Did any of you get up to Alberta last night? Tell me about what you did up there.
Last Thursday is always fun on a sunny summer evening. All the beautiful hipsters, freaks, and families milling by.
If you are chilling on The Porch, you don’t have to wade through the crowd, you can just watch the masses move by while you contentedly swill your Pabst Blue Ribbon or the Sparks Plus that you bought at La Tienda. Or maybe you’re sick of beer, so you just wander over to Cork for a bottle of that sweet berry wine. Any 10 dollar bottle at Cork will blow away what you can get for that price at Fred Meyer. Cork is like money in the bank because people who actually love wine have hand selected what they are selling. Yum.
If you’re hungry, you just stumble two feet over to La Bonita for a chile relleno burrito with black beans and avacado. Green sauce please, and plenty of it. It’s pretty hard to beat The Porch.
Three bands played last night. Throbbing Diablos crushed my ear hole with their psychobilly set. Children walked by clutching their heads with facial expressions like someone was simultaneously standing on their toes and yanking out their teeth. Then the audience demanded that they turn it up more. Mike (drums) and Geoff (standup bass) look like zombies in a 50’s movie. You could crack eggs on Mike’s pompadour. Scott (guitar and vocals) sports lamb chop side burns big enough to feed a family of eight. Hailing from the megalopolis of Vale, Oregon, Scott is also a fine actor too. The song about boy scouts in the woods is still rattling around in my head.
Lord Master laid waste to the crowd during the second act. Jimmy Don’t (bass) and Tristan Trotter (drums) keep it real in the rhythm section while Matt Gannon (aka Yoon from the band Drats) and Ben Cosloy trade guitar god licks and riffs. The art of shredding is still alive and well with these two. Octave guitar dual solos and the whole works. Ben has made several of the guitars he plays on stage. More on that later, because he’s inspired me to build my own Telecaster and has been helping me with advice. I’ll talk about it in later posts.
I play in Party Country. I’m not going to review us, but I can say that the drunker you are, the better we sound. Only 3/5ths of the band was there last night. So Ben Cosloy joined us on lead guitar, and Kevin Marcotte (bass player for Seven Year Tango and Colin Lake and Wellbottom) joined us on vocals. I’m retarded when it comes to lead guitar. I can write songs, play rhythm guitar, and sing, but I can’t shred. I’ve never shared the stage with Ben before, but if I could split out a part of my brain to do whiskey soaked solos, I would want it to sound like he did last night. He had never played the songs before and he basically owned them. Kevin knew all the words so it was great having him singing harmonies. A big Party Country thanks to Ben and Kevin for pitching in last night.
The Portland music community is a bunch of misfits and derelicts but we love each other and help each other out. We’re underpaid and underwhelmed, but we have some good laughs. We sit in half empty rooms playing for ourselves a good deal of the time.
And I’m proud to have the honor of hanging out with some of the freaky musicians who call this town home.
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