Music

I was talking to Jenny from Howie and the Hot Knives at Dante's the other night, not forty minutes after seeing Pure Country Gold blow up their First Thursday show over at Hovercraft Gallery. I know I was just rambling on in a wide-eyed state of enthusiasm, but Jenny understood. She's a fan.

Fans are something Pure Country Gold made quite a few of in '06, which is ex...   More

Music

The SLiP iTS are about the most laid-back "could give a flying F" " punk band I know. All they really seem to want to do is hang out and play their pleasantly jarring Ramonsey-Dollish garbage rock. A dream life, really. Unless otherwise engaged, the band tends to look really, really ...   More

Music

The Stooges did it. The Ramones did it. But the Triggers?

Yesterday Dirtnap Records signed an exclusive licensing deal with Railer Entertainment Music Licensing. Specifics are not available but the basics of this agreement seem pretty easy to understand. Bottom line: Portlander Ken Cheppaikode's hand-picked collection of new wave leaning punk bands just got marketabl...   More

Music

Billy Ray's Neighborhood Dive will be, for the foreseeable future, noticeably less loud on Sundays.

The barn-red bar on 2216 NE Martin Luther King Boulevard, identifiable only by its great neon flashing TAVERN sign, hosted it's last Sunday matinée rock show yesterday with a stacked line-up featuring    More

Music [ROCK] From Pond to the Decemberists, expertly recorded smart-guy fare has long been a PDX music specialty. But a good argument can be made that our city's greatest and most enduring audio export happens to be a 20-year-old garage band from Clackamas, a band that's had records rejected from pressing plants due to poor sound quality. Which is fine, because bleeding garbage rock is exactly the sound...   More

Music Much like what goes on inside that elf-looking hangout off of Sandy Boulevard, Club 21, Fuck Yeah! isn't pretty... but it's cool.

For years, Club 21 (2035 NE Glisan) has been held near and dear to the failing livers of a significant number of hard rocking/hard living Portland musicians. Many were initially turned on to the bar's distinct charms back in the mid-to-late-90's when, acr...   More

Music [ROCK] 'I don't think Portland's ever had anything like this,' explains Brian Applegate over a recent happy-hour beer at Club 21—that funny little bar just off Sandy Boulevard that looks like a ski lodge for elves. 'General comps are shitty. This one is unique because it's about a specific place.' Best known as one half of Portland's Devo-rocking satirists the Punk Group, Applegate has manag...   More

Music

Ken Cheppaikode has a ear for punk and a brain for record making. After putting out nearly 70 records in 7 years, Cheppaikode's Dirtnap record label is a bonafide institution of Northwest independent music. This week the Willamette Week ran 350 words of recent...   More

Music [CLASSY PUNK] Seven years ago in Seattle, Ken Cheppaikode's Dirtnap Records began releasing music by some of the classiest high-energy punk rock bands around. Many of those bands—including the Exploding Hearts, the Epoxies and the Triggers—were from right here in Portland, so Cheppaikode had some company when he purchased the Green Noise record shop at 2615 SE Clinton St. and moved his...   More

Music [GARAGE ROCK] Don't fault the Wires for not having a sense of humor. At Billy Ray's last month, the local four-piece withstood a barrage of good-natured heckling inspired by their near-namesakes, classic British punk band Wire. At one point between songs, someone in the audience of 20 or so jaded drunks shouted, 'When's your album Pink Flags coming out?' cleverly pluralizing a Wire album ti...   More