Laura Vanderpool

Capping Day, 1990

Laura (Weller) Vanderpool has been a musician practically all of her life.  She got her first record (a single of the Beatles’ Help/I’m Down), at age 5. From then on it was all about the guitar for her. She started lessons (folk, naturally) at age seven. “I remember distinctly skipping out of recess every day in 4^th grade to practice Beatles songs with my friend who had the same guitar teacher,” recalls Laura.

Laura has been playing in original music bands since 8^th grade.  When she was in high school she found out that her hero, Ann Wilson from Heart, had gone to her high school! She found an LP that the school choir had recorded that had Ann singing “To Sir With Love” on it; “her voice was awesome even as a teenager. I thought, if Ann could come from podunk Bellevue and become a successful rock musician, then so could I!”

Laura moved to L.A. out of high school because there didn’t seem to be anything going on in town at that time. After three years there of being a small fish in a huge pond, she returned, a little disheartened, to go to college at the UW. To her surprise, a very small but very interesting live rock scene had started to emerge and she jumped in as soon as she could. Her roommate (Bonnie Hammond) and Laura decided to start a band and did some open mics. They were soon approached by two guys, Joe Ross (of 64 Spiders and Green Pajamas) and Scott McCullum (Skin Yard, Gruntruck, Mona Diesel and others) who said, “you guys are good, but you need a real band”.  They couldn’t agree more. Capping Day began, and took off quickly. Scott played at the time in another band called Skin Yard. He hooked them up with the guitar player, Mike Giacondino, who recorded bands on the side. He got quite good at it and became well recognized under the name Jack Endino. That single landed in KCMU’s Top 10 in the annual end-of the year countdown in 1989. That same year, KCMU also entered Capping Day in the annual EMI Records “Best Unsigned Band in America” contest and they won. Soon they had a big recording contract in their hands and were poised for something big. However, Capping Day’s manager (also manager of The Posies, who had just signed with DGC) thought the contract was terrible, taking away all songwriting rights, etc., and the band agreed. They turned down the contract and took the contest reward money instead. They went to PopLlama, taking Jon Auer of the Posies with them as their engineer/producer, and released an EP, “Post No Bills.”

Today, Capping Day still plays together for the occasional show. Laura joined The Green Pajamas (also a long-time Seattle band) and plays and records with that band regularly. She also performs and records with the Pajamas’ Jeff Kelly in a psych-folk project called “The Goblin Market,” and hopes to someday bribe her bass-playing teenage daughter Lindsay to join her on stage. Of course she has always kept the “day job” which for the most part has been in PR and marketing, where she gets paid to play with words. These skills have been put to great use in her recent work as the PR maven for These Streets. But music will always be first in her heart.  According to Laura, “My husband, Scott Vanderpool (of Chemistry Set, Room Nine, Young Pioneers, and King County Queens) and I are determined to play live music until they haul our cold, dead bodies off the stage. We are prepared with a name for our ‘old people’ rock band already – it will be called WALKER. It will rock.”

These Streets Interview

Discography

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Links

http://thegreenpajamas.net/