12
SEPTEMBER 15�22, 2021
SOUND CHECK
WHAT’S PLAYING AROUND
THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
Jenny Don’t and the Spurs
By Lisa Britton
Go! Magazine
B
AKER CITY — Jenny heard
“Don’t!” so often that she de-
cided it actually sounded more
like her full name.
“Eventually it came to sound
like a surname of its own,” she
said.
She even founded a band by
the name DON’T and they toured
for nearly a decade. Now she’s in
a four-piece country and western
band named Jenny Don’t and the
Spurs, actively playing and tour-
ing since 2012.
This month they’re stopping
in Baker City to play Friday, Sept.
24, at Churchill School, 3451
Broadway St. (enter through the
16th Street parking lot). Doors
open at 6 p.m. and the music
starts at 6:45 p.m. Advance
tickets are $8 and available at
www.churchillbaker.com. Tickets
at the door are $10. For concert
details, visit the website.
Jenny Don’t and the Spurs
has released three full-length
LPs and a handful of singles and
EPs. A new single is slated for
release on Oct. 29.
This summer, the band toured
with Charley Crockett around the
western half of the United States.
“We try to get out on the road
as often as possible and, in addi-
tion to playing pretty extensively
around the Pacifi c Northwest,
we’ve done a lot of touring
around the rest of the country as
well as several European tours,”
Jenny said. “We’ve got a lot of
fun stuff on the horizon, includ-
ing West Coast shows later in
the spring, an Alaskan tour in the
summer, and a tour of southern
Europe and the Balkans coming
up in the fall.”
Everyone in the band has a
long history of playing music.
“We all come from pretty
diff erent musical backgrounds,
which we feel helps inform the
music we create,” Jenny said.
She began singing at a young
age and as a teenager played
in bands in her hometown of
Bellingham, Washington. She
moved to Portland in 2008 and
continued playing in bands until
forming the Spurs with Kelly Hal-
liburton.
Halliburton (bass) played in
punk and hardcore bands as a
teenager in the 1980s. He played
in lots of bands over the years
including Resist and Defi ance
before he eventually joined
forces with Fred and Toody
Cole in the early 2000s to form
Pierced Arrows.
Sam Henry (drums) started
playing in bands when he was a
kid in the 1970s. He was a found-
ing member of the punk band
Wipers, as well as playing with
Fred and Toody Cole (of Portland
garage punk band Dead Moon)
in The Rats in the early ‘80s, and
Napalm Beach in the ‘80s and
early ‘90s.
Christopher March (guitar)
started young as well, and played
on the country and bluegrass
circuit around his native Auburn/
Grass Valley region of California,
before relocating to the Pacifi c
Northwest in the early 2000s.
Jenny Don’t and the Spurs
has toured around the Pacifi c
Northwest, plus 22 states and a
11am-8pm Tuesday-Saturday
Jenny Don’t/Contributed photo
dozen countries.
“We have an in-band joke
that goes something along the
lines of ‘We’ll play anywhere
where we can plug in our ampli-
fi ers!’” Jenny said. “This will
actually change when we fi nish
working out the bugs in our all-
acoustic set, which we’re trying
to hone down in order to play
places where we don’t have to
plug anything in — then we’ll lit-
erally be able to play anywhere.
It’s a big world and there are still
a lot of countries and regions
we plan on exploring!”
Jenny describes the band’s
music style as Western Garage
Country.
“A kind of hybrid that com-
bines elements from our musi-
cal backgrounds with the kind
of raw, heartfelt, stripped-down
country music we love,” she
said. “We’re not interested in
the pretensions that come with
a lot of what’s considered coun-
try music these days — we try
to boil it down to the essentials
of what we’d like to hear in a
country band and combine that
with a high-energy live show.”
She said their sound is a
blend of infl uences from “the
old Bakersfi eld country greats
to the backwoods hillbilly rock
of the Deep South, from the
classic history of Northwest
country and rockabilly to the
raw, energetic garage rock, surf
bands, and a touch of Spaghetti-
Western guitar twang.”