Pictures by Brittne Lunniss
Once I walked into the Vera Mission on a wet Sunday morning, I noticed musicians whose work I’ve adopted for years—Shaina Shepherd, Chris Martin of Kinski, Ben Verellen of Helms Alee, Bree McKenna of Tacocat, Shaun Crawford of Acid Tongue… However they weren’t onstage. They regarded as sleepy as I felt, sitting in folding chairs on the showroom flooring below the membership’s overhead fluorescent lights.
It was barely 9 a.m. on October 27, simply days earlier than Halloween—and, even scarier, the 2024 Presidential Election—and 20 musicians from across the Pacific Northwest have been coming collectively to kick off Rock Lottery 13.
Rock Lottery works like this: Twenty musicians are break up into 4 bands of 5 by pulling names out of a hat. The brand new teams are given a bag of snacks, entry to a apply area, and the directive to arrange not less than three songs to be carried out 12 hours later in entrance of a stay viewers. (They’re allowed one cowl music—the organizers aren’t monsters.) The primary Rock Lottery was hosted by the Good/Dangerous Artwork Collective in Denton, Texas, in 1997. Since then, dozens of installments—some official, some not a lot—have been hosted all around the nation in Denton, Seattle, Brooklyn, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Louisville, and past. Seattle’s final Rock Lottery was on the Crocodile on January 25, 2020. The Earlier than Instances.
My espresso hadn’t but kicked in when Rock Lottery cofounder Chris Weber stepped onto Vera’s stage and signaled with the wave of a hat that it was time to start. “The Rock Lottery hat isn’t flawed,” he says, and it’s as legendary because the venture itself. The worn-out straw cowboy quantity is adorned with feathers, ribbon, and a small unidentifiable animal cranium (actual? Not actual? Who can say?), and it has been round for so long as Rock Lottery itself. It’s held greater than 1,000 names—together with Mike Watt, Father John Misty, Reggie Watts, and members of Psychedelic Furs, the Homicide Metropolis Devils, the Roots, They May Be Giants, Harvey Hazard, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs—and spawned greater than 200 bands. It was additionally as soon as eaten by a canine someday within the 2000s, however was fastened proper up with some emergency crafting. (The canine, I’m informed, was additionally nice.)
The drummers are the primary names plucked from the hat—each band will get one percussionist, who then attracts their bandmates’ names. Faustine Hudson of the Maldives was referred to as as much as the stage, adopted by Dave Abramson of Diminished Males, Justin R. Cruz Gallego (aka J.R.C.G.), and Nicholas Tazza of Algernon Cadwallader. Applause scattered across the room as every identify was introduced, and I tried to scribble some notes regardless of having left my hand-eye coordination again in mattress.
It’s not that I used to be protecting Rock Lottery reluctantly. The alternative, truly. I embraced the chance for a enjoyable distraction and regarded it a straightforward task. I’d go hang around with some cool bands, take notes all through the day, pull collectively some type of gentle entertaining hour-by-hour breakdown of how Rock Lottery works behind the scenes, and accumulate my accolades for a job nicely carried out.
And I wanted a straightforward win. The earlier 10 months had kicked my ass. Greater than kicked it. The universe buckled me right into a seat on the Scrambler, cranked it as much as excessive, and walked away. In January, my mother-in-law discovered her most cancers had come again, and she or he started the lengthy, emotional, mindfucking strategy of dying. My husband, her son, spent the primary half of the yr flying backwards and forwards from our place in Seattle to her house in Alabama for weeks at a time. I’d go to once I might, when it was applicable. After she died in March, and after my husband labored one other couple of months to wash out her home, we each landed again in Seattle, lastly in the identical state once more, prepared to ascertain some semblance of stability. Or not less than handle our grief by consuming Kinder Joyful Hippo cookies (her favourite) and distracting ourselves with Eurovision.
Simply as summer time arrived, The Stranger, the place I’ve labored full-time since 2022, doing a job I moved throughout the nation for, was offered. Such a state of affairs is all the time rife with upheaval, even in the very best circumstances. Are we gonna get shut down? Am I about to lose my job? I moved right here for this job—what the fuck am I gonna do? The following month, with my job nonetheless intact however feeling precarious, my husband and I have been informed our landlord was going to promote the home. We had three months to discover a new place.
They are saying the 5 most worrying life occasions are demise, divorce, shifting, main sickness, and job loss. I informed my husband if he divorced me, I’d kill him.
On that Sunday, Rock Lottery Sunday, I wanted to be in search of a home, I wanted to be lining up movers, and I wanted to be packing. Fuck, I wanted to be grieving. However there was work to do. I had a brand new boss to attempt to impress and an impending election to attempt to ignore. So after the bands have been shaped, I hopped within the automobile with members of Band #2, that includes Dave Abramson, Ben Verellen, Numbers Energy, Gabe Corridor-Rodrigues, and William Cremin, and we headed to Verellen’s house studio in Greenwood.
In his heavy rock trio Helms Alee, Verellen makes use of his powerhouse vocals to sing/shout about legendary sea creatures and doom whereas delivering a wall of guitar noise that may rattle the photo voltaic system. Stranger music critic Dave Segal as soon as mentioned Abamson’s band, the Diminished Males, excel at “eerie, ominous jazz rock that evokes myriad noirish cinematic eventualities” and infrequently refers to them as “one in every of Seattle’s greatest bands.” The pairing is sensible. The hat isn’t flawed.
However Floral Tattoo play explosive, symphonic pop and make the most of all the pieces from lap metal guitar and singing noticed to synthesizers and a euphonium on their newest launch, The Circus Egotistica; or, How I Spent Most of my Life as a Misplaced Trigger. In Cumulus, Cremin makes vibrant energy pop with Alexandra Lockhart, and it’s a must-hear for followers of Rilo Kiley and Waxahatchee, and Corridor-Rodrigues’s band Foleada play conventional Brazilian forró. I had little question they might write a coherent music. They’re professionals. However three songs? In 12 hours? Lol, okay.
“Anybody bought some riffs they’ve been chipping away at that their different band rejected?” asks Abramson.
Energy began to play some model of a C right into a D minor and everybody agreed it was fascinating sufficient to discover. As Energy twirled on it for a bit longer, the others politely waited their flip so as to add their very own aptitude. One collection of chords was one other after which one other, and abruptly, a music. After about an hour, they’d produced a wistful three-and-a-half-minute, mid-tempo indie rock tune that seemed like one thing you’d hearken to in 1994 whereas driving down an extended freeway fascinated by somebody you don’t need to be fascinated by.
The band began hitting their stride simply earlier than midday as they started work on their second music. Corridor-Rodrigues took the lead along with his Petosa accordion, and it nearly instantly began to sound just like the soundtrack to a climactic scene in a silent film a couple of murderous tycoon who’s haunting a younger couple on their honeymoon at an Italian villa within the early 1900s.
Corridor-Rodrigues pushed and pulled the accordion quicker as Energy added in some guitar, letting it construct with the identical power as a sluggish however regular rising storm. After just a few bars of simply accordion and guitar, Abramson began in with a waltzy beat whereas Verellen watched, ready for his cue. As soon as Abramson switched to dramatic, drawn-out cymbal crashes, Verellen and Abramson exchanged grins, and, clearly vibing off the music, the bass and drums joined forces to hit the climax the place, within the movie (if there have been a movie), we might see the villain, the knife, the scream, the blood.
“That’s bought some John Carpenter Halloween vibes!” Abramson exclaims because the music fades out.
All of them agree it could possibly be quicker, and, the subsequent time round, Cremin noodles with the keyboard, which introduces a sci-fi aspect. The temper shifts from an Italian villa to an alien-invaded Western within the Nineteen Forties, and I began to recall Edgar Allan Poe tales in my head. Halloween was simply days away, in spite of everything.
So usually, seeing how the sausage will get made shatters the phantasm. When a magician reveals his secret, he turns into nothing greater than a median dude with loads of time on his fingers and the endurance to good sly maneuvers.
However witnessing artwork being made? It feels such as you’re watching another person’s dream. The room fills with sounds, and the musicians can’t clarify how the notes come to them. They simply do. There’s air. There’s quiet. Then there may be music. The most effective I can inform, invisible sounds are picked up by electrical impulses of the mind, which sign the neurotransmitters to let the receptors know that they should inform the physique, the fingers, the fingers, the ft that these are the notes to play, the phrases to sing, or the beat to construct so as to categorical precisely what must be mentioned, must be heard, and must be felt on this very second. That’s how brains work, proper? It’s actual fucking magic! At the least to me, a nonmusician. And that’s not for lack of making an attempt—I’ve performed clarinet, piano, and bass guitar, however my mind can’t seize the invisible sounds. My neurotransmitters are busted. My physique performs the message all flawed when it’s obtained. So as an alternative, I’ve spent a lot of my 25-year profession writing about music—I’ve been to 1000’s of live shows, interviewed a whole lot of musicians, and have even been fortunate sufficient to be within the room whereas just a few data have been being recorded.
However Rock Lottery was completely different. The songs didn’t exist once I awoke that morning. Neither did the bands. And attending to see one thing come from actually nothing in any respect with a little bit little bit of magic and loads of weak creativity and group has reframed every bit of music I’ve listened to as much as that time and every bit of music I’ve listened to since. I had taken music as a right. It has all the time been there; I’ve all the time beloved a lot of it, however I ended fascinated by and appreciating the place it got here from.
Throughout the town, three extra bands have been doing what Band #2, later named Diatoms, have been doing in Greenwood.
At Black Lodge, the band who finally referred to as themselves Jenny (greatest band identify, by the best way)—composed of Bree McKenna, Shaun Crawford, Sébastien Deramat, J.R.C.G., and Shaina Shepherd—have been nailing a scorching rendition of “Season of the Witch.” In Vera’s showroom, Actually Actually I Love You had simply shaped—together with members Faustine Hudson, Liv Victorino, Michael Hamm, Rebecca Gutterman, and Thomas Arndt—and have been flirting with world music and jam-band vibes and getting wild with the percussion. That they had three drummers going without delay! Upstairs, the band who named themselves Minus One, that includes Nicholas Tazza and Chris Martin of rock-forward acts Algernon Cadwallader and Kinski, and Brad Loving of digital venture Reunion Island, lucked right into a band with Anu Batbaatar of Zje Mongol. Batbaatar performs the horsehead fiddle field and does Mongolian throat singing, and the fellows have been clever to let her take the lead whereas they crafted their choices round her distinctive (to Seattle, anyway) skills. The top consequence felt like watching a band from one other planet current their music to us. The Rock Lottery hat isn’t flawed, certainly.
Now, months later, The Stranger remains to be standing, and I nonetheless have my job. My husband and I discovered a cute home to hire in Greenwood and moved in over Thanksgiving weekend. I consider my mother-in-law each day, however I’ve gotten fairly good with grief. A few of my favourite individuals are useless.
I can’t keep in mind a lot in regards to the completed songs I heard that night time throughout the grand finale live performance. However I do keep in mind how they made me really feel. I keep in mind considering, “Why isn’t Shaina Shepherd as well-known as Brittany Howard?” “Is how I really feel watching Shaun Crawford shred the guitar proper now the identical as how unsuspecting music followers felt the primary time they noticed Hendrix?” “How have I by no means heard of a horsehead field fiddle?” And “How has a band by no means thought to name themselves Jenny earlier than?”
Had I stayed house that October morning, had I sunk into my urge to cover away, I’d’ve missed my likelihood to witness all of it. To see magic with my very own eyes. Tacky? Certain. Embarrassingly earnest? Name it what you need. However days after Rock Lottery’s return to Seattle, Trump received the presidency. A bullshit ending to a bullshit yr. However even within the chance of extra darkish days forward, I’m going to attempt my damnedest to remain open to the chance that one thing good is all the time someplace on the market, too. And once I begin to doubt it, I’ll simply crank up my favourite songs and be reminded of their magic.
