When awesome bands cover awesome bands

My favorite season of all.

If you ever want a fool-proof way to make me shout, “Aughaughaughhh,” in a positive manner, tell me about one of my all-time favorite bands having their somewhat obscure songs shown some love by a current favorite band. I nearly bawled fat tears of joy when Glen Hansard of the Swell Season made it clear that he’s a fan of the Pixies. In the Swell Season’s show in Eugene, OR last year, Hansard and bandmate Markéta Irglová took a break from their collaboration’s characteristically yearning ballads and paid their respects to the former-ish band of Eugene resident, Frank Black. I especially like the part when Hansard digresses to talk about Finding Nemo and manages to logically tie a movie about fish to the end of the Come On Pilgrim track. It’s an inspired combination of images that Black would surely enjoy.

Less recently and less locally, the Swell Season also tried out “Cactus” from the Surfer Rosa album. Hansard breaks a string but smoothly gets his guitar replaced without interrupting the flow of the song too drastically. Irglová’s soft voice gets more volume, too. And while it’s impossible to really capture the tension and bare-faced desire of the original, particularly at Coachella as the audience members clap their hands and grow increasingly more delirious with every passing sleepless hour, the song is still a pretty apt selection for a Swell Season cover. Only time will tell if the Breeders or Frank Black’s solo work (or, less likely, the short-lived project of Joey Santiago and David Lovering, the Martinis) get the Hansard/Irglová treatment at a future show.

The Swell Season will play at the Crystal Ballroom on Tuesday, November 24. Doveman will also play.

“Levitate Me”

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“Cactus

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You blew my mind twenty-nine times

This is how we do.

Birthday weekend, full steam ahead! And you know what that means. The highlights on the agenda for my weekend include copious amounts of Jack Daniels, giggles, and not posting on my blog even more.

However, it’s not as if I haven’t been busy or exercising my writerly muscles. I’ve been working out at another location, so to speak. In case you miss me and my musical rants, I can also be found here as part of the Portland Examiner Arts and Entertainment team. The gig allows its writers a lot of freedom, at least as far as content and voice. Hopefully, this avenue of exposure will continue to be a fun and personal way to report on all the fantastic artists in and around Portland.

But as far as TS&tN’s humble page-front, as an early birthday present to myself, I’m borrowing from a Facebook note concept. The object of the FB challenge is to list, off the top of your head, fifty musicians you’ve seen live. I got to some number in the 20 to 30 range before I had to start consulting my ephemera collection of ticket stubs, journal entries, posters, emails, and other websites to jog my memory. But it’s a fun activity. You get to recall specific points in your life, places you’ve visited, people you’ve seen, and of course, all the songs that kept you afloat each time. In honor of my 29th year of life on this planet, here are 29 performers I’ve seen live and the venues that granted me the opportunities. I can only aspire to triple this number or more in another 29 years’ time. By the way, if any generous reader wishes to send me a gift, my friends got me started on the tradition of birthday Jack D. Just a thought.

1) They Might Be Giants at venues in Honolulu, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco. I still love John and John like they’re both the only bees in my bonnet.

2) Reel Big Fish at the Bellows Air Force Station (if you live in Hawaii long enough, you will watch concerts on military grounds).

3) Hepcat in Santa Cruz. First concert of college. I can’t even remember the name of the venue, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist anymore.

4) Big Bad Voodoo Daddy at the Catalyst Nightclub. I interviewed one of the horn players for my college newspaper. Sadly, I can’t remember his name either. You’ll notice that a lot for anything during the time I was in college.

5) Moxy Fruvous in Santa Cruz. First concert I attended alone and really enjoyed.

6) Switchblade Symphony at the old goth club in Honolulu. I found out today that one of the band’s drummers went on to join the Blue Man Group.

7) Death Cab for Cutie at the Great American Music Hall.

8 ) Cat Power at Bottom of the Hill.

9) Frank Black, first at the Catalyst and then at the Independent.

10) Stratford 4 at the Independent. They were opening for another band, some group that rode the wave of “The Insert a Noun Here” bands during the early aughts, but Punchy and I went for Stratford 4. Burned out way ahead of their time.

11) Ted Leo and the Pharmacists at the Great American Music Hall.

12) Clinic at Bimbo’s 365 Club.

14) Low Flying Owls at the Hemlock Tavern.

15) Built to Spill at Slim’s. Found out that Built to Spill was playing there mere hours before the show. A very kind bouncer sold us tickets. The band was amazing.

16) Decemberists at the Fillmore.

17) Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the Warfield.

18) Spoon, in a free performance at Amoeba Records.

19) Digital Underground at Red Devil Lounge, complete with Humpty. For real.

20) Von Iva at the Rickshaw Stop.

21) The Botticellis at Cafe Du Nord.

22) Pixies at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. The best big concert I’ve ever seen. My flask helped.

23) Ziggy Marley at the Crystal Ballroom. This was my first concert in Portland.

24) Tori Amos at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. I’d wanted to see her for so long, and to have finally done so at such a handsome place was extra special.

25) The Swell Season at the Keller Auditorium. Absolutely searing in its beauty, but that was largely thanks to the band.

26) Queens of the Stone Age at the Roseland.

27) Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings at the Oregon Zoo. Don’t let anyone snub you into believing that zoo concerts can’t be awesome.

28) 31 Knots at the Doug Fir.

29) Battles at the Wonder Ballroom, my inaugural foray into Music Fest NW.

Plus, one for good luck: 30) Asylum Street Spankers at Music Millennium.

• Andrew Bird ~ Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs ~ Righteous Babe

The Happy Birthday Song

• Les Claypool ~ Of Fungi and Foe ~ Prawn Song

Primed By 29

So huge it needs one more shout-out from me

She's much taller in real life

Some phenomena are just too big to fit into our half-baked criteria for experiencing the world around us. You know them when you behold them – meteor showers, hurricanes, babies lifting pickup trucks, Greek lyric poetry read by unicorns raised in orchards but educated on the streets. And Storm Large. Everything about her is immense, from her stretchy vocal range to her hair to the joy she (and many of her fans) take in saying crassly hilarious things.

There’s one more thing about her that can’t even comfortably rest in its own paragraph, something built on such a dumbfounding scale that Proust would be hard-pressed to write enough on the subject. Luckily, Storm Large has released video documentation on the subject and she was even kind enough to toss in a Pixies reference.

Storm Large’s show, “Crazy Enough,” is playing at the Gerding Theater until August 16.

“8 Miles Wide”

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Into the limo and on the way to the big-time

Cover of the March 10 release, Pink Limousine

You know how when you grow up in a relatively small town, you tend to see the same people (folks, if you please) throughout the course of your life and theirs? Say you reside in this somewhat fictional small town and you attend the local high school, where your chemistry teacher pairs you with a sweet geek. Not the kind of geek who spends his free time chomping the heads off chickens, but a lovably dorky kid who is dwarfed by the meatheads of your class, makes elaborate sculptures from rubber bands and paper clips in his idle time instead of texting and napping, and would rather force his copy of Doolittle on you instead of get you stoned and grope you behind the cafeteria. You love the dorky kid as a lab partner, consider him a good friend, might never look at the kid in a romantic light but enjoy his presence all the same.

Then you leave your semi-fictional small town for college and your first attempts at adulthood, as most sensible people do. But you come back for visits and meet up with your old friends at places you only dreamed about frequenting when you spent time together as young ‘uns. Maybe you drop by a local watering hole during your winter break, supposedly just to hang out but secretly to take a gander at all your former classmates who have also come home for their breaks. And you spot a familiar face – your chemistry partner. But he’s no longer a geek. He’s shaken off that high school BS, grown into his unconventional qualities, and greets you in a way that is charmingly self-effacing and equally aware of the impact that has on his audiences.

To break away from this imaginary winter break encounter, let me just say flat-0ut that this fictional lab partner is Pigeon John. Back in 2006, Pigeon John’s album, Pigeon John and the Summertime Pool Party, breathed a sense of humor into the independent hip hop scene. While underground hip hop artists tend to lack (or at least hide) the overblown egos of their more commercially successful peers, Pigeon John’s work showed a lack of unwarranted bravado without losing any of the enthusiasm for what he was doing. Plus, my favorite track from that album sampled from the excellent Pixies song, “Hey,” from none other than the outstanding Doolittle. In “Money Back Guarantee,” Pigeon John plays with the first line of the Pixies song but makes it less urgent and more friendly, which was totally befitting and cute from a talented but not-quite-huge rap artist.

These days, Pigeon John has teamed up with Flynn Adam of LA Symphony as an outfit called Rootbeer. The production value for their new EP, Pink Limousine, uses lots of slick touches such as the interjections of 70’s-style guitar picking in the title track. Pigeon John has definitely grown up since fictional small-town high school chemistry, found himself a crew of talented new friends, and exudes a confidence that is refreshing to hear. Unfortunately, it’s also kind of lost among all the flourishes. A funny line about Gary Busey comes across as a throw-away trinket among all the synthesized hoots and echoing vocals. The overall effect is certainly fun but not always charismatic the way that Pigeon John’s previous solo work has been. Plus, if you were like me, you sort of liked the geeky guy all along but were enough of a headcase yourself to not act on it at all when you were still living in the same town. The semi-fictional one.

Pigeon John and Rootbeer will be playing at the Someday Lounge on Saturday, March 28. The Buttermilk Baby Makers and Who Cares will also play.

• Rootbeer ~ Pink Limousine ~ Cornerstone RAS

Pink Limousine