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Sunday, September 30, 2012
To Portland
The Foggy Notion in Portland, OR
with Nasalrod & Ix
We woke up on Saturday Morning to coffee, eggs, bacon and sausage, biscuits, and gravy... Ash (of Ash-Hole studios) and his family treated us exceptionally well. I wasn't kidding about the generosity of our hosts. I don't necessarily eat all that stuff, but among the eight of us, it was consumed.
We didn't wake up early on Saturday. We didn't have much of an agenda. Our scheduled show in Corvalis canceled early and our options in Redington, Eugene, and Olympia all fell through. We were offered a radio show in Boise-- that actually sounded like a lot of fun, and something we were all interested in doing, but it was also five hours out of our way for a non-paying venture. Sadly, a gig that won't pay for its own gas could leave us stranded.
Everyone took their time heading to the Sun Cafe in downtown Boise, getting smoothies, mimosas, and wraps. The afternoon was wide-open, and we all just kind of chilled out for a bit.
Checking Facebook, we discovered that one of the phone calls Michelle made panned out... but it was after 5:00, and we were still in Boise. We did get to Portland just fine-- we left before Nasalrod in hopes of maybe making the show, but we rolled in around 11:30, and the everything had already wrapped, so the day was basically: sleep in, restaurant, seven hours of driving, restaurant, sleep.
We were all a bit tired of our mp3 collections, so we put my mp3 player on random until the batteries died (right in the middle of a Floating Goat song), and then switched to Michelle's. We even established rules: random means random-- no skipping, no selecting, just let the player go. This was fine until we got two KISS songs in a row.
“I only have one KISS album on here, too,” she says as one more corny, reverb-drenched song off Dynasty starts up. “And this one's going to hurt. This is an Ace song.” Then her iPod revolted-- it just stopped, never let Mr. Freeley sing a single note, and found the next song on its own.
Not even the iPod would put up with that much KISS.
We might not have been able to catch our last-minute show, but we got to Portland with plenty of time to hang out. Nasalrod all live here, so they found their homes and beds-- we found Dan from Ix, who often puts us up at the Plural Mural house when we're in town.
I had another friend to stay with, so I split off from the group-- they went to Bily Ray's Dive Bar; I ended up at C-Bar, playing pinball and drinking a Burnside Brewery wheat ale spiced with Habernero. Hells yes!
That is one of the great things about Portland: it's a devoted beer and food town. Bars have wild, creative tap lists and restaurants are multidimensional and always have Secret Aardvark hot sauce. I love eating and drinking here.
I got back to Plural Mural before ubik. got out of bed (figuratively speaking) and just hung out with Dan for a while. We were about four blocks from The Foggy Notion, and were free until the 8:30PM load-in to chill, restring instruments, snuggle the cats, listen to music, read Batman: Year One (it was on the bookshelf in the living room). Free time is nice when you come by it.
The Foggy Notion is a cool venue, and we came up with a setlist while Ix was playing. Maybe it was the energy in the room, but we ended up with a really high-energy, fast set. You'd think that with all our free time we would have written a setlist during the day, but ubik. doesn't often operate with a lot of forethought. We mean to... it just never happens.
We've all become really, really fond of Nasalrod. It could have gone either way: we liked the band, but we never traveled with another group before, and I like them even more now than when we started. Great band on stage, great group of people off stage. It was sort of bittersweet watching the last Nasalrod set, knowing we wouldn't be seeing another one tomorrow.
There was a big group around the fire pit at Dan's after the show, which seems to be the norm when we're with Dan or Justin (who has moved out of Plural Mural, but it was still a big Ix/Nasalrod party), and we hung out well into the night.
Though we only played four nights, the whole adventure seemed too brief, but it was a good run.
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