1. After being out until past midnight on Tuesday night at Sam Bond Garage's Bluegrass Jam, I rested much of the morning and into the early afternoon before gassing up the Camry and heading out in the November rain to Portland for a benefit show for heart transplant recipient Jani March-Wright at the Alberta Rose Theater featuring Jam Bands from the 90s: Renegade Saints, Not Tough Mama, Everyone Orchestra, Calobo, Little Women, and Nine Days Wonder.
I arrived at the venue about an hour before the doors opened. I hadn't eaten lunch or dinner, so I stumbled about a half a block down Alberta Street to T. C. O'Leary's, a casual, cozy Irish pub, and ordered a bowl of seafood chowder and soda bread with a pint of Guiness.
2. The doors opened at five for the six o'clock show and I was one of the first ticket holders to enter the one time movie theater now transformed into a music venue that is the perfect size. It's big enough to hold the mighty sounds of jam band rock n' roll but small enough that no matter where one sits on the main floor, the musicians are easy to see. It's almost, not quite, intimate. Jeff joined me at about 7:30.
Heart transplant recipient Jani's son, Eli, who helped mastermind and organize this event, is a founding member of a juggling and spinning troupe called Circus Luminescence. Circus Luminescence opened the benefit with their, I'd say, vaudeville-ish juggling of illuminated pins and balls, spinning of multi-colored hoops, and a death defying segment of knife juggling. They accompanied their juggling and spinning with outrageous patter, deftly balancing difficult physical feats with verbal goofiness.
3. Circus Luminescence soon gave way to the bands.
Well over a month ago, when I read on Facebook that these 90s jam bands were reuniting for this benefit, I immediately knew I had to go to Portland to hear them, especially the two bands I was most familiar with from sweaty nights of exhilaration in the late 80s and early 90s at the WOW Hall and Good Times Tavern listening to Nine Days Wonder and Little Women. I once owned a Renegade Saints cd. I didn't know the other bands at all, but I trusted that if they shared a bill with the Saints, Nine Days, and Little Women, they were going to be awesome. These bands fully rewarded my trust.
I can't/won't run down the details of each band's performance.
Here's what I can say.
Listening to jam bands not only rock out on songs but open the songs up for the members to play exhilarating solos makes me joyous and fires up my adrenaline unlike anything else. The bands began playing at about 6:30 and for the next five hours, with short breaks to set up equipment, raffle off generously donated prizes, and for a return of Circus Luminescence, I was in seventh heaven as these awesome bands, all composed of superb musicians who played their hearts out, ripped through one song and one ecstatic jam after another.
There's nothing like it and nothing in life I enjoy in the same blissful way that I enjoy soaring guitar solos, rock solid drumming and bass playing, masterful keyboard riffs, and the driving powerful heartbeat of rock n roll, whether standard rock n roll, blues inflected rock n roll, reggae, or sounds and rhythms inspired by other cultures.
Tonight had it all.
I especially loved listening to the woman from Calobo who played keyboards and accordion in the Everyone Orchestra, her band Calabo, and in the quickly assembled line up of musicians from all of the bands who joined forces for a fiery encore, led by Little Women's Jerry Joseph, to close out the night.
I don't know the keyboard/accordian player's name, but every time she had a break out on either of her instruments it was thrilling -- especially because I love the accordion and did not know when I walked in the hall tonight that I would get to hear anyone, let alone this splendid musician, jam on the keyboard, bellows, and buttons of a squeezebox, of a strapped on Steinway.
Oh. By the way. I was not the only ecstatic member of the audience. Far from it. This benefit was like a jam band tent revival and the hall was filled with jam band lovers who were slain, quenched, filled, overcome, healed, and comforted by the spirit of home grown jam bad rock n roll. And we all answered the call to the altar of generosity to help buoy the spirit and ease the financial strain of Jani March-Wright.
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