Kids Forever

[April 9th, 2008]

It’s overcast and getting dark over the front steps of Southeast Portland venue/artists’ collective the Artistery. The five members of self-described “gnar shred” oufit White Fang return from a trek down to 39th Avenue for smokes and snacks. They don’t need much prodding to start talking about their band, which is spending the afternoon here recording its forthcoming Marriage Records debut. The band’s members—who range from 17 to 20 years old—interact like a family of adopted brothers. “It’s a tribe, more,” says 19-year-old shaggy-haired singer-guitarist Erik Gage. “We’ve all slept in the same bed, we’ve all eaten from the same plates, we’ve had every emotion together. Most of us have taken acid together, which is about as deep as you can roll.”

Gage speaks with the quick confidence of a debate-team standout, smiling faintly from the corner of his mouth as he relates White Fang’s unlikely story: “Basically, we all grew up between 122nd and 136th [avenues]. Most maps of Portland don’t even go out past 82nd, but if you had one, we were in the cobwebby little corner.” The band’s members met through church (“our parents used to make us go”) and tours of duty at David Douglas High School.

Though surrounded by “Jet cover bands” in the cultural badlands between Portland and Gresham, Gage was a self-described music nerd by 15—moving from his former-skinhead parents’ punk rock records to Northwest indie-rock legends Beat Happening and ex-Microphones frontman Phil Elverum to local jazz-rock outfit the Watery Graves. Eventually, he tapped into Portland’s vast experimental underground and wound up interning with outsider-pop label Marriage Records at 17. “When I had fights with my parents,” explains Gage, “I stayed with Adrian [Orange, the Watery Graves/Thanksgiving] for a while; I stayed with Curtis [Knapp, Marriage Records’ founder] for a while.”

Gage brought his new musical discoveries back to the band, each member of which went through a similar process. “Every different kind of band we’ve gotten into since we started has influenced us,” says drummer Jimmy Leslie—a skinny kid who grew up on his dad’s old jazz tapes. The band doesn’t agree on everything, Leslie says, but each member’s musical taste is diverse. Recent collective favorites have included Portland punk legends the Wipers, West African percussionist Babatunde Olatunji and off-kilter rapper Kool Keith. CCR, Gage points out, is always in rotation.

As one would expect from its list of influences, White Fang has a sound that’s all over the map. The band recently moved away from its former “summer vibe” sound, replacing jangly guitars and congas with heavy distortion and a second drum kit. But White Fang’s live shows have always been frenetic: The boys regularly get drunk before shows, don faux-Indian headdresses and DayGlo Hammer pants, refuse to play stages and generally make an absolute ruckus. “I broke my nose once,” Gage says of the band’s live abandon. “I think we’ve all broken our noses,” bassist Tyler Bristow adds. Blood, by all accounts, is the band’s unofficial sixth member.

Downstairs, Artistery manager Aaron Shepherd is ready for the band to record the day’s last two songs. The first, a 90-second instrumental, sends intermittent blasts of fuzz and disjointed percussion tumbling off the space’s uncharacteristically blank walls. Gage throws his entire body into conducting the band, revealing heart-speckled boxer shorts with each rise and fall. But even in the midst of this, a dark and immediate first take that sounds like the Who meeting the Melvins for a West Side Story knife fight, there’s overflowing, unbridled joy—shit so pure they could bag it up and sell it from every street corner.

It’s the sound of five best friends with everything ahead of them. Maybe music this joyous and energetic is as fleeting as the youth that fuels it. But something Gage said earlier, unprompted and with that mischievous smile in full effect, haunts the amplifier buzz between bursts of noise: “We sold our souls to the devil so we could be kids forever.”