Friday, January 13th, I released my latest disc with a group I play with known as the Portland Playboys. The record is called 'Early Sessions', and is a mix of Western Swing, Honky-Tonk and Hillbilly Boogie. I'm capitalizing all three of these genre's names because I have great respect for the heritage of all three and am grateful that there's room in the closet there somewhere for a guy like me to dress up and occasionally play the part of the 50's cowboy radio star, at least in my own mind.

I've gathered four of the best musicians I've ever played with in this group -- David Langenes and Keith Brush from the Stolen Sweets and Ian Miller and Rusty Blake from (insert any hot shit retro hillbilly band you care to think of HERE). These guys get it. They swing, they rock the house, they're in the pocket. They're nice. They play because they love it, and they have found a way to transmit this to everybody in the room like all true great musicians can.

We got together… [Read More]

A couple of months ago I had a chance to play loud rock music with Jody Bleyle again. It had been at least a decade, maybe more (unless you count the Crystal Ballroom thumb your nose at the new crowd show we did with Crackerbash, et al). Along with Brady Smith and Fred Nemo, we played in a group called Hazel back in the day. Sort of a pop punk band that swung like a trainwreck and often smashed itself to pieces. We made it maybe 5 or 6 years and 2 1/2 albums before the hangover was too harsh to deal with, and we quit. Brady went to NYC, Jody to LA, Fred and I stayed in PDX and observed the fallout.

Hazel was (in retrospect) one of those perfect old kinds of bands -- built in a garage, then wheeled out to the schoolyard where it actually flew once we got the motor started and figured out how the controls kind of worked. It brought us many experiences and allowed us to live a little bit. Our heroes were the Minutemen, Husker Du and the Wipers.

During the intervening… [Read More]