Street roots
March 1, 2013
To the beat of a very different drum
MarchFourth celebrates 10 years as a Portland original with international chops
BY SUE ZALOKAR
S T A F F W R IT E R
archFourth Marching Band was
born on Alberta Street 10 years
ago this week. Since that time, the
band’s 22 members have become
ambassadors of joy and funk, taking a piece
of Portlandia with them as they tour the
country with their off-beat brand of circus-
tent pageantry.
Bandleader John Averil and four friends
living in the Alberta Arts District hatched
the idea for the raucous troupe, naming it
after its first Fat Tuesday performance on a
March 4. You can catch the 10-year
anniversary spectacle extraordinaire at the
Crystal Ballroom March 3 with shows at 4
p.m. and 8:30 p.m., and March 4 at 9 p.m.
M
S.Z.: M4 is kind of a social experiment. You
guys turn the marching band paradigm on its
head, but you are much more than a marching
band. How do you explain what you do?
J.A.: Aside from being a band, this is very
much a social experiment. I describe it as a
high energy big band with performance,
circus elements that integrates with the
audience. A celebration, really, that’s what
it is. We’ve considered dropping the
marching band from our name. We really
aren’t a marching band anymore. We look
like one. We have five drummers instead of
a drum kit player. We have electric bass,
guitar. We have vocals, we write all of our
own music. We have stilt walkers. We’re like
a traveling rock and roll circus, if anything.
S.Z.: MarchFourth played its first show 10
years ago at what is now the Star Theater.
J.A.: Yes. At the time, it was called Level.
When MarchFourth played our very first
show, it was to a packed crowd. That wasn’t
because we promoted it that well. The
untold story is the history that led up to
that.
S.Z.: Tell me some of that backstory.
J.A.: I came (to Portland) in 1997.1 was a
stop motion animator making really good
money with health benefits, working four
days a week. It was a dream job. Our
producer gathered us all one day and said
Fox decided to cancel the show. I looked
around the room and I saw what had
become my family over the last three years.
It made me angry and frustrated that an
entity outside of my creative family could
just say, “Oh, this is over.” It really pissed
me off. I didn’t know what I was going to do,
but I knew I wanted to stay in Portland and
I thought that maybe this was a time for me
to give music a shot.
S.Z.: Had you considered a music career
before that point?
J.A.: Music had always been my first love,
but I had never taken it seriously as a
profession at all. Growing up, a message I
got from society was, “You can’t make it as
an artist.” You have to find some
commercial aspect to make art.
I hadn’t considered a career in music as a
serious venture because it’s a lot of risk and
there is no road map for it. Any other job I
had was very much career oriented where
you learn a skill and then you trade this
time for money and it’s a very linear
equation. With music, it’s a crap shoot. You
don’t know where your money is coming
from.
I contemplated all of this stuff, and I just
said, screw it. I want to give it a shot. What I
decided to do was to build a scene, an
audience. I wanted to build an event and
then insert a band into that scene. I started
doing these underground parties.
In 2000, there wasn’t this fusion of DJs
and live music and performance art like we
see everywhere now. Every single show I
did, I changed the name of the band and the
set list would be within the theme (of the
party). All the other bands that I put
together were four or six piece rock bands,
so I thought it would be fun to do a
marching band as an idea.
I birthed a band by doing the party first.
MarchFourth was a party, it was a band
named for that day (Fat Tuesday, Mardi
Gras) and there was a built in audience. I
haven’t heard of anybody who used that
model. Our success came because of our
numbers and the whole sheer mass of music
and spectacle that comes together.
S.Z.: Can you provide a quick sketch of your
current line up? When you tour, do you take
the whole flock?
J.A.: We tour with 14 musicians; four
dancers; we have two bus drivers; we have a
merch person and we have an all-purpose
roadie, tech guy. We still at this point don’t
travel with a lighting person or a sound
person, but I’m really hoping that will
change sometime, but we just can’t afford it
right now. But there are about 22 people on
See MARCHFOURTH, page 9