Seattle has changed a lot over the past several years. Locals are rare birds, so I always get a kick out of telling folks I was born here. When I tell them I was born at the Group Health hospital (RIP) on Capitol Hill, I may as well have said I was born on top of the Space Needle. It’s native bordering on the exotic.
By 2011, most of Old Seattle had become New Seattle. Amazon had transformed a traditionally gritty neighborhood full of tow-truck lots, car dealerships, and parking lots into an urban corporate campus. People love to bitch, especially people from Seattle, and Amazon makes for a great (if misdirected) target. Personally, I’ll take Whole Foods and a few chain restaurants over dimly lit parking lots and Toyota dealerships. To some folks in this town that makes me a right-wing plutocrat, but most of those folks just arrived. :P
Around this time I was running a small company I had started with two friends. While it ultimately thrived, the early days of any company are tough. We shat our pants more than a few times and even pronounced the company dead on several occasions. We had employees (lord knows why in hindsight), which made this roller coaster ride exceptionally stressful. Our office was located in the center of Amazonville in a charming old warehouse with exposed brick and beam. It was a true creative loft space. Like every other tenant we were on a month to month lease. The building was scheduled for demolition, the cranes rising all around us like hungry giants ready to eat the place our company called home.
The bar scene in this part of town was… lacking. And while this may seem like a small detail, most companies I’ve started typically had a shithole dive bar within a two block radius where the founders can get together, decompress, and catch up. I love shithole dive bars almost as much as I love shithole countries. When I was a kid running another company I was entirely unqualified to run (a recording studio and art gallery), we would go to a shithole punk rock bar at the end of the block called the Comet Tavern (also RIP).
Almost on accident, we found our shithole dive bar in the heart of Amazonville. Like our office, it was surrounded on all sides by new construction. Also like our office, the building is long gone and exists only on some archive of Google Street View. The bar was located in the back room of a cheap Indian restaurant, with an unmarked entrance off the side street. It wasn’t a speakeasy. It just didn’t have a sign, or a sign that you could notice without it being pointed out to you. I certainly don’t remember one.
The bar was poorly lit and always nearly empty. They stayed open as long as you were drinking. They closed when the bartender became more bored than you were thirsty. The liquor, I suspect, was being sold without a license. There were no windows. The glasses were dirty. The taps didn't work. It was intimate and terrible but close to perfect. The only thing I would have changed would have been the compressor on the fridge where they kept the tall boys. The beer was always too warm.
One night there was new girl working the bar. She looked barely 21 and obviously didn’t have the credentials to serve alcohol. Free spirited with a dash of mania, she told us stories about touring around the country with different bands as a groupie/roadie. Another couple months working odd jobs (like this) and she'd have saved enough money to hit the road again. She told us these stories as she cleaned and restocked the bar, interrupting herself to curse the owner - not enough glasses, no dish soap, hasn’t paid the water bill, etc. After organizing the bar to her satisfaction, she changed the CD (yes, a burned CD if memory serves) and told us to help ourselves to whatever we liked while she stepped outside for a smoke.
As she walked onto the dimly lit side street, the unmarked door closed behind her and the music started to play. It was special. Striking, though not unfamiliar. There was a rawness, an unpolished nature to it. I couldn't tell if it was new, old, or from the future. Maybe this girl was a time traveler and accidentally slipped the wrong CD into the stereo.
The band was called Pickwick. I went home and searched for them. There was only a Bandcamp page. I bought everything they had for sale, a few singles and an EP. I didn’t think about it until a few days later when I hopped onto a flight to the UK, where I had no data and very little music loaded onto my phone. I listened to Pickwick on repeat, from the subways in London to the long train ride into Scotland and solitary late night walks around Edinburgh. It never got old.
I can recall seeing Pickwick four times now, though it’s a safe bet there’s a fifth night lost in the haze of short days and long nights. The first time was, like so many memorable shows, at Neumos in Seattle. After the show a friend and I chatted with lead singer, Galen, and his bandmates. A couple of girls walked over and thought we were also in the band. Galen didn’t correct them. I haven’t chatted with him again, though we’ve been friends on Facebook ever since.
In October of 2017, I took a friend to see Pickwick play in NYC. They were on tour for their second release, Lovejoys, which had come out only months prior. Being so far from home, they were playing at the relatively intimate Mercury Lounge in the Lower East Side. I knew that this would be a special show.
“So, what did you think?” I asked after the show.
A brief pause, then in her characteristically understated (though not insincere) manner she turned to me and smiled. “I liked it.”
Photo Credit: Ellie Lillstrom
