The 7 Year Bitch Page!/Articles And Interviews/Article 36

Bands That Board

By Richy B.

It's winter, and unless you've been hanging out in Fife at your Uncle Chester's toilet repair shop listening to Yanni bootlegs and reading Deepak Chopra, you know what time it is: It's time to pace around your room in your long johns early Monday and Tuesday mornings while practicing your best croaky voice and mulling insane lies to tell your boss so you can head up to Snoqualmie Pass for cheap lift-ticket days. It's time to hang out at the Snowboard Connection, drool over all the new gear, and pray for a big dump to powder the mountains. It's time to put-up-or-shut-up about all the "fakie to forward 540 switch liens" you've spent all summer bragging about doing when the snows come. And it's time to call all your acid-eatin' patchouli-pals up at Western so you can crash at their pad while goin' large at Baker all weekend.

"It's time," as the B-Boys would say, "to get ill." It's time to snowboard.

Like so many others around the world, people in the mountain-laden Northwest are trying a sport that has exploded in popularity during the past few years, and among them are a slew of Seattle-area musicians. Often they are introduced to the sport when board manufacturers, eager to align their products with all things cool, hook them up with free equipment. Truth is, musicians who ride aren't "hot-rockin" maniacs who thrash boards by day and shred guitars by night; they're average Janes and Joes (albeit with cool jobs) out there hitting the slopes for the same reason everyone else is: To have fun.

"K-2, at one point, was bouncing around the idea of doing a Mudhoney board," explains Mark Arm, picker and crooner for the aforementioned band, "so we got free snowboards from K-2. That was probably about four years ago. I'd been an avid skateboarder and skier up to a point—about '84, when I couldn't really afford to go skiing anymore and my skis were broken. I hadn't done any activities like that for a couple of years—then I got the free snowboard."

And the new toy's allure was instant. "It's the speed," Arm says. "It's a good time. I kinda came from a '70s Washington version of skateboarding when it comes to snowboarding, which is a downhill thing more than doing tricks. I'm too old to start going backwards and stuff," he adds, laughing. "My legs will break."

Supersuckers frontman Eddie Spaghetti avoids any discussion of his own boarding prowess by spinning sacrilicious tales about his friends instead. "Y'know, I've seen Mark Arm do some things on the snowboard I couldn't believe," he says in confessional tone that brings to mind the tallest of Texas tale-tellers. "Me and him learned together on the same day, and we were at about the same level. He was a really good skier, so he was already pretty comfortable on the snow. I'm from Arizona, so say no more. We didn't board together for a little while, and when we did, he's going over these jumps and just flying through the air! I'm talkin' like way over my head, and I'm just going, 'Holy shit!' So I kinda felt like a retard."

Arm, however, burst out laughing when this story was relayed to him.

"I wasn't flying over his head," Arm retorts with an audible scoff, his hearty laugh tempering the incredulous tone of his voice. "No, I'm basically a hack. I can't do any tricks or anything, but I can cruise and I can jump, sort of," he adds, before his voice fades back into laughter over Spaghetti's yarn.

As for Spaghetti, the allure of snowboarding comes down to a single, comic issue. "It makes me feel like the Silver Surfer," he says, speaking as though no other reason could matter more.

Getting out onto the mountain, where the stink of exhaust and incessant clamor of the city are just a distant annoyance, can be an amazing experience. Standing atop a wind-blown cornice affords a view of a world with no concrete, no billboards, no fast-food restaurants, and no ominous, leering skyscrapers barring your view of the beauty that surrounds you. The mountain is a place where you feel able to truly breathe, where you can stretch out, where time seems an irrelevant entity.

"You know, what's really great about snowboarding is that it's a solitary sport," says 7 Year Bitch bassist Elizabeth Davis, in a convinced, passionate tone that shows she's spent a lot of time thinking about it. "It's not a team sport. If you're around a lot of people all the time, it's a good sport when you want to get away. True, you have to deal with lift-tickets and lift-lines, but I cross-country ski, and the two are similar in that I don't find them social. I find them blessedly anti-social. You know, you're totally bundled up, and you're just snowboarding. You don't really have to think about anything else."

For Carrie Akre, singer of Goodness, the wealth of physical beauty that a trip to the slopes provides goes hand-in-hand with the beauty she finds in expressing herself in a way the workday world does not allow. "I really like the flow of snowboarding," she explains, "and how it feels on your body when you're doing it well. It feels good to go out, get physical, and be outside. It's got a good feeling to it, it sounds good to music, and it just feels really good to wear your whole body out. You don't really do that when you're at home, doing your job, or sitting around."

Speaking from Northern California, where 7 Year Bitch are currently recording, Davis lamented the distance between her and her hometown slopes. "I was seriously dragging my feet real hard to come down here," she says, "even though San Francisco is beautiful, warm, and charming. Last winter I spent every free moment I had either snowboarding or devising a way that I could snowboard more."

And this boarding season should prove the same for Davis, distance be damned. "All I can say is that it's only $61 to fly round trip from San Francisco to Seattle," she asserts. "With the prices being so much cheaper for lift-tickets in the Northwest, it's actually worth it to fly up there to ride. I wouldn't be surprised if I do that at least once this winter."

Akre echoes Davis' tenacity with a dogged determination to get as good at the sport as the pro-riding friends she boards with. "I want to get over the fear," she says emphatically. "I want to do the jumps. I think that would be fun. That's totally about getting over fear, though. Like the fear of free-falling—some people are totally up for it. It's an all-or-nothing sport, I get the feeling."

But let's face it, snowboarding doesn't have to be a challenge or a push-yourself-to-the-limit undertaking. It can be, simply, a good time. And for Steve Dukich, wailing bassist and cantor for Steel Wool, it offers the ability to bypass the one thing he doesn't enjoy about his favorite sport, surfing.

"I just like that you don't have to paddle out," he confesses, laughing. "Definitely powder is the most fun, for sure. But just making turns and keeping it on the ground is cool. I'm not really into trick riding, or halfpipes, or any of that crap. Just have fun, make turns, get in the trees."

When not out on the slopes, he and some friends have been trying to get back to the old days of the sport by building replicas from the time when a snowboard was little more than a homemade slab of wood with a rope attached to the front for steering.

"We've been calling 'em 'Snurf-boards,'" Dukich states, "because the name 'Snurfer' is still trademarked. They're basically a bindingless, super-narrow, super-squirrely, hard-to-ride thing for riding on the snow. They're pretty funny. We've been working on them out in the 'Bigfoot Research Laboratories'; that's our company name.'

Any plans to sell?

"Nope. We've got two orders, though, for the 'Don Ho Tiny Bubbles' model," he adds with a laugh.

It's a prospect we should all be willing to hoist a hearty toast for.

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