A tale of two cities. Security guards ensure Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready is okay as the rockstar revs up fans in Seattle, a city that suppressed Black music. Like an ordinance to deal with teen dance? I don’t know what it could have been called to make it seem better, but it just sounded likeSo says Keith ‘G Prez’ Asphy in a recording studio at Seattle’s NPR affiliate, and the frustration over one of Seattle’s dirty secrets is carved into his wry smile.
Either intentionally or cluelessly, Sidran was criminalizing the music community exactly at the time it was bringing the entire world’s attention to the city. By the early ’90s, hundreds of young people were turning out for Asphy’s events. For that reason he found himself under scrutiny from officers from the Seattle Police Department and Seattle Fire Department, who showed up to enforce the TDO. The ordinance worked not by banning dancing outright but by establishing a series of absurd — and absurdly expensive — regulatory hurdles that made all-ages events virtually impossible to produce.
“I don’t know what the underlying feeling was or what the motivation was,” says former Seattle Police Chief Jim Pugel, pictured here running as a candidate for the Seattle City Council in 2019. This all fits with the experience of a slew of Seattle concert promoters. In 2000, Kate Becker put on more than 50 all-ages shows at the laundromat-cum-concert venue called Sit & Spin, including the White Stripes’ first Seattle appearance. These were daytime shows, 1 PM on Saturdays. Unlike Asphy, she didn’t go the legal route. She made sure the space was safe and relatively orderly, but she didn’t pay SPD or take out the required insurance policy.