Our music in pictures, from brass bands to grunge

Author and historian Peter Blecha's new photo-essay book, "Music in Washington: Seattle and Beyond" (Arcadia Publishing, $19.99), begins in a time we don't know much about and ends in an era that we thought we knew everything about.

"I could have done just a Northwest rock book, and in my mind, I was torn about that," says Blecha, a former senior curator at Experience Music Project and occasional contributor to The Seattle Times. Blecha grew up in Seattle's North End at a time when Pat O'Day promoted local music on KJR-AM.

"Few people care about the bands of the 1880s or the 1910s, and a lot of people care about Northwest rock. But I thought this was the one good chance to do the broad sweep. I've made the point so many times in essays and in the exhibits I did at EMP that music is so much deeper here than just grunge or 'Louie Louie' or The Wailers or The Ventures. "So I grabbed this opportunity to establish once and for all — in this case, visually — that we had a really neat music history here."

The chronology begins with obscure brass and string bands entertaining mill workers and prospectors in the early days of statehood. There was neither chance nor expectation of the music reaching beyond their local communities. The arc ends with grunge, which similarly existed to create music for a community — in this case, an underground rock scene — with no goal toward recognition or reward.

"For me, the clincher of the whole story is that we finally hit it big with the grunge scene," Blecha says. "It became the dominant musical movement of an entire decade. Global recognition came to many of our bands, as well as our best nightclubs, photographers and poster designers.

"And it began with no promise that our best bands would do anything more than what the Heats or the Cowboys did before them, which was become local stars who made their living through jobs like washing dishes."

"Music in Washington: Seattle and Beyond" is part of Arcadia Publishing's "Images of America" series. Founded in New Hampshire in 1993, Arcadia has published more than 4,000 titles on neighborhood, city and regional history, including last year's "Vanishing Seattle" and "Hydroplane Racing in Seattle."

Most of the book's more than 200 images are from Blecha's own personal collection — promotional photos, event posters, rare records and other artifacts and ephemera. Some photos are unearthed from the basement boxes of band members. Five Northwest photographers also contributed to the project, including Gino Rossi, who is credited with the cover photo of an early Paul Revere and the Raiders concert at Seattle Center.

Bands like the Raiders, who hailed from Portland, brought about the term "Sea-Port Beat" and "The Original Northwest Sound" to try to define Northwest rock to the rest of the country. Many people think of that sound as "Louie Louie," Blecha says, but it was more than that.

"Any region that had a decent college town and dancing scene took old or current R&B songs and did them in white-boy, garage-band style," he says. "But the difference with Northwest bands, more so than in other regions of the country, is that they locked into the instrumental."

The Ventures, the Frantics, the Dynamics, the Viceroys, the Wailers and even the Raiders all started or thrived with instrumentals. The Northwest sound solidified around the saxophone and electric keyboard — the same instruments that defined jazz and R&B.

"That's what the kids liked," Blecha says, "because it was slightly distasteful to be honking your saxophone or riding your organ in a suggestive way."

Stuart Eskenazi: 206-464-2293 or seskenazi@seattletimes.com