3 Inches of Blood are back with catchy metal anthems with unapologetically nerdy lyrics straight out of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

by Kevin Diers

Twenty-one years ago, a 12-year-old kid from Seattle named Wyatt Olney stood outside the original Hell’s Kitchen location on Sixth Avenue in Tacoma, where 3 Inches of Blood were playing a show. Olney was too young to get inside, but his newfound love of the Vancouver, BC heavy metal heroes was enough to keep him glued to the back door, catching short glimpses of the band as metalheads left the club. 

Fast-forward to 2024, and Olney, now a successful musician himself with his hard rock band Wyatt Olney and the Wreckage, saw his favorite band more than 50 times before they disbanded in 2015.

“I truly believe that 3 Inches of Blood is the greatest live metal band of all time,” Olney explains. “Absolutely untouchable in their genre. The performance is always intense, visceral, and triumphant.”

It was a no-brainer for Olney to make plans to travel to Vancouver, BC the second he heard 3 Inches of Blood announce that, after nine years away, they’d be playing a weekend of comeback shows at their hometown venue, the Commodore Ballroom in mid-January.

“I would be lying if I said that I didn’t have tears in my eyes seeing my heroes return to the stage,” Olney says. “So much life has passed by. At the farewell show in 2015, I was a 24-year-old kid with a newborn at home. Now that baby is 9 years old. But the moment they took the stage, that time gap no longer existed. We were all transported to youth again. Full of passion and aggression. It reignited a fire that we had forgotten.”

On Friday, June 7, 3 Inches of Blood will bring their over-the-top brand of Judas Priest-meets Lord of the Rings-style of heavy metal wizardry to the Showbox. Much like those three Vancouver shows, it sold out almost instantly.

“It’s pretty bonkers,” said vocalist Cam Pipes. “We’ve played the Showbox before, but we weren’t the headliners. We were the opening band on that tour. We’ve never played a show this big in Seattle in the whole existence of his band. So, the reaction to the ticket sales has been… frankly, I’m just kind of floored.”

The band will be celebrating the 20-year anniversary of their Roadrunner Records debut Advance and Vanquish, which features fan favorites like “Deadly Sinners” and “Destroy the Orcs.”

Back in 2004, thanks to heavy rotation on MTV’s Headbangers Ball, a strong publicity push by Roadrunner Records, and a road-tested in-your-face live show, 3 Inches of Blood blew up from their successful regional act status. Their debut was a game-changer and completely opened up a new world, but Pipes remembers that time as a difficult one for the band. 

“It was a pretty tumultuous period,” Pipes said. “We basically lost a drummer and bass player before we even recorded [Advance and Vanquish]. Then [we] recorded it. Then our two guitar players quit. Things were kind of in a state of flux pretty much from when we were recording through the whole touring cycle.”

During their 16 years as an active band, 3 Inches of Blood released six albums, toured the world extensively, took part in legendary rock festivals like Ozzfest and Wacken Open Air, and partied their asses off while writing some all-time catchy metal anthems with unapologetically nerdy lyrics straight out of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. 

Bassist Nick Cates recalls a particularly drunken date of the Ozzfest tour at the Gorge that reinforced his nickname, Liver of Steel.

“I drank way, way, way, way, way too much vodka and started Paul Stanley-dancing around the Gorge and up to people such as Zakk Wylde,” Cates said. “After flying around the Gorge all night, I ended up in my bunk and I got the spins. Somebody shoved me out the front door of the bus. Of course, I yacked everywhere. I woke up in that pond at the top of the Gorge and I heard the bus start. I was like, ‘Oh, shit, I gotta get back on the bus!’”

After nine years away from the band, preparation for their first shows back took close to a year.

“We want to make this not just like getting onstage and saying, ‘Okay, we’re playing again, that’s good enough,’” said Pipes. “We really wanted to step up the show in every aspect of it.”

Reflecting on the first few times they got back in a room together, drummer Ash Pearson knew it wouldn’t take long to get back into fighting shape.

“There’s always gonna be rust, but it’s like, once we jammed, I was like ‘We sound fine,’” said Pearson. “Everybody made mistakes, but I can just tell that it’s not going to take us long to get back up to snuff.”

As far as the future plans for 3 Inches of Blood, the members assure me they have some things in mind, but they want to keep them special. 

“It won’t be a great many engagements,” Pearson says. “We all have kind of stable normal lives now. And one surefire way to put a wrench in that is to get back in a van and disappear for six months.”

3 Inches of Blood play the Showbox Friday, June 7, 8:30 pm, 21+. The show is sold out but resale tickets were available starting at $74.95 at press time.

The Stranger

Rapid Relief Cooling Gel from Rare Cannabinoid Company combines CBG, CBD & THC in a new formula to tackle muscle & joint discomfort.

The post How Rapid Relief Cooling Gel with CBG, CBD & THC nails the recipe for relief appeared first on Leafly.

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Key Tips On Bouldering And Marijuana

It has been one of the hottest fitness trends, so here are key tips on bouldering and marijuana.

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Lewis Powell’s oligarchic legal attack machine continues to target Washington schools with manufactured legal battles.

by Austin Field

Last month marked the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous 1954 Supreme Court opinion declaring racially segregated schools unconstitutional. Brown v. Board’s 70th anniversary is a somber one, as one of America’s most celebrated legal decisions faces a legacy of failure. The Supreme Court justices who unanimously condemned school segregation and white supremacy in 1954–and Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case before he joined the court–would be horrified to learn that American schools are now more racially segregated than at any point since the late 1960s. 

A small group of white Seattle parents played an outsized role in Brown’s failure. In 2007, they allied with powerful conservative attorneys to make Brown unenforceable in Parents involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (PICS). US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, a lifelong foe of legal efforts to combat racism, used Seattle parents’ lawsuit to attack the civil rights movement itself—part of a plan begun decades before Seattle parents brought their lawsuit.

The story of PICS illustrates how powerful interests have manipulated the court system to roll back hard-won civil rights victories without explicitly overruling treasured precedents like Brown. Today, Seattleites live with the results of that attack: our local schools are as segregated as they were under the Nixon Administration. As our long-segregated school system braces for a round of school closures—closures that I believe are all but guaranteed to harm the very students Brown sought to help—we must critically examine how Seattle parents became pawns in a much larger fight.

Decades of Reactionary Planning Laid the Groundwork to End School Integration

There are a few excellent articles, including a 2016 Stranger article, summarizing Seattle’s flawed, decades-long attempts to desegregate schools, so I’ll skip to the late 1990s. Mandatory busing collapsed in the face of attacks from both reformers and conservatives, and by 1999 the district had adopted a new plan allowing students to attend any public school in Seattle—provided the school had space. If too many students chose a particular school, then the district used several factors as tie-breakers. The second-most important tie-breaker was racial diversity, which specifically considered the student’s race and the racial demographics of their desired school. 

Powerful, reactionary interests saw Seattle Public Schools’ milquetoast efforts to encourage school diversity as an opportunity to roll back the civil rights movement, including Brown v. Board of Education. Their campaign began in 1971, when they coalesced behind a plan outlined by Lewis Powell Jr.—a plan that ultimately included Seattle parents’ PICS lawsuit. 

In 1971, Powell was a wealthy attorney who sat on 11 corporate boards, including Philip Morris. He’d already refused to join the US Supreme Court, preferring to add to his considerable fortune. He spent most of his career vociferously defending Philip Morris’s efforts to deny smoking was harmful–arguing the corporation had a First Amendment right to deceive the public. He wasn’t a fan of everyone’s First Amendment rights, though; he harshly criticized Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns. 

Powell’s pro-corporate, anti-civil rights bona fides attracted the US Chamber of Commerce, which commissioned him to write a memo outlining strategies for rolling back the civil rights movement, the labor movement, the consumer rights movement, the environmental movement, and other threats to oligarchy–all of which seemed, briefly, to be winning. 

Powell delivered, writing 6,400 words identifying “[l]labor unions, civil rights groups and now public interest law firms” as major threats to corporate power. Although unions had only haltingly embraced the call for racial equality, by the 1950s some powerful labor leaders understood that ending racism and ending corporate oligarchy were the same fight—a fight to redistribute national wealth more equitably. Recognizing their common interests, the United Auto Workers partially financed the NAACP’s fight to get Brown v. Board of Education to the Supreme Court. 

Powell correctly viewed labor unions and civil rights groups as existential threats to an economic system that had made him extremely wealthy. He advised corporations to fight back, in part, by creating a network of foundations and nonprofit law firms to defeat the civil rights movement in the courts. He also finally, grudgingly, accepted Nixon’s second invitation to become a Supreme Court Justice—allowing him to rule on legal arguments advanced by these new corporate legal nonprofits. One of those nonprofits, the Pacific Legal Foundation, became the driving force behind the PICS lawsuit.

Powerful Interests Manufactured a Grassroots Lawsuit

The standard story of PICS typically begins with Kathleen Brose, a parent outraged after her daughter was assigned to Franklin High School—then only 6% white—instead of overwhelmingly white Ballard High School. Brose, so the story goes, then founded a nonprofit, Parents Involved in Community Schools, to fight for her daughter all the way to the US Supreme Court. 

But lawsuits don’t get to the Supreme Court without someone spending millions of dollars. Fortunately, attorney Cara Sandberg dug deep into the powerful, wealthy interests who manufactured the PICS suit. While a group of frustrated parents did try organically to challenge the district’s racial tie-breaker, most of them had no interest in suing the district. The few who did, including former Republican Congressman John Miller, formed PICS. 

Miller convinced the Seattle office of powerful corporate law firm Davis Wright Tremaine to represent PICS pro bono. Harry Korrell, who was—and remains—a Davis Wright Tremaine partner, represented PICS for free. Korrell is a longtime member of the Federalist Society, one of the corporate-backed groups created to execute Lewis Powell’s oligarchic, anti-civil rights strategy. He was assisted by lawyers from another such group: the Pacific Legal Foundation. The Foundation provided both legal arguments for Korrell and media coaching for Brose. Brose, a more relatable figure than the elite Miller, was made the public face of the lawsuit. 

Backed by corporate lawyers and corporate nonprofits, PICS lost in lower courts but found a sympathetic ear at the US Supreme Court in 2007. Chief Justice John Roberts, like Korrell a veteran of Lewis Powell’s corporate legal movement, wrote the leading opinion. Roberts didn’t explicitly overrule Brown and bring back Jim-Crow-style mandatory school segregation. Instead, he banned government policies intended to proactively integrate schools. Under Brown, school districts can’t force all the white kids into one school and all the Black kids into another. But, under Roberts’s PICS ruling, Seattle couldn’t do anything intended to make schools more racially balanced. 

Roberts’s ruling rested on two false premises. First, he argued that the Constitution didn’t allow Seattle to consider race in school admissions because Seattle school segregation resulted from residential segregation caused by individual choices—not government policies. This laughably inaccurate claim needs no debunking, though law professor Richard Rothstein thoroughly shredded it in his book the Color of Law. 

Second, and more perniciously, Roberts willfully misinterpreted Brown, turning a color-conscious decision into a colorblind one. Roberts argued that Brown condemned ever racially classifying students. But Brown was not about classifying all children by race, Brown was about classifying Black children by race. Roberts failed to understand—or deliberately ignored—that Brown prohibited classifying and segregating Black students because whites were using school segregation to perpetuate the myth of Black inferiority. Roberts used PICS to transform Brown from a unanimous condemnation of white supremacy into a gag order preventing schools from even acknowledging obvious racial disparities. 

Roberts’s false claims yielded real results. A few optimists tried to argue that Justice Anthony Kennedy’s tie-breaking opinion—which attempted to salvage Brown’s legacy by allowing some limited school integration policies—was the actual law of the land. But Justice Kennedy is gone, and his successors do not believe that the Constitution allows schools to undo generations of racial discrimination. 

Seattle bowed to the court and abandoned its halting school integration efforts. Davis Wright Tremaine added insult to injury, spending years trying to force the Seattle Public Schools to pay $2 million in Borse’s legal fees. 

Lewis Powell’s corporate legal attack machine continues to target Washington schools with manufactured legal battles, from the Bremerton praying coach case to moral panics about “critical race theory.” Their goal isn’t just to end school integration, it’s to create permanent oligarchy by destroying public education entirely, subsidizing private school tuition for wealthy families, and depriving everyone else of a quality education.

PICS was part of this oligarchic campaign. Wealthy elitists used Seattle parents to gut Brown as part of a decades-long campaign designed to stamp out any whisper of a simple, obvious idea: the current distribution of wealth and power in America is unbelievably, violently unjust. The elitists seem to be ascendant, seizing control of school boards nationwide and dominating the Supreme Court. But Brown isn’t just a court decision. Brown is, and always will be, a simple, powerful acknowledgement that white supremacy is evil. Brown reminds us of a period of vibrant, brilliant, joyful, successful resistance—a time when the powerful and their lackeys were justifiably, gloriously afraid of losing their ill-gotten gains. We can make them afraid again.

The Stranger

The Stranger’s morning news roundup.

by Ashley Nerbovig

Heyoo, good morning.  Damn, the National Weather Service says maybe some thunderstorms today with a high near 63 degrees, with winds reaching 25 miles per hour. Make sure your smols stay indoors today, or else the winds could lift them away. 

Vacant building fire: One person is dead and another is in critical condition this morning after an apartment building on Roosevelt Way Northeast and Northeast 63rd Street caught fire. Fire crews treated two other people found in the building. A fire last month had led the City to condemn the building, according to KING 5. Three people died in vacant building fires last year. The Mayor introduced legislation to demolish these buildings faster. Of course, the Mayor could instead provide housing to people who are forced to live in condemned buildings. 

Roosevelt Way NE & NE 63rd St.: One of the patients that was in critical condition has succumbed to their injuries and was declared deceased at the scene.

— Seattle Fire Dept. (@SeattleFire) June 4, 2024

Kent Police scheduled to sweep migrants Tuesday: The Kent Police Department plan to crack down on 200 asylum-seekers who city governments keep shooing from place-to-place. The asylum-seekers have camped right next door to an Econo Lodge that King County owns and could open as a temporary shelter for the migrants, but they won’t due to some dispute with the city. Hannah has more.

King County Superior Court changes rules around evictions: King County Superior Court has adopted an emergency court room that allows some eviction cases to go before civil court judges instead of King County’s three commissioners. The cases must involve some sort of public health or safety risk. Housing Justice Project’s Edmund Witter said he doesn’t have a problem with the court revisiting the rules around evictions to allow more access to the legal system. However, the court made the change without stakeholder feedback and created a “messy” system for tenants to navigate, which could result in people losing housing, even if they have strong cases against eviction. Witter also has concerns about how the new system can be weaponized against people with behavioral health problems, who have the most trouble navigating these systems and who are the most likely to end up homeless.

INBOX: In an emergency rule amendment, King County Superior Court will allow some eviction cases to go before judges instead of commissioners. Landlords will first need to prove a health or safety risk. Seems targeted to allow evictions to go more quickly in some cases. pic.twitter.com/gEPuMGexoA

— Ashley Nerbovig (@AshleyNerbovig) June 3, 2024

Seattle assistant chief back to work: Interim Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr has reinstated SPD Assistant Chief Tyrone Davis as the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) investigates a complaint brought against him by the Community Police Commission, according to the Seattle Times. The details of the complaint have yet to be made public.

Lawsuit over pet pig slaughter: Some guy sent to kill some pigs in Port Orchard last month took a wrong turn and ended up killing a family’s pet pigs. Now the owners of the pigs have filed a lawsuit against the 29-year-old who killed the wrong animals, according to the Washington Post. Crazy that I have to sign for packages, but not one for someone to come shoot an animal in my backyard. That should probably be a policy. When I open my butcher shop, I’m going to make that a policy.

SPD officers disciplined for delayed response to domestic violence call: The OPA has finished its investigation into a complaint against two officers who sat at a Starbucks for about 40 minutes while a domestic violence suspect attempted to enter a victim’s house, which I reported on back in September. DivestSPD has the full update on the investigation, but OPA basically said that even if the officers involved considered the call to be a low priority, “it was higher than socializing at Starbucks.”

Biden plans to close border to asylum-seekers: The president plans to sign an executive order that allows the US to shut down the border after the number of crossings exceeds a daily threshold, according to the Guardian. Biden plans to hold a press conference at 11 am PDT. He must be trying to save gas with the way he’s taking all these right turns. 

Also, according to the Guardian, at a campaign event in New York Biden called out Trump for the whole becoming a convicted felon thing. Voters who decide to choose Biden over Trump because of this annoy me. People who let the legal system decide for them who to trust have a fucked up sense of the world.   

breaking news reports lost no time amplifying the stigma of a criminal record pic.twitter.com/1bEcaAVYoq

— jon ben-menachem (@jbenmenachem) May 30, 2024

But maybe Biden has a messaging plan: Hunter Biden’s own felony trial began Tuesday. The poor guy had to give up his plea agreement deal after Republicans decried it as special treatment. He tried to make it his choice by saying he was mad about the Justice Department targeting him. Maybe if the case ends in Hunter Biden’s conviction, Joe Biden will be like, “See, some people with felonies should be president, like my second-favorite son.” I’m not hopeful. 

Another good one from The Number Ones: One of my top music columns from Stereogum dropped a new good column last week reviewing “Fancy,” the 2014 hit by Iggy Azalea, “a white Australian woman who rapped in a Black American accent.” Give it a scroll as you listen to a song that will not leave your brain for hours afterward.

The Stranger

This chaotic situation marks only the latest episode of instability and uncertainty for the 200 migrants.

by Hannah Krieg

Kent police officers delivered a 48-hour eviction notice Sunday afternoon to about 200 asylum-seekers mostly from Angola, Congo, and Venezuela, who set up camp in a field next to the Kent Econo Lodge hotel on June 1. If the refugees don’t leave by Tuesday at 3:17 pm, then they will be subject to arrest for trespassing. 

According to a Monday Instagram post, the asylum-seekers plan to stay, and they asked community members to stand with them as they attempt to stop the sweep. Rosario Lopez, an advocate from Super Familia, said the migrants don’t have anywhere to go—except maybe the empty hotel that the county owns right next door. 

“We are camping outside a hotel that could serve as an emergency shelter, but instead of opening the hotel they chose to call the police on hundreds of migrants,” Lopez said. “So they would rather send us to jail than to a shelter.”

Advocacy groups, including Super Familia King County, South King County Mutual Aid, Global Solidarity Network Seattle, Congolese Angolan Movement, and Comunidades Sin Fronteras, asked community supporters to call and email the members of the Kent City Council, Kent Mayor Dana Ralph, the members of the King County Council, King County Executive Dow Constantine, and others to demand they open the Econo Lodge as emergency shelter for the refugees for 90 days.

As the Seattle Times reported this morning, King County bought the Econo Lodge in 2020 and used the 85-unit facility as a COVID-19 quarantine site. Now it’s empty and seems like a natural fit for the 200 or so asylum-seekers. A press release from advocacy groups working with the asylum-seekers said that “[d]ue to King County and the City of Kent’s conveniently intractable bureaucratic disputes, the entire EconoLodge only is home to cars from a local dealership, and the state is sending police instead of services. A small change on the part of King County government and Kent City officials could rapidly ensure emergency housing for hundreds of people.”

Asylum-seekers and their allies asked King County to reopen the Econo Lodge back in April, too. At the time, King County Executive spokesperson Kristin Elia said, “No, the county does not have plans to reopen the hotel. The county is in continued conversations with the state and local jurisdictions on a long-term, statewide approach to provide support for asylum-seekers.”

Elia did not respond to my request for comment about the group’s renewed demand. I will update if she does.

This chaotic situation marks only the latest episode of instability and uncertainty for the 200 migrants. Local governments, including Seattle, Tukwila, Kent, and King County have played hot potato with this particular group for months. The refugees pitch tents, public pressure mounts, and a local government or private donor foots the bill for a few nights or weeks in a hotel, only for the cycle to repeat itself when the money dries up and they get kicked out. But localities maintain that a more permanent solution will come when the State releases $32 million for shelter and resources for migrants and asylum-seekers on July 1. 

The Stranger

Hannah Gadsby, The Black Trans Comedy Showcase, and More Top Picks

by EverOut Staff

Welcome to the first full week of June! Spend some time at tip-top events from Hannah Gadsby: Woof! to to Jon Batiste’s Uneasy Tour and from TRANSlations: 19th Annual Seattle Trans Film Festival to Lavender Rights Project Presents The Black Trans Comedy Showcase. For a look at what’s in store for the rest of the month, check out our June event guide.

MONDAY
LIVE MUSIC

Echo & The Bunnymen
You can easily identify the famed post-punk quartet Echo & The Bunnymen from their full-bodied vocals, ethereal instrumentation, and wind-tossed hairstyles (set in place with lots of hairspray, of course). Let them add some doom and gloom to the spring season (we need more, right?) with songs like “The Killing Moon” and “Lips Like Sugar” as they bring their Songs to Learn and Sing tour to Seattle. AUDREY VANN
(Showbox SoDo, SoDo)

The Stranger

Wedding Couples Should Know About This Aphrodisiac

They can be stressful with a desire for them to perfect. Wedding couples should about this aphrodisiac used for centuries!

The post Wedding Couples Should Know About This Aphrodisiac appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

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