(written September 18, 2019)
A while ago I wrote a post titled “The Gospel According To Mike,” in which I wrote about my regular open mic in Hollywood: The Pig N’ Whistle. Now that I’ve lived in Portland for over two years (okay fine, Beaverton for most of it) I think it’s damn-well time I wrote about an open mic here.
First off, let me say that I’ve enjoyed Portland’s music scene significantly more than that of LA. And before you cite the southern Californian paradise’s benevolent creation of the sound waves of The Byrds, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, The Beach Boys, The Mamas & Papas, or whomever else as examples of why the City of Angels is the greatest thing to happen to rock music since the British Invasion, allow me to explain.
From what I gathered during my time living there, there are two types of open mics in LA: those in Hollywood and those everywhere else. My resident mic was one of the former, marked by an attendance half-composed of young, ambitious songwriters ready to make their big break and the other half old, washed-up rockers long-passed their own. That mix made for a lotta talent and a lotta weird.
Outside Hollywood, the choice was between the trendy new places that get flooded by the most recent transplants looking to make a name for themselves and the long-established venues: the Canter’s and the like, whose clientele are professional drinkers and where being told when you’re up is as big a favor as you’re gonna get from the tenured and disinterested host.
Not the case in Portland.
Portland’s open mics—or the ones worth playing—all exist on the east side of the river. Each main street running laterally, eastward from the Willamette has their own. On Hawthorne it’s the Ranger Station. On Belmont it’s The Nest. Glisan has the Laurelthirst. Slim’s is in St. John’s. Then there's Mississippi... All these options mean you can hit a mic every night of the week if you’re so inclined (and presumably unemployed).
Each mic has its own unique attributes. The Laurelthirst encourages songwriting by giving a writing prompt every week and allowing performers to play an additional song in their set if it was written to the previous topic. The Eastburn keeps its performers there supporting each other all night by pulling names from a hat, so even if you get there early to sign up, you might not get up to play til midnight. The Nest only allows originals, and during the summer, you can play those originals while sweating beer out of your ass in the 90° attic that is their mic room.
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But on this night, at this writing, as I wipe the top of my third PBR with a paint-stained shirt, I write about the Eastburn open mic, where I performed a few hours ago. Their rules are pretty standard: two songs per performer, sign up at six o'clock, randomized order kicks off at seven. I was running late so my friend Marcus Angeloni, with whom I'll share a bill tomorrow night at the Eastside Bar & Grill, put my name down on the list. (I usually hate it when people do that. It was hypocritical of me, but I’d been bumped off the list from absentee sign-ups before, so I figured it was my turn to be the dick. That’s how karma works, right?) Besides, the order gets shuffled anyway.
I was number seven on the list and Marcus was eight. Enough time for a beer, an order of chicken tenders, and a smoke outside. As always, the performers before and after me were inspiring. Fingerpicking folk singers, drunken poets, cowboys, jokers, smokers, and midnight tokers.
Like usual, I didn’t decide what I was going to play until I was adjusting the height of the mic stand. I went with the first and second real songs I’d written: “Fuck This Song” and “San Francisco” respectively. Each song has a great story, which I forgot to tell, but I did manage to remember to plug tomorrow's show.
Cody Ryan Lutz—another songwriter who will share the stage with Marcus and myself—went up after me and picked an original ballad that wouldn’t've felt out of place on Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks. His fingers danced across the strings like a spider’s legs spinning her doomed prey in a silken coffin. I’d seen him play once before, and once again I marveled at the precision of his thumb. And he didn’t use a thumbpick either—the guy’s nail hangs over his thumb by half an inch!
Later David McIntyre took the mic. A veteran of the spoken word here. He walked up with a confidence earned by countless readings (and bought for $2-off on Whiskey Wednesday). His shirt read “FEAR THE POET” and his faded jeans were sagging in the back. He read two poems. One was about a bitch, the other about an angel. The two sides of love. As elegant as Bukowski.
As each of the talented souls in the room took their turn on the stage, sitting quietly, front and center, was Simran. Also known as “Slow Camera Paparazzi,” he attends open mics around town and for the barely 10 minutes each performer is on stage, he will paint their portrait on a plastic CD case and then give them out for free. I’ve watched Simran paint before (and am even the proud owner of one of his works) so I knew the privilege we were all getting.
Ya know how in the movie "Midnight in Paris" it shows Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Cole Porter hanging out together, and you're amazed of that concentration of artistic talent that existed in one place in time? Well that’s how the basement of the Eastburn Public House was tonight. Poets, singers, painters, drinkers, dreamers, all spending a weeknight out, howling at the moon, defying sleep to enjoy the creations of the city’s insomniac artists, hoping to get enough inspiration to write something new for next week.
A flame-haired woman stood next to me at the bar, waiting to place her order. She was the poet David McIntyre’s girlfriend, Red. She complimented my set (and my sideburns) and offered to buy my next beer. I said thanks and she ordered David’s whiskey and two PBRs, we cheers’d, and she returned to her seat.
Taking her place at the bar, Simran came over and handed me his work of art. Other than a general care to avoid the wet paint on the edges of the CD case, he gave me the piece with the nonchalance of the bartender handing me the billfold. But looking down at the thick, vibrant brushstrokes, seeing me (and my sideburns) and my flannel and my sunburst guitar and the red wall behind the mic stand…
I offered to thank Simran by buying him a beer. He said he still had plenty of his first pint left. No time to drink when you're painting, I suppose. I looked down again at my portrait. The beer told me to test how dry the paint was and I ended up with the palette recreated on my palm. I was wearing my nice jeans so I wiped my hand across my shirt. It then occurred to me that I carry a handkerchief in my back-left pocket every day for just such occasions. But again, the beer failed to remind me of that.
So now, as I wipe the top of my fourth PBR with a paint-stained shirt, I’m still basking in the afterglow of the open mic—that confounding amalgamation of talent. It’s the reason why you don’t mind getting drawn for the midnight slot on a Wednesday night. It’s the reason I’m still going out to open mics after over two years living here. It’s the reason I felt so inspired when I got home tonight, I wrote the first new addition to this “blog” thing I’ve written in—holy shit, two years??—yup, two years...