34 JiMt Olft - july i 2004
It's up to you... Portland, Oregon
How 14 romantics might just put
the local music scene back in business
P H O TO BY JAY
t’s 9 o’clock on a Tuesday
night. Fourteen organiz
ers are sitting in my din
ing room, debating.
We’re about to take our
fourth vote of the night. I’m
bleary-eyed.
After this, we still have
to check off a laundry list of
tasks: We need a second
stage, bottled water, volun
teers, microphones, more
sponsors, six sound engi
neers and a voter registra
tion partner. We need 44
musicians to return our calls.
Every one of us re
arranged our lives to produce
the first PDX-POP Now!
music festival. Three days,
two stages, 44 local bands,
free admission A double CD compilation.
We’re voting. Three hours have passed since
the meeting started. Why am 1 doing this?
I’ve been asking myself that question a lot
lately. To be honest, Ijn a bit of a
lone wolf and not much of an
activist.
I guess it makes some sense that
I’m helping create this festival. If
there’s one thing I'm not apathetic
about, it’s music. I’m the obsessive
record-collecting geek, always docu
menting and analyzing what I’m lis
tening to. And in the past few
years, I’ve been satisfied to listen
from the sidelines. I’ve been the
audience. An observer.
Well, not anymore.
In 2002, after 10 years of
domestic bliss, my relationship with
BY
Portland hit the skids. Blame it on
CORI
a couple of nasty winters, a love
TARATOOT affair in New York City and a
growing disenchantment with the
local music scene. I did a lot of soul-searching
about leaving.
First, New York. Six months after 9/11,
1 met and fell in love with a New Yorker. We
flew often to see each other. At night as the
subway mmbled through the walls of her apart
ment, I sifted through the emotional debris
firsthand. New York still seemed shocked and
nervous, like a trauma patient coming in for
her first checkup.
I was falling in love with a New Yorker, but
I was also falling in love with New York. For
the first time since moving to Portland in
1992, my city didn’t feel like home.
But soon my love affair unraveled and the
constant blast of post-9/11 anxiety—
Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Palestine—fried my
nervous system. On one particularly bad day,
two old friends gave me the kind of advice only
old friends can give. Go back to doing what
you love; she’s not coming back.
So I started over.
1 screamed into microphones and thrashed
my guitar. I discovered new bands, fell back in
love with old ones—Explosions in the Sky,
Postal Service, The Gossip, Imperial Teen. At
my favorite venue, The Blackbird, I purged in
the company of strangers who felt like friends.
Then Elliott Smith died. Cold rain arrived
on cue, painful and predictable. The Blackbird
closed.
I
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My mind still chat-
tered. 1 needed to sort
and re-sort the things changing around me.
I began to write. 1 interviewed my favorite bands—
talked for hours about music and about Portland.
While I struggled with my place here, a con
versation about local music started up on the
Internet mailing list www.indiepop.com/pdx-pop.
People complained about cash-poor (and in
attentive) local audiences, subpar venues, shows
starting too late. Bands writing in from the road
reported that the rest of the country seemed
impressed with Portland music, a sentiment not
felt strongly back at home.
The cynical idealists shouted loud, but the
optimistic DIYers shouted louder. We met
weekly for five months, figuring out how to
produce a summer festival.
Margaret Mead wrote: “Never doubt that a
small group of thoughtful, committed citizens
can change the‘world. Indeed, it’s the only
thing that ever has.”
PDX-POP Now! is my love letter to Port
land, but I didn’t write it alone. I’m just one of
more than a dozen organizers and countless
volunteers intensely determined to promote,
celebrate and rattle the Portland music com
munity. It’s the most radical collaboration I’ve
ever been a part of.
The festival is just days away. Our compila
tion CD is in record stores all over town. The
Web site is up. Volunteers are posting fliers.
The artists—including Mirah, Sunset Valley,
Tara Jane O’Neil, The Joggers, The Divided,
The Minders and Sarah Dougher—are booked.
We’re almost there.
Taking a day off to recharge, 1 grab a ticket
to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Seeing
New York hurts, and I can’t deny it—1 still
miss her. But almost as overwhelming is my
sense of obligation to the city. Not New York
City. PDX.
1 think, 1 have to do something.
And then 1 realize, for the first time in a
long time, I am doing something. JM
The first-ever PDX-POP Now! music festival is
July 9 to 11 at the Meow Meow, 320 S.E. Second
Ave. Visit uuw pdxpopnow.com for a complete
schedule.
T arat OOT is a Portland free-lance writer.
She loves Sonic Youth, Wilco, Jay, Jon, Michael,
Anne, Sum, Cary, Greg, Ross, Lexi, Marta,
Josh, Darin and Matt.
CORI