BREMERTON — “Hester Pryne was my entrance to the Underground. Their music was a revelation. Complex and layered and unlike anything I had ever heard before. I could hear bits of many genres in their songs, the old and the new, the mainstream and the obscure all blended with an uncanny pop sensibility. Sort of punk-prog-metal with pop influences and sort of not that at all. Hard, but not always so, sometimes dark and sometimes chimey. They evolved. They were a band that was comfortable playing thrash at times, rootsy, twangy laments and anthemic rock ballads. Their interests varied wildly but the music was always unique to them and hard to categorize. Their body of work blew through genres and resisted labels or types. They had in their repertoire the most random collection of cover songs from the Kinks, Elvis Costello, Lou Reed and the Sonics to the Banana Splits. I have not heard most of their music in many years. Thirty to forty years for some of it, but I can still remember the life of those songs and the energy. There are bands that you listen to for one element, or one stand out musician, and then there are rare bands that you listen to for each individual and the combination of those elements–if you lose one member, you lose the sound. Hester Pryne seemed this to me. I know there were other members over the years, but Burt, Stace and Shawn were the three that were present when I was in the pit being floored by what I was hearing. My apologies to any former members who may be reading this and feeling left out. The failure is mine and certainly not yours. I found Hester Pryne at a formative time in my life and their music along with the incredibly diverse and talented Bremerton scene of the later 80s and 90s influenced my early adult thinking, my likes and dislikes, and my life.” – A. Fan, 2025
SOMETIMES IT’S EASY to feel like we are all being drowned out from all the different noises coming from all different directions. It’s easy to feel like your voice is not being heard in this raucous air plane hanger they call society. In today’s world, if your voice is being heard, the chance that some know-it-all is going to tell you that you are wrong for doing your own thing and having your own voice is extremely high.
Let it be known, here at Smokestack, we see you doing stuff. And your voice is being heard loud and clear. We want to hear more of your voice… So Please Keep Talking!
One day our office (conveniently located in a dingy dive bar downtown) received an email asking if anyone has any information on a local Kitsap County band from the 1980’s called “Hester Pryne…” So, of course, the email immediately gets forwarded to me. It’s times like these I feel like I am the oldest person hanging around the office. You know me, you’ve seen me… I am that old guy that still wears Converse All Stars so that no matter how bad the sciatica hurts in my hips… I am still kinda hip.
Now, of course I remember this local band Hester Pryne from the 1980’s that no one else really remembers. I remember them more as a band that was always kind of odd, and always kind of out of place. And that’s probably why they stick out to me still after all these years.
At first I wanted to turn my back on this email and shelter my memories of this underground band no one really remembers. Like Gollum, I wanted to keep “my precious” memories to myself.
As an old punk rocker, I look at 1980’s Heavy Metal like cigarette smoking… It was something thing I was into in high school. It was something I thought looked cool. I gave up cigarettes, and Butt Rock both right after high school. But here’s where this odd ball band Hester Pryne stood out to me: Yes they had long hair and pointy guitars, but their music was fast tempo, kind of choppy, and really raw sounding. The lyrics told these weird stories that could only come out of one person’s mind. Like a punk rock Pink Floyd. It was different, it wasn’t polished with reverb and meaningless lyrics like most American heavy metal bands.
Yes, they wore eye liner and spandex pants.
But they also wore your grandma’s long, oversized, knitted bathrobes. This was well before the grunge fad/craze came along, so it was almost kind of creepy. Hester Pryne were more serial killer rock than they were grunge rock. I can still remember seeing the singer walking around downtown Bremerton in the middle of the summer, with a quart of beer in a brown paper bag, messy eye liner, disheveled, knotted up hair, dressed in nothing but dirty mismatched long underwear and dirty ass bare feet. Even walking around in his dirty underwear with no shoes, no one really messed with him because he looked so out of place. The drummer was just a teenager, looking like he wasn’t quite old enough to get into an R-rated movie. He looked like he was kidnapped and only let outside to score weed at high school and play shows. I remember the bass player was kinda funny. He always looked, and smelled, like he had more money than the other two guys in the band. But not that much more money because he was also wearing your sister’s eyeliner and some of your grandma’s clothes. Since the band only released a couple cassette tapes and a double 7-inch vinyl on their own music label, there’s not much more than memories about Hester Pryne kicking around this old navy town they call Bremerton.
So this is where I start getting interested in who this person is that sent this email regarding this odd ball rock band from the 1980’s that only a handful of people remember… My curiosity gets the best of me, and I email back.
This person’s name is Mike. He explained that his wife, Wendy, is the cousin of one of the band members. I can more or less tell that neither Mike or his wife were alive in the early 1980’s. So I’m kind of torn between schooling these kids or simply not returning anymore emails. Then I get these important questions from Mike…
“Are you still in Bremerton?” and “Do you drink coffee? If so …Can I buy you a cup of coffee, and hear some stories?”
Ok, so Mike almost has me on board now. But I’m still old, and paranoid, and nothing can change that. So without asking, I send him Tony Reed’s email. Tony likes to talk music 24/7. And he was actually the last drummer of Hester Pryne. Win, win. I’m in the clear, and they get their stories.
About a week or two later I get an email from Mike thanking me for sending him Tony’s info. He said they had met up, and Tony had all kinds of information, and stories. Thinking I was in the clear by passing them off, I sent a friendly, “Glad I could help, good luck on whatever you are doing.” Well, that was short lived. He returned right away with “Hey, I’d still like to buy you coffee, and hear what you have to say…” Ahh shit! This Mike guy just got me with my top two addictions… Coffee and running my mouth. I can’t back out now. I can’t pass up a free cup of coffee in this economy. I recommend my favorite locally owned, neighborhood coffee shop. He returned my email with ‘Sounds great… see you there!’
As I’m writing this, it is now 7 o’clock on Saturday morning, and I am pre-funking with my own pot of French press wondering, “What am I going to say to this guy?’ Maybe I should flip the script and interview them about what they are doing. “Why are you so interested in this band that personally imploded before they could explode?” … “This band that was grungier than grunge, more than 5 years before grunge existed… This band that disappeared some 10 years before you were conceived?”
I WALK IN THE COFFEE SHOP and the only customers in the building are this middle aged family with what looks like their teenage kid sitting at a table. I case the joint, and there’s no one else around. Not the people I was expecting, but these must be the people I’m here to meet. They introduce themselves. They buy me a cup of coffee, and I sit down. I scan the table, and it looks like a table at some kind of convention. There’s all the Hester Pryne cassettes, CD’s and a couple 7” records. There’s some random show posters, a thick three-ring binder packed full, and there’s even a couple bootleg CD’s I’ve never seen.
The nerd in me can’t help but get excited.
I’d only had minimal email contact with Mike, but I quickly realize Wendy is the collector of information. They start telling me how they had to get the records from Germany. The CD’s and cassettes came from some other European country. They tell me they couldn’t find anything in the states when they first started looking. Wendy has all this information she’s found searching all kinds of different avenues. She even had a newspaper article from the ‘Bremerton Sun’ where one of the band members fell asleep at the wheel and ran into Skippers seafood restaurant. Of course, at the time, they had been misgendered in the article, and the paper a few days later had to write some sort of an apology.
That brought up another story of the bass player and guitar player working at Arby’s to support themselves. The kicker was that back then, they couldn’t have long hair and work at Arby’s. So they both picked up wigs at a thrift store. The wigs were awesome. They almost looked real. As much as they were trying to look “normal,” they kind of looked even more like serial killers.
Wendy had this old Seattle rock n roll paper called the Backlash that has a 3/4 page piece on Hester Pryne, the other 1/4 page was about a new band called ‘Nirvana.’ She had several articles about the huge punk rock riot on the ferry boat to Seattle after a show at Natacha’s with the English band GBH, The Accused, and Hester Pryne. Ferry workers had locked themselves in a break room while a bunch of hair-dyed, clove smoking kids thrashed the ferry. It’s a legendary story, you can read all about it if you search the internet. It might have been called something to the effect of “The Puget Sound Riot!” Back in those days, there was a dance ordnance placed on the city of Seattle so all ages shows became illegal. The big punk rock theater in Tacoma called The Community World had shut down, so Natacha’s dance pavilion in Bremerton caught the eyes of punk rock promoters from Seattle and Tacoma. There would be hundreds of young punk rockers drinking in the parking lot. Things would get rowdy, things would get rough. Things turned violent, and then Natacha’s would be closed down… Which was an end of an era, for sure.
Hester Pryne was the go-to local opening band in those days, so they started catching the eyes and ears of all these international bands. One of the touring bands that came through Natacha’s at the time was called ‘ALL.’ That band had some former members of the legendary band Descendents out of Los Angeles. At some point, ALL ended up inviting Hester Pryne down to Southern California to record a 4 song 7” vinyl. Shortly after that, they did a US/Canadian tour opening for a pop punk band from Costa Mesa, Ca called Big Drill Car. A funny fact I learned was that Hester Pryne had not been booked on a majority of that tour, they would just show up, explain that they’d been touring with Big Drill Car for a while, and ask if they could play first tonight… Now that’s punk rock!
Unfortunately, that was pretty much the end of Hester Pryne. The band slowly fell apart shortly after, going through multiple drummers and multiple personal problems. Some members went on to other bands, some members went to jail, and some went on to different mental facilities. Hester Pryne went down as fast as a lead zeppelin you might say…
Now that’s punk rock!
After five shots of coffee, an hour-and-a-half of back-and-forth storytelling, it was time to leave. We said our goodbyes and went off in two different directions. I left questioning what Wendy and her family were doing, exactly. This wasn’t a podcast about Hester Pryne. This didn’t seem like a documentary either. After meeting these people, and seeing all their hard work, I couldn’t be upset. I would be the first to promote it. I honestly think they are simply collecting music, memorabilia and stories of Wendy’s cousin’s weird Bremerton punk rock band from the 1980’s. This just might be Wendy’s slightly nerdy, personal collection, and that, weirdly enough, to me seems really quite genuine.
Here’s where I might normally end this by telling you all that if you want more info go find them on the internet. But here’s the cool thing… Hester Pryne is not on the internet. They are truly a Bremerton, underground, punk rock legend is all… God Speed Wendy! // CRAVIN MOORE
