Cornerstone

We thought we were kings. After a year and a half of playing consistent gigs throughout the state, we decided to take the plunge and move to Portland, the nearest metro area that we thought had a great musical potential. We played our last few shows to warm responses by those that had followed us over the years, and said goodbye to our town and our friends.

            When we arrived in Portland in November of 2005, it was in the middle of a torrential rain that lasted for 33 days. We moved into a drafty eye sore of a house, and lived in absolute poverty and misery for some time. The band’s prospects mirrored this lifestyle. We’d come to this city in search of the next rung on the ladder we’d so studiously been climbing in Montana, expecting a sort of ease that was born out of naiveté. We quickly found ourselves playing house parties, coffee shop patios, and a handful of less-than respectable other places in hopes of getting on a real stage again.

            The idea was, if we played well and put our heart into it, someone was bound to notice the talent we had; more importantly�"the hunger we had. But time and time we overlooked. We started scanning the Internet for venues in search of bands, and found a local company promising guaranteed gigs for bands with little to no following (you can’t get a show at a good venue without proving you can bring in a thirsty crowd of customers). Big Time Entertainment, they were called. How could we go wrong with a backer like that?

            Big Time, we found out, was nothing but a scam. They would rent out a venue in downtown Portland�"ones that actually had a proper stage and audio set-up for a good show�"and then divvy out a set amount of tickets to each of the bands. The bands would then go out and sell these tickets, and on the eve of the show bring the money to the Big Time employee present at the venue. We discovered quickly that selling twenty tickets to a show for bands without fans is nearly impossible, not to mention the fact that we knew no one in Portland, let alone what areas might be appreciative of cheap live music. Because of our low ticket sales we were usually booked last and didn’t take the stage until around midnight, when only five or six tired people were left to watch us play.

            After a year and a half of such sporadic and esteem-pummeling gigs, we holed up in our rehearsal studio and ignored the happenings of the “scene” in town. We stayed there for two years�"writing, recording, rehearsing and remembering why we wanted to make music in the first place. After we finished an album of material recorded during all this, we had to go out and promote it somehow. Which meant returning to the dreaded system of trying to get someone to notice who the hell we were. We found our haven in the most unlikely of places.

           

            I’d never really given a second look to the ugly purple building in the middle of my neighborhood. In our little shopping district where there was a grocery store, video rentals, and other mini-mall shops, there was this tumor of a building. At two stories, its lower half was painted a uniform and hideous purple, while the top half was what can only be described as the strangest mural I’ve ever encountered. It seemed at first glance to be a western scene: there were cowboys and lassos and cacti. But on closer inspection, you’d notice the cowboy wasn’t riding a horse, but instead a bucking Ton-Ton from the Star Wars films. Pepe Le Pew was in the corner of the background prairie, and other surreal characters were added here and there. In short, I never thought of it was a venue.

            Scotty’s, we later found out it was called, was just as strange on the inside. Our first time there was an open mike night we’d been invited to by some friends. Hearing there was a main set of equipment used by all the musicians playing that night�"we just needed to bring our guitars, nothing more�"was enough to get us to come, as lugging equipment to a show is usually decided only if the reward of playing there is worth it.

            The interior was classic dive bar. Cramped tables and chairs, TV’s showing muted sports programs, a substituted blue paint scheme for the outside purple, neon beer company signs, Christmas lights hung willy-nilly, shrunken drunks peppered throughout the bar, and a floor that was cracked concrete with endless questionable substances spilled on it, creating a continuous riiiiip as each footstep pulled away from its adhesion.

            We were skeptical, to say the least.

            But after playing a short set of songs on unfamiliar gear, we were surprised with an instant welcoming applause from the audience. The musicians that ran the open mike nights asked us if we’d like to play a show with them a few weeks down the road, and we agreed.

            We started playing there regularly, sometimes twice a month, sometimes more, but with each performance we became more comfortable there. There was no stage to speak of, just a cornered area to cram us between support beams that held up the ceiling, and yet there was something different about the energy in the place. Something that made us feel like we’d found a foothold.

            Soon we were playing our own shows, three set monster performances that lasted from nine until midnight, and each time our crowd grew a little until we began to draw our own dedicated following. The tacky décor and bad lighting became staples of things we looked forward to, because they were peripheral pieces of a whole that allowed us to carry out our dreams of performing for people. Drunks that had seemed like annoying badgers before were now singing our praises and clapping our backs.

            We got to know the bartending staff, the owners, the regulars, and all the sorts of mythical ideology that surrounds a neighborhood bar. We were told stories of a ghost that sometimes appeared after hours, a fire that had nearly burned the building down a few years prior, rumors about a vagrant that sporadically inhabited the vacant upper floor of the building. And through our experiences there, Scotty’s began to transform into a place we loved to be at, and longed to play at.

            They treated us like kings, and then perhaps better, like friends. We were welcome to free drinks not only on our gigging nights, but also just when stopping by the bar on a weeknight. We became part of a group of bands and characters that made the bar something bigger than itself�"a place where people gathered to enjoy themselves. All of us were poor, most were unemployed and struggling to find work, but all was forgotten in the dim glow of bad lighting and loud music. Here we all forgot our day-selves, the ones that couldn’t make ends meet, and instead had the opportunity�"even if only for a few hours�"to don the masks of those musical heroes we all so desperately wanted to be.

            What we’d left Montana for, to get away from trashy bars that would never take us anywhere greater, was exactly what we’d found in Scotty’s. But there, after so many dismal starts at “real” venues, we found that spark that we’d been trying to find. And if I remember hard enough, I can still feel the surging rush of playing to a giant crowd of ten or fifteen, under the stadium spotlights screwed into the low ceiling, and feel like I am home.  

Reviews

[DavidRyanM]

Dig this, man. Mainly because I've been there for the whole thing, but I feel any artist, struggling to make ends meet, to be noticed for their artistic merit and drive, can relate to this as well. We're all older now, and going different directions with our lives, art, hopes, but there will always be the nights we would gather at Scottys, drink until it was unfashionable to still be doing so, and then starting all over a week later.