The Record Store Years (Side Trip): The Glanz and The Monastery
A memoir of 25 years (1975-2000) spent working in the world of records & music in Seattle, with occasional side trips into writings on Led Zeppelin and other adventures from my musical life.
In late 1975 I was still a lowly sales clerk at Cellophane Square, and the Sunday solo shift was mine for several months. The store was open from noon to 8 p.m. and business was usually slow enough that the owners deemed it unnecessary to pay more than one person to run the store. It was not an especially popular duty assignment among the staff, but I didn’t mind it – I could eat my supper behind the counter, lock the door for a minute or two when the store was empty if I had to pee, and best of all, I had complete command of the turntable and could listen to whatever I wanted to all day long.
It was almost always a sleepy stretch of counter time for the business, so I could also engage in long conversations with the customers who did come in as well as occasional friends who stopped by. One afternoon I was playing a Neil Young album and struck up a conversation with a deep-voiced customer who was a fellow Neil fan – he had recently moved to Seattle from Cleveland and described catching the “Times Fades Away” tour live in Ohio about a year previous. At that point in Neil Young’s career you were either wondering what the hell he was up to after the commercial triumph of Harvest, or you were loving the newer stuff even more and in it for the long haul. We were in the latter camp and ended up chatting for quite a while about our many common musical passions and it turned out he was a drummer, and I was a guitarist, both looking for other musicians to jam with.
Jeff Humphrey, aka ‘Hump,’ subsequently became one of my best friends and musical collaborators, and we still get together regularly to this day to play and hang out. His musical knowledge and passion was (and still is) on par with my own, and when Tower Records opened its Seattle location in 1977, Hump immediately got hired and eventually moved up to being their import buyer and an integral part of their staff.
We had jammed a few times with various people prior to that, but nothing approximating a band came together until we hooked up with two other Tower employee musicians, a laid-back bassist named Doug and a charismatic, wise-cracking guitarist named Jeff Gilbert – nicknamed ‘Fish’ at the time for reasons I can’t recall. The first time we played together was in Fish’s tiny apartment on lower Queen Anne – small amps but full drum set and certainly not a low-volume affair, somewhat to the chagrin of his neighbors!
Above: Me ‘n’ Hump, apartment jam summer 1977.
Things really clicked and we jammed a few more times at parties in other locations that I can’t remember - Fish had some catchy original material (all instrumental) and we learned “The Rover” by Led Zep and “Speak Now. . . Or Forever Hold Your Piece” by Terry Reid via Cheap Trick. Despite the lack of a vocalist and anything approaching a serious attitude (lots of beer drinking & weed smoking went on), we decided it was a band and the next step was to find a place where we could rehearse regularly without getting noise complaints.
So we put an ad on Craigslist, no, wait. . . it was 1977 – we put an ad in the Seattle Times classified section stating, “rock band looking for rehearsal space” or something to that effect, and amazingly enough we got a response. Described by our respondent was a room in the basement of an ancient edifice on Yesler Way in Seattle’s historical Pioneer Square district, right near the waterfront. I remember it being referred to as the “Yesler Hotel” however I don’t think that’s historically correct - I’m pretty sure that today it has become The Pioneer Hotel, run by the Best Western chain on the south side of Yesler between 1st Avenue and Alaskan Way (below is the building as it appears today). The guy sounded friendly and assured me that the rent would be dirt cheap, so all four of us went down to check it out.
Let me set the stage for you: We were all in our early 20s with varying degrees of long hair – Doug had a bushy white-boy afro, Fish had curly blonde Robert Plant-style locks to his shoulders, and both Hump and I sported the long straight parted-in-the middle look. We paraded into the lobby of the Yesler Hotel to meet this landlord and found it dingy and dimly-lit, with elderly, third-stage alcoholics slumped in chairs and benches on each side of the room, staring at us with a mixture of curiosity and horror on their faces.
Mr. Enthusiastic duly met us and took us to an ancient, cage-like elevator that descended two stories to a sub-basement with a single light bulb illuminating a sloping dirt floor, cave-like stone walls and a claustrophobically low ceiling. To say it was creepy would be an understatement. At the lowest point in the sloping floor there was a puddle of water, and when questioned about it Mr. E said, “oh, it only gets wet when it’s high tide!” Needless to say, we bailed as quick as we could (not the water) and chalked that one off the list.
Then we stumbled on a classified ad actually stating, “Rehearsal hall with full sound system, available 24 hours” with a phone number that turned out to be for one George Freeman at a place billed as “The Monastery.” If you’re at all familiar with Seattle music history, at this point you’re probably thinking, “that Monastery?” and yes, it was that Monastery.
Above: The original Seattle Times ad and my notes on the meeting, and some original Monastery swag – a pink balloon.
I made the call and we set up a time to meet George and check the place out, and it was perfect – a huge old church on the corner of Stewart and Boren Streets on the border of downtown with an enormous room that must have been the main chapel of the facility at one time. The pews had been removed so it had a big open floor, and a large stage with plenty of power outlets and great daylight streaming in through various stained-glass windows. There were no residents nearby so noise would not be a problem. George was easy going and charming, and told us we could practice there during the day just about any time we wanted to, and if it worked out he might even plug us into some gigs they were planning to host in the evenings. He claimed they were “interested in grooming acts.”
We agreed on a very fair price for our occasional use of the space, and proceeded to lug our gear in and rock out every time we could coordinate our days off together to play in the afternoons.
Now the story of the Monastery is one of Seattle’s most legendary and notorious tales – probably the best and most complete telling of it is on a recent KUOW podcast called “Let The Kids Dance” by Jonathan Zwickel [ https://www.kuow.org/podcasts/let-the-kids-dance ], which over 7 fascinating episodes details the story of a city ordinance known as “The Teen Dance Ordinance.” It was put into effect around 1985 and effectively outlawed all-ages music venues and events within the city limits of Seattle. That ordinance, proposed and passed by an overzealous city council, was more or less a direct result of George Freeman’s Monastery, and our time at The Monastery was near the beginning of its existence.
Above: The Monastery in May 1977 (photo from George Freeman’s website, georgefreeman.com)
George Freeman was what might today be considered a gay activist. He set up The Monastery as a non-profit religious organization and within its walls he put on all-ages parties and disco dances, and most controversially provided a refuge for homeless and at-risk teenage kids, many of whom were struggling with sexual identity, mental illness and drug problems.
It was the late 1970s and I’m sure there were some questionable and possibly unsavory things going on in the maze of rooms below the big chapel where we rehearsed – for one thing, cocaine was everywhere in those days – but I believe that George Freeman was a good man who had the best interest of these kids at heart, and he certainly did right by us. He would often be hanging out with some of the kids as we trooped in to rehearse, and affectionately dubbed us “The Guitar Army.”
Above: A Monastery promo flyer (left) and the flyer for our only show there in May 1978, billed as ‘The No Name People.’ We did not stick around until sunrise.
George also made good on his promise of putting us on a show, and we played an ‘early’ 10:00 p.m. set before one of the all-night disco events. We hadn’t settled on a name yet so on the flyer we were billed as “The No Name People.” There was a small crowd present including some of our friends, who responded enthusiastically as the disco fans clapped with light amusement. That turned out to be our only ‘real’ show. We practiced at the Monastery for a few months and eventually settled on the name “The Glanz” (don’t ask), played a few parties, and eventually broke up after one particular party where the bass player got too high and I got pissed off about it.
One of the funnier things in our Monastery experience was going into a bar across the street before every practice to buy some beer. The place was the dive-bar equivalent of the Yesler Hotel lobby, and we always went in together with our quasi-rock star vibe, Fish cracking wise and all of us pooling some bills onto the counter for a couple of 6-packs of Budweiser. The patrons stared and the bartender took our money, gave us our beer, and never cracked a smile or said a word.
My musical career didn’t amount to much until the 1990s, but Hump became a founding member of Moving Parts, a noted Seattle band of the early ‘80s, and Fish (Jeff Gilbert) gained local notoriety as a journalist, publisher (“Mansplat”), bar owner and man-about-town. We’d run into each other over the years and laugh about the good ol’ days of The Glanz and The Monastery.
George Freeman survived the many assaults from our city fathers – though The Monastery did not – and he is still around and highly visible in the community, God bless ‘im. He maintains a website with the story of the Monastery and some other interesting things at georgefreeman.com.
NEXT: The Tao of Cellophane Square
Below: The Glanz, aka The No Name People, ca. July 1978. You don’t need to hear us to know what it sounded like – 2 Les Pauls, an EB 4, Marshall and Ampeg amps. . . earplugs required!
Below: Hump’s later, better-named band and Fish’s mid-’90s efforts in politically incorrect journalism (back issues available here: https://www.mansplat.com/ )
Wow! Your brain cells seem much more intact than mine. Thanks for filling in the blanks. Fun times.
These side trips down Seattle history are quite the exciting journey!!