Love Battery… man, those guys had a sound that was a little different.
I first heard them around ’91 or ’92 when a friend played me Dayglo. It wasn’t the heaviest or loudest thing coming out of Seattle, but it had this cool, dreamy thing going on that stuck with me. Ron Nine’s voice and the way the guitars sounded just clicked. I ended up buying the record the next day and played it a lot.
I got to see them live a few times after I moved here. One night at the Crocodile Café in ’93 really stayed with me. The place was packed but not crazy, and they played like they were just happy to be up there. No big poses, no trying to be the next big thing — just a solid set of songs that felt good. You left the show in a better mood than when you walked in.
They were never the band that blew up huge like some of the others, but a lot of us who went to shows every weekend really liked them. They had their own thing and they stuck with it. They put out a couple more records after that — Between the Eyes and Straight Freak Ticket — and then things got quiet by the mid-nineties.
These days in 2002 they haven’t been around much, but every once in a while I still pull out one of those albums when I want to remember that part of the early scene that wasn’t all about the hype. Love Battery were never trying to be stars. They were just making music they liked, and that’s why they always felt like one of the good ones to me.