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Street Roots • March 24-30, 2017
New s
exceedingly well-funded - at least by indie-
rock standards - in a beautifully renovated
Pearl District theater. An Old Portland show
for New Portland. Oregon is the lifeblood of
Blitzen Trapper’s music and its vibe, right
down to the dueling flags - blue-and-gold
beaver and Cascadia - that M enteer and
Marquis drape over their keyboards on tour.
But success and touring literally takes you
farther away from who you were, and
literally farther away from home.
B LITZEN TR A PPER , from page 9
includes several of the band’s old favorites
where they seemed thematically or
dramatically apt (along with the
aforementioned snippet of “Black River
Killer,” “Astronaut” is particularly
prominent). And in the four months
between the JAW Festival and a new round
of rehearsals, Earley couldn’t stop himself
from writing songs in general.
“It’s my usual process,” he said. “Just
keep making stuff, and it will all work out in
the end.”
Just as the members of Blitzen Trapper
bring Earley’s songwriting and home
recordings to life in a different way in the
studio and live, “Wild and Reckless” takes
that process further, adding directors, a set
and costume designer and modest special
effects.
“You’re only focused on one thing making
a record,” Blitzen Trapper guitarist Erik
Menteer said. “It’s just the sonics of it.
Whereas in the theater world, we have to
make sure everything visually is working out
and that everybody’s acting intention is
correct.”
Besides Earley, three other members of
the band have speaking roles. Menteer plays
Joey, another “dust” user connected to
Carbonell’s character, The Girl. Koch and
multi-instrumentalist Marty Marquis are,
respectively, The Scientist and The
Professor, who both serve as something of
Greek chorus, filling in bits of the story.
Michael Van Pelt sticks to his bass.
A big part of what Carbonell and Norby
brought to the process was not just acting,
but being able to fit in with the band as
musicians. Carbonell plays quite a bit of
keyboard in the show, and Norby learned
how to play the congas.
“It’s been pretty intimidating for me
coming into this gig, truthfully,” said Norby,
who was also in “Astoria” and “Oregon
Trail.” “Blitzen Trapper is not only an
amazing band, but a fully rounded group of
individuals, both musically and artistically.”
Having all the actors play an instrument
adds to the sense that you are always
watching a band as much as “characters.”
“We kind of get the best of both worlds,”
said Carbonell, a Tualatin native who’s spent
most of her acting career in New York. “We
get to pretend we are in this awesome band
and fulfill a theater dream at the same
time.”
The overall effect is somewhere between
British director John Doyle’s Stephen
Sondheim musicals, in which all the actors
also play instruments, and the The Who’s
“Tommy,” though Earley says his own
inspirations were even simpler. As a
songwriter, his touchstones are Bob Dylan,
Neil Young and Townes Van Zandt, but for
the pomp and bombast of the theater, he
looked to ’70s and ’80s favorites like Judas
Priest, Queen and even Bruce Springsteen.
T
P H O T O BY KATE S Z R O M
Bonnie Henderson-Winnie applies lightning scar makeup to Erik Menteer (The Kid).
“What we’re doing is a sort of mini-arena
show, with the lights and the projections
and the movement,” Earley said. Most of
the band is also using Tom Cruise-in-
“Mission Impossible’’-style wireless
microphones, which is both delightful and
takes getting used too (“my belches are
amplified,” Earley joked during one early
rehearsal).
Just having sets and a lighting designer at
all makes the whole experience kind of a
rock ’n’ roll fantasy.
“Usually we just go to clubs and there’s
an uiThouse designer and they just wing it,-
Koch said.
arley’s character kicks off “Wild and
Reckless” with a story that is basically
his own.
“I’m telling totally true things,” Earley
said. “The whole show is this kind of active,
animated memory.”
During last fall’s “Songbook” tour, one of
the songs Blitzen Trapper covered was
Elliot Smith’s “Alameda,” and Earley would
talk about the fact that Smith’s music was
one of the things that inspired him to head
up Interstate 5 and try playing music in
Portland himself. “Wild and Reckless”
harkens back to those years, as well as
Blitzen Trapper’s breakthrough period - a
spot on Willamette Week’s 2005 “Best New
Bands” list, the release of the 2007
Pitchfork favorite “Wild Mountain Nation,”
and the subsequent record deal with Sub
Pop.
That peak creative time for Earley was
also a time when he was basically living on
the street, albeit of his own accord.
“Things were so different back then,” he
said. “I made this conscious choice, like, all
right, I’m not going to live anywhere. I’m
just gonna kind of float.”
E
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o the director, Earley’s lack of theatrical
experience - never even seen a play -
was a huge plus, because he had no habits,
expectations or boundaries.
“I think the coolest aspect of it is the fact
that he has never been to the theater,”
Riordan said. “So the way he approached it
was just, whatever he saw in his brain.”
She also found him egoless - someone
who knew what he wanted and wouldn’t
budge if something was important to him,
but was still open to anything.
Blitzen Trapper has never even worked
with a producer in the studio.
“It’s a whole different buy-in, (to have)
these outside folks that are working with
the band for the first time,” Marquis said.
But for PCS, it was like having a ready
made ensemble, so they just had to
accommodate and nurture the band’s
existing dynamic until they were a part of it.
One thing Riordan noticed right away was
how few words the band members needed
to communicate with one another. Then one
of the band members told her he couldn’t
did. ieve. how Lliey. were having to talk to one
another compared to in the studio.
Mostly, though, this “concert event” will
still feel like a rock show. The “reapers” that
dominate the set - rusted and old light
fixtures, tangled in thick, black wires -
blend seamlessly with the amps, strobe
lights and projection screens. And
rehearsals weren’t that different from sound
checks, at least during the inevitable
downtime, when different members of the
band would reflexively switch into musical
self-amusement.
During one tech rehearsal, six days
before the first preview performance
started, Marquis killed time vamping the
opening of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon.”
Van Pelt thwacked out a few familiar bass
line bars of songs by Rush and Heart, then
committed fully to Dee-Lite’s “Groove Is in
the Heart.” And the bass line to that song
sounds similar to the classic opening bass
line of the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of
This Place,” so much so that Carbonell
began singing it without even realizing what
it was. By the time she asked, Earley and
Van Pelt had joined in. Blitzen Trapper fans
and theatergoers can always hope there’s an
encore.
The band was rehearsing at what’s known
in Blitzen Trapper lore as the “Telegraph
Building” (originally the Pacific States
Telephone and Telegraph Building) on
Southeast Ankeny, which was somewhere
between a storage space and squat.
“Half of it they were using; the other half,
the roof was caved in,” Earley said. “So you
kind of had to watch where you stepped.”
The building had been the home of Sally
Mack’s School of Dance, where,
coincidentally, Carbonell took classes.
Earley was usually up all night, writing
and recordings and-would
outekte-------
during the day. Then, as now, the
Springwater Corridor and the knoll by the
Japanese American Historical Plaza were
favored spots. If it rained, he went back to
the building. “Wild and Reckless” includes
many references to places that were
touchstones for Earley or people he knew
during that time, from the punk rock club
Satyricon, which was almost at its end, to
the Hooper detox center.
During this period from 2005 to 2007,
Earley wrote and recorded both “Wild
Mountain Nation” and 2008’s “Furr,” plus
two albums’ worth of largely unreleased
material. (One of them is coming out as a
limited-edition vinyl release in April, for
Record Store Day.)
Then the band began its life of constant
touring, which allowed Earley to be the same
kind of vagabond, except now it was his job.
Ten years of touring later, Earley can still
remember the shock of coming back to a city
that was changing as quickly as he wrote
songs. “I can remember just being like,
‘What? When did they build this? That place
is closed?”’ he said. “It was kind of stark to
us, because we were on tour all the time.”
And now the band has a career and gets
to do something crazily ambitious and