Treacherous Jaywalkers recorded live at the Vogue, Seattle WA. 29 August 1988.

Note: The recording of “Pave The Way” is incomplete, taping finished before song ended.

In August of 1988 Treacherous Jaywalkers embarked on a tour up the west coast of the U.S. across to Bozeman, Montana (!). The “Treacher Collector" newsletter, dated June 1988, says that the tour originally was going to cover the entire U.S. “…the Treacherous summer U.S. tour has been called off due to an organizational change in our booking company, Global Network,” I wrote, “which caused everything they were doing to get hung up…We hopefully will have a short West Coast tour for the last week of August.” This show, which took place at the Vogue in Seattle, Washington on August 29, 1988 was part of the trip, which also took us to Portland, Oak Harbor, WA, and Bozeman. The drive from Seattle to Bozeman is over 10 hours so I’m assuming Bozeman was the only gig from the original (cancelled) tour.

This marked the second time Treacherous played a series of shows outside L.A., the first being the previous summer when we played in Lake Havasu City and Yuma, AZ.

Treacherous already had an EP out on SST Records by this time, Sunrise, which was recorded in April of 1987 and must have been released before the year ended. The same newsletter referenced above states that by June of 1988 our debut full length SST LP, Good Medicine, had already been completed. It had a release date, according to the newsletter, of October 1988. The set list of this show is almost exclusively from Good Medicine.“Green Lantern” and “Crossing The Threshold” were new tunes.

The “Jack Cheeseborough” I talk to frequently from the stage was a DJ and engineer at KCRW in Santa Monica, where I had been working as a music library assistant.

According to the flyer, the show was presented by “Bombshelter Video”, a local TV late-night music video showcase, and radio station KCMU, which thirteen years later turned into KEXP. The Vogue, a small bar that hosted early shows by Alice In Chains, Mudhoney, TAD, and other Seattle grunge bands, closed in 2007.

But this night is most well-known for its early appearance of Nirvana. This show is listed in all their gig-ographies (see www.nirvanaguide.com/1988.php.html, for example). Kurt also included us in a hand-written list of bands Nirvana had played with, a list he would use to get other gigs in Seattle - a photo of this appears in the 2002 coffee table book Kurt Cobain Journals. Nirvana did open the show. I remember meeting Kurt, but I don’t remember their set. I had never heard of Nirvana before. There’s no recording of their performance as far as I know. This is the first time any recording of this night has been released. A couple of years later Treacherous drummer James and I met Kurt a bit more formally in L.A. when he came into the Rhino Records store in Westwood, CA, where both of us worked at the time. If he recognized us from that night he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t remind him of it.