Still Unwinding

It’s just over a month since re-living the glory days of 1994 at Portland’s Revolution Hall. The show was billed as Unwound playing their 1994 album New Plastic Ideas. That was reason enough to go to the show, and I was expecting it to just be Unwound as was the case last year during their first tour in over  two decades at the Wiltern Theatre. I was more than pleasantly surprised to discover that this show had a three-band bill: Clikitat Ikatowi, Steel Pole Bath Tub, and then the great Unwound, this could have been a show at LA’s classic post-punk club Jabberjaw back in the day. Learning the other bands were on the bill just a couple of days before the show built up my anticipation that much more—and I was already fired up.

The skating rink is hopping at the abandoned Lloyed Center in Portland, Oregon

One of the things that really struck me about Portland is the degree to which this hometown* band seemed to be the center of the universe. On the morning of the Unwound show my good friend and die-hard Portlander, Zach Davis, took me to the Lloyd Center, which was something out of Dawn of the Dead—all the way down to the zombie-filled ice rink. The Lloyd Center is an all but abandoned Mall smack in the center of the city which is currently home to low-rent or transient shops that are very much inline with the alternative magic that makes Portland so wonderful. In fact, we ended up there because Zach was interested in the comic swap happening in a vacated H&M—I got more than a few choice VHS tapes at that same exchange. After that, while walking around this abandoned mall, we came across a pop-up record shop that heavily featured Unwound vinyl, cassette tapes, shirts, and other paraphernalia. It was like walking into an alternative universe, going from a world where no one ever heard of this Pacific North West band I’ve idolized for decades to entering a store in the mall that is dedicated to them, as if they were the post-punk Taylor Swift. It’s hard to fully wrap your head around how Portland can make your marginal, alternative world seen central and that much more exciting as a result.

The Movie Madness Van in Portland, the support vehicle for the Movie Madness Video Store that is out of this world.

This helps provide a bit of context of how the build-up for the show was fueled by the environment. This was a hometown band, and Portland honored that fact in ways that were both surprising and admirable. But the Rose City did not stop there, and if you’ve read this blog for any period of time you know I’ve re-created an old video store in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and more recently migrated that concept to the far-removed frontier of American pop culture in Trento, Italy. So VHS and video stores are near and dear to my heart. As it turns out, the Saturday of the Unwound concert just happened to be International Independent Video Store day and Portland was celebrating—you just can’t make this shit up!

Saturday October 19th is Independent Video Store Day

To celebrate the day Zach took me to Movie Madness: “Portland’s Landmark Video Store Since 1991.” Now this is a video store, with +90,000 titles with everything from DVDs to Blu-rays to the venerable VHS.

Another view of the Movie Madness Van

The store not only has a ton of videos for rent, but it’s also a movie prop museum with everything from Orson Welles’s Rosebud to Ray Harryhausen models to one of the ears from Blue Velvet.

Orson Welles’s Rosebud from Citizen Kane

Ray Harryhausen models from 20 Million Miles to Earth and Clash of the Titans

The ear from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet

Unlike Reclaim Video, which had just a smattering of VHS offerings and was more a conceptual art piece than operating video store, Movie Madness was alive. The store was full of people, prices were reasonable, and the selection was exquisite. It’s probably preposterous to dream of a world where video stores become the norm again, but that Saturday in Portland at Movie Madness dreams came true.

Rental prices at Movie Madness (including late fees)

As the afternoon turned to evening, the main event of the day was closing in in the form of a full blown time warp to 1994.

Unwound at Revolution Hall (10/19)

The show was amazing, one band better than the next. Clikitat Ikatowi’s drummer was the centerpiece of that band back in the day, and Mario Rubalcaba did not disappoint—he was a total beast on the drums. Up next was Steel Pole Bath Tub, a band I’d seen live decades before at Jabberjaw, and I had a sense this lesser known experimental art quartet would surprise the room—and that’s exactly what happened. They rocked that venue something fierce, which had me wondering for a bit whether they might not end up being the real headliners. Those doubts were soon answered when Unwound came on stage and delivered an hour and change of pure, unadulterated mid-90s, angst-filled noise. Beyond the album New Plastic Ideas, the voyage back to 1994 was epitomized by the single “Broken E Strings” off Jabberjaw’s compilation album Good to the Last Drop:

Portland had shown up for Unwound, and then Unwound demonstrated why. 1994 was a very good year.

__________________________________________________

*They’re more accurately from Olympia, Washington—or Tumwater if we want to get even more precise.