Portland to Wisconsin

April—May 2018

My first trip to Oregon — visiting my old friend Laura and her husband. We used to play French horns together in a high school orchestra. Her first day there she turned up with blue hair (this was '88) and wearing a Violent Femmes' Blind Leading the Naked T-shirt! She used to lend me cool books by authors like Ursula K. Le Guin (who had lived, written and — only a few weeks earlier — in Portland). We'd not seen each other for over twenty-five years, but this seemed entirely irrelevant.

Apparently Portland has the highest density of record shops of any city in the US (or world?), so I had to buy something...Laura pointed me to Mississippi Records, across the road from a grocery place she was about to drop into. Instantly overwhelmed, I ended up coming out with Sun Ra's Jazz in Silhouette (1959) and Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air (1967), having got a thumbs-up from clerk who laughed that he'd just been on phone to one "Smoky Sausage", claiming to be Run-DMC's original hype man, wanting a job. I also had a couple of lovely spaced-out evenings sitting up chatting with Laura and Fred while an endless stream of wonderful music poured out of their speakers courtesy of local station XRAY.fm (aka KXRY). Fred is into the audiophile thing, explained to me about the mid-80s golden age of amp technology, and "boutique capacitors"! My plans to meet up with eclectic WFMU (remote) DJ Tony Coulter and get to a Wooden Shjips show didn't work out, but I did manage to spot the premises of the Portland 'Pataphysical Society (Soft Machine fans involved?), a semicolon-shaped bench and a fire hydrant almost entirely swallowed up by some massive tree roots. Cool city, no doubt.

  

I got an Amtrak train across Washington (hooking onto a train my mum was on at midnight in Spokane, as planned), Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota and into Wisconsin. Very chilled. Having settled in in Stevens Point, WI, I ran into some people I knew, ended up at Anna Jo Banjo's birthday party...a piñata party involving various local hippies taking turns to (blindfolded) smash a banjo-shaped piñata while Tyler and Coulter played a brilliantly coordinated noise set as MC Robotripper in the garage (only in Stevens Point!). Back upstairs in the house, some members of local bluegrass/old-time band Dig Deep tore it up (I got on a shaky egg trip). A few days later (Sat 28th April) I got to see local jamband Soul Symmetry rocking out at Guu's — two long sets including some Allman Brothers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Stevie Wonder's "Superstitious", Floyd's "Breathe" > "Time", some reggae. Their original stuff isn't as strong as their interpretative work, but yeah. Had a great time.

Beltane eve was spent down at the Elbow Room songswap. I had no saz with me — turned out that bringing one with me on Norwegian Airlines would cost more than getting a new, basic student-model-type saz (like my first one) shipped from Turkey via eBay! So I'd ordered one before leaving. Sadly, the shipping time exceeded my expectations... I can remember a student with a guitar singing Jonathan Richman's "Pablo Picasso" (great choice), then ending up in my old pal JP's garage on the West Side (apparently the highest point, topographically, in the rather flat town) reminiscing while listening to Syd Barrett albums via old cassettes. Nice.

Saturday 5th of May saw two gigs a stonesthrow apart, at Guu's and PABS (a bikeshop with a beer license which now doubles as a venue — the same space the old Mission coffeehouse used to occupy): Tuck Pence and Armchair Boogie in the latter (Tuck surprised me with an acoustic cover of Floyd's "Time" — strange to hear that covered twice in such different ways at such a short spacio-temporal distance). AB's hillbilly vibe didn't really do it for me, so I wandered over to Guu's to hear an MC called Catalytic. The beat wasn't loud enough, but the mostly student audience seemed to be familiar with his shit. Seemed to be from Chicago. A student at UWSP? I walked back to my mum's and listened to his lyrics more carefully on Soundcloud, decided he was a misogynist. Oh well.

The next afternoon I was cycling out to a rural bar called Renee's Red Rooster with my fibre arts/maths/philosophy friend Maud and her feminist religious studies lecturer friend Alice to see local heroes Sloppy Joe do their thing. I sat at the bar chatting with Alice about anomalies in Genesis surrounding Abraham's wife Sarah (brought to my attention by Robert Crumb!) while the band played their way through a couple of Tom Waits songs ("Come On Up To The House", "Gun Street Girl"), a couple of Guy Clark songs ("The Cape", "Homegrown Tomatoes"), some Michael Hurley and other 'slopgrass' favourites. The core quartet was ameliorated (as they often are) by Bobby Burns, Jamie on washboard, et al. Bobby was doing some amazing stuff with syncopation in his mandolin solos. Stef was outside in "the lot" outside selling her amazing handmade soap during the set break! Grateful Dead culture just keeps on rollin'

12th May 2018 I was back at Guu's for an afterparty of the (rather lame, I'm afraid) Portage County Cultural Festival. This was anything but lame. I can't remember who told me to go — many thanks to whoever it was — but "John Roberts y Pan Blanco" didn't sound too promising. Support was from a three-piece Funkyard Dealers. I'd seen a different version of this band last year — this time there was a Moog player (making use of a breath controller) involved on some numbers. A trombone and sax joined them for "Pick Up the Pieces", sounded great. They turned out to be part of five-piece eclectic funk/afro/Latin band from Chicago (I think). They'd come up for the PCCF, probably paid well for it, and this was them letting their hair down in a late night session at a local bar. And this was world class stuff! Ecstatic dancing... I couldn't quite believe what was going on, kept forgetting I was in Stevens Point. Samba, salsa, boogaloo, cumbia, "I Like It Like That"... crazy Latin rhythms, such a great night : )

On Friday 18th, I was back at PABS to see Dig Deep and Soul Symmetry (again). I caught the last half of DD's set (missed a cover of "Ace of Spades", apparently) — hillbilly vibes, but good ones. Guitarist from SS sitting in with them. Punk bass player. SS rocked it again, more jammed-out bluesyness... they mentioned that they were about to relocate to Madison (the state's capital city), but wouldn't forget their dear hometown. The Allmans' "Whipping Post" was the standout again. "The Sky Is Cryin'" also pretty impressive. Great fun, a few friends old and new in the audience.

The saz finally arrived from Turkey a couple of days before I was due to leave! I did manage to get out and have a jam with Stef from Sloppy Joe (hosted by JP and Molly in their back yard around a fire). Mostly songs I'd never played before, and I hadn't played saz for over a month, so a bit ropey, but so good to be doing:

Listen Here

This would have been my dad's 94th birthday...Mum and I cycled around some of his childhood haunts during the day — a good day — one surreal memory of that afternoon involved, as we zoomed down Heffron Street towards his old swimming spot (now a posh neighbourhood full of doctors' and lawyers' families), an ice cream truck MIDI ragtime Doppler effect. Ever experienced one of those?