Sunday, June 19, 2011

Last Days Of Pompeii

Grant Hart played the East End last night.  Grant Hart!  I'd never been to the East End, and it seems they cater a lot to hardcore and punk bands.  First, I want to describe the venue a bit.  It's been a number of things over the years, with a ton of '90s and early 2000s Portland bands having fond memories of the place under various monikers (The Rabbit Hole is the only one I can remember).  I expected a grungy, dirty hole along the lines of the (now defunct) most recent incarnation of Satyricon, Rotture, or the bathrooms at Backspace.  Instead, it was rather a nice little place.  A small upstairs room with really nice wood floors and vintage 1960s touches like Danish wood-framed mirrors and a padded-vinyl black portable bar (that's probably the dj stand).  Big open stairs take up a lot of the upstairs room, and go down to another room full of nice vintage furniture and candles on the table, plus a foosball table.  Not nearly enough bars have foosball.  A hallway heads off to the bathrooms (these are the as-expected incredibly gross and dingy ugliness, the only place that met that expectation), and strangely, passes a little vintage clothes-records-and-stuff shop that is only open 4 pm-midnight Thursday to Sunday (timed to coincide with when people are downstairs in the East End, I guess).  I bought a green and yellow polyester dress for a dollar, and if I had a few hundred dollars to spare I could have gone nuts there.  Finally, there's a small room downstairs with another bar that's the show venue, with an eight-inch-high platform as the stage.  Dark, but not dirty.  

Drunk Ladies opened up.  From down the hall in the vintage shop (man, they had some great stuff!), it didn't sound like my thing.  Heavy and maybe a little proggy.  Cheap Meats was next.  They were actually a lot of fun, all classic early shouty punk done pretty well (if appropriately sloppy).  Then, surprisingly, much of the crowd cleared out.  The 20 or so people that were left were there for the same reason I was.  Grant Hart is a fucking legend.  One of the two songwriters in Husker Du, and later made a little (very little) splash with his band Nova Mob, Grant's been pretty much just covering his Husker Du and Nova Mob songs, alone with a guitar, for twenty years or so.  Almost every song was familiar, and I haven't seen him in at least ten years.  I'm not sure I can even say he's a great musician or anything anymore, but the songs still make me all warm and happy.  He's a weird guy, I didn't understand any of his stage banter, but I sang along with all the songs.

No comments: