Ahh Portland, the weekend getaway destination for northwest hipsters. I made a one night trip down to visit Blake from Empty Records, he is the owner of Sicko and TFTBB’s record label. We had a great time sampling the local flavour. First, we went to the alibi room, an awesome tiki bar that is kept so dark we were groping around trying to find chairs upon entry. After that, it was the Amnesia brewery, one of a zillion cool PDX micro-breweries for pints, burgers, and brats. This place is in an old converted garage in one of the many tiny Portland hipster sub-neighbourhoods, and has a very laid back warm vibe to it, PLUS an outside beer garden. Next, we walked across town to the downtown area near Burnside (?) street, where all the clubs are, taking in a few of the weird suicide-girl/heroin-chic strip clubs along the way. These joints are a lot different from their Seattle equivalents: there are only a few girls, they are very focused on dancing and pole tricks, and there is almost no contact with the customers. Further, drinking is allowed in PDX bars, so there’s a lot more social activity and conversation going on, sometimes to the annoyance of the strippers! After this, we headed down to a rock club called Dante’s to see a show, Zolar X and Thor, and some all-Klingon grindcore outfit. Adding to the weird factor with this band: the growling, phlegmy singer was missing an arm, and spent lots of time gesticulating with his stump. The entire band were dressed up like Klingons, with weird bald-head masks, dreads, etc. Ditching this after about two songs (sorry Klingons), we headed to a bar/restaurant called the “Shanghai Tunnel”, which apparently has access to a series of tunnels under the city of Portland that were used in past years to secretly move the drunken victims of press-gangs to the boats they were destined for. We had some spicy udon curry, Hoeegarden beer, and listened to old speed metal here. Obviously, this place was packed with hipsters. After this, it was back to the rock club to see Zolar X, which is a sort of space alien rock-punk band that first got together in 1978 or something. Brian Foss from the Funhouse in Seattle described this as the “best band in the world”. Brian is one of the people I love most, but HE IS DEAD WRONG about Zolar X. They totally suck in their blond wigs and George Jetson outfits. So, we split again, this time for some other hipster strip club, where we ran into Sweet Michael Benson the road dog! Mike was Sicko’s roadie on our 1997 US tour, and is featured prominently in the tour video. He was out with a bachelor party, and it was damn good to see him. Mike’s come a long way from being our $10 a day roadie, he now makes a proper living as a sales manager for US Bank in their mortgage department. After this, we headed back to see the headliner at the show: Thor. Thor was a Canadian heavy metal band in the early 80s that got moderately popular on the international scene. Thor is the singer of this band, and his gimmick was that he was an extremely beefy weight lifter type with long hair, of course singing about the usual dragons and swords and crap. Remember those Molly Hatchet record covers and Conan the Barbarian comic covers that always had a big monster, a naked hot chick, and a huge dude with a sword? Thor actually LOOKED like that dude.
Thor back in the day
In retrospect, this was probably a bad long-term move on Thor’s part, because nobody can keep that up, especially not after 30 odd years. These days, Thor is a big chubby guy with a renaissance fair style beard and some short grey hair. He’s compensating though: his new gimmick is wearing plus-sized armour and a variety of monster masks to disguise his non-Thor-like physique.
Thor today
Frankly, it’s pretty entertaining; and they have a kickass drummer, which makes just about anybody sound good. There are some theatrical components to the set, with an “evil” guy in a skull mask that Thor subdues and subsequently spares the life of, lots of sword and axe waving, etc. We had fun, and I bought a t-shirt. After this, it was off to le Bistro Montage, which was pretty damn entertaining in and of itself. Basically, this is an arty pseudo-Italian joint with room for about 200 people. Make that 200 DRUNK people. They seem especially set up to handle a totally loaded post-bar closing crowd, and that’s what they were doing this night. The place was packed, and we were lucky to get a seat at the bar. They had lots of hearty Italian-American type stuff, and seemed to specialise in macaroni and cheese. Really. They had 5 or 6 different varieties, Blake ordered the spicy mac and I got the old mac (old school style). The food came in large bowls, covered with Parmesan cheese, and sprinkled with tomatoes. Even drunk Ean and drunk Blake couldn’t finish these monsters off. The waiters were weird and funny, and seemed to enjoy their job of entertaining/tormenting/serving drunks. This place had some really neat wacky larger than life artwork too, I spent quite a bit of time staring at it. After this, we caught a cab back to Blake’s and passed out. The next morning we had breakfast with Benson and his wife Bianca at this 19th century bar that seemed to have been redone sometime in the 1930’s, and then just maintained after that. This place was really beautiful, with huge ceilings and doors, lots of of dark wood, a huge curving bar top, etc. etc. Of course, the food and service was totally hipster Portland, which seemed a bit casual in the environment, and was totally cool to me. Bianca is a member of a Portland roller girl team called guns ‘n rollers, which may be a uniquely north American phenomenon. Basically, roller girl is where modern hipster/punker types get together and compete in a violent roller skating team sport based on the “roller derby” once popular in the 1970’s. The details are well documented at usrollergirls.com, but suffice it to say that roller girl consists of a bunch of hot and semi-hot punky girls beating the crap out of each other on roller skates. I am by no means a roller girl expert, but I believe that outside of official “bout” activity, roller girl also consists of socialisation, partying, group activities, and a certain degree of semi girl-gang sort of behaviour. Bianca is a member of what I can only assume is a fairly tough outfit of girls, since for the last several years they have practised on concrete(!) rinks instead of the normal wooden floored ones. This makes for some fairly spectacular wipeouts, which are the main vehicle for injury in the roller girl context. Appropriately, Bianca showed up to breakfast in a “cholo” outfit, replete with bandana, baseball had, dickies, etc. There was some complex set of jokes that related her roller girl teams’ guns ‘n roses theme to cholos and thereby to a cholo themed party, and I can’t remember the details now. However, she looked great (and relatively authentic) in her outfit.
We took about 2 hours to eat breakfast, and then I drove back up to Seattle. I wonder how long it will be before I see all these cool folks again?
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