More from the underbelly of the Portland music scene. First you form a band, and then what? How do you market yourself? All bands eventually want merchandise (aka, merch) to sell or give away — stickers, shirts, CDs, etc. A lot of small businesses cater to this. Hopo Screenprinting is one of them.

Printing shirts is a trip. The first thing you notice when you walk into a screen printing shop is the heat from the shirt dryer that melts and sets the pigments. Then you notice the weird smells from the paints and inks.

Damon Rose is adjusting one of the screens. After he locks it in place, he glops on a bunch of white goo, runs the squeegee, and lifts the screen to check out the shirt. It looks perfect to me, but the expression on his face suggests that he sees a small problem with the way the ink transferred to the T-shirt. He makes another adjustment and gets back to work.

He is fussing over these shirts because they are for something special.

They are going to be sold to raise money for the Kevin Marcotte benefit shows on Thursday and Friday. Kevin is a fabulous local musician who has been hospitalized for the past month by an emergency medical issue.

I came over to help print shirts for Kevin, but I’m an unskilled laborer, so my job is simple. I sit at the end of the shirt dryer and grab them as they come out. If it needs another pass to fully dry, I hand it back to Damon and he sends it through again. Apparently only one shirt is getting printed tonight though, and he’ll run the rest of the batch tomorrow.

I ask Damon what he likes most about printing shirts, and he says the corporate jobs pay better, but he likes printing shirts for bands. He understands that musicians are poor, so he cuts them deals to help them out. He shows me one that he is particularly proud of that features a design by Guy Burwell. It has radiating spokes with a caricature of the musician in the center. Damon is very modest about the work he does, but it is first class. He gets a kick out of seeing his shirts on people as he goes around town. They recently cut a deal to sell Baby Hopo clothes for little kids in a natural food store chain, so he was pretty excited about the prospects of that.

So only one shirt down tonight, but at least the machine is set up properly. Damon has 199 more shirts to print before Kevin’s first benefit show. Hope to see some of you there on Thursday at the White Eagle Saloon and Friday at the World Famous Kenton Club.