These Are Not Fall Colors

Olympia, a smaller town located an hour southwest of Seattle, had been an incubator of independent music since the early 1980s. That was partly thanks to Evergreen State College, a public institution, founded in 1967, whose freeform methods attracted restless thinkers from all over. But it had even more to do with the efforts of Calvin Johnson. A Baltimore native, Johnson had moved with his family to the region in 1970, when he was 8 years old. Despite Olympia’s relative isolation, he discovered punk in its very earliest days. By 1978, still a high-school student, he had his own show on KAOS, the fledgling Evergreen College radio station, and in 1982 he launched K Records, a cassette label with a quirky, homespun aesthetic.