Remembering Chop Suey, and January 20
On Tuesday, January 20, Chop Suey is hosting the “Budtender’s Ball,” with Fly Moon Royalty and Fresh Espresso. It’s going to be the last show in that space as Chop Suey. When I found out that that day, in particular, would be the last Chop Suey show, all kinds of memories came flooding back. Please forgive the navel-gazing, I don’t engage in it much.
Sometime around Thanksgiving of 2008, I had finally found the nerve to e-mail Chop Suey’s then-talent buyer Pete Greenberg about hosting a show in the space. He and I run in the same circles and were friendly for several years before, but I wasn’t sure about what putting on a show would entail. I was going to be turning 30 the following January. I think I was probably more than a little curious and possibly somewhat jealous of the people who were connected enough to have bands they like play shows for their birthday. Some close friends gave me enough encouragement to e-mail Pete and ask if they’d have room on their calendar for me to try booking my first show. He e-mailed me back shortly after that and said “Let’s do it!” and offered me a selection of weeknight days that were yet to be booked.
I chose January 20, a Tuesday night, because it happened to be the same week as my birthday. On my actual birthday, I remember then-rising pop star Katy Perry playing a club show at the Showbox before her ascension to world domination. It also happened to be Inauguration Day, the day Barack Obama was sworn in to be President. Part of me also wanted to exorcise a particular memory.
I was in Chop Suey on election night 2004. It was a Stranger-sponsored election party that was packed way beyond capacity, and one of the most memorable moments of my life at the time because I was packed in a tight room with several hundred of my new closest friends and we watched, and mourned, George W. Bush’s reelection live. As a poli-sci major in college, I was pleasantly surprised to be able to talk about election returns and voting precincts in Ohio and Florida with people in the bar line. There was a cautious optimism in the room that slowly deflated after one state after another went red. This was the last presidential election we had to make it through before Nate Silver took away 99% of the uncertainty. America just wasn’t ready for a John Kerry presidency and Chop Suey literally ran out of booze that night.
In late 2008, early 2009, the mood of the nation (or at least my liberal Seattle circles) was much different because it would (we hope) be a long time before there would be another “President Bush.”
When putting together the show, I was so naive. I was pleasantly surprised that four of my favorite local bands agreed to play the show. The lineup was Ed Wang, a power pop band fronted by my friend Aaron Brown; Benjamin Bear, a two-piece band that once bribed me to come to their show and featuring Mychal Cohen, who went on to start The Weather (formerly Campfire OK), Friday Mile, a popular indie at the time featuring some of my very favorite people; and H is for Hellgate, another excellent local band that features Jamie Aaron, one of the finest guitarists in this town and whose newest project Jamie Aaron Aux unsurprisingly rules. Getting Friday Mile on board required a phone call with their booking agent at the time Kevin Sur, the man now behind Doe Bay Fest, Timber! Fest, and unquestionably the nicest person in Seattle. I was incredibly nervous, never having dealt with a professional booking agent, but to get Friday Mile to play, I readily agreed to his (quite reasonable!) requests that the show be billed as an Inaugural Celebration (not Chris Burlingame’s birthday, and thank @TheTweetOfGod for that) and that another band headline. No problem! Friday Mile was also quite wonderful about getting the posters printed out and hung up on telephone poles in Ballard and on Capitol Hill.
I got an amazing lineup, one where everything fell into place, and with the amazing Kiku Hughes making the cool poster, and I used the space I had on Three Imaginary Girls to promote the show and feature every band as much as I could. I was still a bundle of nerves until show time. I was terrified that I would look like a fool with four of favorite bands and some good friends playing to a mostly-empty room with just me and the other bands. Every possible “worst-case scenario” had to have passed through my head in the ensuing weeks. Getting people out on a Tuesday night to see local bands (even great bands) has never been easy in Seattle. I had gotten a handful of text messages from friends who said something like “We’d love to be there but it’s a Tuesday night.” I was also painfully aware of another blogger who put on a celebration in 2008 to only have his headlining band breakup two weeks before the show (though that story had a very happy ending).
Nothing like that happened, and instead Chop Suey was packed. Incredibly, it was full of some friends but mostly people I had never met and everyone was in a good mood. It wasn’t packed like the election night party four years earlier, but several hundred people filled into the club, definitely exceeding any expectation I had and way more people than you could expect to see checking out great local bands on a Tuesday night. All the bands killed and people I didn’t know came up to me to congratulate me on putting together such a great bill.
What I remember wasn’t so much that I got to put on a great show in a cool space. I had plenty of other great memories inside of Chop Suey: being part of Three Imaginary Girls’ “Exile in {Imaginary} Girlville” night where Liz Phair’s perfect debut album was covered beginning to end with 9 local bands each playing two songs, or the Raincoats’ first-ever Seattle show in 2012, or countless others. It’s been a space where I’ve seen James Murphy spin records (with the Juan MacLean) to a mostly empty room, Lydia Lunch’s spoken word, Charli XCX and La Roux’s first Seattle shows (the latter was, IIRC, on a night where the temperature hit somewhere around 110 earlier in the day), MGMT before they were festival headliners, and lots and lots of hip hop. The calendar of Chop Suey usually had shows booked an average of about 30 nights a month and were only very rarely closed.
What I’ll miss about Chop Suey was that it was a place where you could see a local band playing its first show, some hyped band on its first US tour, bass-heavy electronic music, a drag show, comedy from Laff Hole, and hip hop in a typical week. I don’t think there was a club that consistently brought such a diverse schedule over its decade-plus run. Though it had a handful of talent-buyers over its time (all of whom were very nice to me), it brought a diverse calendar to Capitol Hill, and it often took a lot of chances on booking shows that they had no idea if they would work or not (and often they didn’t). At the Raincoats’ show, I remember talking to Chop Suey’s then-newly instated talent buyer Devin Floyd, I think that was the night we met, knowing each other only through social media previously. The night was his first big success and sold out show at the club, but he wanted to talk about all of the unheralded local bands he wanted to champion, many of whom weren’t yet on my radar at the time. One was M. Women, who I saw for the first time opening that show for the Raincoats.
Without knowing much about the new owners, beyond that they will have to pay about $13,000 a month in rent to operate a music venue in that space, and though it is said to still be a live music venue (it was a live music venue, the Breakroom, before Chop Suey was there), it will be tough to imagine a new club that will take as many risks in booking as Chop Suey did, especially on a personal level like in my case (and though I’ve booked two subsequent shows, at Columbia City Theater and the High Dive — Thanks, Kevin! — I’ll likely never book another music show again). But the memories from the space at 14th and Madison are permanent and irreplaceable.
