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On a bright Friday evening last month, the sun shone through gaps in the blackout curtains at what used to be the Dancin’ Bare on North Interstate Avenue. In February, the former strip club began serving a different clientele. Under new ownership, it reopened as the city’s first dedicated all-ages music venue in over a decade. Now, three or four nights a week, lines of eclectically attired young people stretch into its Kenton parking lot, waiting for shows in the shadow of that big Paul Bunyan statue.
Regulars attest that The Off Beat, as the new club is called, is a total transformation, even if remnants of the venue’s past life are there if you know where to look; signs featuring sexy silhouettes remain on the front door and outside the building.
The 400-capacity club is the long-awaited venue of Friends of Noise, a nonprofit that since 2016 has staged DIY all-ages concerts around the city.
“There are a lot of teenagers who need access to a venue like this that’s not going to charge them $1,000 a night,” says FoN executive director Andre Middleton. For years, Middleton ran the organization more or less out of his Honda Element, putting on concerts wherever he could.
On this evening, tickets at the door were $10 for kids, $15 for adults. Around 60 people turned out.
Umbraphile (literally, “eclipse lover”) opened. The jazzy indie-pop quartet formed two years ago in a Grant High School music class, though the group has claim to Portland indie-rock royalty—drummer Lucian Landey’s mother, Jody Bleyle, is a member of the epochal 1990s underground bands Hazel and Team Dresch.
Umbraphile frontwoman Logan Hendrickson, 18, says there’s something special about a space her band can pack with friends.
“It can be really intimidating to play for a room full of adults,” Hendrickson says. “Adults rule the city of Portland, and we’re all still learning. So it’s really cool to have a place where it’s fine if you don’t know what you’re doing and you mess up.”
A number of Portland clubs host all-ages nights—like the High Limit Room, Blackwater and Turn! Turn! Turn!—and others like Holocene and the Hawthorne Theatre allow minors in designated areas. But making an all-ages venue work financially is a tough undertaking.
A common complaint in Portland and beyond is that music venues view alcohol as a sales driver and bands merely a means to get people in the door. Oregon also has strict laws about monitoring underage concertgoers in venues that serve alcohol, which requires additional staffing.
The Off Beat avoids booze altogether. Noah Penwell, 22, was overseeing two teenage techs working sound on the triple bill in July. A run-of-show sheet was pinned above the mixing board near placards warning against drug and alcohol use.
Penwell credits FoN with helping him get sober two years ago.
“This is great,” he says, “because it really creates a space where people can enjoy music without feeling that kind of pressure.”
In addition to juveniles, the crowd contained a mix of graying millennials and Gen Xers, many of whom attended their first shows at all-ages clubs decades earlier.
“It’s more important now than ever,” says crowd member Kiki Laws. “It’s about finding yourself, and letting the pain out, and finding other people who love the same stuff as you. I know I needed it when I was their age.”
Up next were the Impulsive Hearts, middling in order of appearance but not in talent. The infectious surf-pop band out of Chicago is composed of veterans of numerous musical projects.
“This place is great,” says Hearts drummer Rachael Luka, noting the venue’s sound isolation booth—great for both recording vocals and calming those overwhelmed by noise. “Everything you want as an artist is here.”
With a primo location just off the MAX line, Dancin’ Bare operated from 1989 until COVID took it out in 2020. Middleton noticed a “for lease” sign soon after and started on the 30,000-square-foot conversion a few months later, adding a green room, box office, extensive ADA accommodations and five single-occupant restrooms.
Success would look quite different at The Off Beat contrasted with other venues. Instead of turning a profit on liquor sales, it has a formal mission to help young people discover new bands, provide paid gigs for musicians and develop Portland’s next generation of sound techs. To reach these goals, FoN has won grants through the American Rescue Plan, the city of Portland, and the Meyer Memorial Trust.
Six months is perhaps not long enough to know whether the new club is proving successful, Middleton says.
“I think we’re successful, but let’s not kid ourselves—gas prices, inflation—we’re not in a boom period as a city,” Middleton says. “So I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch. Let’s just say there’s room to grow. We’re a small nonprofit that wants to pay the young people who work for us. That’s all.”
GO: The Off Beat, 8440 N Interstate Ave., 971-808-2342, friendsofnoise.org/the-off-beat. See the website for a calendar of showtimes and prices. All ages.
