Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground

What you Love Without the Bullshit — Or the Budget

By Mike Baehr

Photo by Lucien Knuteson

It’s been forty years since the peak of flower-power culture, but Seattle musical collective Kay Kay and his Weathered Underground still seek to embody the spirit of the 1960s. It’s not just their stylistic influences, it’s also in the way the era’s concepts of liberation, defiance and community have shaped the group’s destiny and led its members to create their own musical mini-utopia, forging their own set of rules and navigating the music industry on their own terms.

Kay Kay songwriters Kirk Huffman and Kyle O’Quin met while playing in the experimental, literary-minded indie rock band Gatsby’s American Dream. Huffman played bass and O’Quin joined on keyboards. “We spent 80 percent of our year on the road and Kyle and Ireally bonded because of our shared love of the same music,” says Huffman. Their bond (and the tedium of touring) soon led to a collaboration, with the two staying up all night in hotel rooms playing music.

When Gatsby’s lapsed into inactivity, the two friends found themselves back home in Seattle with a cache of musical ideas that they were eager to get down on tape. Almost immediately, Huffman suggested working with his acquaintance Phil Peterson. “Phil has this studio in this cool old classic Northwest home,” Huffman suggested. “Plus he’s just kind of a quirky interesting guy, and he plays cello, and he’d be perfect for the project.” Peterson quickly agreed and became the final core member of the group, taking on the George Martin role to the other two’s Lennon and McCartney. But as Huffman explains, “By no means did we want to come home and try to start another band and get back out on the road. Iwas just jaded from the whole scene. Ithink we all felt like we needed to capture our sense of normalcy.”

For over a year, they worked at their jobs each day then convened in Peterson’s home studio to record. “At home we were super liberated because we weren’t on a record label. We just lived it for a year and recorded so much,” says O’Quin.

“Thank god I didn’t track by the hour, huh?” laughs Peterson. “Just for the love of music!”

Indeed, the three credit being able to work without the outside pressure of studio costs and label expectations, along with their collaborative songwriting process, with the development of the band’s idiosyncratic vision. As O’Quin puts it, “Each song got a lot of love.” Huffman adds, “The structures of these songs are exactly like Kyle’s brain. Kyle will come over here and be like [in perfect imitation of O’Quin], ‘Oh, check out this thing I wrote,’ and he’ll play it for 25 seconds and then immediately move on to another thing.”

As the songs developed, more musicians were brought into the studio, notably guitarist Thomas Hunter. Still, Huffman emphasizes the goal was not to create any kind of “band” thing. “I wanted it to be something a little bit broader and maybe even a little bit obscure,” he says. From this desire (and quite possibly from Huffman’s penchant for mimicry and funny character voices in conversation) evolved “Kay Kay,” a fictional character who became the project’s conceptual centerpoint.

Self-professed music nerds, Huffman, O’Quin and Peterson share a common obsession with ‘60s pop music, from Brian Wilson to Stax soul, infusing their songs with nostalgic nods to old LPs. O’Quin says, “With Kyle, the whole entire recording process was like, ‘We gotta pan stuff crazy like on Revolver and Rubber Soul, and we gotta have the tambourine much louder than everything else for no apparent reason.’” The group was trying to pay homage but also explore the emotional resonance of these ‘60s sounds, alternating “classic progressions that totally grab onto you with a super-weird chord that you might get lost in,” as O’Quin puts it. Lyrically, Huffman takes inspiration from ‘60s literary figures as well, explaining, “It’s that Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson type of writing where it’s in the complete now.” Kay Kay is inspired by cinematic sources too, and a very unusual one in particular, drawing the idea for what Huffman calls Kay Kay’s “pop cantata” from the Brian DePalma/Paul Williams “sci-fi horror musical” Phantom of the Paradise. “It’s pretty wild,” says Huffman of the film.

The band also emphasizes the importance of its immediate surroundings in shaping its music. “Ithink the record is a completely Northwest record,” states Huffman, who says he and rest of the group were writing about “things we were seeing on our street corners and in our neighborhoods. People come up to us and say, ‘If you guys had recorded this in Brooklyn, it would have been completely different and pretentious.’” O’Quin concurs, saying there’s a discernible difference between songs written “in your hometown, for no one but yourself” and songs written “on a tour bus in a different city every day, thinking what all the 14-year-olds are going to buy.” Peterson takes it even further saying, “For me it’s so personal, it’s like you breathe and your heart beats at the same time; you play music and it’s you. It better not be anything different or put down your instrument.”

A turning point in the trio’s attitude toward its new project came after completing four songs in the studio. Their reaction was, in Huffman’s words, “Oh my gosh — we might be able to do something with these.” They sent the songs to friends and Huffman says, “The initial response was, ‘Really cool songs, really amazing songs, but you’re not going to be able to pull this off. You are too ambitious.’”

The four songs also ended up in the hands of John Sidel at V2 Records, whose interest “was the big spur to wrap up a whole entire record,” according to Huffman. “We signed the initial agreement and then V2 was bought out by Universal. So they ixnayed any spending of the money, and it pretty much ended up that we never heard from them again.”

These setbacks only strengthened Kay Kay’s resolve. Its members vowed to complete and release the record themselves, and to prove their doubting friends wrong, they hatched the idea of a live DVD. Huffman says, “We went back to the drawing table like, ‘Well fuck that, no! Let’s record us playing an entire live set of the eight songs that we’ve got now, straight into a board, no fucking gimmicks, and we’ll show people.’” What’s more, they decided, as Huffman retells, “Let’s dress everybody up, let’s get the stage all crazy and colorful, and have everybody looking nutty, and get a bunch of people in here looking pretty-”

“Liquor ‘em up,” O’Quin pipes in.

“Liquor ‘em up and do a show inside this little vintage fashion boutique,” Huffman continues, referring to Pretty Parlor, the shop owned by friend Anna “Banana” Lange and located on the same block in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood where he lives. “And we did it and it worked,” says Peterson triumphantly.

Entirely self-financed, the live video was directed by Martin Jarmick and self-released by the band as a two-disc DVD/ live CD set, titled Live from the Pretty Parlor. And beyond shutting up their skeptical friends, the DVD later opened up an unexpected opportunity when it wound up in the right hands and landed Kay Kay, still unsigned, their first national television appearance on Last Call with Carson Daly. Effusively positive about their experience on Daly’s show, the three also used the trip to Los Angeles as a chance to book a handful of shows in the area, their first time taking the act away from its Northwest home base.

Spawned from the DVD taping, Kay Kay’s elaborate stage show can involve costumes, slideshows, and anywhere from six to 17 musicians onstage. “It’s quite an extravagant and difficult thing to put together. It’s a workload,” Huffman says, but explains he would rather play infrequently and make it a big event than hit the road every weekend. Contrasting it with his previous band experience, Huffman adds, “[Fortunately] everybody is literally family or has known each other for years, so everybody is really tight knit — there’s not a lot of what happens when you get five dudes in a van and you’re going all over the place for months at a time.” Peterson further describes the nature of Kay Kay’s community of friends and collaborators: “It’s very important to understand that Kay Kay is a lot bigger than what you might see onstage with us at any given point, so if somebody can’t make it we have other people that can fill in. It’s not even a reserve, it’s sort of a flow.”

The shows in Los Angeles resulted in more industry interest in Kay Kay. “We had every major label you could possibly think of coming and watching us in L.A.,” Huffman says. But the band remains committed to its DIYapproach and the freedom it affords. Says Huffman, “We’re pretty much our own record label, our own recording studio, our own producers, our own mixers, for the most part do our own booking — it’s all self-financed. We do our own merch...”

“And we don’t have any money,” interjects Peterson.

“We’re working our jobs and literally every dime that we have is going into the project to propel it,” Huffman affirms, “but at the same time it’s way more rewarding that way, and there’s no limit to what we can do or no one there to tell us no.”

“Or slow it down,” says Peterson who half-jokes that signing to a major label would have delayed the album by about three years. Huffman adds, “They never would have put it out on vinyl,” which Kay Kay did earlier this year, out of pure love of the format, after being approached by Suburban Home Records and Vinyl Collective. (The album is also available as a digital download.)

“90 to 95 percent of bands don’t need a label,” Huffman says assuredly. “That’s just evident; it just takes a little bit of simple savvy. Imean, anyone can record a song and throw up an MP3 online.” Of course having Kay Kay’s indomitable, all-for-one spirit and strong support network doesn’t hurt either. Huffman also credits his and O’Quin’s time on the road with Gatsby’s as a valuable learning opportunity: “As much as he and Ifelt jaded and just like, ‘Ugh!’ about a lot of that experience. All the indie labels have a small warehouse where they hire a bunch of local kids and they do all the merch for the whole entire label, so Iwas just running around with those guys and watching them silkscreen stuff and that’s how Ilearned. Ithink that’s the same with all of us, just kind of this osmosis of picking things up from our experiences.”

“And together, we all learn a lot from each other,” agrees O’Quin. “Everybody kind of has their own specialty. I’ve learned so much from you guys.”

Peterson makes it unanimous: “Me too.”

www.myspace.com/kaykayunderground