Local News & Reviews

[September 20th, 2006]

^Crazy Train

Portland's premier Sabbath cover band makes one last stop before chugging into the sunset.

[TRIBUTE ROCK] I interviewed Crazy Train six months ago for WW's planned "tribute band issue," an idea that has yet to materialize. I expected ridiculous caricatures of rock stars; burnt-out metalheads reaching for an impossible, vicarious dream. The three very stoked members of the Ozzy/Black Sabbath tribute group (the entire band minus drummer Jeff "Crusher" Johnson) that sat down with me at Sabala's Mount Tabor couldn't have been further from that stereotype. Crazy Train turned out to be four normal guys from the Sabbath generation who all happen to love Ozzy. "We said we'd do it as long as it was fun," frontman (and Ozzy lookalike) Tim Tugg told me at the time. "It's still fun."

Apparently sometime in the past six months things became not fun. After close to a four-year run, Crazy Train celebrates its final show Friday at Outlaws Bar and Grill, sending Tim Tugg's Ozzy routine back to the drunken nights and Halloween parties from which it came. I guess that makes it time to divulge the frontman's secret Ozzy origin.

In the early '70s, Tugg took his girlfriend to see Black Sabbath. When Ozzy threw one of his trademark cross necklaces into the crowd, it was Tugg's girlfriend who caught it. "She gave it to me the next day at school, bless her heart. I've had it for 30-some years now." Perhaps, as Crazy Train's conductor suggests, the necklace has magical properties because with a little help from a long black wig and the bright stage lights, Tugg does a pretty convincing job of transforming into Ozzy Osbourne.

Asked what was so appealing about playing another band's songs rather than originals, Crazy Train bassist Rick Lapinski was quick to respond. "In the tribute world," he said, "we're able to play something that comes from our souls, whether we wrote it or not." The stress level is low, he says, but the reward level is high. Besides, "It's just more fun."

Thanks guys, it was a lot of fun to watch, too.

—CASEY JARMAN.

Crazy Train plays Friday, Sept. 22 at Outlaws Bar & Grill. 10 pm. $6. 21+.

^Smoke, Bleed (Super Happy Wax Recordings)

It took this Portland emcee four years to complete his debut, and it shows.

[POST-HIP-HOP] Whenever somebody says their album was four years in the making, one wonders how much of that time was really spent contemplating and formulating an album and how much of it was spent getting high and watching Family Guy. Bleed, the debut album from Smoke of Oldominion, however, actually sounds like it took four years to make.

Over the course of Bleed's 15 tracks, Smoke presents those four years of time-lapse emotional and stylistic growth. It's a portrait of the artist as a young nervous breakdown, wherein the emcee's own emotional and spiritual sanity fight for air under the massive structural collapse of hip-hop and the U.S. government. Think of a post-Sept. 11 hip-hop's OK Computer.

The album starts with the scattered pops of a beaten old record and disjointed gangsta-rap squeals that soon fade into the punchy war-drums of "Compress," where the narrator opens with the line, "Look at myself like 'who's that?'" before the orders come down from the top in a megaphone blare: "March/ Kill/ Build/ Destroy/ March/ Build/ Kill/ Destroy."

It becomes clear by the next track, "Sinners and Saints," that our narrator, if not Smoke himself, believes these are the end days. He makes a pretty convincing, rapid-fire argument to that effect, declaring that "the last page of history" has something to do with "hobblin' hope bearin' folk sharin' needle evil people tearin' soul shaking pill-popping goblin sniffing coke." When Smoke goes on these verbal rampages, it's almost impossible to follow him completely, but here he keeps the light on long enough to lay blame on both a "crooked son president" and himself, feebly admitting, "Killa, I'm tryin' to build the Tower of Babel out of 40 bottles and beer cans."

The narrator turns not only to religion for solace, but to bling and broken-from-the-start relationships as well. By the end of the album, he's taking drugs that keep him awake for days on end ("Lullaby"). In true Thom Yorke form, Smoke spits a grip of seemingly incongruous phrases before calming down by taking another hit, when the voice of a drug-induced siren/angel sings him into death. After a short silence, seven minutes of ambient noises and sporadic techno-beats shoot like stars over faded AM radio signals, an eerily upbeat postscript to one of the most compelling stories a Northwest emcee has ever told.

—CASEY JARMAN.

Smoke's Bleed hits stores Tuesday, Sept. 26. Smoke plays with JFK, MyG, Sandpeople and JD Void, Friday, Sept. 22 at Ash Street. 10 p.m. $5. 21+.

^NWEAMO Sunday, Sept. 24

Electronic-music guru Joseph Waters makes the world safe for disruption.

[EXPERIMENTAL] When he was an electronic music instructor at Lewis & Clark College, Joseph Waters would tell his students a story about playing a country-club show with his band as a teenager, totally fucked up on acid. His big keyboard solo came up, and—born of a temporarily fried mental circuit board—the solo consisted of one long, sustained note. We can imagine the "crowd" went wild in the same way my "indie" roommates go wild when I unleash the noise brutality of early Swans or Smegma from my room.

Whatever drug-bent world Waters' single note came from, the result was a rupture in aesthetic acceptability. This is experimentalism. Waters defines it: "'Experimental' is a very personal thing—when we take a cautious step outside of our comfort zone we are entering the unknown and taking risks—but the real danger is that our little worldview will not be skewered and that we will poke our heads deeper into the sand."

This Saturday, Waters—now a professor of experimental music at Portland State—is committed to grabbing us by our hair and shoving us straight into that rupture, by way of the Northwest Electro-Acoustic Music Organization festival.

Experimental music happens every night in this city, at spots such as Food Hole, the recently opened Weapons of Mass Compassion and Hotel. But few are billed as shows where "surprising congruencies and confluences and dramatic, breathtaking differences" will appear in the mutable collisions between six performances from all over the aural and geographical map. It will also be a rare chance to see White Rainbow's Adam Forkner play on the same bill as Waters, his former professor and frontman for the San Diego foursome SWARMIUS, a combo of chamber strings, laptopping and dance performance. The others range from works by Canadian "polygravitational" composer Maxime Rioux performed by a crew of "automates" (read: robots), to MASONIC, a San Francisco-based club DJ.

The latter may be the best example of true experimentation. Someone like MASONIC, who focuses his spinning on trip-hop and funk, could get any meathead nodding. But that music becomes something else entirely in this context. It highlights the paradox of making "experimental" music. If the norm becomes a series of radical attempts to be different from the accepted, then being different loses its meaning. Suddenly hooks, dance rhythms and bubblegum lyricism are the experiments. Experimental music is not a style, it is a relationship.

—MICHAEL BYRNE.

Doug Fir. 9 pm. $10. 21+.

^Sexy Pants Sept. 15 at McFadden's

Ironic Portland hipsters clash with the non-ironic polo and miniskirt crowd. Nothing happens.

[DISCO VS. THE SHOW] "It's going to be a bloodbath," said Sexy Pants' Matt "New Member" Hubele, when, following his performance at the Fez during MusicfestNW, he told me about an upcoming gig at McFadden's, a booty-dancing establishment.

It seemed he would be absolutely right: I had just witnessed the men of SP (four singers and a DJ) strip to tiny running shorts, select a "lucky" volunteer from the crowd and strut their hairy legs over her as she lay on the stage. And on Friday night, PS invaded polo shirt and miniskirt territory.

The show was preceded by an invite-only third anniversary party for the bar. Mixed in with the anniversary crowd were about a dozen fans of the band who clapped and sang along as impressively tight choreographed robot motions and ass-facing-the-crowd pelvic thrusts (with serious range and lower-back flexibility!) kicked off the set. But behind those two rows was a talkative crowd, facing the show but generally ignoring it. Normally it's difficult to drown out a dance act with bar chatter, but SP simply wasn't loud enough, and after the show the band and the McFadden's sound person each blamed the other.

Mostly due to the poor sound, SP played a short set of about 20 minutes, and Hubele told me afterward: "They were about to pull us off when we stopped. I guess people kept asking them to put the booty music back on." The objection was to the lack of dancing, not SP. The crowd had no cause to be angry: There were no extended forays into the audience and none of the singers ascended the small wall surrounding the sound booth to show us his ass curve.

I suppose it's hard to harass an audience when your microphone isn't loud enough to talk shit to them properly, but I wanted to see Sexy Pants win over the crowd with their homoerotic antics or be killed trying. When the chances of the former were ruined by a weak PA, would some blood have been too much to ask?

—JASON SIMMS.

^The Kingdom, K1 (Arena Rock)

The Kingdom finally releases its debut opus, which is actually just a collection of great, simple pop songs.

[POP] Chuck Westmoreland, the spirited leader of local pop outfit the Kingdom, is as promising as young pop songwriters come. Clocking in at one and a half or two minutes, his songs generally ride the fence between jangly pop anthem and arty outré rock with high dramatics, both vocal and instrumental, packed into each bite-sized track.

Eleven of those songs appear on the band's debut LP, K1, all loosely revolving around a narrative of a man who climbs the hierarchy of transportation in some sort of kingdom, progressing from a motorcycle rider to a snowmobile racer to an airplane pilot. The concept, though, isn't very important, in part because Westmoreland's vocals—ridiculously distorted, unpredictable and willingly sacrificing clarity for dizzying acrobatics—render many of the lyrics indiscernible, and also because the songs are, on their own, tremendous.

The greatest example of the beauty that Westmoreland and his band can pack into a two-minute song comes on "Polaris," the album's stripped-down ballad. Accompanied only by piano and a few vocal effects, Westmoreland tells a story about snowmobiling. The result is chilling, and as the singer recites the line, "Your little snow-/ -mobile jack-/ -et fits like a dre-he-ee-eem," his reference point shifts from Guided by Voices' Bob Pollard to Elton John, which is not a bad thing.

The rest of the album is a full-fledged production, some of the songs filled out with string and—as is the case with the wonderful, anthemic "Motorcycling" and the otherwise-gritty workout "Die All Over Me"—horns. There is nothing wrong with the added instrumentation, except that it isn't necessary. These songs carry an inherent drama and emotion that no string section could ever really improve.

—MARK BAUMGARTEN.

The Kingdom plays with Castanets and Adam Gnade & the Confederate Yankees, Thursday, Sept. 21 at Doug Fir. 9 pm. $8. 21+.