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The Black Tones are bringing punk rock back to Seattle

This trio lives against the grain, from their music to their upbringing

Dan Ray August 14, 20181 Comment
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The Black Tones are bringing punk rock back to Seattle August 14, 20181 Comment

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

Photo courtesy of The Black Tones

From the Sex Pistols and The Clash to Green Day and Blink-182, punk rock has always embodied one main ideal: rebellion. And rebelling is what The Black Tones, a Seattle punk-rock/ rock ‘n’ roll trio have been doing their entire lives.

The creators of The Black Tones, twins Eva and Cedric Walker, are first-generation Seattleites born to Southern-raised parents, and that mish-mash dynamic has played a key role in their upbringing and musical influences.

“It’s being full-blown northerners raised by southerners. It’s kind of created this soulful rebellion — like the soul of the South but the grunge of the Northwest. And then the cooking, of course. I’m sure people up here can cook, but not as well as people down there. They might be backwards in other ways, but those people down south can cook,” said Eva. “We were at a show in Bellingham once, and the best way I was able to describe [our sound] was Kurt Cobain with some cornbread.”

But it goes deeper than that. As Cedric explains, the Walker’s grandfather was a black engineer in the 1960s who wanted to stay in the south, but that didn’t seem feasible — “my mother said quote, ‘they told him n—s aren’t engineers,’ “ interjected Eva — so he accepted a job offer to work for Boeing and the space program at a plant in Kent, WA. A year later, the rest of his family, including the Walker’s mom, joined him.

So, while being an engineer might not seem super punk rock, according to the Walkers, it is.

“Anyone that lives in an institution that works against them — that they’d have to overcome — whether that’s working twice as hard, three times as hard, to overcome the odds [is punk rock]. My grandpa told me, ‘you need to be three times better to be equal to any white person who’s doing the exact same thing you’re doing.’ I’m like, oh crap okay. I don’t want to try three times as hard but, okay, I have to, and that’s just even to be considered equal,” said Eva. “Anyone can pose in a stupid leather jacket and dye their hair orange and have a Mohawk, like okay. That’s the aesthetic of punk rock, but, to me, that’s not what it is.”

“You have to live it,” Cedric added.

The current three-piece has undergone multiple personnel changes and varied from being a two-piece to a three-piece to a four-piece and back again, but they said they’re happy with the current lineup. The third member of the band, bassist Robby Little, seems to understand the punk rock aesthetic in the same way the Walkers do:

“What punk rock is is going against the man, going against the grain,” said Little. “Back when punk rock was a thing…these guys would come out and play punk rock and they were just playing one note. It was dirty, a little bit of dangerousness, and that’s what punk rock means to me, not doing what everybody else expected.”

Unexpectedly is exactly how The Black Tones like to do things: the group cranks out true-to-form, authentic rock ‘n’ roll as if Chuck Berry himself were still alive and gracing the stage. Their tracks are often five to six minutes long, with epic instrumentation from all three band members (Eva plays guitar, and Cedric plays the drums). But even in this genre, these rockers still manage to bring out the punk.

“People are just surprised that we’re even playing rock ‘n’ roll,” said Cedric. “They’re like, ‘oh my god,’ even though rock ‘n’ roll actually stems from blues and has a whole history behind it; but if you just bring that aspect in, people think we’re doing something against the norm, even though it’s actually something that’s been going on forever.”

In true punk rock fashion, it doesn’t matter if what you’re doing is actually rebellious, or if it’s just perceived that way. It’s this no-fucks-given attitude that makes The Black Tones so magnetic, both on recordings and at their live shows, where Eva, Cedric, and Little manage to fill out an incredible rock sound with only three instruments and Eva’s Janis Joplin-esque voice.

And with each show, the band takes more small steps against the norm and for all those punk rockers fighting out there. The Black Tones recently played Capitol Hill Block Party on the Barboza stage, and Eva lamented that — while the band didn’t have any say in which stage they performed on — because the stage wasn’t ADA accessible, some fans wouldn’t be able to see their show.

“I just want to apologize to the people who can’t come see us. This will be the last non ADA accessible venue we’ll play at,” she said. “Otherwise, thank you for your support.”

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Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).