Sleater-Kinney Returned to the Pacific Northwest & I Cried (A Review)
Entertainment“There are more books at this show than any other one I’ve worked,” the door guy at the Showbox remarked immediately after checking both mine and my friend Sonya’s bags. We looked at each other and laughed. That pretty much summed up the crowd for the second of three sold-out Sleater-Kinney shows in Seattle—the very end of their No Cities to Love tour, which brought them back to the stage after going on “indefinite hiatus” nearly a decade ago. That night, Friday May 8, was the 21+ show, but it definitely skewed older than that. (It was also more evenly gendered that we’d expected/hoped. Because we’re judgmental misandrists, we were disturbed to see several men in khakis.)
There were still plenty of fans with the energy and passion of teenage music devotees, though.
Before the doors opened, Sonya and I hung out in Kerns Music Shop, the restaurant adjoining the Showbox. They’ve got one of those deals where if you eat/drink there, you get priority admission to the venue. Since this was a priority show for us—we’d been sending “SLEATER-KINNEY!!!” and “EEEEEEE!” texts to each other since before eight that morning—it was a no-brainer. We spent two hours watching the other fans around us—a group wearing “Janet Fucking Weiss t-shirts totally lost their shit when Janet regrammed their photo—and catching up on each other’s lives. Sonya had recently gone to LA to see the Manic Street Preachers. She said she’d cried during that show and wondered if she would cry during this one, concluding that it would depend if they played the right songs.
“I will definitely cry,” I informed her.
Sleater-Kinney is the band for me. Like my musical soulmate. I discovered them right at the beginning of their career and right at the perfect time in my life. I’d found Bikini Kill and the rest of riot grrrl a couple years too late, but I was 16, fresh out of an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship when the girl at the punk rock record store that popped up very briefly in my suburb handed me Sleater-Kinney’s self-titled ten-inch. It is the only record I’ve ever actually worn out from overplay.
I saw Sleater-Kinney for the first time at the Fireside Bowl, the Chicago bowling alley/punk club that I frequented in high school. I met up with a girl I’d been chatting with in the Riot Grrrl forum on AOL. It was our first time meeting in person, but before long we were holding hands and crying as we screamed along to “Anonymous.” The last time I saw Sleater-Kinney was with her as well. It was 2006 at Lollapalooza and since my friend worked for a music booking agency then, we were able to watch from backstage. I pretty much cried all the way through.
I have only known Sonya since I moved to Seattle two years ago, but I’ve told her the backstage-at-Lollapalooza story so many times that she barely fights off rolling her eyes when it comes up again. I’m embarrassed by this, but can’t help it—I don’t tell it as a gross brag, but because it was such a pivotal moment for me. I watched them recognizing that I’d grown up with them and actually survived the journey.