AWHILE BACK, MIKE JACKSON—a longtime wicked talented local artist, musician and craftsman—published a beautiful memorial to his life long friend Maria Elger, which doubled as a ‘little known fact about the Kitsap music scene’ on the internet. I asked him if we could print it. He said yes. We didn’t have space in that issue, so me and Mike got together for an hour-and-forty-five minute chat over beers instead. Here’s the first 12 minutes… For reference: Natacha’s (formerly Perl’s Pavilion, alternately mis-spelled out there as ‘Natashas’ and ‘Pearls’) was an historic and infamous west bremerton dance hall/rock club that hosted some massive names in rock and roll over its two incarnations. It was also plagued with public health compliance violations and years long vacancies. The dance hall closed in the mid-1990s. The structure burned down in 2018. The lot is currently empty.
BILLMAN: OK, SO THIS IS 1985… WHAT DOES YOUR WORLD LOOK LIKE AT THAT TIME? DID YOU GROW UP HERE? MIKE JACKSON: I did grow up here, but at that particular time I was homeless. [He opens the interview with that classic Mike Jackson cackle as he lights a cigar.] … But Maria’s mom actually let me move into this little stupid-ass-piece-of-shit room they had in the back of the house. And I think Maria was only 16, and I was 18, or 19, or something like that. But that didn’t matter back then.
TELL US MORE ABOUT MARIA… She was a punk rock chick. She was a full-blown punk rock girl. I mean, she was fun. I had a lot of fun with that girl. She was my first real love, too. The first girl I was actually in love with. We were inseparable for a couple of years. And she is pretty much solely responsible for opening up Natacha’s again… Pretty much, I mean, I was like, ‘I don’t care,’ you know. I didn’t want to do that. That guy Bill was a weirdo. And Maria was like, ‘Well, let’s talk to Natacha…’ So they started talking about dancing and things like that. And she worked her pretty good, to the point of talking Bill into opening up the place again.
DID YOU EVER GO TO PERL’S? That’s was before me, man. [Perl’s became Natacha’s in the early 70s and fell into disrepair shortly thereafter, long before Mike was introduced in the mid-80s.]
BUT YOU SAID MARIA’S MOM HAD STORIES, WHAT WERE THOSE LIKE? She used to go there all the time, Maria’s mom did. She’d go dancing and drinking and shit like that. She lived next door. So that’s how… [He pauses.] Maria’s mom was a partier, man. We used to have to go drive up to go pick her up from, what’s that bar that was up on National, what was it, Cookies? Is it still there?
THEY CLOSED DOWN, BUT I THINK THE BUILDING’S STILL THERE… Yeah, I think it was Cookies. We used to have to drive her car up there to go get her, because she was hammered. And I’m like 17, hammered myself. Me and Maria were trashed and would have to go pick up her mom. She would call. On a landline. And we’d be home. And have answer the phone… so yeah, that was fun.
WHAT WAS THE AREA LIKE BACK THEN? It’s Navy Yard City, man
YEAH, BUT COMPARED TO HOW IT IS NOW, WAS THERE MORE WOODS BACK THEN, OR… No, it’s pretty much the same. It hasn’t really changed much at all. I mean, except the houses got more expensive for some stupid reason. But it hasn’t been gentrified yet or nothin. You know, none of that shit, like Manette has. It’s still the same as it was…
WHAT DID NATACHA’S LOOK LIKE BACK THEN? It was a disaster. It was trashed. There was garbage and shit all over the whole property. It took us, myself and… I can’t remember who all was there, it’s hard to remember, this was a long time ago. I think Jaymie Daumen was one of them who helped us clean it up. Jon Rydeen, when I was in this band called Felony. Brian Bonaquisti. Mark Bonaquisti. Moen was there. He would show up and smoke cigarettes and laugh at us… That’s what he did. Shawn,Tony Reed, I think were in and out of there…
SO YOU’RE ALL OUT THERE, BUILDING A PLACE TO PLAY MUSIC? WAS THERE ANY OTHER PLACES FOR YOUR BANDS TO PLAY BACK THEN? Yeah, like, grange halls and shit like that. That’s mostly what it was. What’s the place out there, when you go into Belfair, and you take a left…
SUNNYSLOPE? Yeah, the Sunnyslope Grange, we played there a lot. All the bands played there a lot. Also there was one out on Central Valley road, too. And then another one in between Silverdale and the bridge kind of…
BUT NATACHA’S WASN’T A GRANGE. WHAT EXACTLY WAS NATACHA’S? It was a dance hall.
HUH, SO THAT WAS THE ORIGIN? A DANCE HALL? Yeah, it was huge man…I’m trying to compare it something… I can still see it in my head… It was a big building. It was probably like 200×200… maybe 4,000 square foot, or something like that. It had big stage. There was a green room in the back that had like Jimi Hendrix autograph on the wall, and, uh, Janis Joplin, Chubby Checker. Who else was on there that blew my mind? All of Heart. And then when Alice In Chains and all the grunge shit started happening, all those guys did… but I went into Natacha’s with Maria about ten years ago, and some dude was living in the property and it was still standing. And everything was still there. The roof had caved in, part of it, the floor was still there. I kinda wanted to take some of the floor to make guitars out of cause it was maple. They wouldn’t let me do it. But all the walls were gone… I had no idea where they were. And nobody else seems to know where they’re at.
DO YOU KNOW OF ANY RELICS THAT SURVIVED FROM THAT GREEN ROOM? I’m not sure if they’re still alive, but Natacha has two daughters that still own that property, as far as I know.
SO, YOU GET TO GO BACK INTO THE BUILDING 10 YEARS LATER. IT SAT EMPTY FOR YEARS. EVER SINCE IT STOPPED BEING NATACHA’S IN THE MID-90’s, RIGHT? Yep, Bill just started piling shit back up again, like it was when we got to it the first time. There was just tons of garbage and trash. I mean, the city came after him a bunch of times about garbage, trash and rats and whatnot… But, man, when we started partying there… I went in there whenever I wanted, I had a key, it was frickin’ rad, I was in there all the time. I booked most of the shows there for the first six months to a year. And then it started getting over my head. Like bigger bands wanted to play there, which I had no control over, no say over it at that point. They’d call Bill. Bill took over when it got to be shows where he thought there might be like more than 500 people at. Which happened at a bunch of the shows before that even went down. And then he started getting, like, ‘I need some money…’ Because we would give him like $100 or whatever it was for the night…
SO THAT IS KIND OF LIKE A GRANGE HALL… Yeah, we rented it from him, for, I think it was a 100 bucks if I remember right. But, man, we made it back. So we would only charge a couple, $2, $3, $4, $5 to get in. And then most of the time, we had kegs. So, you know, $5 for a beer cup, all you can drink. Which was normal there, not legal, but normal. The cops didn’t mess with us ever…
INTERESTING. THAT’S KIND OF WHY I WAS WONDERING IF THAT AREA WAS MORE ‘IN THE STICKS’ BACK THEN. BUT NOT SO MUCH, YOU’RE SAYING… No, it was the same as it is now. The cops knew about it, and they drove by it, and the parking lot would be full. You’d have like a thousand people there, 500 inside and 500 outside, and nobody called the cops on us. Ever. It was crazy…
THAT’S BADASS. It was. It was frickin’ badass. And it lasted for like five years like that. It was awesome.
…AND ALL THOSE BIG NAME BANDS, TOO. HENDRIX, JOPLIN, RAMONES, ALICE IN CHAINS… AND ALL THE LOCAL BANDS. I FEEL LIKE THERE’S SO MUCH TO THAT STORY. A LOT OF PEOPLE PROBABLY KNOW ABOUT THE ‘PUNK ROCK FERRY RIOT,’ BUT THEN, THERE’S ALL THESE SCATTERED MEMORIES OUT THERE FROM PEOPLE LIKE YOU, WHO WERE THERE. HOW DO WE COLLECT ALL OF THAT IN ONE PLACE? HOW COULD WE WEAVE ALL THESE MEMORIES TOGETHER? Yeah, it’s a trip. And it’s so long ago, it’s hard to remember everything…
WHY DO YOU THINK THOSE KIND OF BIG NAME BANDS WERE COMING TO BREMERTON… I don’t know. I think it was like just that Natacha’s was a vibe. It was like: nobody messed with you. You could do whatever you wanted. Pretty much whatever you wanted… in the parking lot… or in that building… and nobody said shit. // INTERVIEW w/ BILLMAN
Check out Mike Jackson’s new band The Karmakazis, 8 p.m., all ages, Aug 27 at The Charleston, Bremerton
[Photo: Maria (left) w/ Mike Jackson, 1985]
