Jeff Kirby • Musician

In which I spend my twenties desperately wishing I was in Fugazi

Spend enough time listening to albums and going to concerts and eventually you’ll think you’re capable of making music yourself. If you’re lucky enough to grow up someplace with a positive DIY scene, you’ll have a better chance of sticking through the growing pains and actually figuring out how to make sounds people want to listen to. I stuck with it long enough to have emerged into something resembling a competent musician, but the jury’s still out on whether anyone really wanted to listen to it.

I started teaching myself guitar chords while I sat on the couch and watched TV in high school, and by freshman year of college I was writing cringeworthy emo songs. The next year I joined a band as the bass player and started playing shows around Bellingham, WA, saw the Fugazi documentary Instrument, and decided that I wanted their band lives and ethos to be my own. Still, just in case I didn’t become a rock and roll demigod, I got a college degree when I wasn’t being soaked in beer performing in basements and bars. After moving to Seattle, I tried my best to tightrope the precarious situation of performing music in a city where I also actively criticized it for a popular alt-weekly. My bands played regularly, and though the intention was always to get them on the road, it proved exceptionally difficult to just to get them out of the driveway. In my case, “the driveway” was regularly playing in a clown-themed dive bar at 1am on a Wednesday night. We were exceptionally good at performing for a crowd of five people. You should have been there! At virtually every one of these shows, a very drunk person in the bar thought my band was the hottest sound since the Beatles hit Hamburg. Somehow, improbably, these new superfans never returned to see us play again.

I never got to be in Fugazi. I did get to play in a band with one of my high school music idols though, and when he introduced himself to my then-girlfriend (now wife) by saying, “I’m in a band with Jeff,” she responded, “Oh yeah, your band f***ing sucks.”

One of the nice things about having chosen music as your creative outlet during your formative years is that a band recording is finished; it’s not a story in a word document you can obsess over and nitpick for infinity. It exists as it was created in the moment, and it is what it is. Good or bad, the songs I wrote tell the stories of the life I was living at that time; I’m glad I still like the stories that I told. Writing lyrics was the first legitimate application I found for the creative writing skills I learned in school, and I take a lot of pride in those words, even if I was usually howling them into an empty bar.

Rad Touch

This band started as sort of a joke with two guys I delivered pizza with in the mid-2000s. Originally, we wanted to start a “party hardcore” band with parts that were simple enough to play at house parties and had songs about the X-Men and dogs wearing sunglasses. Somehow, the joke got serious and turned into the longest-running and most significant of any of my musical projects. The album we took several years to make and finished in 2011, Creative Nonfiction, is the most comprehensive musical statement I ever created. As we described the album in a never-used press statement: “Creative Nonfiction is a detailed yet obscure testament to the food service twenties - a tome of deferred aspirations and sardonic observations compounded in a series of tangentially-related tantrum mantras. It’s heavy but nimble, unrelentingly progressive, and rooted in a fine history of aggressive music without bypassing pop sensibilities.” After nearly five years together, our drummer Tim quit pretty much the minute the album was finished and the band dissolved away. Drummers, am I right?

“Love Theme From Endless Banana”

This track is a more-recent piece I’ve created, custom-made by my wife and I as a wedding present for our good friends Endless Mike and Anna Banana. I like giving creative presents, and nothing seemed like a better gift to celebrate our friends’ nuptials than a good-old-fashioned slow jam.

The Marianas Anchor

This band was short-lived but exceptionally fun, and its death definitively marked the end of my college days in Bellingham. Our schtick was that we had two bass players, one who played “high” bass and another who played “low” bass, and I sang and played guitar. I lived in a house called New Street at the time that seemed to exist in a sound vortex, so we were able to practice pretty much whenever we wanted. I have such fond memories of jamming and recording in that pink-painted basement while our friends barbecued and played games out on the lawn. Two of the band members were from Kodiak, Alaska, and had a good friend who hung around with them all the time. She and I hit it off and had a fling during the summer while my bandmates were back in Alaska fishing, and when they came back and found out about us the band broke apart. The drummer was clearly in love with the girl, but she was in love with the “high” bass player, and was only with me as a placeholder for him. What a mess. The band exploded unceremoniously after just one EP and a handful of shows, but the girl and the bass player ended up moving back to Alaska together, getting married, and having a kid. Freshly graduated and not knowing what to do next, within a single week my “girlfriend” dumped me, my band broke up, and I was fired from my job at the bagel shop. Reeling, I got a random phone call from my friend Greg, informing me that there was a room free in his house and wondering if I had ever thought about moving back to Seattle. I packed my bags and left Bellingham immediately.

Future City Fear

This was my first band, started with my good friend Josh when we were both still teenagers. I pretty much learned how to play bass in the process of joining this band, and by the time we broke up a few years later we were actually pretty good. We used to practice out in Deming county, where our friend Brad’s mom had moved to California and left him all alone in a beautiful house in the woods, even though he was still just a senior in high school. All of his punk friends basically turned the house into a squat and destroyed it, so it was a perfect place for a young, crappy band like ours to learn how to be a young, less-crappy band. Back in those days in Bellingham, you could still do stuff like get gigs at bars even though you weren’t 21, and then not only hang out inside and drink for free all night, but prop the door open in the alley so all your underage friends could sneak in too. Josh was a guitar virtuoso but managed to unplug himself multiple times or fall into something pretty much every show we played. Future City Fear recorded slightly less than one proper album and then Josh quit to focus on his other band, which lasted for over a decade and eventually got signed to a big label and put out a record produced by Ross Robinson, so he probably made the right choice there.