All Ages Show: The Story of a DIY Music Scene in an Unexpected Place

I grew up in Pasco, Washington. It was one of three little towns, collectively called “The Tri-Cities”, packed along the Columbia River in the southeast corner of the state. It wasn’t anywhere near Seattle. As a teenager It seemed a universe away from coolness. It was the eighties: We were young, bored, and left to our own devices in a literal desert wasteland. The antidote? Punk rock — our style.

Mike Fischer Fronts Punk Band Diddly Squat

I can’t begin to express how lucky we were and how determined we were to create our own scene-a real community for all the outcasts and neglected kids that needed a family, friends, and an outlet for our frustrated ambitions. We were desperate and naïve, but we were anything but lazy. Whoever coined the term “slacker” to describe Gen-X didn’t know us. We made something from nothing.

This is our story. It’s full of grit, love, loss, tragedy, and resilience. It stars our local hero, Nate Mendel of the Foo Fighters, and so many other never-to-be-forgotten characters remembered for the contributions they made to music and to our region’s legacy.

I sincerely want to thank Tony Moser and all the backers and contributors of this project from the bottom of my heart for memorializing this time in our lives with this beautiful documentary. Having such a brilliant heartfelt movie not just for ourselves but to inspire future generations is a true gift. Now we can each point to this and say, “I didn’t dream it. I didn’t make it up. It was real and I was there! We really did that!”

We thank you, Tony. I hope younger people will see this and know that they can do it, too. Never give up.

The full movie is available for purchase and immediate download on Vimeo and Dropbox

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Tri-Cities is about 3 hours south of Seattle and during the early 90s, when Seattle’s music scene was changing the world, Tri-Cities had it’s OWN thriving music scene, one that many didn’t think could exist in a place like this. What story could be told about a scene that lives in the shadow of a nuclear plant? All Ages Show tells a story about the history of Tri-Cities music and asks the question; with music now so accessible, band exposure so saturated, and combine that all with the decline of record companies, could there ever be a thriving scene again? …here or anywhere?

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