“Do you know how to play bass?”  

“Sure, I can play bass,” I lied, taking a swig from my 40 ouncer of Rainier Ale in an attempt to bolster my bullshit. “I mean, guitar is my first instrument, but I also know my way around a bass.”

“Good, good,” Markus nodded, “because we don’t need another guitarist. We’ve already got two. Everybody wants to play guitar… but bass? That’s a different story.”

He was right: Guitarists were a dime a dozen. Not only were there shitloads, but ever since picking up the six string at age thirteen I was quickly outperformed by so many of my peers. They learned flashy licks and even speedy solos, while I perpetually languished in power chord town. However, I later realized that those hours I spent chunking out rhythm and riffs in my bedroom would help me make the eventual jump to the bass. So perhaps my confidence that night wasn’t entirely unfounded, even if somewhat amplified by the bottle of “Green Death” I sipped from.

In any case, I had nothing to lose. After a heady nine months in Seattle attending Cornish and soaking up the peripheral electricity of the local music scene, I was back in Olympia, living with my parents, washing dishes at Sizzler, and dying to rock out. I had already tried my hand at playing in a band up in Sea-town, but despite the fact that our bass player Jeremy’s brother was in a pretty popular local outfit called SGM, we were dealing with the dual handicap of being underage (most Seattle venues were 21 and over), and most importantly, not knowing how to play our instruments. Our one and only gig was a party at Jeremy’s parents’ house in the U-District, where, between tsunamis of feedback, we attempted to jerk and stagger our way through a set of classic rock covers. Cool brother Chris showed up with a couple of his big belt-buckled, rock star-looking buddies; they appeared distracted and unimpressed, though they could have just been nodding out on smack.  

As the Cocteau Twins poured from the speakers, Markus and I continued our conversation, comparing musical influences and backgrounds (despite his elfin, Euro-sophisticate looks, he hailed from the unlikely hick burg of Yelm). We were in the living room of a party at the Ash Apartments next to the Evergreen State College, where Markus studied film. Evergreen, at this point, was an oasis of culture and hippified fun in Olympia, which, without the college, would have been just another angry, rain-soaked, redneck logging town.

As a bonafide townie, it had taken me a while to discover the glory that was Evergreen, but once I did, my friends and I would often just head out to the sprawling, mossy campus to wander around, smoke weed, and see what kind of parties we could sniff out. Little did I know that one of those parties would lead to Markus which lead me to joining a band which in turn punched open a whole new world in my life.

The following Monday I took up Markus’s invitation to jam, and found myself in the living room of a house on Olympia’s eastside. Aside from Markus, who handled the vocals, the rest of the band was made up Micah (on lead guitar), Bill (on rhythm), and Scott Jernigan, a 15-year old Tumwater kid who pounded the kit like he wanted to kill it. They already had three songs worked out and handed me a beater bass to sit in with, since I lacked one of my own. The tunes were mostly three or four chord affairs and heavy on the jam, allowing Micah to open the gates with his wah pedal and throw some serious Hendrix at it.. The effect, of course, was greatly enhanced after a mid-practice pipe full of very potent bud. Feeling a bit lost, I just kept my head down and tried to pluck root notes on the fat E string, which ran through a tiny amp that you really couldn’t hear, anyway. This worked to my credit, it seems; by the end of the practice it was all backslaps and handshakes and I was invited to join the band.  

The following day I plunked down 200 bucks for a black Peavey Foundation at a local pawn shop, and soon we began practicing in a spare room in the 809 House, a big wooden abode that Markus shared with Micah and his girlfriend Andrea, along with a whole host of other Greeners. 809 was one of those terrific cheap rentals that Olympia was so full of, making the town a haven for students and artists and anyone who could assemble pack of people to cover the usually insubstantial rent. The result was a community peppered with bumping house parties, as well as the bands that cut their teeth at such beery gatherings.

We were to be one of those bands for sure, and after a week of putting songs together we settled on the name “Brave New World,” which reflected our student-y existence. With the exception of Scott, who was still in high school, we were all college kids (I was technically “taking a break”) seized by the youthful romance of intellectual ramblings, which often featured Huxley’s most famous tome. The name also reflected the social and political winds sweeping the globe. After all, the Berlin Wall had just fallen and soon there would be rumblings of war in the desert. Change was indeed afoot, or so it seemed, and like so many others at the time, we hoped to embrace it through rock and roll.

Our music came together quickly and organically. I’ve been in a lot of bands since, and never has the creative process been so effortless. Bill Kozlowski was the songwriting engine, though Micah also contributed his share. Bill always had one or two songs on the go, and the rest of us would just build on what was working on. Bill’s feet stood solidly in a pop universe, which went on to flavor everything we did. While we were all creatures of the Northwest and the dirgy angst that came with it, the music we were making tended to fall on the sunnier side of the tracks. We were just feeling things out, and our rapidly growing set was steeped in jangle pop, psychedelic fuzz, 60’s grooves, along with a good dose of anthemic white boy funk. This of course was all awash in Micah’s wah-wah and a fat layer of warble courtesy of Bill’s 1970’s effect unit known as the Mu-Tron Bi-Phase.

In a sense we had an Oly aesthetic, since a lot of the music coming out on labels such as K and Kill Rock Stars had an optimistic (if extremely quirky) bent. We, however, didn’t really embrace the low-fi artiness of the Oly “downtown sound,” nor were we punk rock ragers. Our stuff fit in more with the Evergreen house party crowd, in that there was always a bit of hippy in it. Like a lot of young bands, we were bursting with passion and influences, but these things can take some time to gel into a truly original style, so early on we were a bit all over the map.  

After a few months we were ready to play out. One of our first shows was at the gazebo in Sylvester Park following a protest downtown against the First Gulf War, which was getting ready to kick off. It was a frigid November afternoon and my fingers began to freeze up in the cold. Despite being a seasoned stage actor at this point in my life, I found performing music in public to be a terrifying experience. Coupled with the fact that I was still figuring out the very basics of my instrument, I had to do everything I could to overcome seizing up. Still, I managed to get through the gig, though Micah was promptly fired from his job when his boss found out he had spent his day off lending support to such a terrorist-loving, anti-American enterprise. A reminder perhaps, that Oly wasn’t the liberal mecca it was often made out to be.    

Soon after, we played a gig at the State Tri Cinema, the tatty, second-run downtown movie house where I worked part-time with Bill. We shared the bill with hardcore heroes Fitz of Depression and Giant Henry, an early incarnation of the legendary noise trio Unwound. I loved both these bands and was stoked to share the stage, even if my own band’s punk rock cred was less than mighty. The gig only happened because of Bill and was sparsely attended, but I’m happy that it happened at all, even if our inclusion was a stylistic mismatch.

That said, mismatch was part of the fun in Oly: eclectic was the name of the game. Most of the shows were also all ages, so if you didn’t like a particular band, you could always step out and sneak some vodka in the alley until someone better plugged in.

This was 1990, and the town was crawling with musical combos of all stripes. Of course you had had cult icons Beat Happening, but there were scores of others bands such as Dangermouse, Treehouse, Death Squad, Witchypoo, The Noses, Bratmobile, Nubbin, Earth, Herd of Turtles, Honeybucket, Jimmy Einstein and the Deersmen, Helltrout, and the criminally underappreciated Telefunken. Cobain was also living on Pear St. at the time, though in my view Nirvana was never really an “Oly band,” despite their undeniable regional roots.

Brave New World suffered its first hiccup when Scott, our baby-faced drummer, announced that he was leaving the band.

“My mom says I gotta quit,” he informed us one day after rehearsal, all hangdog. It appears that his parents came to disapprove of him spending so much time with this crew of older, weed-blazing dudes. Scott was a beast of a drummer with great time, solid technique, and that core rock and roll spirit that can’t be taught. We were gutted to see him go and took him at his word that his killjoy mother had indeed vetoed the endeavor, though it occurs to me now that he may have quit our band in order to play with much cooler kids his own age: After all, he formed the band Karp that exact same year, and they went on to do very great things.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long to line up a new percussionist. Not only was Bill a gifted songwriter, he was also a natural facilitator who seemed to know everyone in town. He soon introduced us to Glen, who, at the wizened age of thirty, seemed positively ancient. Glen was married with a kid and worked at the local YMCA, but he had also played in loads of Top 40 bar bands and had his shit down. He was very much a creature of the 80’s and could have won a Ric Ocasek lookalike contest—complete with well-coiffed black mullet—but the guy was a pro. He’d show up 30 minutes early for every rehearsal, unload his cases from his Toyota hatchback, set up his kit, tune it, and be ready to go. He didn’t drink booze or smoke weed but played the drums with the precision of a studio guy. He had a kind of tippity-tappity Steward Copeland feel— and while he never attacked the skins with the raw, animal vigor that Scott brought—he made up for it with pure, honed technique. For us he was a major score, though it was also clear from the outset that he was stoked to be part of an original project after so many years of banging out the same tired cover tunes to bored drunks.

Glen learned our set in the course of a week, bringing a kind of professional verve and energy that leveled up the band. I had taken to the bass as well and almost regretted the fact that I had spent so many years trying to figure out six skinny strings, when four big ones seemed to be much more to my liking. Sure, I played with a pick, but the bass lines came easy, and the instrument just felt right in my hands. By now the cramping palm and shaky fingers that used to plague me were a thing of the past. Everything was just flowing; we were now hitting our stride.  

We decided that it was time to record a demo, and soon found ourselves in the outbuilding of a property on the edge of town laying down tracks on a TASCAM eight-track. It was wintertime and as soggy as you’d expect. Our “studio” was heated by a wood burning stove, and I remember going over the parts of each song on my bass while kindling crackled and the smell of smoke filled the air. This was such a  Northwest way to record a record.

The demo turned out pretty good, all things considered. I had never recorded music before and was super nervous doing it, flubbing my part on more than one occasion and having to “punch in” on the track, something these kids who have only laid down parts on digital technology will never appreciate. It was terrific, of course, to have a physical cassette to play for family and other friends. Suddenly, it seemed, I was in a real band.

This idea was cemented when, driving through town one day, I tuned into the Evergreen State College radio station, KAOS. A friend of the band hosted a show and was playing our song “Godforsaken Restaurant,” a kind of Sonic Youth-y jam that sounded a bit different from the more groove-oriented stuff we were doing at the time. Bill, who wrote the song, claimed that Unwound’s Vern Rumsey had shown him the riff and said he could have it. It was the closest thing Brave New World ever had to a single, and to hear it over the airways—even just a little college station—made my heart soar. People who grew up with the internet will never understand that nothing beforehand ever saw the light of day without the approval of a gatekeeper, however low-level. Your work could only be publicly accessed through someone else’s stamp.

While our demo never got much further than a handful of single plays on KAOS, I do recall it getting a bit of love one night at the North Shore Surf Club. Beat Happening was opening for the Melvins. Between sets, I walked up to Calvin Johnson and handed him the cassette. He accepted it, nodded, strolled straight to the sound board, put the tape in, and pressed play. For the next thirty minutes or so our demo blasted out to a packed club of sweaty Melvins fans, which thrilled me to no end. Despite Calvin’s reputation for too-cool-for-school aloofness, this was an act of pure punk rock egalitarianism, for which he still has my gratitude. 

1990 dissolved into 1991, and we spent most of that winter playing house parties. We rehearsed two to three times a week to where the songs were second nature, and would sometimes end the practice by swapping instruments and attempting to go back through the set that way. After being dressed down and written up for eating a spare meatball, I quit Sizzler and got a job washing more dishes at the Harborside Restaurant in the old Yardbirds store. I was also doing theater, performing in a couple of plays with a company downtown. Playing in a band also began to attract the attention of girls, and soon I was dating a willowy, steely-eyed beauty who could often be found at 809. Bill Kozlowski introduced us, of course, because he was friends with everyone.

Looking back, I don’t know where I found the time to do it all. I suppose this is a function of youth, where your innate energy just pushes you through, no questions asked. But part of me also believes that the music itself played a role: rock and roll can act as a kind of fuel, because what is it but pure energy in sonic form?  

It’s all a vodka and weed-soaked time warped blur, but I still remember those shows, those house parties, standing up there, in front of my massive bass cabinet, digging into those lines and settling into that beat, sweating and jumping and moving in time, snapping my head and flapping my bangs, while the rest of the room did the same. I remember the salt on my tongue and blistered fingers, losing myself in the music and blossoming heat. Losing myself in oblivion. Losing myself in youth.  

As the weather warmed up, our band was touched with a second wind. Bill and Markus began collaborating on songs, and a new demo was in the works. The work was moving in a dreamy, shoegaze direction; it all seemed so natural and true, and a couple of out-of-town shows in Bellingham just cemented this, as our new material was the most enthusiastically-received. It only occurred to me then that we were a band in its infancy.

But life has a way of getting in the way of life, and by May there were plans to escape Oly. Micah had grown up in Seattle and was keen to get back in the mix of the city to get married and start a proper career. Markus too wanted to head north, as did I. That year I had spent at Cornish was eating a hole in my gut, and as fulfilling as Oly was, it was still my hometown, and at the age of twenty the only thing I could think of was getting out.

Plus, the music scene was hopping in Sea-town, yeah? Surely we could just take our act up I-5 and expect bigger and better things? .

Bill planned to stay in Oly a while longer but could commute for shows, while drummer Glen had a wife and kid. Moving for him was out of the question. So for a while we just didn’t tell him.

Our second to last show was in May of ’91, at the Grandpa Cosmos Festival at Evergreen. This was a springtime event where pretty much the whole campus dropped acid for three days and rocked out to music. We managed to get booked with a whole slate of bands, including headliners Skin Yard, of whom I counted myself a pretty big fan.

It was a festival gig however, and we were slated early, while most of the kids were out in the woods having deep conversations with the Douglas Firs. The sound was spectacular, though, and we played on that big stage with a celestial groove, blasting out our set (complete with new, atmospheric material) like we were on the main stage of Glastonbury. We walked off that platform confident in the fact that we were a real fucking band, despite the fact that we were to break up just a couple of weeks later.

We played one final gig at 809, and while we planned to keep Brave New World alive in Seattle, it never happened. Yes, Markus, Micah, and I all moved there and continued to play music in different forms, but Bill went his own way, and Glen—who took our move as a deep betrayal—faded away into the mists of memory.

But let’s be honest: Brave New World would have never survived a month in Seattle. It could have only blossomed and thrived in the Oly of the time, a town that offered up a kind of purity. There was just a sweet innocence to the place that managed to shine through the clouds and rain that otherwise smothered the region in that sad blanket. Beat Happening embodied this purely, but this sense of possibility rubbed off on every band to percolate there, even the heavier outfits like Unwound and Karp.

I still think about the Olympia of 1990, every day, strolling those streets, tasting the salt and mud, listening to the plaintive squawk of the seagulls as I duck into the Spar, the Smithfield Café or browse the records at Positively 4^th Street. I can smell the burnt beans from the roasters at Batdorf and Bronson, the sawdust of Yardbirds, or the decades of popcorn baked into the velvety walls of the Capitol Theater; I make out the cruisers opening up their hotrods down the strips of State and 4th on summer nights, and feel the seismic vibrations of rock bands practicing in houses that could do with a bit of paint or fresh timber to reinforce their rotting, sagging frames.

Perhaps I idealize this version of Oly and the band that goes with it, pining for these lost days as I grow older and feel my own body, along with creative verve, break down. That abbreviated year I spent playing with Brave New World was life at its sweetest and most frenetic, and while I don’t wish to return the poverty and uncertainty of those days, I wouldn’t mind the odd taste of its feverish splendor.

After all, not all of us lived long enough to look back with a tear-stained eye. Scott Jernigan died in a boating accident in 2003. I remember popping into his memorial in Seattle—a well attended affair at the old Off Ramp—but I didn’t recognize a single soul. Scott went on to rock the bones of so many in Karp after his very brief stint in Brave New World, so it’s no wonder they showed up en masse. As I strolled through the club, I looked to his mourning friends and fans with a mixture of pride and sadness, but in the end I couldn’t share in the memory of any but my own. After all, I never managed to see Karp, which remains one of my biggest rock regrets to this day.

Bill Kozlowski didn’t make it much longer. I had a drink with him at the Rendezvous shortly after Scott died. He was living in Juneau, Alaska with his wife, where he ran his own business and still played music. I was trying to figure out what to do with Act Two of my own life at the time, and Bill attempted to talk me into moving up north and joining his band. He offered me a place to stay and even part-time work. I seriously considered it, but instead ended up blasting off to Korea and never looking back. Bill died a year later of complications from hemophilia, though I didn’t learn of it until a long time after the fact.

Oly has changed, they say. I’m told it’s now overrun with junkies and tweakers. The Smithfield is long gone, as is The Spar, along with most of the record stores. Mike Dees from Fitz is dead, as is Vern Rumsey. The director of the theater I acted at got hard #MeToo’d and my old downtown friends have since dropped off social media and seem uninterested in keeping contact. And despite the fact that I grew up in the area, I really feel no reason to ever go back. After all, haven’t I already spent enough time there?

Perhaps that’s why I’m writing this. Perhaps by telling the story of my Oly band, I’m finally exorcising myself of the place, since, despite it being such a wellspring of life, I now mostly associate the place with death.

Still, I am reminded of the good. In 2002 I was living in LA and saw that The Tight Bros from Way Back When were playing Spaceland in Silverlake, so of course I went. The Tight Bros were a blistering rock and roll band fronted by Jarred Warren, who also played in Karp, Big Business, and still helms the bass for the Melvins. I had actually done some theater with Jarred in Oly when he was a kid, so I guess I kind of knew him. You know, from way back when.

After the show—which was pure hi-octane rock goodness—Jarred came up to me.

“Chris Tharp!” he shouted, wrapping me in a sweaty hug. “What are you doing here?”

I went on to sputter out my stock answer of why I was spinning my wheels in LA. He heard me out before letting me in on a confession:

“Dude, do you know that Brave New World was the first live band I ever saw?”

He went on to explain how Scott invited him to come out to a New Year’s Eve Party at 809 House where we played with The Noses. Jarred was just a fifteen-year-old kid who had never seen real bands before, and the whole experience left him floored.

“I was blown away,” he said. “I knew right then and there that that was what I wanted to do.”

“No shit?” I said.

“No shit,” he replied.

I walked home that night through the hiss of LA traffic, homesick for Oly in a way that would only continue boomerang over the years. Still, I puffed with pride, satisfied in the knowledge that something that I was part of had managed to pollinate greater forces of rock and roll. If I can only make the difference in one child’s life….

Recently I caught up with Micah and Markus, who are both in Seattle and thriving. We sat back and listened to a couple of those songs from the demo recorded next to the woodstove, and they didn’t sound half bad. In fact, they’ve done nothing but age well, and still remain the best music recordings I’ve been a part of.

I mean, Brave New World was an actual band playing original music in a place where bands were cultivated and loved. We weren’t important. We didn’t make a splash. We were just one tiny shoot on the massive tree that is Northwest music, and that’s worth something, as far as I’m concerned. Like my youth, I don’t expect it to return, but at fifty I think I’m allowed to look back and savor the moment, because it was sweet as fuck. 

And if anyone ever asks you to play bass for their band?

Say yes. It ain’t that hard.