01.21.07 - Volume 3, Episode #1 - Length 39:47
Few bands have experienced so much good fortune and so much bad luck together. Harvey Danger was once known as a comic book character, but they have become a hero amongst independent musicians by taking their destiny into their own hands. Discover what led to the break up, how they got back together and the decision to give away their third album, Little by Little.
AAC 38 MB
MP3 36.4 MB
( ♪ Moral Centralia – From the Album Little by Little ♪ )
Jeff J. Lin: Aaron (Huffman) was sitting on the couch and he looked up and the Daily of the University of Washington, the newsroom has all this graffiti, it’s completely graffiti covered and there’s this gigantic head on it and it says Harvey Danger underneath it. Apparently it was a cartoon character. And he was like, okay, how about that? Harvey Danger! I was like, great. That will be the name.
( ♪ Moral Centralia – From the Album Little by Little ♪ )
Jeff J. Lin: Myself and Aaron (Huffman) who’s the bass player, we were working together at the University of Washington Daily, the student newspaper and we decided that we’d really to start a band and so we’re like, hey, let’s start a band. And we got our friend Ken Hunt, who actually very sadly recently passed away, to be our drummer. I thought well, I’ll play the guitar, Aaron you can play the bass. We took the bus up to American Music here in Seattle and we like picked out a guitar and I picked out an amplifier and went back to my apartment and did a little diking around and two guys just kinda’ like hey, what’s this. We’re going to start a band or whatever. Aaron eventually saved up money and got a bass and then we started playing together with our friend Ken and the idea was that we would try to play some of these house parties that friends of ours would through. They usually have these around Universities…Ten people to a house, pretty big house. You’ll through a party and a couple of hundred people show up. You have to remember this is the early 90s in Seattle so Nirvana had just become big. The whole grunge thing was happening. Everybody was really into bands and we were just like, hey this is totally cool. We want to be in a live band.
( ♪ Moral Centralia – From the Album Little by Little ♪ )
Jeff J. Lin: We ended up being pretty serious after a while where we kinda’ gelled and then we were like, let’s just write our own songs. We all got excited about them. It’s funny at the time you think your really great and then you listen to them later and your like, god those are terrible. You do a little better, you do a little better, and one time you come up with a new song and your like, hey, that’s pretty cool! It’s definitely one substantial amount better and your like, hey, we’ve made some sort of progress. It was like wanting to make and write better songs. It was us getting better and better because we didn’t really know how to go about getting shows or anything like that so the only thing we had was writing songs for ourselves.
( ♪ Moral Centralia – From the Album Little by Little ♪ )
Jeff J. Lin: You play these little crappy shows on Sunday nights and Wednesday nights and your opening for other bands that you think are a pretty big deal because they maybe got to play at the Crocodile Cafe opening for somebody else on a Wednesday or something. You set your sites like that’s your impossibly lofty goals to play at one of the better venues. Not even headlining, but like maybe you could open on a weekend night. Maybe. You wouldn’t even dream of headlining a show in a place like that. But it’s funny it was never like, you read these stories where people say, we’re going to make it and really go for it. You know go for the mega-hit stadium rock. We wanted to write songs, we wanted to play shows and then you get to a show and your like, well we can do better than the Lake Union Pub, maybe it would be cool to play the Crocodile. Then you get to the Crocodile your like, well maybe it would be cool to open on a weekend. You’re opening on a weekday night and your like, maybe we could draw enough were we could open on a weekend night. And then you move from there and you end up headlining your own show after a while and your headlining on a weekday and then your like, well maybe we could headline on a weekend night. We have enough draw. It just goes from there. Maybe we can release a single. If we through a couple more tracks on this maybe we release an album. Then after you release the album your like, hey, that’s actually not bad. That’s kinda’ how it happened for us. We released a demo, actually what happened was we were on KEXP, not KEXP. At the time it was KCMU and they had this local music show and we got on it and we played a couple of songs and at the time Sean (Nelson) was covering a story and he ran into John Goodmanson, the producer, and gave him a tape and we were like, maybe we record a song or something? John was like, I like what I hear. And he was willing to give us a day at a super discount rate and actually we recorded two or three tracks which actually ended up on the album, Private Helicopter and Terminal Annex.
( ♪ Private Helicopter – From the Demo Harvey Danger ♪ )
Jeff J. Lin:
"It was us getting better and better because we didn't really know how to go about getting shows or anything like that so the only thing we had was writing songs for ourselves." - Jeff J. Lin
