Almost a year has passed…

Kieskagato's most recent band photo

Well, it’s been a long time since those ill fated shows that we so gratuitously complained about. This year has been a tumultuous one for all of us. The band stands in a state of suspended animation as all of its members tend to other responsibilities in their lives. For now, Adam and Bryan may be seen on tour (in October) and otherwise with System And Station. Dave may been seen on tour (in late October through early December) with Blind Pilot. Both bands recently played Musicfest Northwest in Portland. Blind Pilot may have played a bigger venue, but System and Station played a way better show. Have a pleasant fall!

Public Practice, Part 3

After playing a show with the band Fatigo at The Trunk Space in Phoenix AZ a few years ago and then hanging out at the bar with them afterwards, we urged them to hit the road and play with us sometime in Portland. We truly meant it- after so many nights in unfamiliar towns playing with unfamiliar local acts, Fatigo genuinely stood out as one of the best bands we had ever played with. But after twice booking them shows in Portland only to have last minute cancellations, we thought that things would never work out. When Heather from the Ash Street contacted us and said that she had a band from AZ that really wanted to play with us, we were very excited. Even though it would only be Mike the lead singer, we looked forward to seeing and hearing him again. Months went by, and a week or so before the gig, we got an email from the Ash Street saying that Fatigo was off the bill. Foiled again! We couldn’t believe it. Then another twist: Fatigo’s keyboard player, named Merrily and who hadn’t been in the band when we met them, was going to do the gig solo. At least we finally got to play with somebody somehow associated with this very elusive band!

We loaded into the Ash Street at around 7:30. It is always weird loading into the Ash Street Saloon because Josh, Dave, and Bryan’s associate at Pizzicato (Amy, the perpetually annoyed catering assistant that delivers corporate lunch orders in spiked heals) is always drinking with her friends when we get there. She obviously doesn’t want to talk to any of us and we try our hardest to avoid making eye contact with her, but since ¾ of the band are her coworkers, an awkward hello always ensues. This time we got off with a less awkward clinking of glasses in passing.

Around this time, we noticed the poster that the club had made for the show: a picture of a trumpet player running in a hamster wheel. At first, being the trumpet player to whom this presumably referred, I was offended. After thinking about our band and how we work really hard on complicated songs, only to play them a few times at dive bars to crowds that are really only trying to talk over us, I took poster designer Heather’s point to heart. It was a very appropriate image indeed.

The first band, Critical, consisted of a keyboard player/singer and another guy, who for the life of me I can’t remember what he did. It was pretty bad. Maybe the songs were good starting points for band development, but they definitely were not ready for public performance yet. The amazing coincidence about the band, as the singer told us later, was that he recognized our name because had started our old record label, Iconic Rocket, with our former contact, Mark. The story of our experience on that label is a tale better left for another day.

Next up on the bill was Merrily. She turned out to be a very nice woman that had grown up in Portland and was integrating this show into her holiday trip home to see family. This worked out well because as she set up to play, waves of her elderly family members started to converge in the club. At least twenty disoriented old people, drinking glasses of Ash Street wine (eew!), pulled all of the tables together so that they could sit in a long row directly in front of the stage. This allowed them to not only gaze proudly at their granddaughter/ niece/ daughter, but also to cleverly ignore the resident Ash Street population of shameful drunks, located directly behind them. As Dave and Bryan were watching this unfold from the rear of the bar, they were approached by a tremendously drunk male in his mid 40s, who appeared to be by himself. “Hey, you guys gotta help me drink this Whiskey- I am FUCKED UP!” the man blurted out. Since he hadn’t contaminated it yet, we each drank some of his whiskey. “Don’t drink it all though!” the man then countered. “Oh, sorry..” As he continued to tell us how drunk he was and how this hardly ever happened to him, Merrily was ready to start on the stage. This was the point in the night when the real magic happened: within two beats of Merrily’s piano introduction to her first song, just as she opened her mouth to sing, our drunken friend started singing, in perfect rhythm and pitch “I Like Cat Power, I Like PJ Harveyyyyyy! I Like Cat Power, I Like PJ Harveyyy!” He sang this line over and over, as loud as he could, for about four minutes. The whole rear portion of the bar had turned and were laughing and urging him on, while Merrily’s family table in the front were showing how smart they had been to sit right in front of the speakers. After this scene, Merrily’s set was great and the house loved it.

Next up, we played. Everything went pretty well- we had fun and had more friends than usual out to see the set, so it was a good time. After getting off the stage, Dave was approached by a couple that had recently arrived in Portland from Poland. They were very excited about the “light bulbs” in my organ (tubes). Just then, the night’s final band, Heirs Of The Eiffel Tower started to set up. The lead guitar player apparently was threatened by our set and felt the need to assert his domain by shredding blues licks at us as fast as he could during his sound check. With this, the Polish people got very excited, explaining, “Ah, this is the music of America- your band plays the Soul music of the 1960’s and here on stage, we have the Blues!”

Heirs Of The Eiffel Tower (HOTET) were really bad. Our first trouble signal was that the singer/lead guitar player was wearing flip-flops in the winter. Those people are always trouble. HOTET was a Frat band, and the best thing I could say about their songs was that they’d have fit well in a Dawson’s Creek episode. Plus, they brought a fog machine! It filled up the whole room and made everyone cough. HOTET also had a few “groupies”, each of whom were trying as hard as they could to convey the impression of really being into the band. The five or so very drunk girls, along with some very hesitant and somewhat embarrassed looking boyfriends, kept the dance party rocking well enough to, in the eyes of the band, merit two encores. At the end of the night, as we loaded the van outside the club, the drunkest of HOTET’s groupies came up to us and said “I want to meet your fake lead singer” (meaning our guitar player- Josh). “He’s right there,” replied Adam, and as Josh emerged from packing the van, the girl turned to him and said: “Hi, I want to meet you.” Josh just stood there, completely baffled by this statement. “You want to meet me,” he replied?  “I want to meet you,” the girl reiterated. Then, after a long awkward pause, she apparently realized that no one, especially not Josh, seemed interested in her vague offer. “Oh, so you’re a Douche like all the others,” she pronounced as she stomped away.

public practice, part 2

As previously stated in Public Practice Part 1, Kieskagato had booked three shows of low expectation in rapid succession. We thought of them basically as being public practices- a chance for us to get used to playing together outside of the garage. Having gotten through the first show, the previously described day-after-Christmas show at Kelly’s Olympian in the midst of a snowstorm, our sights were now set on public practice number two:Wednesday January 7^th at Satyricon. Claiming to be Portland’s oldest rock club, Satyrican has had its ups and downs over the years, recently going out of business and then reopening as an all ages room. Room 101 had played there somewhere around 2001, but none of us had since even been inside. Maybe, as an all ages venue, there would be kids there that we could freak out with our monstrous, wordless compositions.

The show came about through an out of the blue message on Myspace from a band called Kate’s Mirror. Apparently they had since changed their name to Total Hippy Comeback, or THC for short. Since the club website said that the show started at 7:30, and having not heard back from the Total Hippy Comeback folks about load in time, we showed up at about 6:30 just to be safe. That’s when things got kind of weird.

We pulled up in front and the doors were all locked. I knocked on the only backlit door, that of the tiny bar adjoining the venue, and identified us as Kieskagato. The bartender told us to go ahead and load in, that the show would be in this little bar instead of the main room, that there was no PA system because the other band was bringing their own, and that we could basically do whatever we wanted as long as we were done by 11:30. So, we loaded our stuff onto the “stage,” the small area at the back of the bar between the pinball machines and the entrance to the bathrooms. THC having not yet arrived and the bar being empty, we waited to set up, collected a sizable string of drink tickets from the bartender, traded in some of them for beers, and sat down at the bar to wait. The bartender, despite being very patient, quickly grew tired of listening to our conversation (regarding how Adam had liked the band U2 as a kid until he went to see the Rattle And Hum movie and was confronted with disturbing images of the band’s undershirt-less leather vests, leather pants, rawhide jewelry, etc), so he turned on the Family Guy movie on the bar TV’s. We drank beers and watched the whole movie- just us and the bartender. Toward the movie’s end, we started getting pretty nervous because the other band was still not turning up and it was now past 8:00.

Adam: “Dave, how did this show come about again?”
Dave: “A band emailed us on Myspace and offered it to us,”
Adam: “How do we know them?”
Dave: “We don’t, it was purely random. I’d never heard of them before.”
Adam: “Did they say anything about when they’d be here?”
Dave: “No, I emailed them for show details and never heard back.”
Adam: “Have we really pissed anyone off lately, made them angry enough to construct this situation as an elaborate trap to make us feel like idiots?”
Dave: “I don’t know!”

Shortly after this exchange, the other band did show up, along with Adam’s parents, wife, sister w/ beau, and Dave’s fiancé. Also fleshing out the crowd was Total Hippy Comeback’s fans, consisting of two awesome guys that sat right in front and listened to our whole set and an AV Tech guy that had an old fashioned slide projector like my parents once used in their dining room. After much technical preparation, he projected some slides on a ceiling pipe during THC’s set. It was dank. We played, interrupted only by the audience needing to tiptoe between us to use the bathrooms. Then we loaded out. Then THC played.

Another interesting exchange, outside the club during a fresh air break while THC was playing:
Random pedestrian: “Ya’ll got a smoke I can bum?”
Dave and Bryan: “Sorry.”
RP: “I’m wasted, dog.”
D/B: “That’s good!”
RP: “How much is the cover?”
D/B: “Free, you should go in.”
RP: “Naw, I fi’n to go down to the gay clubs and make ‘em all buy me drinks.”
[long silence…]
RP: “Alright, y’all have a nice evening.”

After this, we stayed as long as we could through THC’s set, which was kind of fun- like a lo-fi Sonic Youth, and went home.

True Story.

Public Practice, part 1

A month or so ago, we decided to accept a few show offers that conventional logic would have suggested we reject. However, we’re not exactly a household name in Portland and we decided we could use a few dry runs with our new material before playing any shows of consequence. Here are the results so far.

The first was a day-after-Christmas show during a snow storm at Kelly’s Olympian. Kelly’s used to be a great place to play because it was always free at the door and packed with weird cocaine people that would ignore the bands for a while, but eventually come around with crazy eyes and tell you at length how they were going to join your religion. Pretty much just what a local band hopes for. That all changed with the club’s attempt to become a legitimate music venue- they bought the knife shop next door and turned it into their venue room, accessable only through a small door at the front of the bar. Now, all those cocaine people sit in the packed bar area with no idea that there are even bands playing, while the bands play to a room of significant others and parents. Even the sound guy, after making sure that all the instruments were way too loud, disappeared into the bar to drink.

Christmas morning, the day before our show which, incidentally, had been booked exclusively via gramatically poor text messages, we recieved a text from the booker informing us that he had neglected to book any other bands. This was just great- our only chance for a show on the day after a major holiday amidst bad weather was that the other bands would draw too, but now due to a lazy booking agent, there were no other bands. We had already invited people to the show, so we went to play anyway. We loaded the Hammond organ in, which really wasn’t too bad to move, and set up. As an instrumental band in a small room, we really didn’t even need to use the PA, but the soundguy had to look busy, so he made us blaringly loud. Adam asked about a strange feedback on his bass, and the response was “there is a subwoofer right under you.” By under you, he meant the stage.

When 9:30 rolled around, we played all of our songs for Adam’s sister and her friends, our old friend Ericka and her friends, and Dave’s fiance Kate and her coworker. Just as we were finishing up, one of those aforementioned cocaine people stumbled into the venue area and listened to our last song. “You’re done,” he asked with energy shooting out of his eyes, “what if I get all of my friends to come in here- will you play again? There will be at least twenty people.” This was awkward- there is nothing more lame as a band than to play your set twice to fill up time. No one at the club even cared, and while we were free to go, it seemed silly to waste the opportunity to reach a few new fans after hauling all of our gear downtown. So as our wild eyed friend made good on his promise and filled up the room with other cocaine people, we tried to play again. The sound guy had put on a Radiohead record and disappeared, so the cocaine guy went to find him. Grumbling that we had interupted his break, he came back in and we played a few songs again. The cocaine people had all gone back to the bar area when we started, so we embarrasingly repeated a few songs for our few people, packed up, and left the club.

True Story.

Some Holiday Portland Shows

The band will be playing a few low key shows this holiday season at some old Portland haunts: Kelly’s Olympian (Fri Dec 26), Satyricon on (Wed Jan 7th), Ash Street Saloon (Wed Jan 14th). We haven’t played Portland since last June and are looking forward to seeing all of our Portland friends again. God willing, Dave’s Hammond L111 will be venturing out of the garage for these shows- it’s a monstrous sound that is probably already subconsciously pissing of the respective sound engineers that will have to handle it in their live mixes. In addition to the six posted new songs, we’ve got another four or five to introduce that expand parabolicly on the new direction we’ve adopted. Happy Holidays, we hope to see you soon!

Bryan and Dave Journey to Eugene

MMW at the McDonald Theater, Eugene OR on Sat 11/15 (Daniel Temmesfeld photo, CC 2008)

The musical group Medeski Martin and Wood has caused upheaval in Kieskagato; their influence has been both a driving force in our movement away from pop music and a real-time tutorial in the fundamentals of blues and jazz improvisation. After the whole band went to see last year’s show in Portland with John Scofield, bassist Adam Schultz’ reaction was ‘you can do that, you can just play anything?’ It was a eureka moment and soon he was deeply immersed in theory-heavy bass lessons. Drummer Bryan Fairfield dove into Billy Martin’s catalog, which contains an array of diverse projects besides MMW, from Afro Cuban to Gamelan. The band has never been the same since.

This time around, for MMW’s Radiolarians 3 Tour, Bryan and Dave decided to see both the Portland and the Eugene shows. The Portland show, Friday 11/14 at the Aladdin Theater, was a pretty typical concert for MMW. The crowd was full of musicians and gearheads, lots of settled down former hippies, and a few hardcore jazz fans. The band was very engaging,  but the encore was the really interesting point in the show because drummer Billy Martin announced that one of his heros, Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell had just passed away in a Portland hotel (The Benson). His emotion was evident as he led the band into a heartfelt version of the Hendrix classic Crosstown Traffic. Following the show, Bryan and Gwen stood in line and met the band, getting a chance to personally discuss Billy Martin’s drum lesson book, which Bryan swears by.

The next day, Dave and Bryan drove south through the Willamette Valley to Eugene. Eugene is an enigmatic city in the sense that it is home to both a huge, well respected college and a huge illicit drug industry. Like many Portland bands, Kieskagato once assumed that since it was full of stoned hippies, Eugene would be a great place to play music. So, we started booking shows and making the drive down every month or two. Our big mistake, we conceded later, was not acknowledging the fact that the kind of hippies that live in Eugene can’t go out to bar shows because they feel the need to guard their pot plants with shotguns. Whether they would have liked our music or not we’ll never know; the only people that ever heard us were the other major Eugene contingent: the tweakers. Show after show, we’d play to a sparse room full of methamphetamine-addled twenty-somethings that looked like fifty-somethings, drinking Sparks while they played video poker. The really amazing thing was that the bookers at the bars didn’t seem to care that their rooms were empty. They’d always invite us back, promising to book us with a really popular local band but never quite getting that bill together. In the end, Kieskagato made a decision not to play Eugene anymore.

Early for the concert, we walked around Eugene’s downtown looking for a place to have a beer. This was where our past caught up with us: while we’d mentally condensed our Eugene experiences into a few miserable shows, we started seeing bar after bar that we’d played multiple shows at. Sitting in The Black Forest over pints and watching the lonely alcoholics watch the Ducks win, the memories seeped back into our heads.  We took inventory and realized that Kieskagato had played Sam Bond’s Garage, The Samurai Duck (many times), Cafe Paradiso (many times), The Black Forest (a regular monthly gig), and a house show. That means we made the 220 mile round trip at least 10 times in a few years time and had shut the whole experience out! What a lot of wasted time and gas!

The show itself was fantastic. We were right up front, leaning on the stage, and were not only treated to some incredible music (which we were better able to follow having heard it the night before), but also to the tremendous amusement of watching the band members react to the absolutely freakish crowd behaviors and attires. Some notable examples: an elderly man with some sort of military parade jacket and a long, wispy Merlin-like beard who was floating about the room like a ring of smoke; a man of probably 40 who looked like he was playing Jesus in a community theater production; a younger hippy in a crushed velvet hat sporting an acid-dealer beard, resting his elbows on the stage with his eyes closed and reacting to the music as though he were in an F16 simulator (this drew many concerned looks from Keyboard player John Medeski); a college age dread-locked kid that was jumping around like a man possessed and throwing what we’d assume to have been Suburban White-Kid Gang symbols on approximately every downbeat; and a big, tall, fat, ragged, pot grower-guy wearing a sweatsuit and all of his hair in a ponytail located directly on the crown of his head, cascading greasily in whichever direction the wind (of pot smoke and body odor) happened to blow.

We in Kieskagato can only hope that someday we too will have a fiercely devoted community of ‘alternative’ people attending our shows and providing us with windows from the stage into their lives.

Kieskagato unveils new, all instrumental incarnation

After retiring from public view last June and holing up in the garage to prepare and record a new block of songs in the all instrumental format, Kieskagato tested the waters of live performance for the first time this past weekend. We drove 200 miles east from Portland- through the Columbia River Gorge and out across the plains to the place where the old Oregon Trail descended out of the Blue Mountains onto the desert floor: Pendleton, OR. Pendleton has become known to many Portland bands as a great place to play; it is home to many supportive and enthusiastic music fans of all ages as well as some old friends of ours.

Having not yet played our new music for the public, we were a bit nervous about how things would go over. Kieskagato has gone through many phases of development over the years, but the jettisoning of vocals may be the most radical change yet. That said, what better place to put it all on the table than a bar full of drunken cowboys?

Well, the cowboys approved. The crowd was fantastic, turning the bar into a dance club within a few notes of the start of our set. We only had seven songs ready to perform, so things ran a bit short, but we had a great time playing and the energy level stayed high throughout the set. The band came away from this performance more eager than ever to continue working on new material. We’re looking to move away from the 40 minute set standard of the rock club environment and towards longer sets that draw from a much larger book of tunes and feature much more improvisation.