Exploring the neighborhood’s record-shop history
In the summer of 1984, Russ Battaglia and Bruce Pavitt were two former record store employees—recently unemployed after the closing of Capitol Hill’s Bomb Shelter Records in the Broadway Arcade– when they decided to open Fallout Records & Skateboards in a tiny storefront on E Olive Way. The pair, who met five years earlier at Evergreen State College, were both “creative people who were interested in the emerging punk rock culture,” Pavitt recently recalled.
Fallout Records quickly became the center of alternative, indie, and DIY music, ‘zines, comics, and skateboarding, hosting in-store performances by Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, the White Stripes, and many other bands and musicians. Artists and illustrators Peter Bagge, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, and Jim Woodring visited the shop to sign books and hang out. The shop even had two late-night TV commercials featuring the U-Men rummaging through stacks of records and racks of T-shirts and skaters barreling down John Street and dodging traffic on Broadway en route to Fallout. Skateboarding icon Chris “Wez” Lundry worked at Fallout, as did Tim Hayes, who was hired in 1986 and bought the store from Russ and Janet Battaglia in 1999 (Pavitt left Fallout a couple of years after it opened to launch the Sub Pop record label).
Fallout Records closed permanently in February 2003, swept away by the neighborhood’s changing demographics and dynamics. It was an impressive 20-year run for a record shop that frowned on pop music and strictly adhered to its punk ethos. Today, the bar Montana operates in the space formerly occupied by Fallout. But the store is still remembered. “My wife was in Montana a couple of weeks ago with some girlfriends,” Hayes told me. “One of them told the waiter, ‘Did you know this used to be a record store?’ He said, ‘I know. It was Fallout.’”
As part of my ongoing interest in exploring Capitol Hill’s music-related history, Pavitt and Hayes recalled their experiences at Fallout Records. Continue reading