MFNW - Day One Retrospective

It appears that's it's finally time to do start a series of retrospective posts for MFNW 2013.  Over a month has passed since the festival ended, giving me a little time to gather some perspective on the events, and even though Rocktober is now still in full swing, this week is something like the calm eye in the middle of the storm, allowing me some time to look back and ruminate.

Before going any further, though, I have to mention that no discussion of MFNW 2013 can be complete with a discussion of Boxed Water.  During their Tuesday-night set, veteran LA punks-turned-popsters Redd Kross frequently drank what appeared to be milk from the familiar, one-quart waxed cartons.  "That can't be right," I thought.  There's no way that drinking a quart of milk on a sweaty stage is going to end well for anybody, either on stage or in the audience.  I imagined that it might be some sort of health food - maybe coconut milk? - being consumed by a health-conscious veteran band.

But then I started seeing the cartons everywhere, at every venue.  A few performers, two or three, really, gamely drank what was clearly water out of the traditional clear plastic bottles, but most others were drinking out of the square cartons.  It wasn't until Thursday that I finally got a close enough look to realize they were drinking a new product called Boxed Water, which is actually just good old water, but served in eco-friendly, bio-degradable paper cartons rather than inert plastic bottles, which will last, like, forever (plastic bottles also leach toxic phthalates into bottled water, especially when warm or left in cars, but the marketers aren't touting that additional benefit).  After I got a close look, I heard several performers acknowledge how disorienting it felt to be drinking water on stage out of what looked like milk cartons.  Still, it appeared to be the official stage beverage of MFNW 2013.  

In any event, in addition to adding Boxed Water to the proceedings, MFNW also added an additional, sixth day to the proceedings in 2013.  Granted, there wasn't too much scheduled for the newly-added day, at least by MFNW standards, but that was something of a relief to me as I had to travel down to Portland that day from Bumbershoot up in Seattle.  The only venues participating in the festival that first night were the Roseland Theater with a hip-hop slate, and Dante's, a block or so away, with three garage-rock bands.   

I started the night (and the festival) at Roseland, a 1,400-capacity, arena-style theater on Burnside Street in Portland's Old Town.  It's an all-ages venue with drinking and seating up in the balcony. It wasn't my first time to Roseland - I was there last year for Reignwold and Those Darlins' - but it was my first of several visits that week.  When I arrived, a local dj named Gang$ign$ was warming up the audience.  I went up to the balcony to find myself a seat and watch the show.

Gang$ign$ is Portland's Nick Sisouphanh, a 24-year-old "who isn’t afraid to mix braggadocio-laced gangster thump with Doris Day samples, electronic fuzz, jazz, punk and indie rock, putting it all through a Skrillex- and Dre-infused filter" (Willamette Week).  Everything he played flowed together into a seamless whole while the nearly-all-white Portland audience just stood watching him.

I was interested in seeing how he would end the set, since one could never tell where a "song" began or ended.  In fact, it never really ended at all, but after about an hour, when Seattle rapper Nacho Picasso was scheduled to take the stage, another dj set up behind him and started mixing his beats into Gang$ign$'. He eventually just walked off stage, leaving his set-up on the table.

Nacho Picasso eventually ambled onto the stage wearing a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt, a shiny grill, and big square specs.  One reviewer wrote that he couldn't shake the feeling that this is what Raj from What’s Happening? would have turned into if he did time in the joint for breaking and entering.  

The t-shirt didn't stay on for long, and it turns out that Picasso is built like a prizefighter and covered in tattoos. He unleashed some of the funniest and most shamelessly filthy rhymes around, referencing "everything from Haile Selassie to Tommy Tune all in service of getting laid. And he’s wearing . . . boxer briefs covered in pictures of bananas" (Willamette Week).

Gang$ign$ resumed his dj set after Picasso had finished, but with all due respect to the rest of the line-up, that was it for me at Roseland.  Missing out on rappers Antwon and Joey Bada$$ (it was apparently a big night for cash-money band names), I walked the block or two down Burnside over to Dante's to hear some garage rock.

It was my first time in Dante's, both of the week and of all-time.  Dante's is composed of two rooms in an historical, brick building, rumored to have once been a brothel. The main room comprises the eastern half of the venue and the adjacent Limbo Lounge sits to the west, connected to the main room by a large open portal in the brick wall.  There are often large and rowdy crowds outside, but when I got there before the first act, things were still calm and peaceful.

The first band, Summer Cannibals, is an almost-but-not-quite all-female band, fronted by vocalist/guitarist Jessica Boudreaux and lone male member guitarist Marc Swart.  They play muscular, straight-ahead garage rock informed by punk, metal, and blues, but not confined to any particular genre.  I had been looking forward to hearing them, and they lived up to my expectations.

On stage, Boudreaux thanked everyone for coming, wondering “Who can compete with Joey Bada$$ going on at Roseland?” Everyone laughed, but I later heard that while Summer Cannibals were playing at Dante's, the Roseland audience had started chanting for headliner Bada$$ even while Antwon was still on stage performing.

By far, though, the most memorable event of the evening was the train wreck of a performance by the band Black Bananas.  Having to discuss this set at all might be the single most compelling reason I've put off this whole retrospective until now.  The performance was highly anticipated by the Portland press, who had given their recent record great reviews.  Black Bananas is fronted by Portland singer, songwriter, record producer, artist, and model Jennifer Herrema, and is the successor to the band Royal Trux (later just RTX).  

Herrema took the stage at Dante's swilling beer from a bottle while looking lost under her heavy bangs. Wearing an oversized t-shirt featuring a huge pot leaf on it and a Black Bananas hoody tied around her waist, she alternately sang and babbled incoherently into her mike.  To her right, one guy was making a lot of noise somewhere between electronica and jagged hip-hop, while to her left a guitarist in a Miami Vice baseball cap was unleashing glam-metal lines.  No one seemed to hear, or care, what the others were playing, and they were all playing very loud (except Herrema, who could barely be heard).

As she banged into amplifiers and seemed to be generally lost, it was apparent that Herrema was either very drunk or in a deep narcotic stupor. She once almost fell on top of Redd Kross' drum kit before the guitarist caught her and literally kicked her ass back toward the front of the stage. I wondered if she would have better seen where she was going if she cut her bands a little, but I doubted it. It was an awful performance, and for the life of me, I don't know what the fuss was all about.

The evening's headliners were veteran LA band Redd Kross.  This band has lived through it all - they first arrived during the LA hard-core punk scene of the early 80s, lasted through the glam-rock and hair-metal days of the Sunset Strip, and still played on during the grunge, alternative rock, and indie scenes.  You can hear the entire history of LA rock in their songs.   

Here that are at LA's Amoeba Records store:

Some Canadian dude at Dante's told me that it was hilarious that the guitarist was wearing a vintage C-Fox 99 jersey, as C-Fox 99 was not only one of British Columbia's worst and most commercial radio stations, but that logo had gone out of style sometime back in the 1970s. 

Red Kross bassist Steve McDonald wore a shirt with his hometown of Hawthorne, California’s motto, “City of Good Neighbors” written on it, which was ironic given that McDonald later introduced their 1982 punk anthem White Trash by discussing how he and his brother wrote the song in their garage in protest of their Hawthorne neighbors.  Later, he introduced the song Frosted Flake as being about “that Pavement singer. Does he still live here? He was such a blunt monkey.”

Despite their late start, they still played a long set, once stopping to shame audience members leaving Dante's before they were through. “Are you guys saving your energy for the rest of fucking MusicfestNW?!  Were you offended by the Stephen Malkmus shoutout?!” McDonald asked before their one-song encore.  It was only a little after midnight, but it still was a Tuesday night.  

And that was it for the first night - a little hip-hop, a little rock, one train-wreck of a performance, and one sublime set by newcomers Summer Cannibals.  That, and the mystery of Boxed Water.