tour in support of their second album, New Plastic Ideas, that had tested everyone’s endurance and patience. They had just completed an exhaustive ten-week U.S. With the exception of Yoyo, the summer of 1994 was Unwound’s longest period of inactivity since Sara joined the band. “At IPU it didn’t seem like it mattered who was there and after that it was like, ‘The Russians are coming! Hide your ideas!’ And you’d wonder: is Olympia turning into something cheesy?” It was cool that there were Japanese bands playing and bands from England, but to me, it was all about the Olympia bands.” “There’s this mentality in Olympia where people don’t want things to be successful,” Justin said. “We went for them, for Karp, Kicking Giant, Godheadsilo. At IPU it didn’t seem like it mattered who was there and after that it was like, ‘The Russians are coming! Hide your ideas!’ And you’d wonder: is Olympia turning into something cheesy? When the band walked onstage for a prime opening-night slot at Yoyo, they were one of the festival’s major draws. But since then, with Brandt quitting the band and Sara Lund replacing him, Unwound had tucked two LPs and multiple cross-country tours under its belt. At the time, the name Unwound was new enough that most Olympians still referred to the band by their original moniker, Giant Henry. Unwound played their second-ever show at IPU, an afternoon set at the North Shore Surf Club with their first drummer, Brandt Sandeno. The whole thing was so weird with tourists and media.” “The atmosphere was paranoid-maybe ‘toxic’ is a better word,” said Unwound guitarist/vocalist Justin Trosper. By the time Yoyo kicked off three years later, Kurt Cobain was dead and media scrutiny of riot grrrl had become so intense that most of the bands associated with it were refusing to talk to the press. Back then, the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind was still a month away. Its opening night, dedicated exclusively to female musicians, was one of the galvanizing moments in the rise of riot grrrl. McManus had never exchanged anything more than a few mail-order niceties with anyone in Olympia, and yet there he and his roommate were, being welcomed by name in the intro of the official Yoyo program: “Sean and John from Texas, who quit their shitty service industry jobs just to be here with us all.”īut IPU had been hatched in simpler times.

Both were ambitious, grassroots celebrations of the DIY underground, and while music was their shared centerpiece, both would emphasize community. Yoyo, like many other aspects of the Olympia music scene, was directly inspired by the International Pop Underground Convention organized by K Records in the summer of 1991. And to McManus, “Olympia seemed like musical Mecca.” So when Pat Maley, an Olympia-based producer and founder of the Yoyo Recordings label, announced that he, along with Michele Noel, a DJ at Evergreen State College’s KAOS radio station, and Kento Oiwa, an area musician, were organizing a five-day music festival in downtown Olympia called Yoyo A Go Go, McManus decided a pilgrimage was in order. Local stores were good, but what they were really into was mail-order. They flipped burgers at a hole-in-the-wall to pay the rent and whatever money they had left over was spent on records. McManus and his roommate were 20 years old at the time, sleeping on bunk beds in a studio apartment they shared in Austin’s Hyde Park district. “The first one, everybody freaked out, like, ‘Don’t let him swallow his tongue!’ By hour eight everybody was like, ‘Jesus, just let this guy die already,’ because we kept having to stop.” “This one guy on the bus, he didn’t tell anyone he was epileptic, and then he started having them every hour,” McManus said. It was three days from Austin, Texas, to Olympia, Washington, by Greyhound, and what Sean McManus remembered best about the journey, which he embarked upon with his roommate in July 1994, is the seizures. South Georgia & South Sandwich Islands (USD $).

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