Jason Traeger: So Sarah, where were you born and raised? 

Sarah Utter: I was born in 1975 in Vancouver, Washington. When I was about a year and a half, our family moved to Olympia. My parents are from Seattle. My mom was originally from Vancouver, BC, but grew up in Seattle. And all my siblings were born in Seattle. So my dad took a job in Vancouver, WA after he got his master's degree. He's a social worker, and we were in Vancouver for a second, then he got a job with the state doing social work here, so we moved to Percival Street on the lower westside (of Olympia). That’s the house I grew up in, and lived in until I graduated from high school. 

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Jason Traeger: Did you grow up in a musical family? 

Sarah Utter:My dad is a drummer, he's a jazz guy – very, very into jazz, pretty much exclusively. Some classical, but definitely not rock and roll. And the street that I grew up on (Percival) was ‘jazz street’ in Olympia. Two doors down was Bert Wilson, who was a really well known saxophone player. And then next door to him was Michael Olson, who plays percussion. 

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Sarah Utter: Pretty much every day, not exaggerating, there was music coming out of both of those houses, doors open. Bert Wilson’s especially had a revolving cast of musicians from all over the US, and probably globally, that would drop in for sessions, a lot of like, serious free jazz, and maybe something like hard bop, I don't really know jazz very well, but it wasn't, you know, peaceful (laughs). It was wild. My dad loved that, and he and Bert were good friends, so he would hang out there.. But, you know, like a lot of musicians, he just got stuck in the grind of having a day job to support his family. 

Jason Traeger: So music kind of got put on the backburner for him? 

Sarah Utter: Unfortunately, it did.

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Jason Traeger: Your dad encouraged you to play music? 

Sarah Utter: Yeah, both my parents encouraged my brother and I to play music. I started playing violin when I was three and a half years old, which is crazy to me now, but my parents put me in lessons that were called Suzuki method, which is pretty well known for violin. It’s a really intense way of teaching kids to play. It wasn't militaristic, or anything like that, but there's just a lot of expectations. There's your private lesson every week, and also a group lesson. When you're a little bit older, like probably starting when I was in kindergarten, we would meet up the street at Gloria Dei church – we’d learn how to play with other violinists and about music theory through playing games. As I got a little bit older, 4th grade I think, I was in a little traveling quartet where we would play at nursing homes and whatnot. And then when I was in fifth grade, I begged my parents to let me quit because the stress of it was too much. I was getting migraine headaches, which is pretty wild and pretty serious for a kid that age. So they very begrudgingly let me quit violin, and then I didn’t play music again until I was in high school. 

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Jason Traeger: What happened in high school? What did you listen to, or who were you into then? 

Sarah Utter: In high school, I was really at a loss for what was going on musically. I knew that I wasn't interested in what was on the radio. We didn't have cable until I was maybe a junior in high school. So the only MTV I was seeing was at my friends’ houses. But as far as radio and top 40 and stuff like that, it wasn't because I was cool or anything, but I just couldn't connect with New Kids on the Block or Tiffany or Debbie Gibson, and that was what a lot of my friends were into when we were in middle school. And then in high school, it was like Paula Abdul and dancy kind of stuff. Yeah, you know, pop dance music, and I just didn't feel too much for that either. When I was growing up, we weren’t really allowed to listen to top 40, not because our parents were religious or anything, just because I think they both viewed it as very regressive and somewhat, you know, like watching bad TV, maybe? My mom encouraged us to watch PBS and old sci-fi movies, and we had some Beatles records and Ella Jenkins records – there was a record player that my brother and I had headphones for, so we would sit in these little kid rocking chairs and listen to the Beatles. 

Sarah Utter: I do remember we had this tape, and I think that my brother must have taped it off the radio, or maybe our babysitter was trying to do us a solid, but we had a tape with a few songs on it that we listened to a lot in elementary school. And I remember it had the Go-Go’s ‘We Got the Beat’ and ‘Electric Avenue’ by Eddie Grant. Oh, and ‘Hey Mickey’ by Toni Basil, another perfect kid song. We were heavily into that tape. 

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Sarah Utter: In high school, in my junior year, I had the incredible stroke of luck of taking a horrible class, 1st Period PE, which mixed up all the grades together, and they would make us go jogging right when we got to school. I met my friend Karla Gore, who was a year older than me. And through her I learned a lot about music and made a ton of friends and it kind of just started from there. 

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Jason Traeger: What did she teach you about music? What did you get turned on to?

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Sarah Utter: Well, Karla worked at the dollar movie theater, the State-Tri Cinemas, downtown. And a lot of her co-workers were a few years older, they were done with high school. She worked with Vern Rumsey (of Unwound), and Greg Allen, who would be in Long Hind Legs together, and Rachel Carns from Kicking Giant, and a lot of other people in the music scene. Karla had started collecting records, she was going to Positively Fourth Street downtown, and to Rainy Day, and buying records with her money from work. She learned a lot about local music from friends at the movie theater – she was really into Riot Grrrl bands, so Bikini Kill and Heavens to Betsy were on heavy rotation. And Mecca normal, and bands from other scenes, like Slint. 

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Sarah Utter: We hit it off just personality-wise, she's funny and smart. And I wanted to get to know her more – I found out she lived only about six blocks away from me on the lower westside. I started hanging out at her house a lot, listening to records, looking at zines she got at work. And she was also getting into being vegan, and it was all through this connection to the older punks that she worked with at the movie theater. She had two other friends that went to CHS (Capital High School), Krista Fricke and Kristi Strathdee that worked there also, and I just started hanging out with all of them a lot. And Karla had a car, which was important for getting to shows even though we lived super close to downtown – as a teenage girl I didn’t really want to walk home, like at midnight or one a.m. from a show. So Karla had an old Subaru hatchback, and we started going to all-ages shows all the time. That must have been 1991 when I first started going to shows with them. 

Jason Traeger: So how old would you have been? 

Sarah Utter: I was 16. 

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Sarah Utter: There were tons of all ages shows going on, so having access to go to punk shows wasn't a problem at all. There were hardly any bar shows, and there were tons of house shows. There was the Capitol Theatre backstage, and the Uncola across the alley, another all-ages space. 

Jason Traeger: Do you remember what the first show was? Who you saw? 

Sarah Utter: I do. Karla, at school one day, told me that her friend Vern who she worked with had a band, and was playing a show that night, it was a really big deal because they used to be a different band, and then they were going to be this new band and the new band was going to be, you know, important. And she was kind of like, do you want to go to this thing and see my co-worker’s band? And I was like I think so, okay– something to do. There was nothing to do really. I think that's important to touch on..there was a real lack of anything to do for teenagers in Olympia. So finding this sort-of secret scene and community was really crazy because it was right there the whole time. But you wouldn't really know about it without an invitation, maybe from somebody a little bit older, somebody that went to Evergreen, or somebody's older brother or sister. Somebody they worked with. 

Jason Traeger: So your first show was the first show between Giant Henry turning into Unwound?

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Sarah Utter: It was the first Unwound show, or maybe the second? I remember that Some Velvet Sidewalk played before them, and there was probably another band or two that I can’t recall. And like I said, I had zero familiarity with any of the local music, except for some of the stuff I had heard in Karla’s bedroom. But even with that, we had just recently become friends, so I was pretty new to everything. And I remember going in and the show had already started, Some Velvet Sidewalk was playing, I remember it so clearly, it was packed out. I definitely felt like one of the youngest people. I think Vern was three years older than me, which seemed like a big gap when you’re a teenager. 

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Sarah Utter: And so Some Velvet Sidewalk was playing, and I remember thinking, what is this? It definitely wasn’t like anything I had heard on Mtv or the radio. I just thought ‘What is this, I'm not sure if I like it, and I'm definitely coming back’ (laughs). Those are all the thoughts, like all rolled into one, just being overwhelmed from a sensory standpoint, wondering, what is this? This is music? What kind of music is this? ‘This is a band. I've never seen a band like this before’. I mean, there’s Don and Martin, the rhythm section, and then Al Larsen is the front person and guitarist – You know, I was just really struck by them. And that's what I remember the most about the night actually. And then Unwound were really good, Brandt (Sandeno) was still playing drums. And they're obviously, like, a legit band, but Some Velvet Sidewalk is really what got the wheels turning in my mind that I wanted to play music again. 

Jason Traeger: How long was it before you started playing music? 

Sarah Utter: Very soon after that first show. And it wasn't that I wanted to be in a band, that wasn't anywhere on my radar. I actively didn't want to be in a band because no part of me wanted to be on stage. I wasn't a theater kid. I wasn't super shy, but I was somewhat reserved, and pretty independent. I did my own thing a lot. But mostly I just didn't want to be a performer. But I knew that I wanted to play electric guitar. And I'd always gravitated towards things that girls or young women weren't ‘supposed’ to do, or that there weren't very many women or girls doing. I told my parents I wanted to play guitar and my dad was like ‘oh, rock n’roll, hmm.. how about acoustic guitar?’ And I said no, because that was what you're supposed to do as a girl, right? Play acoustic guitar, play something pretty. I wanted to play something really loud and aggressive. And so we made a compromise that I could play electric guitar if I took jazz lessons at Yenney’s, the local music store on the westside. 

Jason Traeger: How did that go? 

Sarah Utter: It was okay, I was back in a world of lessons which wasn’t my favorite thing. My teacher was a nice guy, he was a jazz guy. Having those skills in violin, even though I hadn't played in a long time, I think it really transferred to guitar because the finger work is very similar. But as far as the other stuff, I was clueless. He had me using those little teardrop, really hard jazz picks, I didn't even know there were other kinds of picks (laughs). That was just what I was handed. Like, here you go, you're gonna be an electric guitar player. Here's your tiny, tiny, hard pick (laughs). He taught me some really important things, like the pentatonic scale, which I just took off with and started practicing all the time, backwards and forwards on different places on the neck, mixing up the notes, and that led to my love of ripping guitar solos. And he taught me jazz chords, which I very much sucked at. I have super small hands, and they were complicated. I learned how to play some jazz standards like Summertime, and Time Out /Take Five by Dave Brubeck, but my heart wasn’t really in it. After about six months, my

parents, begrudgingly again, let me get out of that one. 

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Jason Traeger: How long was it before you played music with other people? 

Sarah Utter: It was a while. Well, in teenage years, you know. I started playing right at the beginning of my senior year of high school. I got my first electric guitar, which was a cheap-y special from Music 6000, the only local guitar store at the time. It was a red Yamaha with a pointy headstock and a whammy bar, a hundred bucks out the door with a little practice amp. And I still use that practice amp 30 years later, it sounds great. The distortion is perfect. 

Sarah Utter: Another person that really helped me was John Devoy, he also went to CHS and was a year older, he had a band called Mushmouth that became Bunnyfoot Charm. I didn't know him super well at school, but we became friends right after I graduated. He taught me two very important things. One, how to tune my guitar (laughs). At lessons, my guitar teacher would tune it for me – you get there, he takes your guitar, he tunes it, hands it back to you. John taught me how to tune it from harmonics. I didn't have a tuner. And then he was like, here are some important things, and showed me how to play a power chord, two fingers wherever you want. And I was like, ‘Yes! This is what I've been looking for!’, in 15 minutes we really covered a lot of ground compared to jazz lessons (laughs). And then he taught me how to play the intro to Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne. So I felt like a real stud after I mastered that, and I have to say I really suck at doing covers. So that's the only one in my repertoire, the intro to Crazy Train. 

Jason Traeger: So Randy Rhoads was your guy, really a mentor (laughs) 

Sarah Utter: Yeah (laughs). But thank god for John, showing me those things, who knows how long I would have been stuck playing with tiny picks, he probably told me to get a different pick too. 

Sarah Utter: After I graduated from high school, I started hanging out with John and other musicians more. I went to Evergreen right out of high school. I was a straight-A student, and was expected to go to college, that’s just how it was. I was an overachiever in school, I had perfectionist tendencies, so it was very much expected that I was going to go to college. I went up to Seattle with my mom and looked at UW, it was really huge, and I didn't want to be there. Evergreen seemed like a better choice, because it was here and I could go to shows still. But I didn't want to be in college, I just wanted to move downtown and play music with those friends. I was kind of obligated by my family to do it. And it was a horrible year, I lived on campus, I didn't have a car. The buses only ran until 8pm. I didn't have any punk friends on campus. It was like, at the time in 1993, it was very much still a big hippie school. So you know, a lot of people listening to Phish and jam bands. And I was just like, thumbs down to all of this. I experienced my first bout of major depression, which at the time, you know, there wasn’t access to knowing that mental health care was important, that there was help and it wasn't super weird that you felt awful all the time. And it wasn't your fault and didn't make you a bad person. So like a lot of people, I think my first year of college was pretty terrible, and a waste of time and a waste of money – luckily in-state tuition was really cheap at that time, or I wouldn’t have been able to go college at all, we were very much a working-class family. 

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Sarah Utter: I dropped out after spring quarter that year, and moved downtown. I could go to shows again, everything was right in the world. I started making tons of new friends, and that's when things really took off. 

Jason Traeger: What happened when once you moved downtown, did you start playing with people? 

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Sarah Utter: That happened kind of slowly, I was just into practicing in my room by myself and didn’t want to be in a band per se. I met Kimya (Dawson), she was somebody I had met at shows when I was in high school, she was an Evergreen student, so a few years older. I met her through some of my skater friends who she was also friends with. Kimya was just, like, the coolest, I was pretty intimidated by her and didn't talk to her very much. She was beautiful and had amazing style, she was super smart and funny, and very magnetic. And I was like wow, you know, she's cool! I really got to know her in the summer of ‘94, we quickly just became super tight friends. I moved into a punk house downtown that was kind of a little bit off of the punk house radar. It wasn't really kids in bands, it was Kimya and then a bunch of boys from Vashon Island. Just a bunch of awesome creative weirdos, but maybe not punks in the Olympia punk-fashion-sense, or whatever. Our house was just in really bad shape. It was a duplex. I think there were eight of us living in two bedrooms and the living room and the closet, you know, all of that. Kimya and I shared bunk beds. That was the first time we were bunk-bed roommates, we lived in bunk beds in another house too. We were goofballs. She was 21, so her and our roommate Grr would go out a lot, there was a cool dance club called Thekla, they went there a lot – there was pinball, and punks working there, and it was Olympia’s only gay bar at the time. They would go out and come back and just be raging and drunk and funny, and over the top and scary and all of those things. I'd still be at home because I was 18 or 19. 

Sarah Utter: One thing that Kimya and I did a lot was write stories back and forth to each other on our typewriters, like writing lines of absurdist poetry and handing them back and forth, and adding to them. She’s always been an amazing writer, and we decided to make songs out of our writing, just me on acoustic guitar and us both singing. One of our songs was ‘Sandy Duncan’s Illegitimate Love Child’. That was about our friend Kelly Hogan who was in Bunnyfoot Charm, rest in peace. So, songs like that, we were both just really into absurdity, humor and comedy. My depression was a lot better when we were hanging out together. 

Sarah Utter: Something I remember about that time period is that we would go to this night at Lucky 7 house, called ‘Lucky 7 Coffee House’, it was a recurring thing for a while. Chris Jordan and Mike Elvin lived there and put it on, Mike was one of those people that was never in bands but was just as important in the Olympia scene, he took Unwound on their first tour if I’m remembering correctly, in his giant old Suburban wagon thing. He's a few years older than them. So yeah, there's this whole lineage of like the slightly older, cooler person sort of helping out the younger, developing punk. And then that person helping out the next generation of younger punks, and so on. And that's a really cool thing that still happens here, I think. Lucky 7 Coffee House nights were usually a quieter performer – like Lois, I remember her specifically playing. Chris Jordan was a coffee guy before that was really a big thing, he’s still involved in that world, and he would always have good coffee ready. And so you drink coffee and listen to music, it was pretty wholesome. I mean, you could drink beer, I guess, if you wanted to, but we just drank coffee. Kimya and I would be playing a dice game in the corner, listening to music and just kind of being our own, like, ‘secret spy club’ style – kind of like the dorky, younger siblings hanging out at the cool teenager party. But that was just one of, like, those very specific Olympia things, part of the

whole punk community of Olympia, just a lot of people of different ages hanging out, a lot of peoples’ specific individual talents and tastes lending themselves to all sorts of little micro-scenes in an already very small scene. 

Jason Traeger: So when was the first time you would say you were in a band that had a name and played out? 

Sarah Utter: The first time I really started playing music with somebody else in a band sense was with Pat Maley. Pat and I met through my high school friend Karla, when the first Yo-Yo-A-Go-Go fest happened, in ‘94. Right after my first year of Evergreen, right when I'd moved back downtown, and Karla was volunteering with the fest, which was organized by Pat Maley and Kent Oiwa, and Michelle Noel and others – a bunch of people had come together to put on this music festival, similar to IPU which had happened in ‘91. I missed out on IPU, that was in the summer before I met Karla and started going to shows. I decided to volunteer for Yo-Yo, and Pat asked me what I wanted to do, and I told him I had a camera and could take pictures during the shows, I had taken photography in high school. So he said allright, take pictures, here's your full pass in exchange. That was really great, I did take a bunch of pictures, I gave them to Pat after the fest, but I’m not sure what happened to them. The real photographers at that time were Reuben Lorch-Miller and Jeff Smith, they were taking actual good photos. I got to be good friends with Pat, he found out that I’d been playing guitar for a little while, and he wanted to learn how to play. 

So we started meeting up at his office above the Capitol Theater, the Yo-Yo office, and I would show him a few things on guitar, we would end up just hanging out and getting coffee and shooting the shit. And it was really fun, and then he wanted to make a band, which I was, again, sort of not interested in. But he talked me into it, so it was me and him, and then Karla played stand-up drums, we were called Skylab. We recorded in the theater, I’m not sure what happened to those recordings. And we played one show, which was fine with me to keep it at the one. We played at ABC house in the basement. We opened for Modest Mouse, which were just like these boys from Issaquah and not really my jam, but Skylab was pretty quiet and not really my style either. But it was cool that Pat included me, and wanted to get to know me, as you know, an older cool person in the scene, again, helping out a younger fledgling punk. So that was my first experience playing with other people. Not long after that, Kimya and I and our roommates got evicted from the Firm (the punk house we lived in), it got slated for demolition and remodel. She moved into this cool punk house called the Ski Lodge, it did look like a ski lodge. It was really nice. It was right next to the Capitol building, so definitely the most stately of any of the punk houses in Olympia. And I moved into my parents’ basement for a couple of months. I just like, I don't know, I had to regroup for a second. 

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Sarah Utter: I ended up moving into the Ski Lodge a few months later, sharing bunk beds with Kimya for the second time. One of our roommates there was this guy named Mark who was from Scotland, and then had lived in San Diego for a long time and was sort-of part of the scene down there. Mark was pretty aloof, he was pretty cool. He lived in the dining room in a tent. And he always wore, like, head-to-toe polyester outfits from the thrift store, the whole white belt thing, he had a super mod haircut and was just really put together, he had a specific look. I was just kind of wearing random clothes from thrift stores and band t-shirts, jean jackets, pretty much how I still dress. But he had a definite style and an aesthetic. He was pretty stand-offish, and we didn't hit it off at first because I was still pretty unsure of

myself in some ways. I always felt younger, I felt like I was just an observer in a room at that time. I wasn't really like, you know, bouncing around from group to group, talking to everybody– that came later (laughs). But at the time, I was pretty much an observer and kind of kind of aloof myself, I guess. 

Jason Traeger: So, Mark.. 

Sarah Utter: I just kind of avoided him in the house as much as I could for the first month we lived together. And then one day it was just me and him in the living room during the middle of the day. He was smoking cigarettes in his recliner. And we were listening to records, and it turned out we liked a lot of the same records, so we started getting into listening to records together when no one else was home. We had a small collection at the house, but on constant rotation were the Stooges, MC5, Huggybear, Blue Cheer, and the Seeds. I also remember listening to flute music by Herbie Mann, and Liquid Swords by GZA when it came out. 

Sarah Utter: Mark had good taste. He had his cool facade, sort of icy but it melted a little bit and we became really good friends, and that was really special to me, because Mark was a very interesting person, somewhat mysterious. He was living here on an expired visa, so he had no ID or passport, he was a pro skateboarder at one time, that’s how he ended up in San Diego. He had a really funny accent too – it was a mix between Scottish and San Diego surfer. So it was very specific, and I won’t try to imitate it. He was like, ‘So I can hear you playing guitar, you’re pretty good at that. We should play. I can play drums’. And I was like, ok, but where will we play because the Ski Lodge was one of the only houses I’ve lived in, in Olympia, that didn’t have a basement. My parents had moved from Percival Street to the South Capitol Neighborhood, and lived about six blocks away, across the alley from Calvin (Johnson), so we ended up playing there. 

Sarah Utter: I had played with Pat, but he had written all the songs, and now being in a two-piece band with Mark, I’m supposed to write the songs. So that was a whole new experience, and I didn't really know how to write songs at all. The band we made was called Plastique, Mark named it, and the songs were a little chaotic, and they don't have, like, super good structure. And that’s all on me. But we definitely had some sort of vision which was to be the loudest two-piece possible, you know, outside of GodheadSilo. But in a different sort of way, channeling our own version of the Stooges or the MC5 into just guitar and drums. 

Jason Traeger: What kind of amp did you have? 

Sarah Utter: Mark, like I said, was just more aesthetically tuned, so we went to the newly opened Moon Music downtown that Steve Wold, who later became famous in Europe as Seasick Steve, owned. It was a really cool smaller guitar and amp store, lots of vintage equipment. And I was playing an Ibanez guitar at that time, with these cool lipstick pickups. It was kind of a retro guitar, but it still wasn't the guitar that I really settled on. But for an amp, we went to Moon, and Mark was like (pointing to a MusicMan amp) ‘oh, this is great’. It was a 100-watt head, all tube, and it was paired with two 12- inch MusicMan speaker cabinets, probably from the ‘70s, they were like two little suitcases someone had painted orange. And they were loud, really loud, extremely loud. And so that was it, you know – sold. 

Sarah Utter: By this time I started working at the dollar movie theater, along with all the other punks, the State-Tri. Which I cannot emphasize enough the importance of the State Theatre for the music scene in Olympia, I referred to it as the brain-center or the clubhouse of downtown Olympia, so many different punks worked there. I was 19 when I started working there, and my friends from high school that had worked there had all moved away for college or were doing other things. Vern was still working there. Scott Jernigan from Karp was a projectionist, and Dan Haugh from GodheadSilo was also a projectionist. Michelle Mae from Frumpies and later the Make-Up worked there, and Natalie Cox. Natalie was a person who was in a lot of bands, and never really got a lot of recognition for her music talent, but was just a full life-force. She very sadly and tragically passed away from cancer in 2010. She was the assistant manager at the theater, and John Devoy and Kelly Hogan from Bunnyfoot Charm also worked there. Dave Schneider from Lync worked there, and he was also one of my roommates at the Ski Lodge House, and I think of all the roommates I’ve ever had, he was my favorite. He was just the best roommate and often gave me his clothes, and he had very good taste in vintage clothes, so I ended up with some cool jeans and jean jackets from him. Pretty much everybody was involved in the music scene in some capacity worked at the theater. And people like Brian Boswell, who was not a musician, but very much important in the scene, he was at shows and knew what was up, he drew comics and made zines. 

Sarah Utter: Oh, and Chris Smith from KARP also worked there. And that was actually my very first day at that job, working behind the concession counter with Chris. And Chris did not like me, for unknown reasons – he very actively disliked me. And for those that know, Chris could be pretty harsh, it was unpleasant. Later we became good friends, and I asked him what he had against me, I mean I had seen KARP play so many times, but we didn’t have any interactions really. At that point, when I was 19, they were the band that played all the time, like every show. So we knew each other from around. When I was still in high school, I went to some house on the eastside, not Lucky 7, some random one where Fitz of Depression and Bikini Kill were playing, I think it was Halloween or around then. That was such a good show. That’s the first time I saw Fitz and they were incredible, and Bikini Kill were always amazing. But I remember again just being 16 or 17 and looking like a scrawny grunge rocker, like I probably had on a flannel and striped shirt or a shirt with comics on them, like a Life in Hell shirt or the Far Side, stuff like that. I had really long hair, and had just got my braces off. I wasn’t looking super cool (laughs). Like in the Olympia way at the time. 

Jason Traeger: You were grunge in a hipster town? 

Sarah Utter: I sure was. I was really into Mudhoney and Soundgarden, those were the kinds of northwest bands I was most into. So anyway, at this party, I remember standing against the wall and just kind of observing people, and I look across the room and Chris is just staring at me and giving me the middle finger for a long time, and I have no idea what’s going on but he continues to just stare and flip me off. He told me much later that he thought I was looking at his girlfriend ‘weird’. So when I started my first day working at the theater, with Chris, it was uncomfortable. But shortly after there was a weekend when the boss went out of town, so Vern’s little sister who I think was still in high school, Lisa (Rumsey), was the assistant manager and therefore in charge, and she didn’t like Chris, for sure. I was standing right next to Chris, behind the counter, and he said something totally flip to Lisa, when she probably asked him to go check on a theater or something. And he said something rude back to her and she was just like ‘Get out of here, you’re fired’. And he said ‘You can’t fire me’. I remember standing there, like, so nervous, and then Lisa said something like ‘I can fire you, I’m the boss’ and Chris took off his bow tie and threw it on the ground and left in a huff. And I was kind of like ‘wow, way to go Lisa!’ and I was relieved. But Chris and I ended up being roommates later at the Central House and we really got to like each other and became good friends.

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Sarah Utter: I had just come from high school and I found the Olympia scene to be very high school adjacent. I think it's easy to look back 30 years and say ‘Oh, we're just all one really inclusive community’. It wasn't like that at all. And you (Jason) can attest to that. There were definitely cliques, divisions, all that kind of stuff. And like I said, I had just gotten out of high school and I really wasn't interested in any of that. In high school and beyond, I've always had really great friends and that's all I needed, so I tried to stay clear of this sort of rampant gossip and stuff, as much as I could. There was a lot of it. 

Jason Traeger: Yeah. 

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Jason Traeger: Getting back to Plastique, what did the band do? What was the arc of the band? 

Sarah Utter: The arc of the band was very quick between when we started playing together to when we played our first show. Mark was friends with Calvin (Johnson), and I knew who Calvin was but we weren’t friends yet. My parents lived across the alley, so he would hear us practicing, we were so loud. And so he's started bugging Mark about, you know, ‘you should play a show, you guys should record a record, you guys should put something out on K’. And I was like, ‘Whoa, what's happening, we're in a band, like a real band. Ok Mark, you’re in charge of branding (laughs) and I'm just gonna play guitar’. And so we played a show pretty soon after we'd written six or seven songs. We played the Central House, in the basement, which was a great place to see bands. And I don't remember who we played with. I was so nervous. But once I turned my volume up, you know, to the point where it was loud enough, I felt fine. I felt good, and actually really surprisingly comfortable. And I've always been a singer by default, because nobody else wants to do it. It's fine, but I love playing guitar. And that's what I enjoyed doing more than anything, definitely more than singing or being a front person. 

Sarah Utter: So, soon after that, we recorded at Dub Narcotic, Calvin’s studio that was in the basement of his house. We recorded a seven inch, so three songs, and Mark and I collaborated on the art. He wanted to use very few colors, just red and black and white. We took some photo booth pictures at Woolworths and used a copy machine and threw it together. Shortly after the record came out, Sam Jayne from Lync had just started Love as Laughter as a solo project by himself, with, like, loops and electric guitar and a drum machine. I was good friends with Sam, and so was Mark. 

He was living in Tacoma and he would come stay at the Ski Lodge, and was just a really great friend. And I'm so sad that he’s not with us anymore. Sam was incredibly talented, like beyond, just beyond. Sam was experienced, he’d already toured a bunch with Lync and he was like, ‘Yeah, I have a band, let's go on tour. I made this tape, I'm gonna put out a record on K, but for now I have a tape. It's called Love As Laughter. So just me, you, Mark, and someone else, let's take your friend Karla’. Karla was back from college, and she came on tour with us. I had only been off of the west coast once in my life at that point, I went to New York and that was like, two months before this tour. It was the first time I flew on an airplane. I went with Audrey Marrs from Mocket, who, like a lot of my friends, was about six years older than me. And so like a real adult, you know, and she worked at the movie theater also. The way she remembers it is that she was talking at the theater, saying, ‘Oh, I'm gonna go visit my friends next month, I’m gonna go to New York, it's gonna be great’ And she said that I wistfully said to no one ‘I wish I could go on an airplane. I've never been on one’. And so in classic Audrey fashion, she was like, ‘What??’, almost disgusted with that - how can you have never been on an airplane? So she said, ‘Let’s go, you’re coming with me, do you have $200? So I went home and scrounged some money and got a ticket. And that was the first time I left the west coast. So I had been to New York, which was amazing, and then I was setting off on this month-long tour with Sam and Mark and Karla, driving around the whole US. And we did it, and we made it back. And right when we rolled into town a month later, in the middle of the night, we’re driving up 4th Ave and when we roll by the dollar theater, it was boarded up. It had been shut down while we were on tour, I was still working there. Without internet and cell phones, word hadn’t made it back to us. So yeah, everyone lost their jobs, it was a sad day in Olympia, a really sad day not only for all the punks that worked there, but also for the community. The theater was a really vital resource for downtown in general and a lot of low income seniors and people who were just maybe isolated were regulars, and we’d let them in for free. And a lot of times when it's pouring rain, we let in a few of our regular friends who didn't have any shelter. So when it did get closed down, it was really a loss for all of Olympia. 

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Jason Traeger: So how long did the band last after the tour? 

Sarah Utter: Well, it was one of those tours where we were against all odds, you know, half of our shows fell through and before cell phones you just had to have your stapled-together papers with various phone numbers scribbled on them. You’d get a calling card and try to find payphones on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. We broke down a lot. So there was that, and it was rad that Sam had a van but you know, old vans just break down, and a lot of shows fell through. And we wouldn’t know anyone in that town, and have to sleep in the van. We scrambled our way through. But you know, we had a lot of good times. And we had a lot of really shitty times, like pushing the van down the street and rural Louisiana, when it’s 108 degrees. And our show has been canceled and again, we have nowhere to stay. And everybody has like $1 to their name. But that builds character (laughs). Mark had scored me a fake ID because I was still only 19 or 20, and we had to play a few shows that were at bars. We had some really great shows though during that tour, places I would never imagine like North Dakota, amazing all ages shows and scenes. Just bored kids. 

DC was another really good one, we played with the Monorchid at the Embassy house. I knew about the established ‘friendship triangle’ between DC, Olympia and the Bay Area, and then to some extent San Diego. Our DC friends were really great. And we were very relieved to show up there and get to 

spend some time with them. When we got back to Olympia, Mark and I kept playing, and we put out another seven inch for K, that was a split 7” with Love as Laughter. We went on a West Coast tour with Mocket and Love as Laughter again. Sam had expanded to a full band, with Dave Schneider and Jessica Espeleta. I rode with Mocket and Mark rode with Love as Laughter. It didn't go very well for us. Mocket were great, they were being courted by American records. And so that was hilarious to everybody because they were being you know, wined and dined by the American’s A&R guy. And we just rode those coattails and wined and dined along with them, but Mark had gotten involved in some stuff that I didn't know about, partially because I'm really naive. I still am, in general, about drug use. And also I think that he was pretty protective of me. So I think he shielded me from that. But you know, I think it was obvious to everybody else that there was just a lot of stuff going on in Olympia at that time, and he had gotten involved in it. And so, by the time we met up for our first show at Gilman street, he wasn't doing so well, and that's when I found out about that. We missed that show, but we did have one really good show at Jabberjaw in LA with the Makeup. And the other shows were just kind of – there were some problems – and I didn't know how to talk to Mark about it. I was so young, and I didn't really have a handle on how to talk about adult problems with other adults. So I just kind of avoided it.

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After the last show in LA, Mocket had been put up in the Roosevelt Hotel by American, it's this historic, cool hotel in Hollywood. And so the rest of us crashed in their rooms. I was in a room with Mocket, Mark was down the hall in a different room. And I called my mom, she really liked Mark, and I didn't really want to get into it, because, you know, he's not doing so well, and it's bad. It's not good. You know? And so she's like, you know, can you fly home? Can you get someone to take you to the airport? So I got a ticket. And I called Mark in his room, and told him I was going home, and there was awkward silence. He said something unkind, and then hung up on me. And that's the last time I ever talked to him. Which is super sad. We’ve emailed maybe twice over the years, just to say hi. From LA he flew home to Scotland, and then he moved to Germany, cleaned up and really became successful in art, I think video or film installation, which is so great and makes me so happy. Because he was a little bit different than my other friends, he was an intellectual and was probably reading about post-modernism and philosophy when I was more interested in less academic stuff. But he was really interested in, like, art theory and whatnot, and continues doing that and does really well. So I'm so happy to hear that. 

Jason Traeger: And so when you got back to Olympia you were without a band. So what did you do? 

Sarah Utter: What did I do? That's a good question. Well, I made another band right away. I ran into this guy, Jesse Fox at a party up in Tacoma with my boyfriend, Chad Queirolo, who was another one of those people in Olympia who wasn't a musician, but he was important to the scene. And he had started a booking agency and a little record label. He just knew how to get things done, he’s magically talented that way. He's been the head booker of the Showbox for years now in Seattle. But back in Olympia, he’s from here, he had a lot of friends who were these crazy rockers in Tacoma that were super fun to hang out with. We went to a party and I ran to Jesse Fox, he had also gone to my high school and was a year older. He was in the marching band. I didn't really know him, but I knew that he was a kick-ass marching band drummer, and that's what you want. Right? Scott Jernigan, Sara Lund, a lot of great drummers were in marching band. We just got to talking. ‘Hey, want to play sometime? Are you ever in Olympia?’ And he's like, ‘Yeah, I live in Olympia, I'm in a band called Polecat. And I play guitar in that, but I love playing drums’, and so we met up and played at his house on the westside. And yeah, he fit the bill. He was really loud, he played what I would call a Tacoma style, heavy. And it worked just fine, he was intuitive and knew what he was doing. His style, to me, was really driving and not like a lot of nuance, but just super straight ahead balls-out drumming. He’s really good. 

Sarah Utter: So we played, and I was like, we should get a bass player because I've done the two-piece thing before, and it's cool, but I think bass is a really important part of a band. And I just want to play guitar and worry about that. So, who should we get to play bass? I asked Jessica Espeleta, another very important part of the Olympia music scene at that time. She played in lots of bands, but also didn’t get the notoriety she deserves for being such a badass guitar player. She was one of the few girls or women in Olympia that played really loud, ripping electric rock n’ roll guitar. We became super good friends. She was a couple years younger than me, but way more world-wise and street savvy, we were roommates a couple of different times. I asked her to play bass, and she was busy doing like five other projects. So she suggested Maggie Vail, also from CHS, and also a year older than me. Maggie had been boyfriend/girlfriend briefly with Jesse Fox in middle school, he broke up with her to go to wrestling camp. So there's that, but they got over it (laughs). We didn’t really know each other well, but I knew she played drums and I was like, if you can play drums, you can play bass, and her mom had a bass. Her family is very cool. She borrowed her mom’s bass and we checked it out. She was great, so we just started from there. We wrote some songs and the name Bangs came from Chad, I think he was referencing the haircut. But for me, I was just like ‘oh, Bangs, like the word/the sound, an onomatopoeia, loud’. And for Maggie, she said that she liked it because of Lester Bangs, she had read a lot of his writing, so it worked fine. It turned out the Bangles were originally the Bangs, but we didn’t know it at the time. We found out later and it didn’t matter, so we were Bangs but people always called us ‘The’ Bangs, but it was just Bangs. Like the sound. 

Jason Traeger: And you put out records on.. 

Sarah Utter: We put out records on Kill Rock Stars, Maggie worked at KRS, she worked in publicity and promotion. When I worked at the dollar theater, I became friends with Slim Moon (the owner of Kill Rock Stars). He lived nearby in the Martin Apartments, he was doing this thing where he was wearing the same clothes everyday and eating the same dinner every night. 

Sarah Utter: So every night when I was working in the box office, he would cruise by around dinner time headed to King Solomon’s Reef, wearing a white denim jacket, kind of dirty, and white jeans, with his blonde hair in a sort-of bowl cut with short bangs. He’d go there every night for a patty melt, and he’d stop by the box office and chat, and it was cool. He’s just such an interesting person and really not pretentious, not how I imagined he would be. And he asked me a lot of questions, like what kind of music I liked. 

That’s a cool thing about Slim; being a young woman in the Olympia music scene, there’s definitely older men in the scene who were extremely lecherous, and I don’t know if they would get away with that today. I don’t know what the right word is, if its harassed, but a few of them wouldn’t leave me alone. Even when I politely told them I wasn’t interested, they wouldn’t leave me alone. And it was really annoying. It didn’t feel dangerous, it just felt annoying as fuck. And Slim wasn’t like that at all to me, he just wanted to know who I was, and that was so great. We became friends and Slim was always supportive of whatever music projects that Maggie was working on, and that I was working on. He has such good and interesting and spot-on taste in most things, and so for me, it was surprising but also affirming because besides music, I’m an artist, I’ve always been working on art whether its graphic design or posters or collages, anything, and I always identified more as an artist than a musician, ever since I was a little kid. Slim was incredibly supportive of my art and has been my biggest patron and booster, along with Aaron Tuller and Pat Castaldo. Slim had me design a few different things for Kill Rock Stars, and I could jump off on a tangent about Calvin and how he let me run loose in the K graphics room, I did an internship there for some credit at Evergreen, he had me design the quarterly catalog, which was all cut and paste at the time, super up-my-alley. He had me photograph Karp for the cover, we did that upstairs at K in the Cherry Loft, and he had me take pictures of Lois and Brendan Canty who were making a record at Moon Music when it had branched out into a recording studio. He had me design the album artwork for a compilation called Project Echo, which was really awesome. He put me to work in the things that he could see I was good at, which were messing around with my hands and making art, taking pictures, and playing music. With Slim he’s purchased paintings of mine and just been a real champion, and I played in one of the many, many incarnations of Witchy Poo, with Slim, Joe Preston from Thrones, Jessica Espeleta and Zack Carlson. We did one west coast tour, which Zack and I remember as really really fun, and which Slim, Joe, and Jessica remember as the worst tour ever. So I don't know (laughs). I know Slim and Joe didn't get along after that for many years. But I'll just say that I had a ton of fun. Good times.

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Jason Traeger: So you're doing art, you're doing photography, you're in the band, you're working. You've done stuff with K with Kill Rock Stars. You've listed and named all these different people that you've packed in, you’re like 22 years old at this point, right? 

Sarah Utter: Yeah. There's so much, and I’ve lived in all of these places, Ski Lodge, Lucky 7 House, Central House, the Martin. I look at a Lucky 7 house, and punk houses like that, that were just so vital to the scene. It rains all the time here. There's nothing to do. So everybody ends up going into the basement and playing. So the great thing about punk houses is you have your own practice space built in, it usually worked out that a lot of old really cool big old bungalows were in various states of disrepair at the time. You know, sort of sketchy landlords, no leases, but your rent was so cheap, it didn't matter. 

Sarah Utter:There was a revolving cast of roommates, and shows happening in the basements. Before Lucky 7, I lived in the Central house on the eastside, I lived with six guys. Kelly and John from Bunnyfoot Charm, Chris and Jared from Karp, our friend Juan Carlos who also went to CHS, and a man named Pat who was a mystery but had to walk through my ‘bedroom’ to get to the downstairs. I lived in some sort of family room. I think my rent was $85/month and there was an actual, like, eight by four inch hole in my wall to the outside. So I had my requisite futon mattress on the floor, and I just wore a parka and a ski hat to bed. But, you know, plenty of fresh air (laughs). We had a lot of shows in the basement when I was living there. When I lived at Lucky 7 we had some shows, and I remember Worst Case Scenario practicing there a lot, Brandt (Sandeno) was the drummer and my roommate, they shook the house. But there were so many incredible shows in the Lucky 7 basement over the years. Apartments were really cheap too at that time in Olympia, for a few months I got my own apartment at the Martin. I was like ‘hey, I’m an adult!’ I kind-of aspired to be like Vern, like legitimate adults who are cool. And they have a significant other and an apartment. 

Jason Traeger: Like Nikki (McClure) and Tae (Won Yu).

Sarah Utter: Haha, no. Those were like REAL adults. Back to the sort-of factions in the scene, separate groups, I was always like ‘well, there’s the whiskey punks and then there’s the tea cozy punks’, and they definitely all go to most of the same shows, because the bills were always so varied. You could see, like, Lois on the same bill as Karp, totally different genres, both punks. It brought together a lot of different people with different tastes. But, like me and Jessica and Justin and Brandt, and a bunch of the other rock n’ rollers, we’re at Ben Moore’s (the bar), having whiskey. Not really causing trouble or anything but getting back home and playing really loud music in the middle of the night, drinking more, Not just listening to records, but actually playing music together, and those were great times.. And I was like ‘are those other guys really happy making tea cozies? It seems like they are, and that’s great’. I just didn’t understand what that was. That’s an oversimplification, but I mean the twee elements of the scene, more like the ‘K Kids’ (fans of K Records)’. Tae (Won Yu) was a musician and an artist, and a person who had a huge part of crafting the whole aesthetic of the Yo-Yo festivals, and of the Olympia music scene in general. So the records and the festival passes and the posters for Yo-Yo were created by Tae, and had a very specific, amazing style. He did a lot of artwork for K too. I felt very lucky to have Tae in our orb as an artist, and he was always really supportive of me making art. If he was putting on an art show, he'd invite me to participate. And that meant a lot to me because I really, really respected him and I really loved his work, and his band too– Kicking Giant.

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Jason Traeger: So speaking of art, when did you start working with BuyOlympia? 

Sarah Utter: That was later, I want to say maybe 1999 or 2000? Yeah, Pat Castaldo and Aaron Tuller started BuyOlympia.com which was sort of like a pre-Etsy just for local Olympia makers and crafters and artists. Pat asked me to make some stuff for them and I was like ‘like what?’ and Pat was like ‘I don’t know, design some stuff’ (laughs). I knew how to make show posters and collages, and mess around with copy machines, but I didn’t know how to design products to sell, besides band merch. But Pat kept pestering me in a very friendly, supportive tone, like ‘Just make some stuff!’. So I went to Kinko’s, one of my longtime favorite places to hang out in high school and beyond. I preferred to work on copy machines, and still do. 

Sarah Utter: So I went to Kinko’s, but first I had to go to Capital Mall for some reason. Like the worst place on earth for me personally, I still hate it, so I’m having one of my usual existential breakdowns in the mall and I notice that there’s a resurgence of these 70’s-style slogan tees marketed toward teenage girls, but with crap like ‘Mrs. Timberlake’ or just things about money or materialism, this was when Paris Hilton was popular, so probably ‘That’s Hot’. I don't know, it just freaked me out that all that girls were supposed to be into were celebrities and money and getting married, so I continued my existential crisis back to Kinkos and made the Reading is Sexy design with image of the lady lowering her glasses, it's just clip art. I wasn’t trying to be funny or novel at all. I just was making something for Pat and Aaron, it was just a reaction to the shirts I saw at the mall. 

A few years later, the shirt ended up being worn by the main character on the tv show Gilmore Girls, which I was aware of but hadn’t really watched. It turned out the costumer for the show had seen it on BuyOlympia.com and bought it for the show. But they never told BuyOlympia, so we didn’t know. They just saw it, bought it, put it on their main character who was in college, she was an avid book nerd. And so because it's something you can google, Reading is Sexy, I guess people did. I was living in LA, around 2005, and I got this email from Aaron, he’s like ‘Something's happening’. I was like, what do you mean, ‘Something’s happening?’ ‘Our computers are piling up with orders for Reading is Sexy shirts and we can't keep up! A lot of them are from Germany, what's happening??’ (laughs) I had no idea. We found out later. And it was funny, because the shirt had been around for maybe 4 or 5 years, selling, you know, one or two shirts a month maybe. And then it ‘went viral’, it was like a meme before there were memes or something. I was really lucky to have that. And that sort of funded me being able to be an independent artist for a couple years at least, where I didn't have to have a day job. I had a studio and could go there, I was working on painting pretty intensively at that time. So I could go and paint every day. That was just an incredible stroke of luck. And you know, as oftentimes these things seem to happen in Olympia with people that have been involved in the Olympia scene, there's just these moments of magic that you can't really put your finger on how that happened. But a lot of people helped in their own specific way to make it happen. Like if it weren't for Aaron and Pat, my design would never have been on a website. I don't know how to make a website (laughs). And if it wasn't maybe for Slim or Tae encouraging me to make more art I might have been like, I don't know, I'm just a musician. And then going back to somebody asking Plastique to play a show, and Mark and I collaborating on a flyer. All those little bits and parts that just make a lot of really insane moments of magic. As cliche as that sounds. It's just true. I don't have a lot of experience living in other places. I've traveled a lot to other places. But I have to say, I think this is very unique to Olympia.

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Sarah Utter: And the last time we talked, you asked me the question that I think a lot of people who didn't grow up here or weren't part of the scene asked, which is why Olympia – ‘Why have so many bands come out of Olympia? Why have all these people gone on to do all these amazing things? What’s the thing about Olympia?’ For me, growing up here, when I think of Olympia in the 80s, before I started going to shows – there were shows happening, I just I just didn’t know about them, the culture of Olympia seemed to me to be pretty much split between state workers, which were sort of these homogenous people in slacks going to their cubicles, my dad did this. I didn't know what they did, just working for different departments, I guess, dealing with paperwork, going home. I'm sure there were plenty of musicians and artists working for the state. But, you know, it just seemed like this kind of dull culture. And the other half being the working class aspect of the area, the logging industry. There was tons of timber being exported from the port, and a big mill down on the water. There were trucks coming in from Montesano and Aberdeen with logs, so much more than you see today. It was a real boom at the time. So there was a redneck element, you might go a few miles to Tumwater and it's totally different, Tumwater High School was very different from Olympia High School, even though they were only a few miles apart. What injected so many interesting people that wanted to work on so many different, creative things was the Evergreen State College opening in the early 70s. It's a liberal arts school, and it's also a state university, so it was incredibly cheap if you were a resident. My mom went there when I was a kid, she’s an artist and also studied science. 

In my neighborhood growing up there were a lot of houses that were rentals for students, you could spot a Greener by their hippie clothes, that was a really big thing. Bare feet and bellbottoms and the whole 60’s thing, even though it was the 80’s. I wasn't into hippies. I thought they were annoying (laughs). Is that weird? I don’t know, I don't think it's uncommon amongst the punks. I felt like there was a lot of apathy with hippies, the ‘it's all good’ mentality. But there were some parts of punk that had a lot of apathy too. Maybe that was a uniting thing between the hippies and the punks that we didn’t realize. But that aspect always annoyed me..like, who has the luxury for apathy? I gotta get stuff done. But Evergreen had a lot of stuff going on for the counterculture, and just introducing counterculture to Olympia. There were students like Matt Groening and Lynda Barry making crazy comics at the time, like Life in Hell. That comic started officially, I think, when Matt moved to LA, but comics that had those ideas were in the Evergreen school newspaper, the CPJ (the Cooper Point Journal). Or maybe the Evergreen Free Press. Evergreen also has KAOS, the radio station. Sub Pop came out of Bruce Pavitt’s radio show on KAOS called Subterranean Pop. There was this whole thing with the radio station at Evergreen that was really a kickoff to the Olympia music scene. And anybody could have a radio show there, it wasn't just students, it was a community station. There were free jazz shows, or metal, or punk. Or world music or Democracy Now. Just a really quintessential liberal arts crazy community radio station, and I think that was important to introducing all kinds of music to people in Olympia. There are a lot of bored teenagers, like I said, it rains here all the time and there wasn’t much to do. And there were all these interesting college student counterculture people, and professors too. Also the cost of living was really cheap. Now, like everywhere else, it's gotten stupidly expensive. Olympia’s also really conveniently located between Seattle and Portland. So if you can get a cheap car, or get a friend who has a car, you can go to shows out of town. There weren’t very many all-ages shows, but there were some. We’re between two bigger cities with bigger music art scenes, so not geographically isolated at all. There's lots of places to live, and practice spaces. Now, I have no idea where you can practice. I think in the 80s and 90s, there was just a perfect mix of the right place and right economic situation for young people and students and lower income folks to work on their creative projects while only having to be at a crummy day job part time. People had more time to work on art, music, zines. Zine culture was a really big thing I was never a part of, besides appreciating them and reading them. It was just a time when that was more possible, because it was affordable. 

Jason Traeger: What lesson did you learn, or what ideals did you glean growing up in Olympia, in that community that you just described? 

Sarah Utter: One thing that I didn't have to deal with just in my own family, and then in the Olympia scene, was the incredible sexism that the music world, or just life in general, would show you. I was lucky to have grown up in a family where there were two girl kids and two boy kids, and it wasn’t like the boys were the ones that got to have an electric guitar and the girls were the ones that had to be in Girl Scouts. It was very much ‘what are you interested in? Let's encourage that’. My brother was very interested in electronics and taking apart old VCRs. And so he became a volunteer at the local cable access channel, TCTV, when he was a teenager, and then became a broadcast engineer. So we all did our separate things, and I felt supported. For that reason, I didn't get involved in Riot Grrrl, I saw a lot of the bands play and I appreciated them. And definitely later on, when I figured out that the world outside of Olympia could be a pretty shitty place for women in music, I really recognized how much headway they made on tour, sort of normalizing ‘yeah, women can also do this’ while also enduring just horrid sexism, it made a difference when I started touring. There was maybe a little bit of ‘you say you play guitar, but can you REALLY play guitar?’ by some of my male peers, but then I would play guitar they’d be like ‘oh, okay you can’, and it didn’t feel competitive. So I didn’t really have to deal with much of that in my own community. And that's a thing very, I think, specific to Olympia at that time period, and maybe DC as well, Riot Grrrl was a part of DC and a part of Olympia. 

Jason Traeger: What would you say, like as a bumper sticker, what did you learn from the Olympia experiment? 

Sarah Utter: You know, it's hard to say because I'm from here. It's just part of my dna. But there's something about Olympia that completely fosters the idea that if there's something you want to do, especially something that you're not supposed to do, like being a young woman in a loud rock'n'roll band, if you just keep doing it, you can make it happen. And this is a very Evergreen thing too –If you just keep saying ‘I want to do this and I'm going to do it’, you'll find a way and you’ll find people who will help you out in different ways. If someone doesn’t want to let you be a part of some experience, then you create your own experience. You know, just simply put, it's the DIY thing 100%. Just really doing it yourself, but having a support system around you from people who are maybe a few years older, that are like ‘hey, yeah– you can totally do this’. Fuck the haters. You can do this. I believe in you. 

Jason Traeger: Yeah, I think that's a great note to end on.Thank you, Sarah. 

Sarah Utter: I can't believe I said fuck the haters (laughs).

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