Steve Trettevik is a long-time Green Monkey artist, going back to our earliest days. However, Faded Champion is his first solo album. Steve plays almost everything, including the many guitar leads. His compositions are concise, yet warm; they are even occasionally silly, running the gamut from catchy rock/pop to nearly country. His rough baritone pulls the whole thing together.
Tom Dyer: I first met Steve in 1982, in my earliest recording days. Up until that time, Steve had mostly done folk music, hammered dulcimer etc. Steve and I started doing little one-off projects like The Rude Dudes and Group Sex which appeared on the 1983 Local Product compilation. That comp also included Steve’s solo debut as Stevie Nations and The United States doing their greatest hit “Theme From Mudshark.” This was not folk music.
From there Steve and I started a real gigging band The Icons, who had a 3-year run and a posthumous cassette, Masters Of Disaster. In the midst of that chaos, we recorded and released the drunken all-improv Me Three – No Money No Fun, where Steve first appeared as Walter E. Gogh.
Post-Icons, Steve returned to his folky ways, doing a variety of projects with his wife Sherrie Nordling like The Campers.
Jump to 2009, The Icons play a re-union show for the It Crawled From The Basement anthology comp. The Icons had so much fun they decided it was time for a second album, Appointment with Destiny!, released in 2011. We played a record release show and were done.
Since, Steve has become a regular contributor to the annual GMR charity Xmas album, with tunes in eight in of its eleven years, usually appearing with Sherrie as The Elf-tones.
I moved back to Olympia in 2016 and Steve joined the great Seattle exodus a couple years later also landing in Oly. I started a show on KAOS 89.3 FM Olympia, FreeForm Northwest, and Steve joined as my official sidekick.
Steve started recording a lot of electric guitar songs and this year, I talked him into letting me mix and release eleven of them. And now you have them: Faded Champion. I am honored and pleased to release these great songs and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
