Naive With a K: The Shield Around the K @ The Black Cat
By DCist contributor Mehan Jayasuriya
Having never been to a film screening at the Black Cat's backstage before, I must admit that I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I showed up on Monday night. As I found out, I was in for a night of uncomfortable zebra-print chairs, chain-smokers in linen pants and a seven-year old film on DVD, projected onto a pull-down screen. So yeah, exactly what I should have expected. The movie in question was The Shield Around The K (being screened as a benefit for All Our Power), a documentary film on the topic of K Records, the prototypical indie-pop label from Olympia, Washington. More specifically, The Shield Around The K is a portrait of K's early years and a fawning love note to K co-founder Calvin Johnson.
Directed by Heather Rose Dominic, the film opens, appropriately enough, with grainy camcorder footage of Calvin Johnson on-stage with Beat Happening, tossing candy (vegan, of course) into an appreciative crowd. Appropriate not only because Beat Happening will be forever synonymous with the term "twee" but also because this scene sets the stage for the rest of the film: a video documentary that's more about the mythology of Calvin Johnson than it is about the label itself.
In the next scene, we're greeted by the talking head of none other than Ian MacKaye, who recalls first meeting Calvin at a party in, of all places, Bethesda. "He wasn't from around here but you could tell he had been around," MacKaye notes. Indeed, we later learn that Johnson spent a summer living in our fair city, during which time he worked at a now-defunct movie theater in DuPont Circle (the name of which supposedly inspired the label's moniker — just one of several theories posited for the origin of the "K" during the course of the film). However, in stark contract to the hardcore sound that MacKaye would pioneer with bands like Teen Idles and Minor Threat, Johnson's interests tended toward the less abrasive ("It seemed like these were kind of weird campfire songs," MacKaye comments).
The story begins in the late 70s at Olympia's Evergreen State College, where Johnson quickly became involved with college-station KAOS-FM as well as local fanzines. This provided a natural segue into music and by 1982, Johnson had founded both K Records and the seminal Beat Happening. Though shambling at first, Beat Happening would eventually provide the blueprint for American indie-pop: blending Johnson's deep vocals with the jagged energy of punk, the saccharine sentiment of 50s pop and even (according to at least one interviewee) DC go-go.
K Records itself proved similarly influential, demonstrating to others in the scene (as Kill Rock Stars founder Slim Moon and Matador's Gerard Cosloy both attest in the film) that a label publishing cassette tapes of left-of-the-dial local artists was financially viable. The label later switched to 7" singles but when Johnson was questioned about his supposed "cassette revolution," his response was "Didn't you hear, we won!"
For its initial charms, however, Shield really starts to drag once it starts tempering its barrage of interviews (virtually all of which offer little more than cloying praise for Johnson) with free-form, experimental music videos. Sure, they're interesting at first but how many full-length 8mm clips do we really need to see? While a few short clips spliced in between commentary would have been tolerable, we're treated to full-length performances and videos that increasingly seem like nothing more than padding.
Still, a few highlights abound; like Fugazi's performance at the International Pop Underground festival, which finds MacKaye alternately whispering and screaming and an interview with Tiger Trap's Rose Melberg, that suitably finds the twee icon looking back on the early days of K and declaring that she still feels "kind of giddy about it" -- with a Paddington Bear seated just behind her.
Ultimately, what would benefit The Shield Around the K most would be a widening of focus. In its almost myopic affirmation of Johnson's status as indie-rock God, the film misses out on an opportunity to chronicle K outside of the official history (the label's co-founder Candice Pedersen and the critic Michael Azerrad, who points out the irony in Johnson's role as the label's "peacock," play only bit parts). The film also could have employed the music and commentary of later K artists, which would have added a bit of much-needed variety while also demonstrating the evolution of the K sound. Of course, Calvin Johnson influenced an entire generation of musicians and labels and helped set the stage for the indie rock explosion of the 90s. But I'd rather the film tell me something that I don't already know. As it stands, The Shield Around the K is much like the label's early recorded output: amateur, Calvin-centric and only for the most hardcore of fans.