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belltown life
ELAINE BONOW is talking to interesting downtowners
A Rendezvous with Steve Freeborn This month we are elated to interview Steve Freeborn owner, of the Rendezvous and a pillar of Belltown society. He and his wife Tia Matthies have created a place for musicians, performance artists and party people to congregate. They were also the guiding force behind the OK Hotel from 1988 until the Nisqually earthquake on Ash Wednesday 2001. 
We are comfortably sitting in the Red Velvet Lounge with my comrade, David Midbon, manning the cameras.SF: I moved around a lot, I grew up in Detroit, in the suburbs—Rochester—and traveled around. Lots of hitchhiking around in the ‘70s, riding freight trains, doing everything, out to the west coast, picked apples back and forth, finally ended up in Santa Cruz, California in ‘79-‘80, played music there for five, years and ended up here in ‘85. EB: What brought you up? SF: Well, my wife Tia, she was from here, and we wanted to do a nightclub, actually a coffee house/art gallery/music stage kinda thing. First, we checked out the San Francisco Bay area but it was real expensive and hard to find spaces. So then, she said, “Well I live up in Seattle, so why don’t we move up there?” We moved here in ’85… it was wide open. EB: That’s really interesting because you were able to do your dream. SF: Yes. My sister was a producer of rock music in Detroit in heavy metal. In the ‘70s she bought a PA and said you’re the engineer. So, I took on that job for her and I was her engineer for some metal bands she had; and when I came to Santa Cruz, I came with some sound equipment, my drum set. I got a drumming job. I did sound for a couple of punk rock clubs and OT Price, they did nationals, mostly Alligator Records blues stuff, Clifton Chenier, Jonathan Richman—that was all the way ’til ’85. EB: So you were right there when the Seattle punk scene broke out. SF: It was amazing. I never really thought about it until these people in Los Angeles said, “Yes, we’re going to make a movie about this place becoming so famous.” We saw it happen all the time. We are happy for Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam. We knew those people as people. EB: Do you think these bands would have had the same opportunity if the OK Hotel hadn’t been in operation? (We start laughing heartily!) SF: You know Soundgarden never played the OK Hotel and neither did Alice in Chains. Pearl Jam did and so did Nirvana. Now Stone at that time worked at Grand Central Bakery. I would go there for coffee and I remember him telling me that “Oh we have this show coming up,” and that was with Mother Love Bone, so we did a Mother Love Bone show. I don’t think we were legally open. We had this big 4x8 sheet of plywood for the front door and we’d have to take it off, move it over, and drape over what we were working on and put them on a stage. It would have held a hundred people but three hundred came down for the show. In those days, the train ran under the Viaduct and that was awesome. You couldn’t have found a better location for what we were doing. It was hidden away, had nothing to do with anything. EB: In the ’70s we went to Shelley’s Leg down around there to see shows at the Gorilla Room and Roscoe Louie. SF: Graven Image. I wasn’t around but Tia was. She was a punk rocker in the early ‘80s and she went to all those shows; she knew everybody. And knowing everybody was, like, a handful. You’ve seen the map of Seattle, who knows who; everybody’s been in everybody’s band. This town is probably four times the size of when we came here. When shows would happen you would poster the town. There was probably four clubs at the time just before the OK Hotel, you had the Central Tavern, Squid Row, and there were up in the U District called huh… EB: Oh yeah, Hall of Shame (We crack up ‘cause it was called the Hall of Fame). SF: Well, I ran sound in all those places and then I ran sound for Arms Akimbo, a college-y band. Skerik was in that band, the drummer Jeff Mosher. This town was wide open cheap, free. Belltown was locked up. First Avenue was boarded up in ’85. You had Tugs, the Frontier Room. I remember ’85-’86. EB: We never went downtown. SF: First Avenue was the sleaziest street in town. You had the Dutch Oven. It was horrible, where you could still get breakfast and lunch for $3.50 with a cup of coffee. I had never really experienced that. I came from Detroit, which was a downtrodden place but sophisticated; and then to Santa Cruz, where you didn’t even know what season it was; and then I came up here and it was like stepping back twenty years and the people were amazingly sweet. Like I came to a paradise, the people were so awesome. When I first moved here it was way away from the time and the music too. We were doing fifteen shows a month sometimes, and you would see the same guitar amp, the same drum set. There’d be four bands playing out of the same equipment, “ruckusy,” its own style of punk rock-not just punk, very original rock. EB: The bands were creative. They were artists writing good songs. SF: A lot of the bands in the early days, they never made it, they were the ones I kinda coined as “the Seattle sound” and ended up being called a sound called grunge. A lot of Seattle bands had that sound, had that original artistic sound. EB: But your appreciation must have come from being from Detroit. Wasn’t the godfather of punk Iggy Pop? SF: I was more of a suburb hippie. I liked Walpurgis and Frost, long hair, drudgy, 12-minute songs. 
Then there was the other side of me that liked MC5, which was the gateway to political mayhem. Whenever they
played there was a political message. In Detroit, we had the Grandee Ballroom in ’68 into the ‘70s; a
lot of the shows were with MC5, Bob Seeger with MC5. And then heavy metal came to Detroit, and a lot of glam rock. EB: So you guys moved here (the Rendezvous) and you kept that same kind of club-music-venue feeling from the OK Hotel. SF: 
After the Nisqually we were out of business at the time and the Rendezvous was becoming a crack bar. Do you know it still had a pay phone? So, Jerry bought the building, asked if Tia and I would operate the building, and he would be partners with Jane who was from a big theater background.EB: Perfect timing. SF: I’m glad they wanted to keep the theater. The building is amazing. The theater, when you think of the history of this place, which is 81 years, it’s got the original silk brocade on the walls, original light fixtures. EB: They tore down Belltown when it was the Denny Regrade. It’s a miracle really… SF: This is a part of film row. We are the only theater left of film row. The history’s not too easy to find. If it wasn’t for Jerry saving this place, who knows. If you look at this block there isn’t a single condo on this block, which is kinda nice. There’s nothing over two stories. The William Tell is charming, and Buckley’s—at least they are not changing the building. That’s still a beautiful building. EB: What’s happening nowadays in the music? You have your finger on the pulse. SF: Seattle is still amazing. Seattle still turns out some of the best music. It’s all alt-country now. Fleet Foxes looks like a typical Seattle band. They all have beards now; I think beards are the new thing. I think everybody in Pearl Jam has beards. EB: Yeah, nappy hair and beards. This place is great cause you have… SF: We have beginner bands. The Grotto downstairs is the arty room, and the Red Velvet Lounge up here you can reserve for parties of forty. In the Grotto, we do music down there too, actually it’s great for parties of basement bands. They sound good down there because of the stone walls and stone floor, and good because the throw is so short. It’s like being in someone’s rehearsal room, and there are still rehearsal rooms here in the basement. The food here is all house-made. It’s awesome, everything is quality, probably the best mac and cheese with fried onion rings on top. It’s really good. EB: How about the future of the Rendezvous? Do you think this place will hold on? SF: This kind of place will never need to move. The thing that makes it sustainable is that you take over the Jewel Box for 85 bucks, you get an engineer and lights, and if you throw 40 people in there you have a packed show, a very intimate show. A band or a troupe cannot do much better than that, getting 40-50 people who like your stuff. Rendezvous 2322 2nd Ave. Seattle, WA • U.S.A. 98121 (206) 441-5823 jewelboxtheater.com |
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© 2008 Belltown Messenger