Street roots., March 24, 2017, Page 8, Image 8

Page 8
News
Street Roots • March 24-30, 2017
Street Roots • March 24-30, 2017
News
Page 9
BUTZEN TRAPPER
ROCK CONCERT MEETS THEATER
P H O T O BY KATE S ZR O M
IF YOU GO
“Wild and Reckless" opens at The
Armory at Portland Center Stage on
Friday. March 24. and runs through April
30. Tickets are $25-355. with discounts
fo' students youth f$30) and. via the
“Arts For AH' program. SNAP Oregon
Trail participants ($51.
P H O T O B Y P A T R IC K W E IS H A M P E L /B L A N K E Y E .T V
Top: Blitzen Trapper
members (from left) Michael
Van Pelt, Marty Marquis,
Eric Earley, Brian Adrian
Koch and Erik Menteer.
BY JASON COHEN
STAFF W R IT E R
ince releasing its eighth record, “All
Across This Land,” in October 2015,
k Blitzen Trapper has played three
Portland shows: one in Pioneer Square and
two at Revolution Hall. This March and
April, they’ll play 28 - all at Portland Center
Stage at The Armory.
The hard-touring, five-piece,
Portland-based
band is used to playing
" I t w ill feel Hice
in lots of gigs, in lots of different
a concert with a
settings. The Pioneer Square
narrative thread/
appearance was a free concert for
LIA M KAAS-LENTZ, Widmer’s “Hefe Day,” in front of a
C O -D IR E C T O R O F crowd that was mostly interested in
" W IL D A N D RECKLESS"
beer and that afternoon’s Timbers
game. The return visit to Revolution
Hall was the final night of the band’s semi-
acoustic “Songbook: A Night of Stories and
Songs” tour, which skewed toward cover
songs (ranging from Townes Van Zandt to
Smashing Pumpkins), and found the band’s
Above: Blitzen Trapper
performs “Wild and
Reckless. ”
J]
normally laconic frontman, Eric Earley,
sharing youthful memories and tales of rock
’n’ roll inspiration. In between, Blitzen
Trapper fans could find the group
everywhere from a Milwaukee coffee roaster
to a Montana ski resort to the upscale City
Winery venues in Chicago, Nashville and
New York. That’s what it takes to be a viable
working band in the age of mobile phones
and music streaming.
“You’re basically a trucker,” Earley said.
“I like to think of it as performative
furniture moving,” added Brian Adrian
Koch, the band’s drummer.
But not for the next five weeks. During
that time, Blitzen Trapper will never have to
leave the Pearl District - and Koch’s drum
kit will slide on and off the stage atop a
riser, almost like magic. Such are the perks
that theater offers over rock ‘n’ roll.
Because if the location of the 28 gigs didn’t
already give it away, the band is up to
something very different, and unlike
anything it - or Portland Center Stage - has
ever done before. It’s a show called “Wild
and Reckless: A New Concert Event With
Blitzen Trapper,” starring the five members
of the band, as well as actors Laura
Carbonell and Leif Norby.
Commissioned by PCS as part of its
“Northwest Stories” series (which has also
included the plays “Oregon Trail” and
“Astoria”) and co-directed by Rose Riordan
and Liam Kaas-Lentz, “Wild and Reckless” is
- well, nobody is 100 percent sure what it is,
really. The first fliers around town billed it
as a “musical event with Blitzen Trapper,”
but even that may have led PCS subscribers
to expect something along the lines of a
twangy “Hamilton,” leading to the “concert”
substitution.
“It’s not a musical,” said Riordan, and
that’s probably a good thing. Rock ’n’ roll
musical theater usually fails to be one or the
other. “Wild and Reckless” doesn’t try solve
this problem, and also sidesteps the eternal
musical riddle of “why are these characters
breaking into song?” It’s a Blitzen Trapper
show in which the band performs a bunch of
new songs. It also has characters and an
impressionistic, loosely structured story.
“The big thing about this play - this event
- is the sense of time that the audience will
experience is a little different,” Kaas-Lentz
said. “In a concert, you start a song, and
then you sit in the song, and then you get to
the end of the song, and you continue with
the concert. Whereas in a musical, the plot
drives into a song, and the song then drives
the plot to the next point. Back to the plot,
drive the plot, start another song; that song
drives the p lo t”
But with “Wild and Reckless,” he said, “It
will feel like a concert with a narrative
thread.”
The show’s title makes it a sound a bit
more rustic than its story really is. Oregon’s
natural beauty is part of its world, but so is
the state’s history of exploiting all that
beauty. It’s also set in the future, albeit, kind
of an alternate-reality version of the future
based on Portland’s past - the late ’90s and
early oughts, formative years for both the
city and the band. Earley’s songs and
storytelling in the show touch on addiction
and what he calls “Old Portland,” offering
something of a chronological bridge between
“Drugstore Cowboy” and “Portlandia,” with
an extra dose of Williams S. Burroughs and
a little bit of Edward Abbey.
Those latter influences suggest
themselves because,'as you might expect of
any self-respecting artistic vision of the
future -» particularly when that vision also
includes elements of prog-rock - the
Portland of “Wild and Reckless” is
dystopian.
The conceit of the show is that, sometime
in the future, lightning has been harnessed
to generate power: the latest chapter in
mankind’s tendency to, as one character
puts it, “tame the Earthly forces one by one,
to our own short-sighted ends.”.But there’s
also an addictive byproduct from the
“reapers” that harvest all the energy. Users
of this “dust” are not only unable to kick
(the “works” looks like a cross between a
camping torch and a crack pipe), but are
also prone to being struck by lightning,
which, if they survive, leaves them with
permanent, root-like burn scars.
As Earley put it, “What are the symptoms
of a society that seeks nothing but power, in
all its forms?” The metaphor’s not subtle,
but when it’s fueled by loud guitars and
Muscle Shoals grooves, it doesn’t have to
be. And underneath this sci-fi frame is a
much simpler and largely autobiographical
story: Small-town boy moves to the city (four
of the five members of Blitzen Trapper are
from Salem). Boy (Earley’s character is
simply called “The Narrator”) meets Girl
(Carbonell’s character is, in fact, “The
Girl”). They fall in love, and she becomes
his muse, but she is also on the “dust.”
Eventually they end up on the road, and
then ...
“I don’t know how much of the story I’m
supposed to (give away),” Earley said.
Fair enough. But, to borrow from
Chekhov’s famous theatrical truism, if you
put a powerfully addictive narcotic in Act 1
of your play...
I
n a practical sense, Blitzen Trapper fans
have Lauren Weedman to thank for the
P H O TO BY KATE S ZR O M
Eric Earley and Laura Carbonell rehearse “Wild and Reckless” by Blitzen Trapper.
P H O T O BY KATE S ZR O M
Costume Designer Alison Heryer.
existence of “Wild and Reckless.” The writer,
actress and PCS favorite (“BUST, The
People’s Republic of Portland”) is also back
in town this month with a new one-woman
musical, “Lauren Weedman Doesn’t Live
Here Anymore.” But because it is a solo
show, and Weedman lives in Los Angeles and
has a school-age child, there was no way she
could perform on the Armory’s big stage
eight times a week. So the theater needed
something to put on in repertory.
Enter Kaas-Lentz, who is also PCS’s
production manager.
“He said, ‘I know a guy,’” said Riordan,
the theater’s associate artistic director.
That guy was Kaas-Lentz’s fellow Portland
State alumnus Koch, who, when he’s not
behind the drums, is a theater person in his
own right. Koch best known to Portland
audiences as the writer, director and star of
a live adaptation of the B-movie - and
“Mystery Science Theater 3000” target -
“Manos: The Hands of Fate,” and has also
been in nearly all the recent Portland-shot
TV, including “Portlandia” (way back in
Season 1), “Grimm” and “The Librarians.”
Kaas-Lentz asked Koch if the band was
sitting on a narrative piece, and Earley sort
of was. He’d already been writing Blitzen
Trapper’s ninth album, with a storyline
about the star-crossed lovers that was based
on his own life. Earley also writes (as-yet-
unpublished) fiction, including a novel he
described as “a huge blown-out work about
heroin addiction, robotic science and Old
Portland.” That and the music for the album
were enough to reverse-engineer a theater
piece, which the band workshopped last
summer at PCS’s JAW Festival (the acronym
stands for “just add water”), kicking off a
long process of collaboration among Earley,
the band, and Riordan and Kaas-Lentz. The
album, also expected to be titled “Wild and
Reckless,” is due out later in the year,
though PCS will be selling a limited-edition
sampler at the performances.
Some of Earley’s songs from the album
went into the show as is. Some got tweaked
with new lyrics, and some were written
expressly for the show. The show also
See BLITZEN TRAPPER, page 10