“We are taking this to the top,” Dita Vox said to me. She was sitting on a worn couch; the patterns in the fabric were sun-bleached beyond recognition. The couch nestled on a balcony, extruding from an old condemned house, perched back from a busy arterial street, forming a hidden cove to watch the tide of traffic-light controlled cars passing by.

Beneath this porch crouched the basement, formed into a labyrinth by the numerous speakers and instruments stacked haphazardly about. This is where Dita Vox and her prominent Seattle band, Thee Emergency, create their music.

I sat across from Dita, the low sun occasionally burning into my eyes as I watched her paint her nails another thick coat of black. Her large aviator glasses pushed back into the long chopped up Mohawk; wavy, her bangs--dyed pink and black--hung into her shadowy brown eyes; her pupils seemed to disappear into her irises, and her irises then blended into her soft, dark tan skin.

“What is the top for you?” I asked, then clarified, “I mean, for your band. Where do you all want to take it?”

“To the top,” she insisted.

“But, what does ‘to the top’ mean,” 

She paused for a moment to further reflect on the question I had asked.

“There is no top,” she answered, “we are just always going to the top.”

I gave her a confused look.

“Look, I don’t think [the band] is ever going to be like, ‘You know what guys, I am satisfied with our level of achievement, let’s just stay here,”” she said with large hints of sarcasm.

She looked at me with a more serious look and said, “You are either climbing or declining.”

I nodded in agreement.
“Especially in this business,” she leaned back in to the sofa, “you can’t ever sit back on your haunches and say, ‘Ahhhh now I can just float.’ You are always going to have to work hard. Really, really hard."

 “Yes,” I responded. To be honest, I was quite taken aback by the wisdom of her answer. I sat in silence for a while as she stared at me. Being a musician is hard. The viewer only sees the fun part of the dancing and screaming and broken drum sticks on stage. Very often the energy put into this art form is discounted.

I was very pleased and surprised with her powerful answer, so I moved onto the next question. 

I asked, “When was the first break through moment for Thee…”

She interrupted me.

 “…The first time we played together.”

I looked at her in surprise.

She laughed.

 “Seriously,” she said, “It was really weird. The first time we played it sounded awesome, and we were like, ‘We should keep doing this.’”
I think I should tell you, the reader, that Dita Vox never had professional music or voice training; she is completely self-taught, has learned a wealth of music theory, and uses a strong musical intuition to guide her style. This passion for music was cultivated early as she spent her childhood singing with her mother.

At one point I almost asked her what her main musical influences are, but stopped short when I remembered that she already had, while showing me her old 1968 Ford ltd, told me, “For awhile I didn’t let anyone play any CD in my car that wasn’t made before 1975.”

But, this strong influence of old music does not constrain Thee Emergency’s production of the new.

When I asked Dita about how the band’s music has progressed, she laughed,

 “Well, we played together for the first time in August of 2005, and my guitar player immediately got hit by a car and broke his wrist. But we knew we had this rare opportunity to record in November, so we had to write a bunch of songs really fast.”

Her aviators slipped down her bangs a bit and she pushed them back up.

 "All our first songs were really fast and punky because our guitar player could only move his hand up and down really fast like this with the pick,” she strummed on her chest, “because he couldn’t move his wrist and was really limited.”

She ended this description with a light giggle, “So its pretty funny, but it sounded really good.”

 “How did you all progress after that experience?” I asked, my back sinking into the dilapidated couch.

 “We wanted to write the best songs possible and never wanted to write the same song over and over again,” she paused for a moment, looked out in the street at the speeding cars and then continued,

 “We all have a lot of interest, musically. I think we are perfecting the sounds we want to make―we’re still remaining eclectic. And we are trying to be obvious about what genre each song is, instead of having a song that has a mix of three or so genres. The records coming up are definitely going to be more theme oriented.”

 “So, how did you meet your band mates? I mean, you are pretty lucky that you all get along so well.”

The sun was settling behind a large tree with skinny, scrappy branches that cast sharp shadows on the soft round contours of her face. Dita started to explain how the band had formed, but stopped abruptly. She looked back out into the street. A girl was running down the sidewalk, screaming. Her car was being towed.
We both sat in silence watching the girl in the street crying to the vicious pony-tailed tow truck driver. “I met my band-mates in outer space,” she informed. Her face was serious, “On that planet way in outer-space we met and fell in love with each other immediately.”

For a moment I was about to ask her to stop joking, and really tell me the story, but I then realized that she was speaking her truth.

 “Alright, good answer,” I remarked, “But I do need to know the names of the other infamous members of your band. I mean, these guys are incredible.”

 “Yes, they are.” she answered, “So Matt ‘Sonic’ Smith plays the Guitar, and Nick Detroit does Bass, and Tom T. is our drummer.”

“Are there ever moments where there is drama between you all?” I implored, probably further than I should have.

 She looked at me, her eyebrows tilted; she moved her head back, and said, “Of course there is drama, I mean, we are all strong personalities, but we really love the band.”

 “Do you ever feel as if the strong personalities conflict with each other, like onstage?”

 “No,” she said emphatically, “Onstage we complement each other,” she waved her hand, “We put aside all our personal bullshit to make something really great.”

I was lucky enough to see Thee Emergency play one of their first shows in the very basement over which we hovered. From what I remember of the show―it was about four years ago on Halloween―it was full of insane energy.

 “Tell me about your craziest show,” I asked.

She paused, said, “Ummmm,” lowered her nailbrush, laughed maniacally, and then candidly replied, “They are all crazy.”

I laughed, mostly because I completely believed her.

 “Come on tell me a story,” I asked. I wasn’t going to let her gloss over the gritty details.  “I mean, I have seen you all at it. Your stage presence is phenomenal. There have to be some stories that are memorable moments. Tell me.”

 “Well, I guess the amount of times we have fallen on stage,” she retorted, with a shimmer in her lips.

 “How many times?” I laughed.

 “Like, at least eighty. Definitely high eighties.”

 “Damn,” I mused.

 “Yeah, skinned knees every show. Literally every show. Look at this,” she said as she pulled open a hole in her jeans to show me a large scar.

The scar was definitely impressive.

 “The worst,” she continued to say, “is when you go on tour and your knee wounds never heal. Every night you are opening old wounds and you come home hobbling.” Her eyes lit up and her smile flashed.

 “Like this one time I played at the Comet I would just face plant over the monitors and get a big gash in my shins. You think I would have learned since I have played there so many time,” and she let out one last smooth and infectious laugh.

I could not think of a better note to end the interview on. Her skinned knees and Mohawk knotted aviators proved to me what Thee Emergency is all about.

If you want to check it out for yourself you should follow their live shows on myspace, AND, you should buy their latest full-length record: SOLID. In this record you will find an eclectic array of soulful guitar laden songs that are all connected with the same theme: music that makes you wanna jump up and down and be with Thee Emergency while they flail their guitars and skin their knees.

This Friday I am going to watch the Thee Emergency play live. I am sure it is going to be madness, and I will be sure to tell you all about it…

Last night it was warm out. I rolled up to the Funhouse―a landmark punk music venue located directly underneath the Seattle Tram system―on my motorcycle wearing a tank top. I could see the legs of the Space Needle from the front door on 5th Ave.

Inside the bouncer greeted me with a smile and tired eyes. He stamped my wrist and we exchanged a handful of words.

Inside, I scanned the room. The night was still early, and people were slowly trickling into the bar. The first band had already played. There was still one more band before Thee Emergency. Dita Vox was sitting on the edge of the stage. The second band lugged drums and microphone stands behind her. She held a drink with both hands at her knees. I nodded to her and walked over.

“You excited?” I asked.

“Yeah, the next band is going to be awesome.”

“What’s their name?”

“Strong Killings.”

“Cool,” I said. She turned out to be right. The Strong Killings were an onslaught of high energy and audaciously perfect stage antics.

“How many times have you played at the Funhouse?” I asked.

“This is our second time.”

Tom, the drummer of Thee Emergency danced over to us, his tall lanky frame bopping up and down while his long hair hung over his head in-between his broad shoulders.

The conversation between us soon ended as they went their separate ways to check in with other friends at the bar before they disappeared backstage.

The Strong Killings finished, their gear was hauled off, Thee Emergency’s gear hauled up, and the anticipated moment soon came. Thee Emergency was up on stage sound checking, getting ready to do their thing.

The set started off with a nostalgic guitar riff―the type that is repeated over and over again because it is so good that Matt ‘Sonic’ knows you wanna hear it every time he strums it. Dita Vox’s vocals swayed between melodic hums and throaty belts, gluing all the instruments together with her thick notes. Nick Detroit shuffled back and forth, an intense and serious expression poised on his face as his bass did the job of moving chest cavities.  And then there was Tom, who looked like he was in his own world somewhere in outer-space, his eyes rolling into the back of his head as he orchestrated realms of complex, yet still pounding rhythms.

The crowd had fascinating faces. A short man with a belly full of years and years of Beer was wearing a Guinness T-shirt and an industrial black Scottish kilt, known as a Utili-kilt. He stood inches away from the edge of the stage, mostly motionless, slowly rocking back and forth, a slight smile in his eyes. Matt ‘Sonic’ would drop onto his knees, railing guitar solos, and the short man would lean into him, their faces almost touching, long hair whipping around, and then smile with his lips.

As the energy in the set built, the crowd started to get more and more rowdy. Towards the end, Thee Emergency was in a rhythm, Dita swaying, Sonic thrashing, Matt hammering, and Tom leaning and jostling―their bodies all swarming in and out of speaker cables and speaker stacks.

Yet, one vast difference I noticed between how Thee Emergency played when I saw them four years ago in their basement to how they are playing now is that their set is not just a list of songs they play back to back. Rather, their set now flowed in and out more akin to a composed orchestra, certain motifs calculatingly repeated, and songs blended into one another seamlessly, to the point where their entire set sounded like one monstrous song, a symphony, with specific movements and time/scale changes. They had no doubt matured.

During the climax of the song, ‘2069 SpaceTime,’ a girl in the crowd had grabbed onto a metal bar acting as a makeshift barrier from the stage with both hands. She was bent over double, her head thrashing back n’ forth, her body whipping around to the frenetic rhythm, her hair a frenzy of died orange and red.

One of the band members almost face planted off the three foot high stage into the crowd, but was saved mid-fall by five or six audience members. Everyone was feeling it. Onstage Thee Emergency was doing what they do best. Bruising their kneecaps and flailing their guitars.