THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PORTLAND MUSIC SCENE

The Key Largo calendar circa 1984.

It’s our humble opinion that Portland, Oregon, for a brief period in the 1980s, had the best music scene IN THE WORLD.* I should qualify this by saying we only had New York and L.A. to compare it to: New York, where famous jazz guys were making fifty bucks a night, and L.A., where you had “Pay to Play.” [I.e., Sell tickets to get a slot on the club stage, where you’d get exposure and hopefully gain the attention of an A&R man from a major label. People die of exposure.]

Portland was different. For a Golden Period, from around 1980-86, dozens of clubs opened. There was a brief relaxation in Oregon’s strict liquor laws. This came at the exact moment when Nu Shooz changed from a struggling four-piece to a nine-piece band with four horns.

There were ten clubs within a mile radius of downtown. We worked every weekend for seven years. Nobody was getting rich, but our lives felt rich. And it was a unique situation at that time. The Last Hurrah, for instance, wanted sixty percent original music, and that’s what the audience wanted, too.

A video has just surfaced that describes the joy of that era and what brought it to an end. It’s a Cable Access show filmed in 1987 called PDX Rocks, hosted by Pat Snyder. Pat was one of the main photographers capturing that world as it unfolded. In this clip, she’s interviewing two of the most important club owners from that period, Peter Mott (The Last Hurrah) and Tony Demacoli (The Long Goodbye, Luis La Bamba, Key Largo.) Their contributions to that scene AND to the career of NU SHOOZ are beyond measure.

A few of the bands eventually got record deals and dropped out of the club scene. Billy Rancher, one of the biggest local stars, was about to be signed when he died of cancer. According to Peter Mott, all this siphoned off a lot of the top talent.

But other forces conspired to bring that golden period to an end. A recession drove up unemployment. The price of liability insurance for the clubs exploded by 600%, and as Tony pointed out, people had other entertainment options. Cable T.V. and the VCR reached critical mass around 1982, and I swear, you could feel it from the bandstand. The audience was staying home.

No scene lasts forever. We were lucky to live in a time period when it was great to be young musicians. And we’re grateful for intrepid club owners like Peter Mott and his brother Michael and Tony Demicoli, who worked so hard to make that scene happen and made our artistic lives possible.

*I guess Manchester, England, had its own Golden Era around the same time, but that was a faraway land, and it was pre-internet.

The Portland Music Mural Project

We’ve been honored by our hometown of Portland, Oregon. The Portland Mural Project was unveiled in September, a painting by the Pander Bros. of Dark Horse Comics fame. The mural includes thirty-three bands and performers who’ve left their mark on The Rose City and the World. 

The mural is the brainchild of Jason Savage, a freelance photographer. “ I realized that Portland didn’t have any public artworks that were tributes to the music that’s come from here, and there’s a lot of music that’s helped shape the identity of this city over the years.” His dream is to spread the idea to other cities across America.

The acts included span a wide array of genres and more than sixty years of Music History, from the Kingsmen to Everclear, to Esperanza Spaulding... oh yeah...and NU SHOOZ! Head to the Music Mural Project for the complete list of musicians and a close-up of the artwork.