Recent Stories with tag alt-country

It's a drizzly Friday night, April 16, and Exene Cervenka--singer for L.A. punk icons X, solo performer, artist, and poet--is playing an acoustic set at the Queen Anne Easy Street Records to an excited crowd.

The store aisles are jammed with everyone from eight-year-olds to AARP-eligible warhorse punks, and they all devour Cervenka's mostly new material from her first solo record proper in sixteen years, Somewhere Gone. She sings her songs in a plaintive voice that sounds like an Appalachian mountain woman, and provides ragged-but-right accompaniment to herself on acoustic guitar. With her music and offhandedly humorous between-song anecdotes bolstered by the genial vibe (and the smuggled-in cans of Rainier circulating amongst audience members), one of punk rock's most influential and enduring figures has the whole room eating out of her hand.

Cervenka finishes her set and begins meeting, greeting, and signing autographs for fans. Much love is thrown her way, and she seems to genuinely cherish and appreciate it. She's done this free in-store for them on her dime, and she'll continue touring independent record stores in the same gypsy fashion for the next several days to promote National Record Store Day and independent music merchants in general. The phrase "changed my life" is uttered more than once by people in the line, and I find out from Cervenka's assistant Andrea that one admirer--a tall, sleepy-eyed guy in a baseball cap--plans on having the singer design a tattoo for him.

I bump into Exene's human canvas near the doorway as he smokes a cigarette outside. He's stoked, he tells me, despite the fact that he's nursing four broken ribs and has yet to feel the morphine intended to block his pain. "Saved damn near my whole arm for this," he says as he hooks one hand underneath his T-shirt sleeve to show me the bare space intended for the body art. "I'm gonna get Rick Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos to do the other arm," he adds, beaming.

Once the crowd drifts away Exene pulls out paper and a Sharpie and begins sketching an elaborate pattern that looks like punked-up Maori adornment. She hands the drawing to her fan/tattoo canvas upon completion and imparts pointers on how to have the tattoo artist finish the work. Then she emerges from behind the counter. We can do the interview in the back, she tells me as we head to the store's rear and past the "Employees Only" door....

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"I've actually never been to Bumbershoot," said Kristen Ward, somewhat matter-of-factly, sitting over mid-day drinks at the Matador in Ballard earlier this week. It was a somewhat surprising admission, considering that her performance this Saturday at noon—the first musical performance of the entire festival, as it happens—is her second appearance at Bumbershoot. "Even after I played last time, I just left. I had to go to work, or whatever I was doing. So, yeah. This is my second time going, but just because I'm playing."

In Ward's case, it all makes sense: Despite calling Seattle home since 2001 (she's lived in Ballard for the last five years), she's still more country than city, and just plain doesn't like being stuck in such a big crowd, though she relishes the chance to play for them. Raised in Eastern Washington, she prefers getting out of town on her days off, up to the Skagit Valley or the like, to sitting around cafes or bars, and even mentions some vague plans involving a vintage Airstream...

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