SEATTLE — It was one of those Showbox nights when the excitement spills out onto the streets, practically radiating from the marquee's glow. Hometown fans wrapped around the block across from Pike Place Market as Modest Mouse was set to begin a three-night stand performing their seminal album "The Lonesome Crowded West" days before Thanksgiving.
The Issaquah-formed indie rock giants had burned through the same beloved songs in the same beloved room roughly a year earlier for a one-off charity event. But last fall was different. The band sounded fiercer and tour-mode tightened in front of a more dedicated crowd that included plenty of friends and family, including Phil Ek, who helped produce the Seattle classic 25 years ago.
"Teeth Like God's Shoeshine" and "Doin' the Cockroach" cut like a knife fight while frontman Isaac Brock barked and spat his narrative bus bench poetry through splintering guitars. Jeremiah Green's buoyant percussions — that frequently lift and propel Modest Mouse songs in unorthodox ways — bounced the sold-out crowd like a tattered basketball on the Showbox's famously springy floor.
It wasn't so much a nostalgia fest as a white-knuckle service to one of the Pacific Northwest's most treasured indie rock documents.
What no one knew at the time was that that Showbox run would be Green's last local performances. The band's idiosyncratic drummer and founding member died less than six weeks later. Green, who would have turned 46 on Saturday, was diagnosed with cancer in his throat in September. While rehearsing in Missoula, Montana, Brock nearly canceled the tour entirely, but according to Green's family, the drummer was determined to play some of the dates before starting chemotherapy in December. Green lost so much weight during the treatment that eventually his body was no longer able to fight and he died Dec. 31.
"We had no idea that he was going to pass away," says Adam Green, Jeremiah's brother, who was at the show. "Cancer's always finicky so there's nothing 100% guaranteed. But I made sure to pay extra special attention to him [that night]. I remember the band just played their encore and they were gonna walk offstage and somebody tried to talk to me and I waved 'em off because I wanted to make sure that I watched him walk off the stage, because it could have been the last time. And I was right."
Green — whom Brock describes as "essentially my brother" and "probably the greatest natural artist I've ever [expletive] met" — was a soft-spoken, kindhearted father and husband; an inquisitive and wildly creative artist and self-taught drummer who played by his own rules, transcending styles and mediums. Two weeks ago, friends and family gathered in Port Townsend, where he'd long made his home, for a private memorial celebrating the life and legacy of the drum-lesson dropout who became one of the most impactful figures in Northwest indie rock. A quiet giant of Seattle's post-grunge indie rock boom, Green's outlived by the mark he left on the community and the many people he touched.
'Play like you wanna play'
The Green brothers spent part of their childhood as skateboarding misfits in Moxee, a small town outside of Yakima, where they were "the only ones listening to the Smiths and the Cure, Sex Pistols, things like that," says Adam, a former DJ at 107.7 The End. After moving to Kirkland, within striking distance of Tower Records, it got easier for their mother, Carol Namatame, to track down albums by the "obscure bands from England" the younger Green, who went by Jeremy then, wanted for his birthday.
Music — specifically loud music — was a constant in their home and something the family connected over. Primarily a single mother working multiple jobs, Namatame says she didn't have time to get the boys involved in sports. But on the weekends, she'd load her pickup with kids and drive them to all ages shows at venues like the Velvet Elvis, OK Hotel or the Old Fire House in Redmond — many of them stages Green would eventually play.
At age 12, the left-handed Green, who supposedly wouldn't hold his sticks correctly, briefly took drum lessons until the teacher insisted he had no future with the instrument.
"The drum teacher took me aside and told me that he was just never going to be able to play drums, so I was basically wasting my money and maybe he should pick a different instrument," Namatame says. "So, I rented a set of drums and I just told him, 'Play like you wanna play' and he ended up being this incredible drummer. It was wild."
It was one of those all ages shows at Seattle's Party Hall — a "weird little crusty punk place," Brock recalls — where he and Green first met through a mutual friend, the late Sam Jayne of Love as Laughter and Lync. "Jeremy had a weird sense of humor, we both did," Brock says. "When he was introduced to me, he leaned in and was like, 'You wanna fight?' I was like, 'No, I think not.'"
Within a few weeks, Green started jamming with Brock and Modest Mouse's original bassist Eric Judy, who left the band in 2012, in a shed outside Brock's Issaquah home. "I loved what it was like to play music with Eric," Brock says. "Then when Jeremy came into the fold, it really truly just worked. It was [expletive] heaven."
As the youngest member of the band, Green had yet to complete high school when Modest Mouse went on its first of many tours over the next 25-plus years. "We lived together in close enough quarters for a long enough time that, in those scenarios you can go for a week in the same room and not need to have a meaningful conversation, you just joke," Brock says. "And that's not downplaying that, that's beautiful. Think about every time you've thought to yourself, you've been sitting in a room with someone, 'I need to say something.' I didn't need to say anything when I was around Jeremiah."
Modest Mouse released their first two albums on Seattle's Up Records and as they gained traction in the late '90s, the trio became one of the most prominent acts among a wave of bands that reaffirmed Seattle's place on the rock 'n' roll map after grunge's sunset. Modest Mouse reached greater commercial heights in the 2000s, starting with their major-label debut "The Moon & Antarctica" — one of the era's defining indie rock records that's often cited as their masterpiece.
In their early days, Modest Mouse had a reputation as a "feral" band (as Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard once affectionately put it) and according to friend and longtime Seattle DJ Marco Collins, Green's steadying presence was a counterweight to the more "explosive" Brock, who would "turn into a different human being" on stage. "To me, [Green] was sort of the rudder of that band," says Collins, who bonded with Green over a shared love of electronic music. "He kept things on an even keel and maybe that dynamic between Jeremiah and Isaac made that band sort of work."
As Brock describes it, he relied on Green — the band's only other constant member, save for a brief hiatus around 2004's "Good News for People Who Love Bad News" — to "have his own vision this whole time so we wouldn't get stuck with like a monoculture" in the band.
"Jeremiah rarely actually played the same beat twice unless it was necessary," Brock says. "So, he managed to keep things new just because I don't think he wanted to do the same thing twice ever."
Beyond his Modest Mouse duties, Green stretched his creative wings with a number of other projects, including the post-punk quartet Satisfact and post-rockers Red Stars Theory in the late '90s, and more recently Vells and his electro-washed World Gang. When not playing drums, Green often wrote electronic music and had his abstract eye behind a camera lens, posting some of his photos to his @sluglife Instagram handle. "He was wired that way to be creative, every single day," says his brother, Adam.
Recently, Green had been sketching designs for an off-the-grid cabin he planned to build in Hawaii, where he was born while his father was in the Army. In true mossback fashion, he bought a plot of land on a particularly damp section of the island because he loved the rain.
"When he was going through chemo, he was super, super positive," Adam says. "Obviously, we thought that he was going to be fine, including him, so he had all these goals he wanted to do. He got kind of a second wind in life. He wanted to do all this traveling. He kept talking about how he could feel the breeze of Hawaii on his face. He wanted to go back there really, really bad, he couldn't wait."
To celebrate his birthday this weekend, Green's family planned a trip to Hawaii to scatter his ashes. There's also been talk of a Seattle memorial concert, maybe later this spring.
Port Townsend's embrace
For years, Green had made his home in Port Townsend, a town that Namatame says truly embraced her son. Green, who was "kind of a woodsy guy" and not one for rock star indulgences, was a natural fit in the Olympic Peninsula outpost that boasts a vibrant artist community and offered a slower pace of life when he hopped off the tour bus. "I heard that now when they see somebody driving his pickup through town that they cry," says Namatame, growing emotional, "because he was pretty special."
It was there Green started a family of his own with his wife, Lauren, and their 6-year-old son, Wilder, who already owns more drum machines and audio samplers than most adults, Namatame says. "He told us all that someday he's going to be like his dad and play the drums, so we'll see."
Green and Modest Mouse helped lay the foundation for Port Townsend's now-annual THING festival at Fort Worden Historical State Park, where Green used to spend time with his son. Even before the PNW indie rock pillars returned to headline the festival last August, shortly before Green's diagnosis, Modest Mouse played a pair of 2018 shows there, which for the Seattle Theatre Group, served as a test run for the boutique fest it launched the following year.
Evidently, Green had also discussed wanting to do a festival on the same grounds or making those Modest Mouse gigs a regular summer occurrence, and he especially enjoyed playing in his backyard. "I think he felt like it was his vision and someone else made it a reality, so I think he felt personally attached to playing them," Brock says.
'One foot in front of the next'
After Green left the Modest Mouse tour last December, the band continued the run with drum tech Damon Cox on what was supposed to be a temporary fill-in basis. Modest Mouse is scheduled to play its first shows since Green's death later this month when the Lollapalooza festival heads to South America.
For now, Brock's taking a "one foot in front of the next" approach, still unsure how it will feel to lead the band into its next chapter without his childhood friend in the bunk across the tour bus aisle. "I imagine there's going to be a ghost in the house for quite a while," Brock says. "Not literally, but psychologically, we'll be looking at this through his lens on some level."
With Green's passing, Brock lost more than a "brother" and a creative partner of more than 30 years.
"I don't plan on speaking at his memorial," Brock said days before the February gathering. "I figure I'll just say this now." Brock went on to describe a "shared memory" he and Jeremiah had developed among their circle of friends. "We could tell each other stories about things that had happened in both of our lives and only one of us could remember. ... Sam Jayne, he remembered aspects of me and him and Jeremiah's life that lived only with him and when that was gone, that was gone. Jeremiah remembered parts of my life that I don't actually have the memory of, and so that's gone.
"That continues through the entire system, the entire web of friends and the plus side to that [expletive] is this: All that stuff that Jeremiah didn't remember himself about his own life lives inside me, lives inside all the people that were around him. Those moments that you don't remember that other people do, you get to keep living in them. And that's the trick. That's it."
