Olympia Music History Project

Slim Moon

Interviewed by Mariella Luz

January 31, 2025

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Mariella Luz

My name is Mariela Luz. Today is Friday, January 31st, 2025, and it is 12:08 pm Pacific Standard Time. 

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Slim Moon

I am Slim Moon, and I'm in Nashville, Tennessee at this time, and it's 2:08 Central Time.

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Mariella Luz

How did you end up in Olympia? What drew you to Olympia and what encouraged you to stay? 

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Slim Moon

So the reason I moved to Olympia was mostly that I was in the Seattle music scene, going to a lot of hardcore shows and a lot of sort of proto grunge shows.

And every once in a while, a band from Tacoma or Olympia would come to town and the crowd would follow them. And those kids had so freaking much fun, the South Sounders. And it was such a joyful music scene that would follow Girl Trouble or Beat Happening or other Olympia bands. It was so joyful compared to the solemn and violent hardcore scene that I was used to in Seattle. I just luckily had applied to Evergreen State College because an older friend had gone there. It just really fell into place. It was really easy to move to Olympia after I got my GED and got accepted to Evergreen. But really, the reason I came to Evergreen was for the rock scene.

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[00:01:22] 

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Mariella Luz

And how long did you live in Olympia while you were here?

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Slim Moon

I lived in Olympia from January 1st, 1986 until September 31st, 2006. Short answer, 20 years, give or take. 20 and a half years. 

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Mariella Luz

So do you want to tell us about some of the projects that you worked on while you 

were here?

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Slim Moon

When I first moved to Olympia, it was 1986. I was 18 years old. I went to Evergreen and I started to discover and get involved in the music scene, and I went to shows and I made friends with some of the musicians and writers in town. And then I went to Montana, I got sober, I came back and I was recharged because I wasn't drinking heavily anymore. In late 1986 and 1987, I started getting involved more. And the first thing I did in terms of a project was I started putting on spoken word performances, and the first ones I did were at GESCCO, probably in 1987. At least the late eighties. I also put on a couple concerts, including notably a Skid Row concert that was Nirvana's second or third show ever or something like that. But I did these spoken word things, and then I put out a spoken word cassette called “Someone Said.” I put it out, but it was technically on Donna Dresh's cassette label, Make Toast Not War, and it was a cassette of a recording of one of the spoken word performances.

So that was the first project I got involved in. Then my friend Dylan Carlson moved to Olympia and we started a band called Nisqually Delta Podunk Nightmare. We started playing shows around Olympia and occasionally I'd put on a rock show too, but mostly I was just in a band and putting on spoken word performances or doing spoken word performances as a spoken word artist myself. I just kicked around doing those things from 86 to 91. But the Nisqually Delta Podunk Nightmare Band, they eventually broke up and then I joined a band called Lush- and people are always like, “Lush, aren't they from England?” I'm like, “No, this band was called Lush and we broke up probably before the other more famous Lush came about.”

But we were in Olympia for a couple years in the late 80s. After Lush, I'd started another band with Dylan Carlson called Earth. I briefly moved to Seattle to be in that band, then quit that band, then moved back to Olympia and started a band called Witchy Poo. And then six months after I started Witchy Poo, I started a record label called Kill Rock Stars. And Kill Rock Stars, as I have mentioned here- spoken word as a performance art was a big part of my passion at that time. Kill Rock Stars was initially started as a record label with a concept to just put out seven inch records of recordings of spoken word performances. The first record that I put out had me doing Spoken Word on one side and Kathleen Hanna doing Spoken Word on the other side. That was 1991. I got the business license for Kill Rock Stars in February of 1991. I have had trouble figuring out the exact release date of the first 7 inch because it didn't really come out on a specific day. It just arrived in boxes at my apartment, and it was a while before any got to stores. I just sold some through mail order and at shows. The first record that Kill Rock Stars put out came out in about April of 1991. I just got it in the mail, assembled the records with homemade covers that Kathleen and I made, and sold them at shows and sold them to friends.

The first person to buy one was Joe Lally who played bass in Fugazi because he saw it in- Kathleen advertised it in one of her zines before it came out and he actually sent in the three dollars and was the first person to buy it. I still have the mail order, money order receipt from him. Just like people save their first dollar when they have a business, I saved the first money order. Then the second record had Stacey Levine and Peter Toliver doing spoken word on it. It was another seven inch. We called those Wordcore volume one and Wordcore volume two. And then in July of 1991, I kinda got talked into- or I got excited and changed the mission of Kill Rock Stars. So for about a year, I had sworn that it was going to be spoken word only, but then I got talked into- or I just got inspired- to change it and put out rock records as well. And then I had a mad dash to put out a compilation in time for the International Pop Underground Convention that happened in August of 91.

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[00:06:42] 

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Mariella Luz

So the compilation was the first music recording that you put out on Kill Rock Stars?

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Slim Moon

Yeah, it had 14 bands. And Calvin Johnson of K Records was really helpful. That record would not have come about without his encouragement and his help. He recruited some of the tracks and he helped me put the tape together and get it mailed off and get priority at the mastering plant and the pressing plant.

And when I said “I can't do it because we can't print covers in a month,” he suggested that we have silkscreen covers. Which was a really good solution to that problem. 

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Mariella Luz

What was the name of that first release? 

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Slim Moon

It was just called Kill Rock Stars. It was also Calvin's suggestion to call the compilation the same thing as the record label.

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Mariella Luz

What was the second release on Kill Rock Stars? 

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Slim Moon

The second music release was… an Unwound single. It's a long story that I'll try to keep short, but the inspiration for Kill Rock Stars to start putting out rock music was because there had been a terrific high school band in Olympia called Giant Henry.

And Giant Henry broke up, they had an epic final show. Then after they broke up, same three musicians got back together and wrote all new songs. And when they played their first show under the name Cygnus X1, I was so inspired by how terrific the new songs were and what a mature band they were for being a brand new band playing its first show. I was like, “Somebody's got to put out this band.” And it evolved in my mind that we could get attention for them by putting them on a compilation that had bigger bands on it. So that really was the intention when I decided to start putting out rock records, was to put out Unwound Records. The next day they settled on the final name Unwound, but the night before they had the temporary name Cygnus X1. The intention was to put out Unwound records, but the compilation was sort of a route to get there, to build up the brand of the record label and build up the brand of Unwound. The first record I put out that wasn't a compilation was an Unwound seven inch. And as quick as that happened, then Bikini Kill, who had moved to Washington, DC, contacted me and asked me to put out future records by them. So there were a couple Unwound 7 inches, and I could look at the records, but I honestly can't remember. The internet would tell me, but I honestly can't remember whether Unwound's first album or Bikini Kill's first EP came out. They were the next two 12 inch records we put out, but I can't remember which came first.

Mariella Luz

When you first started doing Kill Rock Stars, you mentioned that you started out with a focus on spoken word. How did you move forward deciding what records to put out after Unwound? 

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Slim Moon

My mission in the early days of Kill Rock Stars as a rock label, as a music label- there's this little teeny tiny fine print on the original Kill Rock Stars compilation, it says something about music from Olympia from the summer of 1991. So we pulled that whole compilation together basically in a day. But the night before, when I thought of it, it was only going to be Olympia bands. And then after a conversation with Calvin, I changed it to bands that would play IPU. But then, Nirvana pulled out of IPU. So then I changed it to bands that played in Olympia in the summer of 91 because they had played earlier in the summer. There's some fine print specifying that it's supposed to be documenting bands that played Olympia in 1991, but we never really highlighted that because in the end, it didn't matter.  But it was very Olympia focused, is what I'm trying to say. Although not all the bands on the first compilation were from Olympia, they all had an Olympia connection. They were connected to the scene. Lots of bands in those days would skip Olympia and just play Portland and Seattle, but the kinds of bands that are on that first compilation are the bands that would make a stop and play a show at Olympia. Even the ones that were from DC or elsewhere were the kinds of bands that [had a] connection with the Olympia scene.

So the first four bands quote “signed” to Kill Rock Stars were Bikini Kill, Bratmobile. Unwound and Witchy Poo. They were all Olympia bands, although Bratmobile and Bikini Kill had moved to DC. I think even when they all lived in DC, it was clear that it was a temporary move and that they would be coming back. And then they did come back to Olympia. And Unwound was local high school kids who had gone to high school and really grown up. Bratmobile- this is a distinction that nobody else cares about, but I care about a lot- Bratmobile and Bikini Kill had some local members who'd grown up in Olympia and some members who came to town because of Evergreen State College, but Unwound were all local. They had all grown up in Olympia. And so they were sort of the next generation- or sort of something different, because… I think most of the punk rock bands in Olympia in the 80s had one or five or three members that went to Evergreen. There was an Evergreen related punk scene. But then in the 90s, there really started to be a lot of local bands that were truly kids who had grown up locally, unquestionably influenced by that earlier generation of bands who had included college students. But bands like Karp and Unwound were all local. But anyways, to go on- we really had a mission to do Olympia bands until a band called Huggy Bear wrote to us from England. They really liked Bikini Kill and Riot Grrrl and Kill Rock Stars, and so they just asked if we would put out their records in America, and that sort of opened Pandora's box. “Oh, wow, we could do records with bands from other places.” That started with Huggy Bear, and not long after that we put out Free Kitten, which was Kim Gordon and Julie Cafritz’s band, and then it just went from there.

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Mariella Luz:

What were some of the challenges and disappointments from the early days of running the label? 

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Slim Moon

When I was thinking about starting a record label, I did a lot of thought about what I wanted to do and what I didn't want to do, and what I wanted to avoid and what I wanted to be good at. And I listened to musicians and their concerns and what they were interested in, what they didn't like about record labels that they were working with and what they wanted from record labels that they were dreaming of in the future. And I tried to tailor some of what I did from that research. And so I was very serious from the beginning about keeping really strong financial records of every dollar I spent and every dollar of income that came in. And I tried to invent royalty statements that were comprehensive and showed line by line, basically, every penny. In the first several years, I almost killed myself with the level of detail that of record keeping that I did. But it was really part of what I wanted to be the identity of Kill Rock Stars, this really intense record keeping about royalties and income and expenses. And I taught myself how to do my own taxes. I taught myself how to do double entry accounting. I read all these books- like Everything You Wanted to Know About the Music Business But Were Afraid to Ask. I created a press list and a radio list of who to send promotional copies to by going into magazine stores and opening every music magazine and copying the addresses of every music magazine into a book, then looking at the College Music Journal magazine, finding every radio station that had reported, and then looking up the addresses for all of those radio stations.  I did a lot of legwork. So those are things I'm proud about. But it really did almost kill me. I think that there's this thing that happens when people start a record label from passion because they love the music or because they want to help their friends. A lot of times, those are really creative people caught up in a lot of excitement and the bookkeeping is not their favorite part. And so a lot of times, nobody's trying to be nefarious, but the bookkeeping ends up being not kept up because it isn't necessarily people with a strong business mind who start little punk rock record labels. It's people who are passionate about art. But I think a lot of the labels that have survived lasted a long time either forced themselves to get better at business, or happened to have a partner who had a business mind. I just forced myself to do that part because the artists had made it so clear it was important to them.

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Mariella Luz

And I'll just say that 30 years on, Kill Rock Stars has been known- as someone who's been in the business- as really the gold standard for that transparency of royalties, and people are just really stoked about it. To your point, I'm a self employed artist person. I talk to other artists, and you don't have to just be a creative person, you have to also be an accountant, you have to be a mailman, you have to do all these things that you don't really anticipate. And it's hard. And If you just let one of them go, you're not going to have a business for very long. So it's really impressive that Kill Rock Stars has made it as long as it has and still continues to have good relationships with its artists. Even if you don't continue to work with them, I know that they have high admiration for the work that you've done.

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Slim Moon

That's nice to hear. I don't necessarily always get that feedback. Sometimes it feels like people are freer with their criticism than they are with their praise. But I know that also a tiny bit of criticism can get in my head and rattle around for years, whereas praise, it's I accept it, I appreciate it… and then I forget about it. So sometimes, it is really hard, really, hard. And I didn't know it when I started, it is really hard to go into business with your friends and have the business not affect the friendship. Especially if you have a business relationship with some of these folks now, it's 33 years.

It's really hard over those years to have the business part not affect the friendship. And at times, it's been delightful. It deepened the friendship. But in other ways, at other times, it's been one of the hardest parts of doing what I do. 

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Mariella Luz

I believe it. 

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Slim Moon

Yeah. 

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[00:18:14] 

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Mariella Luz

A few minutes ago you were talking about how the first music compilation that came out on Kill Rock Stars Coincided with the International Pop Underground festival.

Do you want to talk about that for a minute? Do you have anything to say?

Slim Moon

We managed to conceive of and recruit the bands, do some recordings, put together the tape, send it off and get it pressed in one mont. And Tinuviel Sampson designed the cover art, then diligently silkscreened hundreds of covers in her basement. I think we received the records the first day of the convention, the festival, and then started selling them on the second day because on the first day the covers were still drying. They were still hanging from clothespins all across her basement, from the silk screening. And then we had to assemble them and there was an eight and a half by eleven insert as well. The record had to go into the cover and the insert had to go in. Then we sold a bunch on the first day, and we sold them all week in the store at the Capitol Theater. Ian McKaye came to my office to meet me, to just check me out and make sure everything's on the up, and asked me what my intentions were.

And for some reason, when I met Jad Fair, we were like watching Nation of Ulysses. And I met Jad Fair way up at the back of the Capitol theater, up by the projection booth… he was the first person in the whole world I confessed to that I had a dream of someday quitting my job and just running a record label as my full time occupation. And Jad said it's really hard. And it's really neat because I'm back to working with Jad Fair now, 33 years later, which is terrific. It was just a really exciting time. The first night of the IPU was all bands led by women and it was the first time I saw Heavens To Betsy. It was a time when Bratmobile and Bikini Kill had really grown into who they really were destined to be as bands. They really were fully formed. So it was just really inspiring, and a lot of what happened on the first night is a lot of what directed the energy- even if I started Kill Rock Stars initially in the first moment because of the band Unwound- that so called girl night of I.P. U. was really formative for a lot of what Kill Rock Stars did in the next decade, and in the last 33 years. The IPU convention was really a turning point in Olympia that was really a focal point. We had a cool scene that was really inward looking through the 80s.

And then Calvin and Candice invited the whole world to come look at us, and us look at them. And then… even though it was called International Pop Underground, it became much more International. the web of connections between Olympia and all these scenes and musicians and fans all over the world really exploded at that time.

And also bands in Olympia who had been writing and practicing and performing to each other now had the world as their potential audience, and it became serious in a lot of ways. 

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[00:21:55] 

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Mariella Luz

When you and I were corresponding, you had talked about the queering of the Olympia music scene. Do you feel like that started as early as 91, or do you feel like that started to happen later? 

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Slim Moon

No, I think that's the whole history. It probably started sometime in the 80s before I was even there. But I think it's interesting. If you look at who put on IPU, and then who put on the YoYo A Go Go festivals, and then who put on Ladyfest, and then you look at who put on Homo Go and their social location or their identities, and how many people were involved, from the beginning to the end, I feel like there's an evolution. And that evolution is parallel to what was happening in Olympia in terms of the queering of punk rock and, what was happening in Olympia was a parallel to what was happening in the world, but I feel like Olympia was a leader.

If different scenes have different contributions, I think Olympia's feminist and queering contribution is really what matters. That's really the thing. And that's the way Olympia affected the greater culture of the most. And not just who put it on, but also what bands were invited to play, what audience was invited to come and enjoy and learn and share and make community. There was an evolution through that whole decade that was also the same evolution that was happening in the band.

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Mariella Luz

Long before it was really happening in the greater music scene by far. 

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Slim Moon

Yes, long before. And, in some ways, I want to give Evergreen its due. In some ways, queer art and serious academic theoretical thought about queer art was happening at Evergreen in a big way in the 80s, when I got there in 86. And it had an ongoing effect to the people that college attracted to Olympia, and also just being a place where that kind of thought- and all the actions that go with that thought and the development and the art- happened at Evergreen, and then it also happened in the Olympia art scene and the Olympia music scene, in a symbiotic way.

I hope I'm making sense. 

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[00:24:23]

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Mariella Luz

Totally. The next question is, how did the politics of the time impact the work you were doing? 

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Slim Moon

Another thing that I haven't mentioned that's really important is that 1991 was the year of the first Gulf War. And the scene really gelled around anti war sentiment and the cops- can I say assholes in this recording? I lived in Olympia from 86 to 2006, and I have to say the cops were maximum assholes in 1991. They really resented that those punk rockers and those Greeners were against the war. And so they were busting up parties and busting up all ages shows and ticketing people for jaywalking. The war between the establishment and the subculture was at its most intense in 1991. I forgot what the question was, but I'm glad to mention that as well. Because that's part of the backdrop. When Bikini Kill and Bratmobile started, when the IPU convention started and when Killrock Stars started was in that milieu.

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Mariella Luz

The Bands against Bush and that kind of anti war protesting that happened in the 90s?

Slim Moon

Yeah. There was a lot of people doing spray painting, there were marches, there was public art that was anonymously left around town to remind people the horrors of war, there was a daily thing where at a certain hour, people all over downtown played air raid sirens in an attempt to make the people of our city realize and think about the reality of the of war that was happening elsewhere- didn't generally affect our day to day lives, but was being done in our name. It's funny because there's been so many wars since then that we've gotten inured to it. But in 1991, the U.S. hadn't been in a serious war in a while. The other thing in 1991 is that Ronald Reagan had recently reestablished registering for the draft and a lot of young men were worried at that time when the war was about to happen, that the draft was going to be reestablished, and were worried about being drafted. Also some people who had joined the army because they just thought it was a decent job or a way out suddenly realized that they might have to go to combat. And I knew some punk rockers who refused, and had to face legal consequences for refusing to go to combat.

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Mariella Luz

Throughout this time, were you still doing spoken word and playing in bands? 

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[00:27:42] Slim Moon: Yeah. The band that I started in 1990 was called Witchy Poo, and I declared publicly that it was a 10 year project. And started putting 1990 to 2000 on our flyers and whatnot, because I'd been in Eights and Aces and Nisqually Delta Podunk Nightmare and Lush and Earth, in the previous six years, and I just was sick of bands breaking up all the time. So I decided to have a band where even if musicians came and went, we would remain a functioning entity. So I did Witchy Poo through the whole 90s, and I played a little bit here and there with some other bands. A band called No Reason, and I played one show with Donna Dresh in a band called Tim and Grim, and another band called Wacky Dentist Pals that just played a couple shows. But Tobi just recently wrote to me and said that she has a tape of it, which is weird. So yeah, I played in bands all through the nineties and Kill Rock Stars grew all through the nineties. We were putting out dozens of records a year by the end of the nineties, and there was a big shift that happened in 1995. From 1991 to 1995, it was very focused on a community approach to what bands we worked with. It was bands that were either from Olympia or were from these various scenes that had relationships with Olympia- particularly Oakland, D.C., the Huggy Bear sort of Riot Grrrl scene in England, and bands that my community of friends all approved of held in regard in some sort of communal way. And, that was sort of our whole mission- no, we had two missions. We had bands like that, and spoken word from 91 to 95. My baby was the spoken word and the rest of the music roster was more very related to the overall Olympia identity or the Olympia music scene. But then in 1995, two things happened. I started a second record label called 5RC, and the idea was to put out more avant garde records that I felt didn't fit on Kill Rock Stars. And that's how I was explaining it at the time. But now that I look back, I realize in a lot of ways it was to put out records that were more like my individual taste, even when my taste went a different direction than the sort of communal Olympia taste. And, so I partitioned off- here's Slim's music project, 5RC. And the other thing that happened in 1995 was we started working with Elliot Smith. And Elliot Smith didn't really have a relationship with the Olympia scene or anybody in Olympia. We had just become friends because we had been on tour together. And to be honest, my friends and employees weren't that enamored of working with Elliot Smith. They'd said they felt like it didn't make sense. So that was another way where I was stepping out and pushing my taste rather than it just being a community based thing. Ever since then, it's been both. I don't even live in Olympia anymore, but I still feel like there's an aspect of Kill Rock Stars that is still- these are the kinds of bands I came to learn to cherish because of my experience in the Olympia music scene. But then there's also bands that are just like, I've developed my own taste and my own ear and I put out some bands that I think are great that aren't necessarily related to that Olympia music identity.

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[00:31:13] 

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Mariella Luz

When you started, it sounded like you started on your own, with maybe some help. you said Tinuviel Sampson was helping you silkscreen some records. Was it just the two of you or were you doing it on your own to start? When did you start expanding it to have employees 

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Slim Moon

So… starting from 1987 onward, I had a job working for the Washington State Human Rights Commission. First I was a file clerk, and then I was a data entry operator, and then I was a computer programmer. And I had that job until 1993. So the first two years of Kill Rock Stars, I had a full time job.

And so I actually got an employee around 1992 to fulfill our mail orders, because I just couldn't really go to the post office in the daytime because I was at work. So we did have at least a little teeny bit of employee situation from pretty early on. And Tinuviel got involved with art, and then with everything for a while. I described her as my partner for a couple of years. She came into the picture a few months after I started Kill Rock Stars, but she was very important for a couple of years of Kill Rock Stars. Then she moved to Seattle, and then to New York and it just became too hard. This is pre internet. It became too hard to figure out how to run a business together from two different cities. But then the first employee that was full time was Maggie Vail. Maggie Vail has been in a lot of bands over the years, especially notably Bangs, and she's the sister of Tobi Vail, who has been in a lot of bands over the years including Bikini Kill and the Frumpies and the Go Team. Tobi started working at Kill Rock Stars pretty soon after Maggie, and the two of them worked at Kill Rock Stars for a long time, 15 years or something like that. At our peak, let's say around 2003, Kill Rock Stars got up to the point where there were 13 employees. That's the largest we ever were, and now we're back down to four. 

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Mariella Luz

Are you all based in Nashville? Or are you all over? 

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Slim Moon

No, these days we're very modern in the sense that there's one in Berlin, one in Portland, one in Nashville, and one in L.A. So we just do our meetings online and everybody does their job from home. We do have a mail order warehouse in Portland and the employee who lives in Portland does go to work. And there's a fifth part time employee who fulfills mail order. So there's really four full timers. 

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Mariella Luz

Are you still doing 5RC also? 

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Slim Moon

So here's some big picture stuff about the history of Kill Rock Stars. I ran it from 1991 until 2006. And then in 2006, I got this crazy wild hair and I went off and worked for a different company and I handed over the reins of the company to my wife, Portia Sabin. And so Portia Sabin ran Kill Rock Stars from late 2006, summer, to 2019. She ran it for 13 years. So when Portia took over Kill Rock Stars, she shut down 5RC. And so some of the 5RC bands just switched over to Kill Rock Stars. Marnie Stern and Xiu Xiu and Hella and Deerhoof just became Kill Rock Stars bands, although they had been 5RC bands. So 5RC was dormant from around 2007 until 2022. And then we did put out a record on 5RC in 2022. So 5RC technically exists now, but just a little teeny bit. And we haven't done a spoken word record in the nineties. We did 10 spoken word seven inches and three spoken word CDs. We haven't done a quote “spoken word as performance art” release in 20 years or so, but we released a lot of comedy records in the last 10 or 15 years, and that is spoken word. So I guess the accurate thing to say is that the portion of what Kill Rock Stars does that is spoken word is more from being super arty spoken word to being comedy. There's a couple artists that I'm chasing right now to try to get to do spoken word albums, but it hasn't come together yet. 

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Mariella Luz

What made you decide to go back to Kill Rock Stars? After a 13 year break. 

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Slim Moon

So when my son was born, I also was very sick with Lyme disease, and I just decided to leave music entirely- working as an artist manager, running a business, doing management for artists for their careers. I quit all of that and I went back to college, and finished my degree at Evergreen. And then I went to grad school and got a Master of Divinity at a Unitarian seminary, And I was really set on the idea that I was going to become a parish minister in the Unitarian tradition. But I just kept getting sicker and sicker with Lyme disease that whole time. After I graduated, I started doing internships at churches. I worked at churches for a couple of years, but my energy level was so [low], I was so run down by that time. I just bailed out and I took some time off. Then it just so happened that my medical situation… I found a new naturopath and she found a solution for me. And I started feeling a lot better and being a lot healthier and having more energy. Then my wife, who had been running Kill Rock Stars, got a different job. And so she was like, “Do you want this back?” So it just worked out. I took a year sabbatical where I did not have a job at all. And then I ended up going back to Kill Rock Stars, rather than going back to ministry. I've really enjoyed being back at Kill Rock Stars after the 13 year break. And I feel like it's really personally rewarding. And in the last six years that I've been back running Kill Rock Stars, we've really leaned into the queer identity of the label that was always part of our identity, but it's really become- we have so many queer and especially trans artists on the roster. Now, it feels like we're still trying to be doing not just good art, but important art. And feeling very, fulfilling. Everybody's built different and has different passions and different assets. And I feel like it's a job that I'm good at.

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[00:38:21]

Mariella Luz

I think now, to bring it back to the last question of like politics, I think now is the time to- I don't want to sound cliche, but- put our money where our mouth is, where we think that LGBTQIA rights are concerned. It's one thing to say that you support queer and trans artists, but how are we as citizens and humans really doing that? And I think releasing and working with artists and making sure that their work gets put out in the world is a pretty important thing to be doing right now.

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Slim Moon

Yeah. This is probably the legacy I'm the most proud of is that. In the 90s, sure, lots of women in punk rock and in indie rock, but I think Kill Rock Stars was a leader. I think there was no other label that, where like more than 50 percent of the musicians, not just the lead singers, not just the bass players, but all of the musicians on our roster were women. And some of those women were writing lyrics and having the reason their band exists for very important cultural, political reasons. And we were supporting that. I was always more equipped to support activists than to be an activist myself, but to support those activist voices is what I think I was called to do. And indie rock as a genre and as an economic world has really been transformed in the last 30 years. And now in lots of ways, women are the leaders, the loudest voices and the stars of that genre, or at least way more represented and way more respected than they were. If you look back, it's hard to remember how bleak it was. I'd like to think we contributed to that change in our ways. but also it means we learned and grew and realized there's lots more to do. And one of the things is that indie rock and punk rock hasn't had the racial and ethnic diversity that it probably should. And so we've tried to lean into that and support a diversity of voices. And we've really leaned into the LGBTQ+ aspect of supporting those voices, especially folks who have important things to say, because it's a time of great change. This last decade has been so bizarre because it's a time from the moment of, say, marriage equality to now, there's been a lot of positive changes and a lot more visibility and a lot more acceptance- and the backlash where there's a lot of negative change and more intolerance all happening at the same time. And we really want to be on the right side of history. 

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Mariella Luz

Yeah, a lot more vocalized intolerance for sure. I think it probably always there, but people feel much more free to put it out there and that can be pretty scary.

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Slim Moon

Yeah. And I think when it's more vocalized, it makes people who are young and still figuring out how they see the world or people who are on the fence about things when that intolerant view is so loud, makes intolerance more like a viable option for people, and that's just the worst.

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[00:41:48]

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Mariella Luz

In your opinion, how has the story of punk already been told or not been told? 

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Slim Moon

This is not really an answer to the question that you asked- I went once to the Experience Music Project, back when it was called the Experience Music Project, to their museum. I saw an exhibit and I looked around me, and everyone around me who was walking through this exhibit were like middle class tourists from other countries. And the wall in front of me was explaining the importance of Iggy Pop and the Stooges. And there's this punk rock part of me that was just like, fuck this. Like Iggy Pop and the Stooges was a secret. It was ours. Middle class Japanese tourists don't get to have this… and also, fuck this, that academics and college professors that they hired to write the text of what was the cultural importance of

Iggy Pop and the Stooges instead of the people who lived it and the people who loved it at the time. So, I have a schism in my own mind where partially, I want punk rock to change the world, and partially, I want punk rock to have just been our secret in our community that saved our lives, right? Because I feel like it did save lives, and it does save lives, just like art does in lots of ways. It's not like our community or our art is unique in this, but… I had always been a freak and a weirdo and never felt like I fit in and never clicked or connected until I found this community. And in this community of other people who love this art and wanted to make this art and wanted this art to change the world, I found acceptance. Like, this is my place and it's life saving in that way, and I've heard that same story, that same sentiment from so many people about how punk rock saved their life. And this is literally true in my case, because it gave me the motivation to not drink myself to death. But at the same time, when you say you wanted to change the world, then you have to actually accept everything that goes along with it- changing the world- which means you have to offer it to everybody, and it has to become everyone's. It can't just be your secret, your comfortable little place that's sheltered and protected and never changes.

I have no idea if I answered your question, but the question fostered all those thoughts. 

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Mariella Luz
I'll just say really quick, punk rock saved my life in the late 80s when I found it. But then, in 1990, when these white jocks started showing up at Nirvana shows, I was actually mad. I was mad that the people that would push me in the halls at high school were now showing up to my thing. But at the same time, it's like, for all of us who found something, I’m hoping now, even- that we're still continuing to make art that people see that makes them feel seen, seems pretty important. 

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Slim Moon 

Yeah. I think Kurt Cobain had a lot of problems. So I'm not trying to say that this conflict killed him, but I think he had a lot of problems with looking out into the audience and realizing that he's playing music for the same jocks who pushed him around in the hallways. And I don't think he ever came to terms with it. And I think that was unique. I don't see that many other pop stars having that kind of moral quandary about their popularity. It partially says to me- I'm like a chauvinist for Olympia, like I think the Olympia culture that I discovered when I moved there was about… here's a couple things I want to say about Olympia in the 90s and probably in the 80s and probably ever since, sometimes has a reputation… There's some people who are in Olympia will say, “Oh, it's so elitist. It's just cliques. The people who are inside are rude to the people who are outside.” But what I found was that if you did anything- if you put on a show, if you made a flyer, if you started a band, if you opened a store that only sold handmade objects, or if you put on a cakewalk- the scene embraced you. What the scene, the cliquishness was “Don't just be a consumer,” right? If you're just going to show up at shows and clasp your arms across your chest and watch, then you're not really a participant. Part of the Olympia ethic was participate, don't just be a consumer. But another thing was, in a lot of ways, it was really anti professional. It was really, it took DIY- not just do it yourself, but do it even if you think you don't know what you're doing, even if you're not trained, even if this is the first time you've picked up a guitar, or even if it's just a song you wrote in the woods- that's acapella, just do it. And it was a scene- they used to say in the nineties, people would say girls rule this town. It was a woman led scene, which is so unusual in a world of scenes led by guys’ sexist, patriarchal culture. And I'm like a chauvinist for Olympia and the values that I learned there and the art that I discovered there, not just the art made by people from Olympia, but that those people in Olympia pointed out art made around the world that stood out and that aligned with the values that we had in Olympia. I love this about the Olympia Music History Project as well, but my favorite books about these various music scenes and these various music genres are the books that are oral histories, where you get a hundred different people's stories of what it meant to them. And I love that six different people will talk about some party where the Germs played in the basement and they all remember it differently. One of the things I hate about biographies and memoirs is that it can't all be exactly true because memory is notoriously unreliable. And the more often you tell a story, the more it might get embellished or you forget the parts you, but might have mattered to somebody else. But when you get all the different people from the scene to tell the story, then you realize you start to see a broader picture of what it meant to people or what it means to people. I think the more the stories are told by the participants or by the people who were moved by it, and not just told by rock journalists and academics, the better. That is my bias. My bias from what I learned in Olympia is the people in the community tell the stories. Don't have journalists and academics declare the importance of what we're doing. It reminds me, I remember the first time Bikini Kill were reviewed in Melody Maker, which was an important music magazine in England at the time in the early nineties. And the review basically said “These girls have no idea what they're doing, but by accident, they made a great piece of art.” And that's one story of that one time, but that was the attitude towards Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, Excuse 17, Huggy Bear and Tiger Trap. Over and over in the 90s, the attitude was, even when it was good, women were just doing it by stumbling on it. They couldn't possibly just consciously make great art. It was so sexist and so ludicrous. And I developed even more of a resentment seeing that over and over, having journalists and academics be the people who declare the meaning and the value of the art that came from my community.

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Mariella Luz

That's one of the reasons why I got involved with this project, because I think it's really important- I know that Olympia, Washington, Northwest is still, more than ninety percent white. But as we've been talking about here, it's important, I think, to highlight the stories of women, queer, trans, BIPOC folks, even if they are technically in the minority of the scene, because otherwise, we're just having white dude rock reporters about what we did, and it's important for us to share our own stories. 

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Slim Moon

So I used to have this sort of different attitude about like in the 90s, you would look around and you wouldn't see very many- there were bands a certain amount of Asian American participation in indie rock, but you'd look around and you wouldn't see very many say black people in my genre. And I used to think, “It's so freaking white. Why would they want to be?” Right? And that my thinking used to only go that far. Now I realize how much people of color in punk rock and indie rock’s stories were erased, and I also realized that when the people you want aren't showing up, it's an opportunity, it's an obligation to reach out to them instead of just go, “I get it. Why would they want to be here?” And we fell down. We were inadequate, in that regard, both in erasing people's stories and then not inviting people, not reaching out.

But I think there has been a certain amount of work to dig, to recover the stories that have been buried and the scenes and the bands. But there's a lot more work to be done in that way, in terms of all kinds of different aspects of how diverse it has been and can be, we're in the middle of that work, I think. Not where we should be, but better than it was in the nineties.

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Mariella Luz

By far. You had mentioned that you want to talk about Yeah Fest. 

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[00:52:36] 

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Slim Moon

Yeah Fest started as my idea… there had been Rock Against Reagan in Olympia in the eighties, and George Bush was running for reelection and so I wanted to do a festival to highlight the issues and raise some money. So I thought of it as a Bands Against Bush thing, but looking at the different festivals that had happened in Olympia before, I had an aspiration to have it be  really committee driven, and that even though I had thought it up, I wanted it to be really egalitarian and I really tried to get people from the community involved in the planning, and it failed. 20 people showed up to the first meeting, and then 10 to the second meeting. Then by the last meeting, it was just like me and people who worked at Kill Rock Stars. But Yeah Fest was egalitarian in the sense that every band got paid the same amount, so whether it was their first show or it was like Deerhoof and Decembrists, they all just got paid 300 bucks. I don't know what else I wanted to say about it, besides just that it happened and it was an interesting experience and we raised a little bit of money for campaigning against Bush, but he still got re-elected. And it was a failure in this attempt to be more community based and not just be like the brainchild of one white dude. I don't know what else to say about it. I also think it's a little bit forgotten, like it wasn't at the Capitol Theater, so it doesn't fit in a nice, tidy narrative with those other festivals. I think sometimes it's forgotten, but it was 64 bands. 

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Mariella Luz

Wow. I didn't realize it was that many bands. Three days? Friday, Saturday, Sunday? 

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Slim Moon 

Yeah. Really, the real reason it popped in my head, that it originally started, was I thought it was so neat. That building had stages on every floor, The Eagles Hall. So I just thought it would be neat to have a festival in the Eagles Hall because of its architecture. So that was how I first started. “We need to have a festival here just because it could hold a festival.” And then it developed from there. 

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Mariella Luz

It's a shame too, because that building is really neat, and for a long time, they used to have shows on every floor and they don't anymore. They just have them on the main floor now. 

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Slim Moon

Yeah. Which still doesn't have an elevator, right?

Mariella Luz

Yeah, it's not handicap accessible, which also stinks. 

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Slim Moon

Yeah, I can understand the reality that it's economically impossible to install an elevator, but it stinks that it excludes people from the experience.

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Mariella Luz

Yeah. I think we have just two more questions left. And, the first one, which you've talked about quite a bit, but maybe you have something else that you'd like to add, which is: What inspired you when you were here? 

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Slim Moon

Yeah, I've tried to say all the main points. I was also particularly inspired by a few particular people. I put on my first show because Lois basically, Lois Mafeo basically made me. I mentioned a pipe dream of putting on a show, and then I backed out and chickened out when I was like 18 and shy, but she just twisted my arm. She's like “You're going to do this.” And then she actually scheduled a flyer making party in her apartment at the Martin apartments, and Candice and Calvin and Lois and a couple other people all showed up and we all made flyers, so every flyer for the show was handmade, and I still have one flyer that I didn't put up that I kept. And Lois had really important conversations with me at really important moments in my development as a human being and as a person who supported the Olympia music scene. And so she was a really important person. Calvin Johnson taught me how to put out records and he helped me put out my first rock record. It wouldn't have happened without his help and he distributed my first spoken word seven inches. They didn't get in very many stores, but to the degree that they got in stores at all, it was with Calvin's help. But the person in Olympia who really affected me the most in my development as a human being and as a record label guy was Tobi Vail.

When I moved to Olympia, she was still in high school. I was a freshman in college and the first time I hung out with her, she threw up in my lap at a punk rock party. And so then I went home smelling like vomit and Mad Dog 20/20. I don't know if she's going to be mad that I told that story. But over the years, through her Jigsaw magazine and through her bands and through our friendship, she has been one of the most important people in helping me in all these startling moments where I see the world with more clarity, because Tobi is such a clear thinker and such a good communicator and she's so thorough in her thought process and in her communication that she's helped me see things that I couldn't see alone. She really understood the Olympia thing, and was always in the center of it. 

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Mariella Luz

And continues to be.

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Slim Moon

And continues to be. I know, as soon as I said was, I realized I'm using the wrong word. Was and is. Yeah. 

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Mariella Luz

It's incredible, her continuous contribution to what we do here. 

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Slim Moon

Yeah. And there's other people, but those are especially, the big ones.

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Mariella Luz

What are you or inspired by today? What are the things that you're working on that excite you? 

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Slim Moon

I'm doing so much stuff, I'm going to forget some things. I'm working with Sydney Bollins, who is a singer songwriter who's been around since the 70s. Sang songs on the Grease soundtrack and used to sing in Elton John's band and is trans and recently had the lead role in a musical in L.A. about a trans Civil War soldier. And I'm working with Big Joanie, an English band of black women who are influenced by many things, but one of the things they're influenced by is the Riot Grrrl bands that I worked with 30 years ago, and that's really exciting. And, Kill Rock Stars started doing some americana/rootsy records. That's always been part of my listening habits, but with the exception of Daniel Howell, we never really did rootsy records over the years. But now, and we started something called Kill Rock Stars Nashville that's putting out some. We put out Lindsey Lou, an artist who’s got some serious bluegrass cred, and some other more rootsy Americana type records than ever before. And that's an exciting new direction for us. And we did some comedy records, and just a bunch of cool bands and singer songwriters. I’m getting to know a whole new scene here in Nashville, which is neat. There's a cliche of Nashville being known for country and Americana, but there is a really cool underground rock scene here that has produced bands like Be Your Own Pet and Paramore and Soccer Mommy, and some really cool bands over the years. But also a lot of cool bands that didn't really make a big dent nationally or internationally, but are legendary here in town. And there's a really cool all ages space here called Dark Matter that's been in something like four different locations, but it's been pretty long running here and continues to support all ages scene. I think they've been going for 20 or 25 years. Pretty impressive.

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Mariella Luz

Yeah. Super impressive. I wrote those down… because I have turned into the person that my memory is also not that good. I'll be like, what was that band?

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Slim Moon

Yeah. Cidny Bullens, instead of just leaving his dead name completely behind, he just changed the letters. It used to be Cindy Bullens, and now it's Cidny Bullins when he transitioned. And we're working with Habibi and Kate Nash- probably should have mentioned Kate Nash, who's doing really cool stuff. She's been talking to the British Parliament about how the current economic situation is so unsupportive on underground music and how it's gonna stifle creativity unless they change how things are set up, and getting a lot of attention for being on OnlyFans. She calls it Butts for Tour Buses. And Mikaela Davis, Joh Chase, I can't think of everything- I suck at this. I suck at rattling off the current roster. I always have. I always forget somebody. That was never one of my strengths either, but… 

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Mariella Luz

You are forgiven. Is there anything else that you'd like to add?

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Slim Moon

You know what didn't come up that's so important is when I moved from Seattle to Olympia, not only was I moving from a scene in Seattle that was really serious to a scene that had fun in Olympia, it was also moving from a scene where heroin and alcohol were such a big part of the identity of the scene and things that so many of the musicians and the scene members were involved in. And then I moved to Olympia where everybody is hardcore about all ages shows. So, Seattle had gotten to a point where so many shows I couldn't go to because they were in bars and I was still 18. And when I came to Olympia, it was all about all ages shows. And if a band made the mistake of playing a bar, everybody would boycott it and not go, even people who could legally go, they'd just be like, “That's stupid. I'm not going to the show if teenagers can't go.” Of course, there was drinking and of course, like Evergreen, there was like psychedelics, and it wasn't so druggy as it had been in Seattle. I didn't really mention that, all ages venues that have always been important in Olympia and I feel like hand in hand with all ages, the rock scene was less druggy than the Seattle scene I had come from, and less cynical than the Seattle scene I had come from.

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Mariella Luz

You mentioned it earlier, but I have always appreciated it about Olympia that it's always been encouraged to be a beginner here. And I think some of that is like that lack of cynicism. they're connected. It's okay to be bad at something. It's okay to start something new. And I think that allows for a lot of creativity.

Slim Moon

Yeah, and I think a lot of the time- not that there weren't people with technical proficiency- but I think Olympia puts integrity and honesty and pure emotional expression over technical proficiency, in a way that isn't always universally held, but also there's a trick. Sometimes it's just the way people are looking at things. I remember this one time Sub Pop put on a show called Nine for the ‘90s, and it was like New Year's Eve 1989, I think. I might have that detail wrong, but it was nine bands and it was the end of the ‘80s and going into the ‘90s and I was in the balcony at the Moore Theater or the Paramount. I can't remember what venue it was, and Cat Butt was playing and somebody was like “This band's awesome. Beat Happening only knew three chords, they sucked.” And I'm like, “Cat Butt's just playing three chords, they're just doing it through a distortion pedal.” Part of it was just like, Olympia bands didn't rely on the tricks to make themselves look gnarlier. You know what I mean? It was just more naked and pure and honest. But I really don't think that Cat Butt were better musicians than Beat Happening. It was just presented differently. 

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[01:05:09] 

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Mariella Luz

Yeah, even today, seeing some shows where- and again, I still appreciate this about Olympia, but it's like the sort of badness is so awkward at moments and, I try to not shy away from that too much. 

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Slim Moon

The other thing I try to explain to kids now, when I moved to Olympia in the nineties- it wasn't just in the mainstream, it was everywhere- rock and roll required a bass player. And so people constantly belittled Olympia bands and the bands that Olympia liked. Because Beat Happening didn't have a bass player and Mecca Normal didn't have a bass player and all these bands didn't have a bass player and you can't be a real rock band without a bass player. Olympia bands chronically had one less musician than most other bands playing the same thing would have had, and a lot of times it was a bass player but sometimes it was something else. Like they wouldn't have a drummer, or they'd only have bass and not have a guitar player. They chronically did it with less. When we put out Sleater-Kinney, we tried to promote them to alternative commercial radio, and the message back from alternative commercial radio was like, this format will never play rock that doesn't have a bass. And then just a couple of years after that, along came the White Stripes and that ended that rule. Today's kids, when I try to tell them there used to be this strong bias that if you didn't have a bass, you weren't actually a rock band, they're like, “What are you talking about?” They've never even heard of that. Because with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the White Stripes and the Black Keys, that just ended. But, once upon a time in the 90s, Olympia was just this bastion of “We don't need a bass player” in a world that required a bass player.

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[01:07:00] 

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Mariella Luz

I've never been a musician, even though I've been music adjacent for a long time, and never made that connection. 

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Slim Moon

Oh yeah. I especially made the connection because that was the feedback once Sleater-Kinney was so critically acclaimed but couldn't get played on the radio. And the supposed reason was because there was no bass. There's not enough low end for our format.

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Mariella Luz

 Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Slim. 

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