An amazing recording of Beat Happening’s performance at the 1992 Vermonstress Festival (scroll down). This is the band at its best, despite (or maybe because of) Heather’s case of the giggles during “Sleepyhead.”
There was a strong rock ‘n’ roll scene happening in downtown Olympia when I first got here; it was going on when Calvin [Johnson] was going to high school. Then there was this Evergreen thing, where all these smart, hip kids from around the world came here. It was like a magnet for them. And during the time that the New Delhi was putting on rock ‘n’ roll shows, those two cultures merged and created what is here now; the stick-in-the-mud townies and the starry-eyed altruists got together.
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| — | Gary Allen May, in an interview for Love Rock Revolution, on July 29, 2011. May sang and played in the Supreme Cool Beings and booked rock shows at Olympia’s New Delhi restaurant in the early ’80s. |
![THE BEGINNING “I was doing a radio show on KAOS and Heather [Lewis] was in this band called the Supreme Cool Beings. Gary Allen May was the singer in Supreme Cool Beings, and he lived in an apartment over on Fourth Avenue—Bruce [Pavitt] lived next door to him. And he would have shows in his apartment; Supreme Cool Beings would play, and other bands. So I had them play on my radio show, Boy Meets Girl, and it was a really good performance, so I thought, We should put this out as a cassette. I had been working on the Sub Pop fanzine, so I was really into the idea of cassettes. So I said, ‘Let’s do this tape as a kind of official release.’ I knew Pat Baum; she had drummed in this all-girl band in Portland called the Neo-Boys. She had started this cassette label, and she was doing a cassette duplication service. I called her and said, ‘I’ve got this tape, how much does it cost?’ She made 150 copies, sent them up to me. We had these covers printed, Xeroxed, and then the band hand-painted all the covers, put them together. So that came out in September of ’82, or early October, I can’t remember exactly.” -Calvin Johnson, in an interview for Love Rock Revolution, April, 27, 2011](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyhlolg1Rn1r4upg6o1_500.jpg)
THE BEGINNING “I was doing a radio show on KAOS and Heather [Lewis] was in this band called the Supreme Cool Beings. Gary Allen May was the singer in Supreme Cool Beings, and he lived in an apartment over on Fourth Avenue—Bruce [Pavitt] lived next door to him. And he would have shows in his apartment; Supreme Cool Beings would play, and other bands. So I had them play on my radio show, Boy Meets Girl, and it was a really good performance, so I thought, We should put this out as a cassette. I had been working on the Sub Pop fanzine, so I was really into the idea of cassettes. So I said, ‘Let’s do this tape as a kind of official release.’ I knew Pat Baum; she had drummed in this all-girl band in Portland called the Neo-Boys. She had started this cassette label, and she was doing a cassette duplication service. I called her and said, ‘I’ve got this tape, how much does it cost?’ She made 150 copies, sent them up to me. We had these covers printed, Xeroxed, and then the band hand-painted all the covers, put them together. So that came out in September of ’82, or early October, I can’t remember exactly.” -Calvin Johnson, in an interview for Love Rock Revolution, April, 27, 2011
