Love Battery, Truly, and Rusty Willoughby play the Columbia City Theater on Friday, November 23. $6 advance, $8 at the door. Show at 9pm.

Back in the 1990s, while the media was busy straitjacketing this town in frayed flannel and embracing the arena-ready yarl, a slew of great bands dwelt in the periphery. Not all of them fit neatly into the Grunge pigeonhole, but they accumulated loyal followings, bashing away in local clubs and in some cases even garnering major label attention before imploding or getting dumped by those same attention-deficient majors.

Friday sees three outfits from that era resurface at Columbia City Theater. For Seattleites in the right age bracket, it’ll provide a serious nostalgia trip. For everyone else, it’ll provide a window into how much great rock and roll fell through the cracks during those halcyon days.

The night’s headliners, Love Battery, stood near the top of the heap at Sub Pop during the label’s formative years. Lead singer/guitarist Ron Nine’s and guitarist Kevin Whitworth’s dueling string work favored delay, echo, and trippy flourishes as much as overdriven volume, and that psychedelic bent set them apart from their peers. But like a lot of great bands at the time, Love Battery wasn’t as easily-marketable to a fickle public as Pearl Jam (or Nirvana, for that matter), and in the pre-internet days that meant the kiss of death despite attention from a major label (in this case, PolyGram Records subsidiary Atlas). Continue reading Unsung Seattle Rock Heroes Play Columbia City on Black Friday →