The 4 Corners and OP Conference, Olympia, WA Summer 1984








Jake Dillon and I drove his dad's 1967 VW bug cross-country in the Summer of 1984. OP magazine, an extremely hip new music zine put together by some freaks at KAOS radio at Evergreen College, was folding and having a get-together on what to do post-OP. (Turned out 2 magazines took over, Sound Choice and Option.) So Jake and I decided we would trek out for the conference. We arrived 2 weeks late partly because of regular problems with the bug, she was stripping wheel splines every 800 miles or so. (The bug eventually died with a thrown rod on the return in Minot, ND.)

I shot a bunch of super8 film on the road, and intended to show the reels in Olympia at the conference. I was shooting Kmart super8 that included process mailers, so I could mail my shot film and then expect them to be in Olympia when we got there. I also recorded audio on the trip, including a sequence at the 4 corners, where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet, and was going to present an installation of the site in Olympia.

In San Francisco we stayed with friends in the Golden Gate Park panhandle area and went to a Dead concert at the Greek Theater. The night we arrived a Good Year blimp circled above the rooftops and the birthday party we had arrived for. My backpack was stolen from the car, with clothes, sleeping bag and s8 splicer.

Robin James was our host in Olympia, the author of the Cassette-Mythos guide to cassette culture. Robin wrote many reviews of cassette releases for the pages of OP. Olympia Media Exchange founder Jeffrey Bartone was also living at Robin's apartment at the time. Bartone invited us on to his KAOS radio show, where I stuck paper into a fan's blades and cried "Herman! Herman!" in a spontaneous show of Americana. Bartone also put together a film show at the Smithfield Cafe in downtown Olympia that featured Bruce Baillie showing films on 2 projectors and I projected my travel footage in the outdoor alley, using 1 projector to throw a loop of the VW on itself, giving an impression of it turning 360 degrees, while another projected from inside the VW onto the alley wall.

While we didn't experience the OP conference, perhaps our time in Olympia was better spent doing our own thing, with less music business purpose. OP was extremely influential at the time, being the first college radio music magazine that covered every type of music you could imagine and represented everyone from major jazz artists to micro-home label weirdos like us. It was a great networking tool and introduced many artists to each others work through reviews, interviews etc. Those were the days.