They Have Rooms For Art, Live Music At OK Hotel

You can still rent a room at the OK Hotel, but you won't need your luggage. For one thing, the rooms are 8 by 9 feet. And you can't stay there unless you're an art exhibit. And the downstairs part of the building can get pretty loud to boot.

The OK Hotel, which first served as an inexpensive hotel for workers and longshoremen from 1917 to 1970, now plays a triple role for Seattle's young art crowd. It's a gallery, a coffeehouse and one of the few live-entertainment venues catering to those under 21.

Steve Freeborn, who shares ownership of the club with his wife, Tia, reopened the OK in March 1988 as a gallery space that doubled as a coffee shop in the mornings, later expanding its hours to late evening. The closed-off upstairs portion opened as a room-installation gallery last fall, and in January, a fairly large back room was completed for what Freeborn calls ``performance art,'' or, in laymen's terms, live music.

``I think the OK Hotel is the best-kept secret in Seattle,'' said Brad Haug, 21, of Seattle, at a recent OK Hotel show featuring The Fluid, a Denver band on Seattle's alternative SubPop Records.

``The OK Hotel fills a very necessary gap - under-age people don't have many venues in which to see local bands,'' added Tharen Stevenson, 20, of Seattle.

Matt Brooks, the club's booking agent, says, ``I think it's really important to do what we want to do here, which is featuring live music with no alcohol. At least half our crowds are under-age.''

The club features different styles of music, from jazz to reggae to marimba to punk rock, but most of the bands are local underground bands otherwise locked into 21-and-over live-music clubs such as the Vogue, the Central and the Off Ramp.

Freeborn emphasizes that the Hotel's main thing is art. ``We've always been an art gallery,'' he said. ``We've had to expand because the art takes up a lot of space to display.'' The performance room is ringed with paintings, a room behind the coffeeshop in front is currently displaying lithographs and collage books, the latter inspiring an audience member at The Fluid show to proclaim, ``I don't know, it's art or something, man.''

The room installations, however, make the OK Hotel unique in Seattle; Freeborn says it's the only room-installation gallery in the city. The rental fee of $25 a month allows an artist to convert a room any way he or she sees fit, provided it doesn't involve oil-based paints. ``I've seen just about everything done to a room,'' he said.

Highlights from the current exhibit include a room covered with pink balloons around a tall plastic case filled with rotting bananas; a ``dream dispenser'' where the viewer can take slips of paper with surreal dream synopses printed on them from a mannequin with a flip-top head rigged to a pulley; and a piece called ``Captive Audience,'' which has a mannequin strapped to a bed with a TV tuned to NBC suspended above its face.

As far as live music goes, the October lineup is a mix of national and regional college-radio acts in addition to its local fare. Tonight, the Seattle-based, nationally known Young Fresh Fellows will play with the Smugglers, and next Friday night, Portland's Dharma Bums will play with Hammerbox - two bands that could become college-radio dignitaries in the next two years.

But the best-known act for the month, Mojo Nixon, will make an appearance Sunday as part of a two-stop Seattle pass-through.

Nixon, who will also play at the Backstage Saturday, is a psycho-folk-blues singer from San Diego who, along with sidekick/washboard percussionist Skid Roper, gained notoriety in alternative music circles for his wry observations of the American Way. These include ``Elvis Is Everywhere,'' a song about believing the tabloid reports; a love ode to MTV personality Martha Quinn; and ``Get Out of My Way,'' a superlative anti-work song in which he proclaims, ``I'm not even going to get off at that little go-to-work exit.''

Nixon will be touring without Roper, according to Tamara Collier of Chameleon Productions, a Seattle promotions company that works with the OK Hotel. Instead, he will front a band, somewhat of a departure from his past two-man sound, and the show will be opened by Joey Kline, a local musician who has led several Seattle bands, among them Prudence Dredge and the Cropdusters.