CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY MEANWHILE by E.B. Belew photo by M. Hirsch *And always the loud angry crowd mVery angry and very loud X ' % ; Law is We, /✓* £, j f S ' --'j <And always the soft idiot softly Me. J t " * * W.H. Auden . »B September I, 1939 ' > And it's all like ,fun. You know, like pushing somebody,' ' then you push back£ * punching somebody^ they punch */y ou\. [ back, and stu ff like* that. It 's not like^ bam bam bam A A , .■ EW wave or punk, they are bopping like pogo sticks and play-fighting close to stage. Angry young men and women, they are pushing, out-of-line, loud insults and laughter and loud loud music from every band. Not much red or green hair anymore, most is slicked and preened, black as a crow's head or a fluffier bleached-blonde spiking from nape to forehead, a few women in pageboys, a few men in ducktails. They wear lots o f black leather, neon colors in geometric patterns and spray pa in ted 't-shirts, beatle boots, and fifties ' make-believe. Dancing and bouncing they are hard to tell apart in the darkness o f a club or in the alleys outside, one belligerent face after another, bouncing and pushing in one over-populated overradiated group, yelling back at the bands; they will make you feel i f you fa ll under their dancing feet you're gone. But i f you isolate one face from another, i f you wait out the changing equipment between sets, someone will offer you a light fo r your cigarette and talk about the scene, all ages, anybody allowed. l) t t tR x s J U a v i d Corboy,a founder and current member o f Sado-Nation, played fo r several years in a San Francisco heavy metal band before coming to art school in Portland. He is a founder o f the Alternative Arts Association (AAA), the precursors o f new wave culture. Corboy: I played guitar alone, I wrote my own songs, I didn’t play with anybody. Then I saw a flyer one time on a lamppost in downtown, for the Dils or somebody like that. And I went to see a show that the Neoboys played at. I saw that and I said all right. That was in late ’77 or early ’78. I used to go and sit in the corners, you know, and watch it happen. I wanted to find out just how real things were, and I found it was a really honest type of scene going on. The problems were there, but it’s all within the bands themselves, they had a hard time keeping together and things like that, which is pretty normal. But there was also, I guess there was sort of a collective like thing, IINHUII you know? They’d get together and talk about what they should be doing, and I liked that idea. I heard about it after I got involved with John Shirley. We decided to form a band. The name Sado-Nation I’d made up a couple of months before that, and I was saving it for something. I guess we were going to do a show, just a one night deal to see how it went and we needed a name so I said well, I got this name that I’d like to use so we did it. David Propp was playing bass, Mark Sten playing drums, and they were just standing in, you know, just to play. There were no ideas about making a band. We did play for two or three shows after that; Mark Sten got out and I got another drummer. I wrote 95%, Shirley did a few songs that he wrote the lyrics for. The band went on. We were able to write songs together. Like this one song called “Giant Insects.” A couple of others, “ Johnny Paranoid,” which we did record eventually and put on the live l.p. And now I’m back to writing everything again. W w w J k l a r^ $t e n “ generally “involved” in most o f the new wave goings on. He was a drummer in the nowdefunct Bop Zombies and was the booker and can-do man at Clockwork Joe's. A board member o f AAA , he is currently helping to produce a 'collective ’ album o f the local scene. Stem ’77 was pretty much prehistory. That’s because punk hadn’t taken root in terms of actually generating bands in Portland in 1977; basically the first show was in March of ’78. That was preceeded by sort of a community meeting. That was really the organizational meeting for the Revenge era. It was a lot more free back then, but there were a couple of values, one of which was explicit and one of which was implicit. The explicit value was all ages, because there was no place for underage to play. Now the implicit value was that people should deal with the business decisions and that sort of thing on a common basis. That is, they should get together and decide, rather than working through outside promoters or some people doing it, off on their own. The first show grew out of that initial series of meetings. It wasn’t me, it was John Shirley. All through the second half of ’77 this was kind of open-ended. You had people like basically going punk. It finally seemed to hit a point in January where there was enough that he sort of just sent out the word to everybody at that point. It took Shirley to actually say OK, let’s have a meeting. That was musicians or potential musicians or just people who were interested. It was pretty open. Like the Tubes were a band that was involved at that pont and they’re not punk. A number of sort of peripheral underground art types were there initially but sort of fell off when things got focused. We staged the first show in the place that’s now Clockwork Joe’s. That was like a four or five band show. It was under different ownership at that point but that was the hall we rented. That’s why it’s odd to be back. I consider it the first show because it was like the actual new musicians and young musicians fielding the bands at that point and it was the first show that had more than one band. . . The ’78 period is like marked by this meeting thing. We continued to have meetings of whoever was a- round, and it was tough to hold shows during this period. We’d go into halls and that would be the end of it, you know. One show and we’d be out. Not because of damage but just because of the atmosphere. The time back then was much different, it was real underground at that point. We just couldn’t find places that would have us back. We also booked some major out-of-town bands, in terms of underground new wave. That would be the Creamers, the Dils, things at the New Arts Center. . This whole period culminated in the New Arts Center which was a club out on 43rd and Division, run by us for one month, because we couldn’t make the rent after that because at- tendence was so shitty. New Arts was a real active period in a way. It was interesting, the out-of-town bands were like the Avengers, Crime, the Weirdos, and the Offs, Screamers, the Zeros. the This was when punk really hit bottom. All across the world. It was like the month Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend, which was like the worst press punk ever got. I really don’t think it’s true that any press is good press because I think that had a big effect on everybody’s desire to go to shows—I mean, some curiosity got lost at that point. NEOBOYS ON RECORD J L h e Neoboys, one o f Portland's oldest punk /new wave bands, started as a group o f underagers who needed to find a place where they could play. They chose to be musicians, then taught themselves the necessary instruments and techniques. They have always been all women. The Neoboys are: KT & Kim Kincaid, Pat Baum and Meg H. KIM: Because you’re different, because you’re a new sound, then people think you have to be either new wave or punk, even if you don’t play four-chord rock, which punk, supposedly, is supposed to be. CSQ: Well why Portland then? KT: For a lot of reasons. Because of the AAA , and no money, and it’s a good place to get things done. Rent is cheap for a place to practice and work on songs. But like in the bigger cities— Pat: It seems like it’s a lot cheaper here and there’s a lot more resources you can tap into. Whereas in other cities, especially if you were to go where you were new, it would take a lot longer to get known. KT: It’s a lot easier here too. Because in other cities there’s a lot of competition between the bands. Like 45
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