original program. So yeah, that was nice, it was a gatefold, it had Fugazi on it, it had the Melvins, that had all these great bands on it. Beat Happening was on there, Courtney Love is on there. And so when that happened, and I was really excited about that, I really thrilled about that- I was out of college, and I was working childcare gigs, because that's what I had done as a student at the Evergreen childcare center. And I wanted to do something else. So I thought, “well, I've got all these recordings, now why don't I make a compilation-” this is ‘91. “-and I'll put it on CD.” And then it can be like here's- instead of a business card, here's my resume as a recording that you can listen to anytime you want. And I got a whole bunch of bands on that. The Oklahoma Scramble’s on that one. And I did the same kind of layout trick that I did, only now, I had gone to the Sherwood Press here on the westside, which at that time had been run by Jocelyn Dohm. And I just started asking, “can you just- I want to look at the fonts you have, can you just put these words in that font?” So the first three, I'm looking at them on my wall over here- the first three compilations have on them this font that was available at the Sherwood Press and they would spell out the things for me. So that was that's how I did that. And I would lay this out, I would like go spend all night at Kinkos because they were open all night and I’d just have free run of the place. And eventually, I was doing so much reduction and increased percentage calculations on the copier to get things just the right size, that the guy there just said, “why don't you just keep the calculation wheel?” Because it had the little calculator wheels, I could tell from this dimension to this dimension what the percentage was, and then they got a copier where you could change- you could have different percentages for the x/y axis. So I could stretch things like that. So [I was] laying it all out there and pasting it onto the board, and then sending that off to be photographed for printing negatives.

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Markly Morrison:

Wow. So that was the Throw [compilation on Yoyo Recordings]?

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Pat Maley:  

Yeah, Throw was the first.

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Markly Morrison:

I really thought it was really cool that you put that paragraph on the inside of the cover about the Yoyo ethos, about bands who are just starting out shouldn't have to pay for recording if they can't afford it because that's when they've got... I forget exactly how you worded that, but they’ve got more grit. When they're hungry, they're playing better because they have to try to impress people.

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Pat Maley:  

Yeah, and that goes back to that the like the original reason- yes, the studio, [it’s] good to have it and make it available. That story of the Eurythmics. It's like, if there hadn't been a recording studio, that moment that song wouldn't have existed the way that it did. And you know, it's not the best song in the world, but you know, it's not nothing... So, thanks for reminding me, I can't remember any of those things that I wrote. And I think on some of the later things, compilations of things, I wrote, like, here's what I could read for when you go to those parties, where everyone reads embarrassing stuff from their high school journals. What I wrote feels a little like that. So I'm tentative about reading them, but I appreciate that you read that in that you brought that up. Thanks. So yeah, Throw was the first one. And then the second one, Julep, gave me the idea that I would invite bands that I wanted to record to come record, and I would say- and I think this is written in the Julep thing, that I'll take one of the songs to put on a comp. I'll make the comp, I'll get the money for the comp, you get the recording. So it was a barter system in that way. And they did that for the Julep and for Periscope. So that was a lot of fun making recordings that way. And because I had put my studio in the Capitol Theater, I ended up paying rent there. And, you know, starting with the International Pop Underground, just stayed in the theater, from ‘91 to 2006. And I would use the stage there for recordings and I would- so like the during the day, I would just bring a band in, and we'd set up and usually I put the drums on the front lip of the stage. I put the guitar amps facing into the auditorium on the concrete in front of the stage. I never had good headphones and I still don't. Everyone... just sort of like, it became a joke. And I think it's even a little audio joke on the Julep CD. There's a little thing of John Lunsford going, “Hey, Pat, how come I can't hear this in my left ear?” And I said, “just jiggle the wire.”

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Markly Morrison:

Classic.

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Pat Maley:  

So the guitar and bass players would never get headphones, they'd  just turn their amps up to what they wanted to be and mix and place themselves in the rooms so they could hear the drums and the amps. But the drummer would get headphones so he could hear the amps and the scratch vocals. Then I would put up big room mics and- in the winter of 1993, in December, I got a call from Calvin. He says, “Hey, there's these bands playing at Evergreen, from Japan. They're on tour. They're just playing at the rec center there. You want to go see ‘em?” I'm like, “Sure.” So we've gotten to see these bands, and it's the Bloodthirsty Butchers and the Copass Grinderz. And they are amazing. Like, just really amazing. They're just really powerful, really loud, really, really invested, hungry- like you were mentioning before- and I just say “Hey, I've got a recording studio. What are you guys doing tomorrow?” And they had made tour shirts for their tour. They'd like flown over here, they made tour shirts for the tour. And I guess that Beat Happening going to Japan back in the early 80s had really kind them, because it would list these different places they had shows in Portland, Seattle, Eugene and everything. But then it said Olympia and all it said for where they were playing was it had the K Shield [logo]. Like, they didn't even know where they were gonna play. They just were gonna go to Olympia and try and get a show. And they did. Calvin and I went to it. And then I just said, like, “hey, look, let's just go to the studio tomorrow and make these recordings.” And they were sharing instruments, so that made it easy. By that time, I was working at the food Co-Op and I was just like, “Hey, you want some hours? I gotta go” and I just ditched my shift and spent the whole day. And we got down there as early as we could, we recorded two songs by each band, the basic tracks and the overdubs, all before the six o'clock movie, because that was a thing- you had to be out of the way of the movie by the time people were coming in. And so we just like moved the drums back and we got the amps out of the way, struck the whole set as the patrons were walking in. They dropped the screen and then we went up and we mixed. And so in one day, we got these four songs, and Calvin got two and I got two. And two of those songs showed up on Periscope. At that point I start thinking, I say to Calvin, “are you ever gonna do another International Pop Underground Convention?” He's like, “No,” because I guess it was a big fat hassle, right? “Would you mind if I pick your brain? Because I think I want to do something.” And he's like, “Sure.” So I asked him how he did everything for making a record, who he mastered it with, and everything.

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Markly Morrison:  

The blueprint.

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Pat Maley:

The blueprint, right. He was the pioneer, and he kind of gave me the information that I needed. But then I was like, I need somebody else to help me. Who do I know who... has a different taste in music? But I really love speaking, talking with her, and so I talked to Michelle Noel. Indie pop kind of was my layer of interest. And Michelle had a more like Dead Moon, that kind of vibe. So we got together and we sat at the Smithfield Cafe, which is where the now-closed Lemongrass is, and we just brainstormed 200 bands. And we plotted out how many bands like how many days we would do it, and we upped it by- IPUC ended up upping it by one day anyway, from the original four- people wanted to do a girls night kind of a thing. And so that's when The Spinanes played, and I think Bikini Kill played, so it wasn't only the official original program. So we did five days. And so that first Yoyo festival Unwound was playing, Beck played. I'm just gonna lose- my mind’s like a steel colander…

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Markly Morrison:  

Was Team Dresch at that one?

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Pat Maley:  

Team Dresch played that one. Neutral Milk Hotel played that one. Yeah, just a whole host of bands. And I'm looking at the album cover but I can't see the names.

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Markly Morrison:    

Was Elliott Smith had that one as well?

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Pat Maley:  

No, Elliott was at the ‘97 and ‘99 Yoyo-A-Gogo festivals. Elliott Smith played at the those two. And for that, I thought, well, I'm definitely going to make recordings, right? And so I ended up getting this new digital tape format called ADAT. And they were basically VHS tape decks that used the VHS format to record a digital signal, digital 8-track, and you could run them in tandem. So I bought two of those and I recorded the whole festival. And I got three Hi-8 cameras, and did three-camera shoots of everything. So yeah, I really went to town on getting that all done. And my friend, Sharon Franklin was in charge of doing the video stuff, and did a great job on that. We got that all in the can, we started to make live compilations and started to plan these festivals. Periscope, the third studio compilation, came out in time with the festival. It was all kind of done at the same time. And back then we had a concern about whether or not the people would be hassled by the cops, and I had this idea of like, “hey,let's put it on during Lakefair when the cops will be totally busy.” So we scheduled it during that weekend, and I remember my friend Adam saying “God! You're gonna make me come out of my house during Lakefair. But it was great. You know, we both had it was this one point where... I'm thinking about time now. Just wanting to make sure I'm not running over.

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Markly Morrison:  

We're about where I would expect it.

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Pat Maley:

All right. So anyway, we did that. And then we made national news that first festival day because Krist Novoselic was playing with this band called The Stinky Puffs, so this would have been July of 94, a couple months after Kurt Cobain had died, and they're getting ready to go on stage the first night. Stinky Puffs was Simon [Simon Fair Timony], this young kid who had been friends with Kurt and had written songs about Kurt dying and so Krist was playing in his band with him and Jad Fair was in that band because Jad was dating Simon's mom [Mary Timony] at the time, and so they're getting ready and I'm walking up the stage, and uh- why am I going to blank on the drummer? The guy from Foo Fighters name?

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Markly Morrison:

The guy who's in all the documentaries. [laughter] I don't think we even need to say it.

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Pat Maley:  

But that yeah, the drummer for Nirvana.

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Markly Morrison:  

Yeah, Dave.

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Pat Maley:  

Dave Grohl is at the top of the stairs on the backstage, and I'm walking up and and he's talking to somebody and turns to me. He goes, should I go play with them? And I'm like, “yeah, let me get you a drum set.” And I just go down and I steal my friend Brad's drum set from from Craion or Unknown Pride. Oh, is it Sean? Yeah, Sean’s stuff. I just put Sean's drum set out on the stage. So we make national news because it's the first time the two of them have played together since Kurt had died. And so when you looked at that issue of The Olympian it's like this punk- Oh, and everybody got a full pass, and the passes were 40 bucks for five days- and I remember Spin magazine calling up, putting Spin back into it and saying, “Our reporter would like to get a pass please.” I'm like, “Well, you can buy one.” “No, we're press.” You know, it's like, “Well, why would I give you a free one?” And [they] go “well, because we're covering your event.” And I said, “I don't care if you cover our event.” And she was like, “Oh, okay.” It's 40 bucks! Yeah, anyway, everyone got a Yo-yo, so on the front page of The Olympian and that national news is this tall punk with mohawk throwing a yo-yo, it’s this long picture on the side of the page, and then you open it up and there's Lakefair, and there's these six burly dudes who are getting arrested by cops. And I'm like, “our event’s peaceful,” and it's great, you know?

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Markly Morrison:

Yeah. Wow. So a lot of people found their people convening in Olympia at Yoyo-a-Gogo.

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Pat Maley:

Well, it is because of the reputation of the International Pop Underground Convention. That got out you know, word of that got out. And then when Yoyo came in, the AP mislabeled us as K Records. It’s like, “K records event, of course K Records- Olympia, who else could it be?” But because of the popularity or like, people feeling like they had missed something, we became- The Yoyo-A-Gogo festivals were the place where pen pals who had been writing to each other about fandom of bands came and met for the first time ever... that just have written to each other, met for the first time and saw that band together. There were these two kids who lived in the middle of nowhere in Texas, and they shot video of themselves after quitting their dishwashing jobs and getting on a Greyhound, they shot videos of themselves on the way, and one guy's got a Greyhound ticket that's taller than him to get there. And they slept on the floor of the hallway of the Martin apartments at the end, because people just needed to be there. They were there for every show. It was really kind of an amazing- that same sort of high that I was talking about, it initially was really that kind of thing. And, you know, Rancid played. That was one of the big things- big bands that played. There's video of somebody [who] just happened to be filming these punks in line for the Rancid show. And they were kidding around and throwing stuff at each other, one guy fell back into a picture window, and his mosh pit skills got him out before he got sliced to bits. But the whole window went out, and we captured that on video- just great little scenes like that. Sharon did a great job with that kind of stuff. So that was the first Yoyo in ‘99 [should be 95], then I started- just kept recording and eventually decided- Al Larsen said “Hey, you should do another one of those Yoyo festivals!” That was 96, he said I had to do one next summer. I did one in ‘97, We did one in ‘99, and then the last one was done in July of 2001. By then you could kind of tell that people were just showing up on the weekend, sales were not that great. I mean, at the end of the last show of the last night at Yoyo ‘94 [This date should be checked]. I went to the front door and said, “Can I see the counter,” the people coming in, And it was twelve hundred [people]. I said the line must end! [laughing] okay, because it's got  a seating capacity of eight [hundred], right? (Actually, there's how many seats in that theater? I can’t remember).

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Then we got to 2001 and people weren't that interested in staying the whole week. That whole vibe had kind of disappeared. The internet was interfering with things. Because people were not as... we were no longer the internet, basically.

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Markly Morrison:

Right, yeah.

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Pat Maley:

So yeah, then come 2001 I'm still making records. I'm still doing stuff. I had been in a band with Mary, Little Red Car Wreck, which was probably my favorite album I've ever recorded.

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Markly Morrison:

Yeah, I really enjoyed that. What about Little Red Car Wreck? Do you want to talk about that group at all?

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Pat Maley:  

Yeah, I met Mary because she was playing in a band with her then baby father, David Scherer (Water).  I just asked her if she wanted to record and she said yeah, and then I thought David would be coming along, and she said, “but I need a drummer.” So we started playing music, and I did this: I did basically the same drums that I did with Lois, but I think I had a high hat and a crash cymbal. And so Diana Arens recorded us in the Capitol Theater, in ‘97 I guess... And then we made that the Little Red Car Wreck album Motor Like A Mother and it came out on CD. We did a tour- we did what was Mirah’s first tour, because I had made a one sided 12 inch with Mirah. And I loved that band, but that tour was just awful for me. They were younger than me,and it got into this sort of vibe like, I'm trying to get us to go to shows and do things, and they're having a great time, doing a teenage kind of vibe, and I ended up being the dad kind of vibe. And I'm just like, I don't want to be the dad.

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And so our last show ever, before 2012- was in Long Beach. And the guy who had set up the tour- the venue had changed hands. And so while we're playing, he's pacing in front of us, and finally he just kicks us out onto the patio. So halfway through I said “We have to go out on the patio and finish our set.” And while we're trying to finish our set, the cops show up and they say they're filming one of the Die Hard movies down the way, and your sounds getting into the mics and you have to stop… that's how Little Red Car Wreck ended. We drove home, we never played another show. Yeah, it was like at the time it was like getting dumped. I felt because I so loved that band to the point that when- our dear friend Pat Castaldo who did so much graphics work- I can't forget to mention Kento Oiwa who was there for Yoyo festivals to begin with, along with Michelle and I. And Ed Varga who came in later after Kento had left… of course, Ed Varga went on to do the recordings- I met Ed Varga through the Transfused recordings, and then went on to do Homo-A-Gogo festivals. He was the main person for that which was great because then I got to just record those.

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Markly Morrison:  

So, Homo-A-Gogo, that was your sort of passing the baton?

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Pat Maley:  

Well, he [Ed Varga] wanted to do a queer themed, one because he had been doing Homocore in Minneapolis [archive accessible by request via https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/13/resources/9467 ] before he moved out here to be the sound person for the staging of The Transfused which was- I love saying it this way- it was a post apocalyptic transgender trans-specie punk rock opera, which was written by Nomy Lamm, and The Need which was Radio [Sloan] Rachel Carns, and Donna Dresch played bass for the performances and the recording. I put out the soundtrack album that coincided with the performances that happened in 2001.

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Markly Morrison:

So was Transfused a part of the Homo-A-Gogo first?

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Pat Maley:

It was not part of Homo-A-Gogo, but it preceded Homo-A-Gogo. I think the first Homo-A-Gogo might have been in 2002, then in 2004, with the two that were staged at the Capitol Theater- We basically ran them the way we ran the the Yoyo-A-Gogo, although I wasn't one of the organizers.

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Markly Morrison:  

You got to tape op.

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Pat Maley:  

I got to tape op, yeah, exactly. But yeah, Little Red Car Wreck. So that was ‘97. We took a 15 year hiatus. And in 2012, both our kids were going to Lincoln Elementary, and I just said, “Hey, if you ever need a drummer-” and then we started playing music again for a while, and then Mary moved to the east coast with her family, that blew up and she came back here, and we started Guidon Bear with Michael Bradley, who's no longer with us in the band. And in October, we just put out our second album on Antiquated Future, which is a cassette label out of Portland run by Joshua James. We are in the process of writing our third one, and just just before this interview was recorded, I was at Mary's house, doing stop motion animation, photography stuff, just like I was when I was eight, for our next music video for our song, “Lego Set Life.” And we were using Legos to animate.

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Markly Morrison:

So in a way, you're still continuing what you started back in the mid-80s.

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Pat Maley:

Yeah, and I'm still banging on MIDI triggers too. My drum set over there- so Mary plays guitar and sings, I play a Nord drum three, which instead of writing a hi hat, I write melody lines. And in the absence of a bass player, or a keyboard player or an anything player, I also have a sample pad. So I'll sample a bass trigger as a bassline sample, we’ll play to it for the one measure, I’ll trigger it again, trigger it again, and it keeps us in time. But it still it doesn't tie us to a relentlessness to like a sequencer kind of thing. And I play all electronic- I have one cymbal now in that setup, then play all electronic drums because I can keep the volume down enough so that we can really hear everything well and play. Mainly I switched to electronics because we had a show in Powell’s Books in Portland. And, and if you do that you can really keep that volume down. It's like, okay... and basically the other thing that I think about playing with Mary is that I've learned now that anytime Mary says no, let's do it this way, she's always right. Like on tour, she's looking at all the merch I'm packing up. She's like, we're not going to need that. Like, what do you mean!? Of course, you got to bring merch on tour…  We didn’t sell a thing! So she was right, you know, so whatever she wants. She’s probably right.

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Markly Morrison:

All right. Well, I think we've gotten to the “is there anything else you'd like to add” portion of the conversation.

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Pat Maley:

Did that interview with Tom [Tom Dyer] what's his name? On KAOS?

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Markly Morrison:  

Dyer?

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Pat Maley:  

Yeah, and I had to go back in because I was like, Oh my God, how did I not mention The Transfused and Homo-A-Gogo?

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Markly Morrison:

So, checked that one off..

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Pat Maley:  

Yeah, checked that one off.

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Markly Morrison:  

That could be a whole that could be epic conversation itself, what with I the little bit of research I did on it.

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Pat Maley: 1:24:27  

Yeah, I mean for The Transfused- which was I think 10 performances over two weeks- We set it up so that we recorded…  how did we do it? We recorded every live track- the basic tracks of every live song-multiple times, like every night. And those tapes were supposed to be, that we could just  multitrack in the overdubs of the vocals to the live performance, but that never happened. Yeah, there's so many... I just want to make sure there's no thing I've left out. There's so many bands that I've left out. So many people that I just I can't remember anymore that are brought to mind. Like, the thing this week that's come back up as a reemerge is that John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has asked me for the pressing plates for the one-sided 12 inch I did. I did three one side at 12 inches with the Mountain Goats. He'd like to repress it. I'd like to find the box that has those pressing plates that Bill Smith Custom Records sent to me before they closed, because also in that box is the pressing plates for the Little Red Car Wreck album on vinyl, wherein the each side came in at about 12 minutes. So it's actually at 45, so the fidelity of that's going to be a whole lot better. I have test pressings but I don't have the original pressing. I gotta find that box with the plates on it. The plates came up- somebody asked me did that ever come out on vinyl? That kind of thing?

So yeah... I can't think of anything...

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Markly Morrison:  1:26:17  

Are you back to cassette format?

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Pat Maley:1:26:21  

Well, sure, right. Because you can put a cassette out, people like the business of it. I do want to say something, my son Liam- Well, first of all, my daughter Fiona has exquisite taste in music, and teaches me so much about great music that I'm not as aware of as she is. Like if it weren't for her, I wouldn't have taken an interest as much as I did in a certain- her interest in music- that I ended up seeing Lizzo. Like I was, “I'll just go by myself,” no one was going to go, and so I went to see Lizzo, so she's given me- like really broadened my taste in music. I really appreciate anything she shares with me. And my son Liam, for a long time, hasn't liked music- he just wasn't interested in bands. But he's 16 now, and I took him and a friend to see Laser Dark Side of the Moon. His mom and I took him to see Roger Waters perform Pink Floyd songs, and when I went to that it's like my 15 year old self just exploded inside of me, because I had seen Pink Floyd at 15 years old, and ‘98. And when I took him and his friend up to see Laser Dark Side of the Moon, they're sitting in the back of the car, going through a box of CDs and handing me CDs, like Yoyo CDs and Negativland CDs, they're really into it. And my kid said, “Can we go to Rainy Day” and I’m like, “sure.” We went to Rainy Day and he's shopping around... I have a photograph of him buying the first album he ever bought that was with his own money, of his own choice, because he knew the music. He had known about the music by finding out from friends. And he bought Radiohead’s Kid A on CD. And so it's like, maybe it's cassettes, but I think it's actually CDs. I think the kids are like fascinated by them. Because they're accessible enough now, and they’ve got artwork. So yeah.

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Markly Morrison:  1:28:33  

I will say you gave me a big stack of CDs, and I went out and I bought a CD boombox for the kitchen.

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Pat Maley: 1:28:41  

You can use your DVD player.

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Markly Morrison:  1:28:44  

My what now? I still think I have the last laptop they made that has a CD drive. I think I got the last one. And I can hook that up to my stereo.

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Pat Maley:  1:28:58  

You can buy a USB external thing for like 25 bucks.

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Markly Morrison:  1:29:03  

Well, this little boombox is great. And the van, I still rock CDs in the van. That's where most of the CDs live.

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Pat Maley:  1:29:10  

Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's, in fact, the fun thing. I've been trying to get my kid to play music because he has an innate talent, but doesn't seem all that interested. And so the thing I said to him was like, “Oh, hey, we could make an album and then put it out on CD.” He goes, “Oh, that's interesting.” So that might be the hook.

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Markly Morrison:  1:29:34  

Yeah. Well, Pat, thank you for your time.

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Pat Maley:  1:29:39  

Thank you Markly, it’s so good to chat with you and get all that out of my system. There's this thing about memory that is crystalline protein structures that we disassemble when we remember things, and then recommit it to memory, and so what I think happens- My theory is that the reason nostalgia just feels amazing is this- because you go to the high school reunion, you take all these memories that’ve just been hanging out in your brain and you disassemble them. You free up all this space, and then you assemble this one memory of remembering all the things. So I appreciate you clearing up my brain and that it's captured so I don't have to remember it anymore.

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Markly Morrison:  1:30:18  

Yeah, that's great. We’ll write it all down and make sure everything checks out.

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Pat Maley:  Okay, yeah, that's great.

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Addendum, Written May 17, 2023 by Pat Maley

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After being interviewed by Markly Morrison, I realized that there were two important aspects I had left out of the interview, so here they are as an addendum.

In 2008, my daughter Fiona entered elementary school at Lincoln Elementary in the options program in Olympia. I didn’t really check in with anyone, when I decided to show up at one of the morning assemblies in the auditorium at Lincoln with a few drums. Once a week, all the children in the school attended the regular assembly where in classes would share poetry, guests would share demonstrations, as would the science/music teacher of the school, Michael Dempster, who led the Lincoln Elementary Parent Band. Which is of course what it sounds like, a band of parents. As the assembly begin, I simply set up my drums, and started to play along.  They were playing songs like “boil them, cabbage down,“ “I will be your friend.” “ Hand jive” and “may the road rise to meet you..” Pete Seeger style stuff. It was an amazing band with a variety of players rotating in and out, including my friends Michael Bradley, Jon Merithew, Olivia Love, Paulette LeDouceur, Brian Sparhawk, Miriam Sterling, Kelly Ray Smith and many many others. I spent 10 years playing in that band, we recorded three albums, And what an amazing gig it was because every week several people showed up and sang along. And every week I got to play for my kids. It makes my heart sing just thinking about those days.

In 2010, I received as a birthday present guitar lessons. I found the teacher who had posted a flier, and that teacher was Eleanor Murray.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t get past one lesson, but I did come to know Eleanor, who volunteered as a cashier at the Olympia Food Co-op.  Sometime that year, Eleanor‘s drummer quit her band, and Eleanor asked me if I would drum with her. It has been a while since I had been in a band or been a drummer, I had spent most of the past decade raising babies. So I felt pretty enthusiastic about getting back into music and this seemed like a great opportunity. I felt very enthusiastic and tried to really apply myself. I remember noticing how nice it felt to simply play music, rather than set up microphones, roll, tape, track down audio problems, and do all the things that I had done for so long that had to do with production management of creating albums, and releasing them. This was just keeping time, relating to friends, being in the moment, and reveling in the experience. I feel really grateful to have played drums with Eleanor and Joshua James, and Pam Margon, for two tours, and an album.

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