Sleepy
LaBeef, Lisa Miller and the Trailer Park Honeys, The Webbers
Berbati's Pan 231
SW Ankeny St., 248-4579
9:30 pm Thursday, Dec. 2 , $7
Lisa Miller and the Trailer Park Honeys CD Release
White Eagle 836 N Russell St., 282-6810
9 pm Thursday, Dec. 9, Cover.
It is August, deep in Southeast Portland. Fifty blocks from
hipsterville, kids play in dark, humid streets, screaming
happily and hysterically at each other. A few dogs scratch
around for trouble. Adults lounge on porch couches, cans of
what made Milwaukee famous sweating in their hands. In this
neighborhood, Mr. Plywood and an auto-body shop anchor the
business district.
This is where Lisa Miller and the Trailer Park Honeys practice,
in the living room of Miller's house, a room plastered with
punk and country posters, an ad hoc gallery including Wayne
Kramer, Golden Delicious and Mojo Nixon. Robert Johnson
and Patsy Cline wedge in there, too. A pair of cowboy boots
adorned with a thin, fake-gold chain sit orphaned on a low
coffee table.
On the bookshelf, the Mammoth Illustrated Encyclopedia
of Jazz competes for space with The Art of Homemaking
and Marihuana Reconsidered.
Of eight people in the room, four go barefoot.
The band--Miller on acoustic guit and lead vocals, Steve
Aubrey on drums, Billy Kennedy and Nick Sonies on guitar,
Bob Wadle on bass, Marilee Horde on fiddle--plays songs
from a new album that, as the summer wears on, becomes more
and more overdue. Undercover Records, the Portland/L.A.
label that's supposed to release the record, is in financial
trouble. No one knows when it's going to come out.
For sure, though, it's going to be called Lipstick and
Beer.
"That pretty much tells you where we're coming from," says
Miller, who looks and talks like the brassy, crazy-fun,
slightly out-of-control cool mom from down most every kid's
block.
Horde suggests a new, sad extro for the song currently
under rehearsal. "Oh, yeah, let's get 'em all crying," Miller
enthuses.
The band launches in, all easy-tumbling bass, steady guitars
and high, plangent fiddle. It's country, all right--or,
as the Trailer Park Honeys insist, straight-up honky-tonk.
Whatever it's called, it's the sound of long nights, long
roads, cheap beer and cheap affairs, sweet and tangy as
ice-cold lager.
Flash forward a fiscal quarter. The sweaty warmth of summer
has given way to slate-gray weather that defines the Pacific
wetlands. After a long saga with Undercover, the Trailer
Park Honeys have pooled their wages, yanked up their bootstraps
and released Lipstick and Beer on their own. The
CD is on the street, the gigs come hard and fast, tours
are in the offing.
Things are good in Lisa Miller land.
"I am so excited," she says from her day job at Powell's
Technical Store. "It's been a long process, but we're all
so relieved to have the damn thing out, it's unbelievable."
The disc's release marks a high point in Miller's journey
from twang to thrash and back again, a life steeped in gritty
grassroots sounds.
"Everyone in my family loves music," Miller says. "My parents
had an amazing record collection, and we listened to a lot
of country when I was growing up. Of course, we were very
rebellious and said, awwww, not country, y'know.
But when I started playing, I always ended up coming back
to it."
One of her brothers played in the legendary hardcore outfit
Poison Idea; another, a blues guitarist, gave young Lisa
lessons on the condition that she play rhythm while he played
lead. Miller herself went punk rock with a sassy band called
Bop Girl Goes Calypso.
Even as she screamed her way along, Miller felt the call.
"I eventually started up a rockabilly band, so I could
slip some country back in there without my cool punk friends
noticing," she says. "Then I got in a car accident and hurt
my back so I couldn't hold a heavy guitar, and that was
it."
Miller pulled together the earliest Honeys lineups from
a revolving corps of LaurelThirst Pub regulars, eventually
cutting an unfocused album called Trailer Park Honey
and Other Love Songs. Now, though, the lineup of razor-chopped
players has solidified. The raw, open sound of any good
honky-tonk band, often missing on the first CD, rings out
on Lipstick and Beer.
The album has none of the mannered, Smithsonian Folkways
self-seriousness that plagues so much so-called alt-country.
Live and on disc, the Honeys stand apart from the jostling
crowd of come-lately twangers traveling in Uncle Tupelo's
wake. This is not some washed-up punk band looking for the
next big thing, nor is it a collection of snide hepcats
kitted out in campy C&W drag. Even if the room is packed
with knowing urbanites, when you see or hear the Trailer
Park Honeys, you know they're for real.
"We walk some kind of fine line," Miller says. "Here in
Portland, we play to more of an alt crowd. We go out of
town, to roadhouses outside of Hillsboro, down to McMinnville,
and that works real well for us. People in those places
like to dance, and they don't have a huge attitude about
it. Down in Southern Oregon, we draw more of an Elks Lodge
crowd.
"With this album, I just wanted people to know that honky-tonk
runs in our veins, that this music has a name and this is
what it sounds like."
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Willamette Week | originally
published December 1,
1999
|
