Organization promotes self-defense through album

Monday, April 22, 1996

Seattle community rallies around Home Alive’s benefit
compilationBy Vanessa VanderZanden

Daily Bruin Contributor

Three years ago,when singer Mia Zapata was raped and murdered,
friend Gretta Harley knew something had to be done.

Along with other outraged members in the Seattle community, she
helped to form the organization, Home Alive, which provides
self-defense classes for women.

In an effort to raise funds for the cause, the organization has
recently released "Home Alive: The Art of Self Defense," a benefit
album drawing on the local Seattle talents ­ including such
well known bands as Pearl Jam and Soundgarden.

And although the album hit stores just this February, already
the response has been extraordinary.

"We get letters from younger people where, you know, ‘I get beat
up at school every day, and I’m a freak, and I have purple hair …
and you speak to me. And you’re making me realize that I don’t want
to kill myself. I want to fight. I want to keep going. I want to
fight for my life because my life is worth defending,’says
Harley.

"And there’s all these younger people that have been encouraged
to work through stuff-just wanting to live ­ not getting
swallowed up by all the fear and the anger that accompanies losing
someone or being the victim of a violent crime or getting molested.
So it’s intense."

Putting together the 45 track, double album wasn’t easy.

After sifting through hundreds of songs, the organization
finally agreed on the punk, grunge, and spoken word pieces. In the
end what was most important was to find intense and personal works
that best reflected the nature of the organization.

"At first we got together all the tapes that we had and sat down
as a collective and blindly listened to them. We were just going by
the songs, not by what band was what," explains Harley.

Having once selected the album’s tracks, the task of song order
still remained. Harley strove for perfection in the long and
tedious process of placing tunes appropriately on the album. She
programmed the pieces into a computer at Hanzsek Audio, playing
around with variations on three separate occasions. Finally
deciding on the current arrangement, she then took the tape to the
masters and "lived with it for awhile."

She says, "The flow that we were going for was to try to take
the listener through moods." For example, "there’s a section in the
middle with Bobby Miller, Lydia Lunch, and John F. Hall. Those are
the pieces that we hear the most about. They’re the most
controversial.

"We tried to put them back to back because they almost discredit
each other, in the sense of ideology. We don’t go for any one
ideology … I think we really tried to weigh everything so that it
gets really heavy at times and then you get a little chance to
breathe."

Collective member Micheline Levy stands behind the decision to
include sometimes graphic material in the album. She even helped to
design a warning label for the CD case.

"It basically just says, you know, people, these are all
different reactions to violence and unless we can really discuss it
and really say how we feel and really express how we feel, we’re
not going to be able to talk about this in real terms, and we’re
not going to be able to find as many solutions for ourselves."

Down the road, a second album may be produced, but probably
without the help of either Levy or Harley.

As Harley says, "It’s a lot of work to keep it going. It’s very
rewarding and it’s interesting because it’s changed. When we first
got together we were held together by an emotion, which was rage
and fear and anger and so many intense emotions that just kept us
going for a long time.

"Now, we’ve been doing this for about three years, and it’s
moved into a different thing in the sense that we will always be
enraged, but it’s not like we were enraged that Mia was killed.
We’re enraged every time something else happens, but, there’s
something about this work where you step away."

Pearl Jam has a track on the new "Home Alive: The Art of
Self-Defense" album.