[Portland, OR] We were here to see the musicians of NiceButAlsoDangerous’s youth. As NiceButAlsoDangerous and other native Portlanders tell it, Portland was a raucous rough and tumble town until the hipsters arrived in 2003, young people looking to retire. It was a city of latchkey kids camping by themselves in the forest and hurtling down dormant volcanoes in the middle of the city on their little bikes. All the parents were characters, bad influences, or thugs, and the kids loved them for it. These are the kind of unlikely stories I regularly endure. By the 1990s, Portland was Seattle’s little grunge/heroin sister.
By his early 20s, NiceButAlsoDangerous worked at a pizza shop owned by a social worker who was into kink and BDSM. The pizza shop’s manager was Pontiac Slim, a ‘Black man trapped in a White man’s body’ (as NiceButAlsoDangerous puts it); he played the blues and was a member of The Brothers Free Motorcycle Club (a club of Black men, except for Pontiac Slim). The social worker, tired of the burden, sold the business to NiceButAlsoDangerous and his friend, also in his 20s. Unlikely. Well, maybe not so unlikely give that she’d already hit on both of them and spent her afternoons drinking boxed wine from a little cup while watching The Blazers on a little TV in the shop, until her employees told her she needed to take her drunkenness to another location. With its new young owners, the pizza shop became a den of inequity with stories that live on in the lore of this cohort of East Portlanders. In one small example, the building’s landlord lived upstairs and required that any live music include a rendition of “Cherokee People.” He’d show up for the music in mirrored aviator sunglasses and a white tanktop.
I’m not here to put people’s business on the street so will just say that NiceButAlsoDangerous’s PizzaPartner fell on some hard times and needed to exit the business. In addition to those stories, NiceButAlsoDangerous tells me that PizzaPartner is the smartest person he’s ever met – that people thinks he’s slow when they meet him because he, well, talks slow. Yet, he was so good at chess, he was ‘ranked.’ They started offering a free medium pizza to anyone who could beat PizzaPartner in chess but PizzaPartner was so unbeatable and the chess games got to be so long, they had to disband the promotional. PizzaPartner took the SAT for his cousin and aced it.
I’d heard lots about PizzaPartner but had never met him. For all I know, all that he knew of me was that I’m a check bouncer. I am! No one writes checks anymore and when I’m forced to do it, I can’t keep track of my balance as long as the dumb person demanding a check waits to cash it. So I met another one of their associates a few years ago, an associate who’d fallen on even harder times than PizzaPartner, and for a long time. I listened to her unlikely (but, likely, very likely) stories of life on the streets and bought some of her art projects dedicated to the bands of Portland’s past (e.g., Dead Moon). A week after meeting her, NiceButAlsoDangerous is getting texts from PizzaPartner that HardTimesLikely hates me because my check bounced and she knew all along there was ‘something wrong with that girl.’
NiceButAlsoDangerous had been invited to the show by another associate, GuitarMaker and wasn’t even sure his closer buddy PizzaPartner would be there. So who’s the first person we encounter upon sludging up the sidewalk to Georgie’s Garage and Grill but PizzaPartner, talking slow. Kind eyes. Worried about his wife’s health. No mention of the bounced check or HardTimesLikely.
The venue’s in the southern end of Vancouver, WA’s little downtown. My adventure buddies live in Vancouver (just across the Columbia River from Portland—noted for, relative to Portland, its sales tax but no income tax, and its conservatism) so I’m a little familiar with its downtown but not this part. Lots of murals. Georgie’s, like the second band, is hard to typify – warehouse big, lots of tables, a small bar, and a genuine stage. It seemed like the whole front of the house was ran by one nice man (not Georgie). It was *filled* with rock-ish people in their 50s and their moms, apparently. There were kids too.
PizzaPartner and GuitarMaker and the other band members, who’d all arrived in the same van we passed on the sidewalk, were milling around the bar where we sat. Rather than chicks and blow, they were debating which menu item would fulfill their daily protein requirement. NiceButAlsoDangerous observed that “Kevin’s Famous Chili” shirts had replaced band shirts.
IfIdBeenBornInIowa finally arrived, delighted we were finally hanging out somewhere 0.5 miles from her domicile. She would soon come to regret her decision. She pointed out the strobe lights – this was going to be a real show. The band was bass guitar, drums, lead guitar. The lead guitarist wore a Ramones t-shirt. I vividly remember staking my claim that the Ramones are not a legitimate punk band – I lost the debate but I still dislike the band on principle. IfIdBeenBornInIowa declared the lead guitarist to be a doppelganger of the boss she hates – she disliked him on principle. He said a lot but there was something about the microphone that made it impossible to discern anything he was saying.
The drummer, TwoTufts, had one tuft of hair on top of his bald scalp and one tuft on his chin. He beamed like the buddha he is. There was a stuffed Groot (I had to ask multiple people to get the name right) from Guardians of the Galaxy attached to the front of the drum – unlikely. The bass guitarist was obviously a more introverted man, in the plainest of black t-shirts and shorts, but with a gorgeous midnight blue guitar.
I thought Dead Kennedys! I don’t remember if I said it to NiceButAlsoDangerous before he said it to me … but there was a symphony of affirmation. NiceButAlsoDangerous wondered if all there songs were covers? They were fun groovy hard. And their set ended after three songs, just how I like it.
I saw a small girl to my
right reading a book by Toni Morrison called The Bluest Eye. Charming
right? I thought she was 20 but by the end of her escapades, I decided she
could be anywhere from 20 to 40. The next time I swiveled my head, she was
doing a trippy beat dance to the music – by herself – back by the tables. At
the end of the set, the drummer tossed his drumstick and this charmer dove and
slid into the crowdless dance floor to catch the tossed drumstick. Then she returned
to a table to finish her salad. She was the highlight of the show.
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