Day 19: Portland, OR
Nau mai
Yesterday we played in Portland, Oregon.
We were playing at the McIniminams Crystal Ballroom yesterday and that is where we all began our day. Lavonda rolled in and parked herself on a slightly canted street and with this new angle now affecting everyone’s beds it signalled that sleep time was over.
I looked up coffee shops on my phone and chose the one that had the largest number of food options, a spot that called itself Water Avenue Coffee but was actually located on Southwest Harvey Milk Street. What they lacked in sensible naming procedures they made up for with a solid drip coffee and a cheap grab and go menu from which I ordered the hearty banana nut oatmeal served with steamed milk.
There were a couple of activities happening concurrently yesterday morning, such is the life of a busy tour party with many active protocols in place. Jon and Liz headed off to do a radio session, copping the biggest workload from the unfortunate luck of playing the most portable instruments in the band.
Gabe and I headed to the headquarters of Caitlinbread effects, a manufacturer of guitar pedals that had their workshop and demo room just a few miles away on the other side of the river. I tried out and took home a few great effects pedals as well as receiving a tour of their manufacturing floor. Easily the highlight of this tour was the solder bath which if you have seen the movie Terminator 2: Judgement Day will remind you of the T-800 getting lowered into a pool of liquid metal, the PCB in this case descending with the same stoicism that Arnold Schwarzenegger expertly portrayed in this iconic piece of 1990s cinema.
In the afternoon we were all back at the McNninimans Crystal Ballroom setting up for our show, helped by a large and capable crew of stagehands and technicians. This was an iconic Portland venue with a hell of lot of history baked into the walls, both spiritually and in the many framed posters that adorned the backstage corridors, which we took the time to gaze upon wistfully. There were a few quirks to the hall that we enjoyed experiencing. Instead of putting it somewhere along the perfectly good short edge of the rough rectangle that made up this room the stage was placed in the corner – a spot which necessitates the creation of a triangle when you factor in the need for a straight line at the stage front.
The lighting was phenomenal. Warm sconces, marquee lights that highlighted the architectural features of the room, and of course the grand chandelier which was magnificent and also blocked a good part of the mezzanine floor from seeing the stage.
Maybe the most remarkable thing about this show was the floor of the room, a wooden surface that was incredibly bouncy and created some issues for certain members of our crew. While this sprung dance floor may have been the perfect thing for softening the footfalls of hundreds of dancers in the first half of the 20th century, the phenomenon of patrons attending rock concerts and jumping up and down while experiencing happiness created a destabilising effect that made it difficult for Gabe and Erin to operate their delicate technological equipment. They did a fine job of preventing their consoles from bouncing to the floor and I can only assume we sounded good and were lit extremely well on this evening at the McNimeninans Crystal Ballroom.