So what do you do? Oh yeah, I wait tables too/ No, I haven’t heard your band,
’cos you guys are pretty new/ But if you dig on vegan food, well come over
to my work/I’ll have them cook you something that you’ll really love/’Cos I
like you/ Yeah I like you/And I’m feeling so bohemian like you...
The Dandy Warhols’ 2001 hit Bohemian Like You — helped to the top of the
charts by that infuriating Vodafone ad — is essentially an ironic love song
to their home town of Portland, Oregon. Set against the stark beauty of the
dormant volcano Mount Hood, straddling the Willamette River, and dotted with
fir trees and rose gardens, the town’s main claim to fame to date has been
that Simpsons characters are named after Portland streets. In the past six
months, however, this concrete grove of bohemian dreaming has proved itself
a 21st-century blend of Manchester, Detroit and Berlin, producing a new wave
of cutting-edge indie bands that have so excited the mighty Johnny Marr, he
went and joined one of them: the jagged indie rockers Modest Mouse.
“It had got to the point where if I heard another band describe themselves as
sounding like a cross between the Smiths and the Cure, I was going to shoot
them and then myself,” Marr explains. “Modest Mouse caught me at a time when
I had an agenda to do a completely different sound: something electric and
skyscraper-huge. Nobody else sounds like that at the moment.” At the end of
March, this union proved fruitful. The album, We Were Dead Before the Ships
Even Sank, entered the US charts at number one. And yet, as he strides
Portland’s streets looking for somewhere to live, Marr is increasingly aware
of just how many citizens want to steal that slot. Fellow Portlanders the
Gossip — a punk/soul three-piece led by the cover star du jour Beth
Ditto — and tortured indie popsters the Shins currently have the British
press watching their every move. Meanwhile, the mad musical experimentalist
husband-and-wife duo Viva Voce release Viva Voce Loves You in June; alt-punk
guitar threesome the Thermals kick off some UK dates in May; intellectual
rockers the Decemberists play New York’s Central Park this summer;
left-field funk-folk ensemble Blitzen Trapper release their third album,
Wild Mountain Nation, in June; and jangly pop outfit the Shaky Hands
recently signed to Holocene Music.
These bands are just a tiny fraction of the Portland music scene. Last week,
for instance, the local entertainment mag Willamette Week listed more than
100 bands playing in a total of 60 venues on an average Thursday night. This
in a town with a population the size of Edinburgh.
Why should this city generate so much music when few people outside the USA
have heard of it? The Gossip, originally from Arkansas, moved there five
years ago: “Partly, we went there because it’s so cheap — you can live in
Portland for, like, $350 [£180] rent a month,” explains the guitarist, Brace
Paine. “But once you’re there, there are so many people your age — it’s a
really young town — doing so many creative things and all going out and
watching each other play, that it became hard to imagine living anywhere
else.”
“The forest is right there, the ocean has a wild and vicious beauty, the
rivers are swift and dangerous, so that’s all pretty inspiring,” says Viva
Voce’s Kevin Robinson. “But it’s also that people here have a low tolerance
for posturing. You can’t sit around all day talking about starting a band
and how great it’s going to be. You just have to get up and do it. You can’t
have half-assed ideas. People expect to be wowed by you.”
Portland has always supplied America’s indie market. Courtney Love, for
instance, hails from its low-rise streets. She left for the coast, however,
while this generation of Portland musicians has a strong loyalty to the
city. Indeed, these days the flow is in the other direction — Pixies founder
Frank Black and Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus have both settled there in recent
years. And the members of this close-knit muso community are always helping
each other out. Viva Voce’s Anita Robinson sings on the Shins’ third album,
Wincing the Night Away, for instance; and when the Decemberists’ equipment
trailer was stolen in 2005, the Thermals, the Shins and the Dandy Warhols
all donated new kit. Indeed, although sometimes accused in other parts of
America of selling out, the Dandy Warhols used the money from the Vodafone
ad to build music and film studios for local bands and artists.
This desire to avoid LA and New York is fuelled by Portland’s horror at the
destruction of Seattle’s vibrant music scene when grunge became big in the
1990s. “A lot of bands just took the money and ran to LA,” says Paine. “Then
the music crashed and boy-bands took over. Now you’ve got a lot of bitter
guys who still can’t believe they missed out on the 1990s payday and are
completely burnt out.”
“All the bands know there’s a potential threat to this artistic utopia,” adds
Robinson. “Nobody’s going to get above themselves. We’re too smart for that.”
Although you’ll hear plenty of Portland bands on indie movie soundtracks such
as Garden State and Elizabethtown, the scene has an uneasy relationship with
the traditions of pop exploitation. The Thermals refused to licence their
song It’s Trivia for a Hummer commercial — “How could we go on after
soundtracking Hummer? It’s just so evil,” explains the singer, Hutch Harris
— and the Gossip pulled out of their support slot on the Scissor Sisters
tour because Ditto didn’t like performing for an audience that “didn’t know
their Ramones”. The desire for independence is partly fuelled by Portland’s
politics, which offer a vision of an America that turned left instead of
right in the 1980s. There’s a cheap, clean and efficient public-transport
system, and strict urban planning controls to prevent skyscrapers; abortion
is legal, as is assisted suicide for the terminally ill, and the city is
leading the campaign for Oregon to legalise gay marriage. There’s a thriving
local arts scene supported by a healthy counterculture media, including two
radical weeklies, three arts mags and Exotic — which covers the, um, adult
nightlife.
While the global retail chains do exist, Portlanders have a deep-seated love
for local businesses. Mom-and-pop grocery stores, bookshops, coffee shops
and diners vastly outnumber the branded behemoths, even though Nike’s worldwide
headquarters is on the edge of town. Most Portlanders, however, are proudest
of one thing: the city has more breweries than anywhere else in the world:
33 at the last count. That makes for a bewildering variety of local brews —
which just may have something to do with the town’s musical reputation. Put
a bunch of twentysomethings in a beautiful city with low rents and strong,
cheap beer: if that’s not a recipe for bohemia, I don’t know what is.
Viva Voce Loves You is released on June 18 on Full Time Hobby; We Were Dead
Before the Ship Even Sank by Modest Mouse is out now on Epic
