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Karaoke From Hell might seem like a simple and silly enough concept: a rambunctious live band backs singers of all experience and confidence levels every Monday night at the Old Town rock club Dante’s. It’s easy to question whether it would translate to a documentary film. As fun as it is watching people sing, how does it fill more than 15 minutes, let alone an hour?
Easily. Chip Marby and Ben Mercer, director of the eponymous documentary, weave together numerous stories in an hour, and could have kept going on their deep dive of Old Portland culture and lore. Their film also indirectly connects the band to the global tradition of drinking songs.
Karaoke From Hell, which depicts the band around its 20th anniversary in 2012, showed earlier this year at the Portland Film Festival and will show again next week at the Star Theater on Wednesday, Dec. 17. Karaoke From Hell includes celebrations of how the band led by co-founders Tres Shannon and Dawn Panttaja, but it also includes an uncanny blueprint for how the band, and the city, navigate changing times while staying true to themselves.
The movie captures Shannon at a moment before his best-known business, Voodoo Doughnut, boomed into a national chain. As one of Karaoke From Hell’s lead backing singers (you’re the lead singer, remember?), Shannon helps hype nervous newbies and bring out the beast in party animals. Archival footage takes viewers back to Karaoke From Hell’s formative years in the downtown Portland of the early ‘90s, including a show featuring a young John “Elvis” Schroeder. Voodoo as well as Shannon’s other famous business, X-Ray Cafe, appear as side characters. An early cable news story about the downtown doughnut shop—as well as a genuinely badass commercial with a singing plus-size heavy metal babe, and Shannon’s shockingly candid admission that a chandelier was at risk of falling on customers by the time Voodoo Doughnuts expanded from its original location in 2011—seem hard now to connect to a bakery with locations in major theme parks.
After X-Ray Cafe closed in 1994, Karaoke From Hell performed at venues including Berbati’s Pan. Before a permanent lineup was established, Karaoke From Hell was as much karaoke for musicians as it was for singers (karaoke was still new to Portland in the 1990s, believe it or not). Shortly after Frank Fallice opened Dante’s in 2000, he invited Karaoke From Hell to play their Monday night slot, which it’s held ever since. A particularly touching set of scenes include footage of Richard “Lefty” Gismondi, a regular patron at Dante’s and Karaoke From Hell who passed away in 2014 (his black velvet portrait hangs in Dante’s to this day).
Seemingly shot in the early 2010s, Karaoke From Hell also captures an important in-between moment in Portland’s identity, evidenced between archival footage and footage of the then-new apartment building The Yard, which detractors called “The Borg Cube” at the time (side note: Marby and Mercer’s footage of Dante’s and Voodoo Doughnuts artfully—and almost comedically—crop The Paris Theater’s dingy era out of frame). Eerily empty night streets seem to prophesy Portland’s post-pandemic predicament. Panttaja laments in the documentary how much more serious Portland had become by that point compared to The Dream of the ‘90s.
“There was breathing space to just goof off,” she says.
Zia McCabe of The Dandy Warhols appears in Karaoke From Hell, singing its praises on the street outside Dante’s. Ben Ellis, former band member and Shannon’s co-founder of X-Ray Cafe, also makes an appearance. He admits that he wouldn’t open something like X-Ray Cafe today, but only because he doesn’t think there’s as much of a need for something like it anymore.
“It was all kids,” he says in the documentary. “Kids grow up and do things.”
Karaoke From Hell catches Portland and the band growing up, with footage of Panttaja as a young musician in grainy footage progress to a woman in clear digital resolution venturing proudly to kooky auntie territory during an art show at The Old Church featuring her ceramic dolls. Shannon at one point refers to himself as a pillar of the community before pulling over on the way to a Karaoke From Hell gig in Manzanita to marvel and moo at cows.
“It’s not about being cool,” Panttaja says in the film. “It’s about being free.”
SEE IT: Karaoke From Hell at Star Theater, 13 NW 6th Ave., 866-777-8932, startheaterportland.com. 7 pm Wednesday, Dec. 17. $8.26. 21+.
