Sonic Oldies

Twenty eight years have passed since my friend played with members of Sonic Youth in NYC, but that didn’t stop him from getting on the guest list and dragging me along to the headlining show of the Capitol Hill Block Party.  No other Seattle neighborhood is more dominated by youth culture than Capitol Hill.  Yet the band chosen for top-billing has  been doing what they do for longer than the average Block Party-goer has been alive.  Go figure.

But how awesome it was to see the Pike Street corridor filled with people instead of cars—it felt like another country.

There’s only one prominent local politician with the street cred to have a banner on the side of Neumos during the Block Party.   Dow Constantine once worked for KCMU (KEXP before Paul Allen made them rename it after his vanity project), and still has strong ties to the music community.  And now he’s got a good shot at being the next Ron Sims.  People get older.

And for the record, there are plenty of reasons to support Dow Constantine for King County Executive that matter a lot more than his ability to hang with music biz scensters.  Dow has pretty much universal backing from the enviro community, along with strong support from a broad range of other constituencies—info here.   He’s got my vote.  (Not that you asked.)