Beat Happening
You Turn Me On

Few, simple ingredients. Three human beings (one with a male voice, and one with a female voice). A guitar bought at the supermarket (it's a Sears guitar, like saying a guitar from Standa, even though it dates back one or two decades earlier, and was more likely found in a basement or at a pawn shop). An amplifier whose technology, at least judging by the sound, is not much more advanced (it makes little difference once the volume knob is turned up to max to spit out a nice vintage '60s distortion). Snare drum and tom-tom. Microphone and “vocal system”. The three human beings occasionally swap instruments.

They met in a very peace and love university town (among the students, young leftist intellectuals; but the locals, lumberjacks in plaid shirts, hate them and throw stones at the bars where they meet) in the forests of the Northwest. They cultivate a certain sexual ambiguity. They wear cardigans. One day, Big Black at the height of their so-called success played in the nearby city and Calvin (the human with the male voice) was nowhere to be seen. But where were you? I had to wash my hair, Calvin explains.

They form a band and call it Beat Happening. Decision to move to Japan, the only country in the world where being American is still cool, to chase success. They stay a few months in Japan. They don't find success. However, they have time to make a demo tape: tape in the sense of band: an audiocassette, as it was used then. On the cover, they write: recorded in Japan. Cool. Calvin draws a bunny, a very stylized doodle. It becomes their trademark. They set up a label to produce and distribute their music and that of their friends. K records. In this initial stage of their career, in their lyrics “honey pot” rhymes with “I love you a lot.”

In the early '90s, a concert in the homeland of grunge music (and almost their homeland), with numerous local bands with a wide following. Beat Happening takes the stage towards the end and Calvin introduces himself to the thousands of spectators (grunge is turning into a mass phenomenon): we hope we don't disappoint you. We are different from the bands that played before us. We are punk rock. And then they seemed to have brought the house down, apparently (or the stadium, or the ice rink, or the public park...).

During this period, they make You turn me on, their last album. It happened that they came into contact with Stuart Moxham, ex-Young Marble Giants, who is the producer of You turn me on. The collaboration works; Beat Happening evolves while maintaining the spontaneity of the beginnings. One track, the first, stands out among all the others. Tiger trap. You excite me, I want you. I hoist the jolly roger on the mast and like a pirate, I go hunting for your treasure, your secret chest protected by a thousand chains. But I find only the tender hook of the tiger trap: I'm caught in your tender trap. To me, it's the most representative song of Beat Happening; or at least the most representative song of Calvin Johnson. Calvin is this, I believe: an adventurer who, through sex, or love, or some unspecified mix of both, seeks to overcome the unknown land that separates him from others, from their mystery, from their secret chest. He almost wants to claim it. Love in the time of pop culture.

It ends with Beat Happening breaking up, everyone but Calvin tired of remaining obscure and, above all, broke despite their immense efforts, self-production, European tours. The second male element of Beat Happening finds work as a clerk in a bookstore. I don't know about the female element. Behind K records, there remains Calvin. And Calvin continues to write songs, and to sing them.