when you were 14 and i was 14The brief but shining life of Olympia, WA’s Oklahoma Scramble
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Oklahoma
Scramble were an Olympia, WA band that existed for a brief time in about
1986 or 1987. Argon Steel
played rhythm guitar and wrote some of the songs.
Jenny Seymore sang lead vocals, wrote the songs Argon didn’t, and
played lead guitar lines that corresponded exactly to her vocal lines. Marianne Kawaguchi played drums on their recordings, but not
for their two live shows. Jenny’s
neighbor was K/Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson; he offered to release
some Oklahoma Scramble songs on a compilation cassette, Birdcrash,
alongside Spook & The Zombies (Jonathan Richman-esque naiveté by
Aaron Stauffer, Seaweed’s future lead singer) and instrumental tracks by
the Go Team. Although
the least known of the three Birdcrash bands, Oklahoma Scramble’s five songs – almost everything they ever
wrote – are the tape’s highlights.
Each song has an appropriately simple one-word titles – “Boy,
“Girl,” “City,” “Street,” “Mine.” Jenny’s
voice is high, sweet, untrained, with a tart edge that brings to mind the
Cannanes’ Frances Gibson. The
bare arrangements and simple, straightforward guitar are perfectly in sync
with early Beat Happening and what was once known as “love rock.” These songs sound intensely personal and private, like you
the listener are almost not meant to hear them. “Boy”
and “Mine” are about crushes, longing and frustration.
“City” documents a typical evening’s ambient sounds as heard
from a windowless apartment (drunks in a bar; kids on skateboards; the
roar of buses; police sirens; music from a car radio).
“Girl” celebrates a teenage friend gone wrong.
“Town,” perhaps their best songs, is a bittersweet goodbye to
Olympia, capturing all the mixed feelings that go with leaving a warm but
insular place (“you know I hate you I love you this town”).
It’s an appropriate song for a band so of its moment.
It’s even more appropriate 1997’s Go! Olympia
project, a compilation cassette/guided walking tour, ends with “Town.” I’ve
long wanted to unlock some of the mystery surrounding Oklahoma Scramble.
I asked around at YoYo-A-Go-Go, but no one seemed to know what
happened to them. Hence, I
turned to the Internet for answers. A Yahoo! search led me to Jenny Seymore. She
responded from Egypt, where she was doing research on a Fulbright
scholarship. By the time she
e-mailed me her interview answers, she’d also been to Turkey, Germany,
Denmark and England. It turns
out that she periodically spends time in New York City as well, playing
music with her boyfriend and practicing astrology.
She gave me Argon’s e-mail address along with her answers; he
responded from Seattle. The
result is this interview. It’s
a look into a band that was inspired, cozy, fleeting, a little dark around
the edges. Perhaps their
story will inspire you to form your own band.
(Note: Adam Bayer supplied some of the questions.) Jenny, what are you doing in Egypt and Turkey?
How long have you been there? What do you miss about America? How did Oklahoma Scramble get together? Argon:
I started playing guitar back in
the early seventies. I
dropped out of high school, joined a commune and my girlfriend of the time
taught me how to play some song with two chords off the “Be Here Now”
record by Baba Ram Dass. I
was a hippie. I wanted to learn how to play like Duane Allman but everybody
else was playing bluegrass or folk songs.
However, I did find tucked away in the community record collection
a copy of the Velvet Underground. I
used to play “Heroin” full blast.
It was probably the only revolutionary thing I could have done
living on a commune in 1974. Anyway, I went to Olympia many years later to go The
Evergreen State College. One
night I saw Beat Happening playing and looking at Calvin Johnson I thought
to myself “heck, even I could
do that.” Sort of like a
rube seeing modern art for the first time.
But that’s the way Olympia was for quite a while.
Punk affected Olympia by allowing people to do things that were
supposed to be hard and making it look easy.
Before, being in a band was a big deal – sweating to learn how to
play some complicated riff, getting gigs, getting a record contract.
But what if all you want to do is make up some songs and play,
maybe for a few friends but maybe just for yourselves?
Then it’s really easy. So
easy that everybody after awhile was in a band.
It sounds like you’ve been in Olympia (how else would you know
about the RibEye?) but you might let your readers know that Olympia was
kind of unique. For a small
town it has an amazing amount of culture, most of it homegrown: a
community radio station, large community natural foods coop, a thriving
film club that owns its own large theater and puts on a week-long annual
film festival, two coffee shops per block, a steady succession of spaces
for all-ages shows. Perhaps
most importantly, Olympia had a downtown that until recently was really
cheap to live in. While I was
in Oklahoma Scramble I was living in what should have been an artist’s
studio for $50 a month. It
was small and the bathroom was down the hall but the low cost of living
gave me, like everybody else, a lot more time to do things like organize
shows, make music, make art or what have you.
And with our long, rainy winters what are you going to do
otherwise? My friend and musical genius Nilo Madeja suggested he and
I start a band. He taught me
how to play bar chords so I could be the rhythm guitarist and he sang and
wrote the songs. Our band,
“Bete Noir,” only played one gig, but it was probably Olympia’s
first and only multi-ethnic band. Nilo
was Filipino, Larry the lead guitarist was black and me and Larry’s
girlfriend the bass player were white.
I can’t remember all the songs that Nilo wrote except for one
about Captain Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
I thought it was a great band. Nilo looked just like Jim Morrison
the way he held the mike stand, but he was embarrassed because he’d
forget lyrics when he was singing in front of other people.
So he ended Bete Noir to go study philosophy. But now I was really eager to be in a band.
Since I never got very good at playing guitar (I even took lessons
for awhile but I could never remember any of it), I was never tempted to
learn other people’s songs. I just kept making up my own songs and then forgetting those.
I kept trying to find people to play with.
To make it even easier, I started buying really cheap instruments,
collecting them, so that if I found anybody who mentioned that “yeah, it
might be cool to make music,” I’d put a guitar or bass in their hands
and say, “OK, that’s called a fret. Push it down with your finger.
Now hit the string with your other finger. Keep doing it.” Unfortunately,
these bands of mine would last only as long as it took people to discover
how much guitar strings hurt their fingers.
My biggest problem was that while I can come up with songs galore,
I find writing lyrics really, really hard. Jenny Seymore and I had a lot of friends in common.
While I was running around trying to find people to play with Jenny
was busy being a girl genius; writing poetry, putting out magazines,
building atom smashers, you name it. Eventually the music scene must have gotten loud enough to
make her lift up her head from whatever deep intellectual pursuit she was
engaged in and I guess she thought she’d give it a try.
I don’t know if Jenny had ever played the guitar before and I’m
pretty sure she’d never been in a band.
But of course, she’d studied advanced musical composition at age
7 so she was ready to rock and roll.
Luckily we both had the same excellent taste in music: Marine
Girls, Young Marble Giants, Felt, the Jam.
Of course, we liked Beat Happening – they were our friends . But
especially we were both into the Cannanes. So I handed her my Silvertone solid-body and I just
started in on my Fender Mustang, running through all of my little song
fragments and when she’d hear one she liked she’d start trying to pick
out a melody. And that’s
where those melodic guitar lines that you like come from.
That’s her, just picking up a guitar for the first time in her
life. And then she’d go
away and come up with words and then we’d play some more until it came
together as a song. When we
got enough songs together we realized that we’d need a name and Jenny
came up with Oklahoma Scramble – some scrambled egg dish out of a 1950s
cookbook. Frankly, I thought
the name was pretty dumb. But in retrospect I realize that all band names are dumb. How did you know Maryanne and Argon? Had you been in bands prior? How old were you at the time? How aware were you at the time of the burgeoning
pop scene in Olympia? Who
were your favorite bands? Can you recall any influences, musically or
otherwise? Where does the name come from?
(It sounds like a breakfast platter at the Ribeye.) How did you end up on the
Birdcrash
cassette? Argon:
Calvin either heard one of us
talk about it or heard us practicing.
Like I’ve said, Olympia’s a small town.
I guess he had a few Go Team songs and Aaron Stauffer had some
songs, so he figured he could put all the songs together and have enough
to fill up a cassette to sell through K. How many shows did Oklahoma Scramble play? Argon:
We played one show in Olympia at
the Smithfield Cafe and once in Seattle at Geoff’s novelty
store/storefront home in Belltown. I
don’t remember the Seattle show too well.
It may have been a party. I
do remember the Seattle folks saying that they could always tell people
from Olympia because even Olympia punks looked like hippies. What was it like recording at YoYo Studios?
Did you record in the chicken coop?
What role did Pat or Calvin have in shaping the recording? Jenny: It was a nice afternoon, very nice weather. I think we were in a barn. They produced and mixed the whole thing. I don’t think we took it terribly seriously, since we weren’t actually a real band anyway, so we just had fun One of the most distinct characteristics of the
Birdcrash
recordings is the guitar line that follows the vocal melody in
each song. Whose idea was
that? Did you play the chords
or the melodies on the guitar? Argon:
I think I gave you the story
about that up above. I played
the chords. It was a little
frustrating for me in a way, since all the songs were so simple. If we had kept playing, I think we both would have been able
to get a little better in our playing, come up with more “complicated”
songs and more harder sounding songs without losing the cleanness of what
we had. But perhaps that’s
part of the reason we stopped playing since Jenny liked the simple, gentle
sound that we had and didn’t want to change while I did. Who knows?
We only played together for less than a year after all. Did you draw on any specific experiences for those
songs? “City” and
“Town” seem especially true to life. Argon:
Out of the five songs on Birdcrash,
I wrote the lyrics for “City,” which came from living in that
six-by-eight-foot artist’s studio above the Chinatown Restaurant on
Fourth Avenue in Olympia and hearing all the racket coming off the street
and through the paper thin walls. All
the other lyrics were by Jenny. “Town”
was about just how small a town Olympia was.
It’s great to know everybody and be in the midst of a vibrant
community, but at the same time it was hard to have any privacy and not
feel judged. So we loved all our friends, but at the same time we were all
plotting how to get out of town as soon as possible. I think that’s what “Town” was about. What are your fondest memories of Oklahoma
Scramble? Argon:
Our first show was in the
Smithfield Cafe with Beat Happening.
The Smithfield is really pretty small, probably holds less than a
dozen tables, and it’s where high school and college students hang out.
We just pushed the chairs back to make a space to play.
At that time a girl named Stephanie was playing the drums.
(She left for Italy before we recorded, so that’s why Marianne
played drums on the tape.) Me
and Stephanie played standing up but Jenny played guitar sitting down.
Jenny and I had played our songs so little before-hand we just felt
we had to be able to see each other.
So we did the whole show hardly looking at anybody else except each
other. Then Beat Happening
came on, and every time Kurt Homan would yell out a request for “I
Spy,” Calvin would launch into a theme song from yet another James Bond
movie. Amazing.
I never knew there were that many Bond movies. Do you have any particularly strange or funny
stories? Did Oklahoma Scramble write any songs besides the
ones on Birdcrash? Argon:
Calvin Johnson would have any
additional music, if any exists. (ed.
interjection: Calvin claims that these five songs are all that exist.)
Oh, and a friend of mine named Lucy videotaped the Smithfield show,
but I have no idea where either the tape or Lucy are today. Jenny:
Jeff Bartone has tapes of a song
I wrote called “Olympia” which was for a cabaret held at the Pussycat
Gallery or Kittycat or whatever it was called. When listening to the songs on
Birdcrash, it
is difficult to decipher exactly what is going on percussively.
It says that Maryanne played “drums,” but what specifically was
used for these songs?” (As
a side note, I’ve seen a picture of Oklahoma Scramble with just one
floor tom; was that it?) Jenny:
We didn’t have a steady
drummer. We never practiced
with Maryanne, we just persuaded her to record with us. Our two performances were with two different drummers, and
this is awful but I can’t remember exactly who they were. We recorded and performed with that tom or snare, whatever it
was. Why did the band break up? Argon:
Partly it was all of us going
off to separate ends of the earth. I
left shortly after for seven months in Brazil and Jenny went off on a
Denmark-to-Turkey trek. And
as I say, Stephanie the drummer had already left for Italy. But I think we also broke up because Jenny and I would fight
all the time. It’s what I
was saying above about the directions we each wanted to go in musically.
We’re both real opinionated people and real stubborn.
But maybe the most important reason is because we both have so many
other interests beyond music that we wanted to pursue. For most of us, Oklahoma Scramble was the last we
heard from you. Could you
summarize (as concisely as you’d like) some of what you’ve been up to
since then? Jenny:
In 1987 I left Oly and went to
Denmark and Norway and worked cleaning toilets in hospitals.
Then I traveled to the Middle East and got interested in Arabic.
I came back to Olympia in early ‘89 and tried to make a go of it,
but the town really was telling me to get out and get a life elsewhere;
nothing worked for me. So I
dyed my hair and went to New York with a friend, and I’ve been there
ever since. I worked as a
waitress and a bookbinder and in 1992 went back to school to study Arabic.
I’ve also been doing astrology for awhile.
My website address is: www.bway.net/astrology-observed. Argon:
I left Olympia in 1993 with my
girlfriend Eva, to travel around Asia for a year. For the time being we’re in Seattle. And I’m doing pretty much a variation on the same thing
I’ve been doing for years which is environmental organizing. Right now it’s hooking up environmental groups to the
Internet, before that it was getting people to bike commute, and before
that it was trying to save the old-growth forest here in the Pacific
Northwest. Are you still involved in music in some form or
another? Argon:
My latest musical recruit is
4-year old Earl, son of the aforementioned Cyndee Baudhuin.
He likes his music hard and loud, but he hates hurting his fingers
pressing on guitar strings so I don’t know how long he’ll last.
Honestly, for years and years my interests have sort of rotated
slowly through too many interests: playing music, drawing and painting,
studying history and philosophy, backpacking and mountaineering and
practicing Zen Buddhism. Right
now practicing Zen seems uppermost. I
always keep playing guitar and coming up with new songs because, as I say,
I’ve never had the discipline or memory to learn anybody else’s songs.
It would be nice to have another musical “project” again since
it’s always fun to create something and then be able to share with
others. Plans for the future? Jenny:
Spend next year in Cairo.
Finish this ----ing thesis, then get out of NYC. How strange is it for you to be answering these
questions almost a decade after the fact? Jenny:
Very strange indeed.
I guess that’s the late twentieth century for you...we all wash
up as a piece of cultural flotsam now and then. Oklahoma
Scramble’s “City,” “Town,” “Boy,” “Girl” and “Mine”
originally appeared on the Birdcrash
cassette (K Records, 1988). “Boy”
also appeared on Throw (YoYo
Recordings, 1992). “Town”
also appeared on the Go! Olympia
cassette/walking tour (YoYo, 1997).
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