(Backbeat)

www.halleonard.com

BY FRED MILLS

Regional histories or overviews always have one strike against them in that they are, in fact, regional: what may seem an indispensable chronicle to the locals whose area is being profiled runs the risk of being just a laundry list of obscure names, places and events to outsiders. And from a compelling-read standpoint, the problem is sometimes compounded no matter who's doing the chronicling; a longtime scenester who has the requisite intimate access may lack the journalistic chops to convincingly frame the big picture, instead getting bogged down with minutiae, while even the most well-meaning carpetbagger can overlook the telling, colorful details that help bring a region's story alive.

Such is not the case with author Peter Blecha's study of the Pacific Northwest. Blecha, a historian and former Experience Music Project curator who was once called "the Indiana Jones of rock ‘n' roll" by Seattle's The Rocket, manages to strike a winning balance between the opposite poles just outlined through a mixture of scrupulous research (seemingly every still-living early DJ and small label owner that ever operated out of Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, etc. during the ‘50s and ‘60s was interviewed, for example) and genuine passion for his subject - for Blecha, The Wailers' seminal instrumental "Tall Cool One," cut in a downtown Seattle studio in August of '58, was every bit as musically riveting - and, in its own context, influential - as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was three decades-plus later.

Blecha does spend a good bit more time focusing on the early years, which consume two-thirds of this 300-page volume (the late ‘80s to the present are covered in just 25 pages). But in doing so - and by not unnecessarily recounting every well-worn grunge tale we've already heard - he builds a strong case for the Northwest being far more than just the region that bequeathed Nirvana, Mudhoney and Pearl Jam.

From lively descriptions of the black-owned cabarets that operated in Seattle during segregation and spawned talent like Ray Charles; through the ‘60s explosion of teenage R&B, pop and garage combos such as the Ventures, the Sonics, the Kingsmen and Paul Revere & the Raiders (there's a priceless chapter outlining the mad race to see which of those latter two bands' version of "Louie Louie" could be muscled into the national charts first); and onward to the relatively fallow ‘70s (one key exception: Heart) as the nascent stirrings of the metal, punk and hip-hop scenes were gradually felt: Blecha's central point is that regardless of whatever successes or failures any particular era enjoyed, there were always forces in place - some of them, such as ordinances severely restricting what teenagers were allowed to do in public, seemingly counterintuitive except with the benefit of hindsight - to keep moving the region's rich, and indelible, musical legacy forward.

Really, can anyone even conceive of rock ‘n' roll existing in the form it does today if the Kingsmen hadn't gone into an aging three-track radio jingle production studio, in April of '63, to cut, as Blecha puts it so delightfully, "probably the sloppiest two-minute and forty-two seconds of rock ‘n' roll every captured on magnetic tape - and thus a stone classic"?

Incidentally, that vaunted NW sound not only is still heard echoing in the music of today's generation of rockers, it also endures in pure form: At the 2009 South By Southwest festival in Austin, the Sonics took the stage at Emo's and proceeded to burn down the whole fuggin' house. The sight of these older - notice I didn't say "old" - cats blasting through classic after classic (Gerry Roslie in particular unleashing his patented blood curdling screech) as a sardine-packed room of fans young enough to be the band members' grandchildren looked on, pumped fists in air, and sang their lyrics right back at them, will be one of my most enduring SXSW memories ever. FRED MILLS

[Pictured: (above) The Sonics circa 1967; (below) from FBI files, a 1964 letter sent from a concerned parent to U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy complaining about "Louie Louie"]