Eva Ryan-Gallagher… I knew who she was before I ever moved to Seattle.
Not knew her. That’s different.
I grew up in Queens, and I started seeing Eva around the New York scene in early 1990. She was this skinny fifteen-year-old kid who always seemed to be hanging around people older than her.
Robin Maxwell was her girlfriend back then. Robin was seven or eight years older and had already been trying to get her band, The Neon Static Daughters, somewhere around New York since ’88.
They were an all-girl band and already had their own little thing going before Eva came along.
At first Eva wasn’t really part of the band.
She’d get up with them in these little East Village places and do spoken word while they made a racket behind her.
That was the first way I remember her.
Standing there with a piece of paper, reading these poems in that voice of hers.
Sometimes people listened.
Sometimes they kept drinking and talking.
Eva would just get louder.
I saw her around a bunch after that. Never really talked to her beyond maybe a few words here and there. I was pretty quiet in those days anyway, and she sure as hell wouldn’t have remembered me.
But I remembered her.
Over the next couple of years you could see her getting more involved with the Daughters. First the poems, then lyrics, then singing, then guitar.
And she could really play.
People mostly talked about the voice and the words, but she was a damn good guitarist too.
There was also that story about Nirvana.
In late April 1990, when they were in New York to play the Pyramid Club, Kurt and the guys apparently needed somewhere to crash and somehow ended up sleeping on the living-room floor at Robin’s apartment.
Eva was there.
I wasn’t.
I heard that story much later, like everybody else.
It was one of those things that started getting passed around after Nirvana got huge. Somebody told somebody, somebody else remembered hearing something, and eventually it became part of the whole damn grunge mythology.
Who knows how much it changed along the way.
The basic story was always the same, though: before anybody knew what Nirvana was going to become, they spent the night on Robin Maxwell’s floor and Eva met them there.
At the time it was probably just another weird night in New York.
After that you started seeing Eva connected more and more with people from the Northwest scene. She was going back and forth between New York and Seattle before I ever moved out here.
By ’92 The Neon Static Daughters had put out this little 7" on Circuit Records — “Blind” backed with “Cities That Burn Slowly.”
I bought it.
Still have it.
And then something funny happened.
I moved to Seattle in ’92 and Eva was already playing here.
Not living here. She was still a New Yorker.
But I’d spent the last couple of years watching her perform around New York and suddenly I was watching her play the Off Ramp in Seattle.
Then she’d be playing the Satyricon down in Portland.
Then she’d head back to New York and turn up on a bill at CBGB or one of the smaller downtown places.
She went back and forth like that for a while.
By ’92, seeing Eva Ryan-Gallagher’s name on a bill around Seattle didn’t seem strange anymore.
She obviously knew people out here.
She wasn’t really grunge, though.
People put her around that scene because of where she played and who she knew, but the music always sounded like it came from somewhere else.
Punk.
Poetry.
New York noise.
A lot of Bowie.
Whatever else she felt like throwing in there.
And live, Jesus Christ.
That was where I really got Eva.
I’d seen her play shitty little rooms back in New York. I saw her at the Off Ramp. I saw her down at the Satyricon.
Then in early ’93 she went out on her first national tour.
Her tour.
The Neon Static Daughters went with her as the backing band, but Eva’s name was on the bill.
That was a pretty big change from the kid I remembered getting up to read poems in little East Village rooms.
It wasn’t some giant arena tour or anything. Mostly smaller places as she worked her way through the Northwest, California, the Midwest and back East.
But there were a couple of cities where she could play bigger rooms.
New York was one.
Seattle was the other.
That tells you something about how much of a place she’d made for herself around here by then.
So on January 28, 1993, I saw Eva Ryan-Gallagher at the Paramount.
The Neon Static Daughters were behind her.
Fifteen bucks.
That was probably the best I ever saw her.
“Blind” was brutal.
I already knew it from that little Daughters single, but live it was something else entirely.
Then she did “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide.”
I’m a sucker for Bowie anyway, but that version stayed with me.
Somebody taped the show and copies floated around afterward. I eventually got one.
Sounds like shit.
Eva sounds great.
Fair trade.
She was back in New York playing CBGB less than a week later.
That was pretty much how things worked with her around then. Seattle, Portland, New York, then somewhere else.
For a while around ’93 and ’94, Eva’s name seemed to be turning up everywhere.
There was a lot of talk around the scene about major labels being interested in her.
How close any of it ever got, I have no idea.
You heard that kind of stuff all the time back then.
Still, with Eva it wasn’t hard to believe. She’d toured nationally and anybody who’d seen her live knew what she could do.
Around ’94 there were other rumors going around too.
Mostly that Eva had gotten hooked on heroin.
I didn’t know Eva, so I had no idea how deep into it she really was.
But if you saw her play around the middle of ’94, you could tell something wasn’t right.
That was what started happening with Eva live around then. On a good night she could be unbelievable. On a bad one, the whole thing could just fall apart right in front of you.
Chaotic as hell.
Then I heard that Robin Maxwell, her girlfriend, had died that February.
Overdose, apparently.
After that the Daughters were finished.
Eva still played here and there through ’94, but from the outside it looked like she was going through a pretty rough time.
And the heroin sure as hell couldn’t have been helping.
Anyway, I never liked getting too deep into that kind of gossip.
There was another side to Eva that tended to get buried whenever people started talking about the music and all that Seattle stuff.
Eva Ryan-Gallagher was a poet before any of us ever heard her sing.
She’d already made a name for herself in New York’s underground poetry and spoken-word circuit when she was really young, before most of us knew her as a musician.
And as far as I could tell, she never stopped writing.
That was how I first saw her back in New York — standing in those little East Village rooms with a piece of paper in her hand.
She’d been publishing in zines, little magazines and small presses since she was a teenager, and she kept putting poetry out through the nineties.
I picked up a couple of her books along the way, Ecstasy and The Infinite Cunts.
I’m no poetry expert.
I liked them.
Then Unknown Paths came out in ’95 on Sounds of Seattle Records.
I bought my copy here in Seattle.
The title track was the one that really knocked me out.
“Unknown Paths” was dark.
Really dark.
I always heard Robin and the heroin in that song. I think anybody who knew the rumors going around Eva probably did.
After everything people had been saying, and what you could see at some of those shows in ’94, it was hard not to.
“Glass Veins” was probably the one I played the most.
It’s quieter, more intimate, and Eva sounds beautiful on it.
There was “Nobody Keeps February” too, new versions of “Blind” and “Cities That Burn Slowly,” and finally a studio version of “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide.”
It’s a hell of a record.
Not an easy one.
But a hell of a record.
Sounds of Seattle was a small label and I don’t remember seeing many copies around even then.
After the record came out, the major-label rumors started going around again.
How serious they were, I never knew.
Then in ’96 Eva left for England and pretty much dropped out of the rock scene.
That’s about where I lost track of her.
Every once in a while I’d hear something through people back in New York. Apparently she was still writing and doing poetry readings and performance stuff. I also heard she’d gotten into electronic music while she was in England.
But it was all secondhand by then. A friend heard something from another friend who’d heard it from somebody else.
Funny thing was, people still talked about Eva even when she wasn’t around anymore.
I guess she’d made enough of an impression for that.
By the end of ’96 the Northwest had changed a lot anyway. Eva already felt connected to a very particular time around here.
Last thing I remember hearing was around ’99. Somebody back home said Eva was in New York again and that somebody they knew had seen her doing a poetry reading downtown.
Small place.
Not many people.
Sounded about right.
Another story passed down the line.
That was pretty much how I knew anything about Eva by then.
First time I saw Eva she was a kid reading poetry in a little room in New York.
For a while there I got to watch her play places like the Off Ramp and the Paramount.
Last I heard, she was reading poetry in New York again.
Funny how things go.
I still pull out Unknown Paths sometimes.
And I still think she was one hell of a performer.
