FIRST PERSON Why Rocking in Portland Doesn't Suck Portland is a good place to make music--even if you just stay in your bedroom. BY SARAH DOUGHER 243-2122

Recordings by Sarah Dougher: The Lookers In Clover Candyass Records Cadallaca Introducing... K Records I grew up in Eugene and moved to Portland in 1985 to go to college. Except for a three-year stint at grad school in Austin, Texas, I have lived in Portland ever since. I understand that this place is not good for everything (making it as a yodeling cowboy, for example), but I am quick to defend it as an excellent spot to play rock, which I have been doing for a while. Portland is humble, and it has resisted, despite its many talented musicians, becoming anyone's big thing. But for a lot of reasons it has stayed my big thing for a long time. 1983 I don't remember how my best friend and I got to Portland from the hippie-saturated confines of Eugene, where we languished in high school. I don't know who it was we saw that night (the Tone Dogs?), but I do remember sneaking into a small but vigorous rock club called the Blue Gallery (now closed) and pushing our way up to the front. The next day we walked around downtown Portland cradling our newly purchased I-D magazines, doing poppers and talking about when we were going to move to the U.K. Portland would have to suffice. 1993 I spent three years living in Texas, where I built a vivid fantasy of the rock scene in Portland. Unrelenting questions from friends in Austin, where I was going to school, made me realize that there was something going on in Portland and the Pacific Northwest in general: a rock scene I had taken totally for granted. In Portland there were people with no business experience starting labels, people with no musical experience starting bands, people whose dominant mode of performance was "Hey, let's put on a show!" By comparison there was very little do-it-yourself culture in Austin, although the city's musical life was diverse and pervasive. I knew I had to move back to Portland even if it meant leaving both a career in academia and my first band. I could finish my dissertation in a basement in Portland. 1999 One of my bands, the Lookers, broke up, but only after some great adventures and a record. Another of my bands, the Crabs, just made a record and toured in Japan. My third band, Cadallaca, made a record that renown music critic Greil Marcus reviewed lukewarmly. I am also working on a solo record, which will come out in the summer. These projects are the reasons I came back to Portland, and when I consider what makes this city a vital place for music, I find my answers in the three places--bedroom, basement and club. Bedroom: It could be argued that the kindly audience of four walls will react similarly each time you sing a song, no matter what city you live in. This is a comfortable delusion. In many other places, particularly on the West Coast, the effort it takes to surround yourself in a solitary chamber makes you so tired that by the time you get home to your skinny, drafty room, you're all worn out. Either that or the neighbors yell and pound on the floor to get you to stop. In the time I've lived in Portland, I have watched the rents rise. Portland is not the $400 = big house wonderland it once was, but it is still cheaper to live here than it is to live in San Francisco, Seattle or Los Angeles. If you work at a job with an hourly wage, like the vast majority of musicians I know, the economy of the place where you live is an important factor in the way you fit music into your life. I'm not saying that the deadening retail nightmare or revolting coffee job takes a lighter toll in Portland than in other places, it's just that when you're forking over less money for your four walls, you have more time for other things. Basement: If you are lucky, you have a house with enough space between you and the neighbors. You can board up the little windows and cover them with egg crates. Extension cords lead from upstairs through a hole drilled in the floor, and everything radiates from the same power strip. Amps, PA, mics, cords, handmade posters and song lists hang about. The first time many people hear their own voices amplified, it's in a basement or a church. There's one room you built with stolen wood and sheet rock, and maybe there is a little studio rigged with your one good microphone and your four-track machine. This scene isn't really romantic, but together with the trailer park, it has been used by hype-makers to tell the Horatio Alger stories of Northwest rock many times over. The real basement practice space is being constructed and torn down all the time and will always exist despite its eerie '90s media sheen. In Portland it comes easy: We are luckier than our friends in Texas, who live on a flat, wide sheet of granite too hard to bore a basement into. We are luckier than our friends in New York City, whose basements belong to the stores underneath and are used to keep overstock and old boxes. Club: Often, the musical climate of a city is not determined by the way music is produced there but by the way it is consumed. This is why the club plays an important, yet not all-encompassing, role. Every town must have a functional musical infrastructure in order for any person's listening experience to extend beyond happening to hear a band practicing next door. Portland is lucky to have a lively tradition of all-ages entertainment and independent clubs and promoters working at the same time as--and with more vigor than--the bureaucrats who bring us Korn and Celine Dion. Labels like Cavity Search continue to support local acts, and studios like Jackpot! nurture the careers of engineers and producers and provide the essential ingredient to fledgling bands--a comfortable, nice-sounding, cheap place to record. Bands like Quasi, No. 2, Jr. High and Sleater-Kinney will show us a good time in 1999. Portland has had, and will continue to have, an infrastructure that's not based on the blaze of a hit single, the next whoever or the parroting of cynical rock critics and carpetbagger-A&R guys from L.A. It is based on the sustained respect, work and cooperation of its members. An infrastructure will be sustained as long as these remain the ethical principles of its players. Back door: I'll get out this way, lest I be accused of lauding the obvious, of being naive to the economic realities of the music industry, of loving the grimy and cold places where many, by necessity, are right now playing music. I hope I'll finally get to go to the U.K. for my first visit this year, although the issue is less pressing than it was when I was a teen rebel. It is easy to hold illusions about what a place can give you, but your life there can only have meaning if you create it. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Willamette Week | originally published January 6, 1998 .