Urban dweller or townie, we’ve all felt the feeling that occurs after 2 a.m.  You’ve been partying hard, but now you’re cast out on the sidewalk, too restless to go home, not wanting the night to end but also in drowsy refusal that another night’s bar crawl has played itself out. So you end up sitting in some 24-hour donut shop or diner, an anonymous scene but for the waitress’ coffee top-ups arriving like clockwork.  No one can save us…

It’s a universal emotion, one that a handful of able folks have shaped into art:  Edward Hopper, Tom Waits … Jeff Kelly.  The last of that trio may be unfamiliar to most, but not to those fortunate enough to have heard “Kim The Waitress”, a song Kelly wrote and sang with Northwest combo the Green Pajamas, back in 1986.

It was arguably the most successful of those strikes at the fortress of Pop attempted by ‘80s Seattle indie label Green Monkey Records.  “Kim” got further attention in 1994, when a cover by Chicago power poppers Material Issue became a minor MTV phenom.  Even so, it was still more attention than the Pajamas or most of their fellow acts at Green Monkey got in their lifetime.  And with the release of this new anthology covering the lifespan of the label, more’s the belated pity.
 
Over the eight years of GMR’s existence, founder Tom Dyer amassed a formidable stash of smart pop thrills.  Wacky at times, compelling, melodic, as ambitious as resources would allow, they were tunes one wished you could hear any time you turned on the radio—not just local college stations—to blast with impunity.

As with many DIY record labels, Dyer started out small and eccentric, with art-damaged japery such as his own “(Half the World Is Made of) Women” and “Van Vliet Street”, which indeed sports a trout mask on its sleeve.  Early clues to the local musical direction of the impending decade can also be heard, courtesy of a gleefully incoherent track by Mister Epp and the Calculations, led by future Mudhoney Mark Arm.

With the discovery of homegrown pop-psych auteur Jeff Kelly’s home-studio creation the Green Pajamas, GMR’s fortunes began to gather momentum.  More local hopefuls would soon find favor with Dyer and join his roster.  There was Prudence Dredge, cranking out wiseacre lounge-lizard rock with the implication of ska (must have been the saxophone).  They were fronted by one Joey Kline, later associated with a network of clever musos that included the Mighty Squirrels and Young Fresh Fellows.

There was also the Elements, a trio of sensitive U of W frat brats; their pair of included tracks here are lovelorn but tough acoustic rock, closer to the Go-Betweens than Sonics/Wailers kegger revelry.  That said, Dyer and Green Monkey were not above shaking it down in the classic NW garage style, as heard on the Liquid Generation’s rave-up “I Love You”.  GMR even managed to catch some locals ascending to higher profiles, with some fine early cuts by the Fastbacks (“Time Passes”) and gifted folk rockers the Walkabouts (“1+1”).

It Crawled… reaches its halfway point, appropriately enough, with “Kim The Waitress”.  At six minutes plus, Jeff Kelly takes his sweet time in creating this moody, sitar-twanging, shoulda-been-mega nugget, a woozily expectant audio image of reluctant disconnection. 

Dyer and Green Monkey soldiered on through the ‘80s and early ‘90s, producing many solidly wrought, tuneful pop moments.  The Queen Annes, with songs like “If You Could Only See Me Now”, were almost like a Northwestern take on the British C86 stream: Lou/Velvets ’69 rhythm strum with Mod-era lead intrusions.  “Mona Lisa” by Capping Day carries a positive whiff of the numbers Mitch Easter would have the distaff members of Let’s Active sing, like “Horizon” or “Blue Line”.  The Fall-Outs and the Purdins wave the proto-punk pop flag with songs like “A Fine Young Man” and the brashly untrippy “Psychedelic Day”.  Still other GMR artists like Steven Lawrence, the Hitmen, and, of course, label mainstays the Green Pajamas, also came correct with quality tunes well into the early ‘90s.

Green Monkey closed up shop concurrently with the rise of Nirvana, leaving behind a sizable cache of appealing and bewilderingly under-appreciated rock/pop moments, finally seeing post-millennial light with this retrospective.  Nowadays, Tom Dyer runs a private university in Seattle.  I have been forbidden to express the cliché about the opposite of pop music’s loss, but it’s pretty damned true all the same.  Ignore the best of this double dose of forty-seven pre-grunge charms at your aesthetic peril.