On the last day of May, the second annual Porchanga took place on a porch in Port Orford. The event was named by host and performer Heather Carpenter – a play on pachanga, the latin American term for a lively party with dancing, music, and jubilation.
With minimal surprise, the day turned out to be extremely windy. The curtain we’d planned to draw between sets proved impossible. The balloon decorations and tapestries had to be nailed to the porch and nailed again as the party went on. Setup was tedious and time-consuming, complicated by what we eventually diagnosed as dirty power on the east side outlet – whose surges sent a loud pop through the monitors and main PA speakers at random spaced out intervals. After three rounds of redistributing power we finally abandoned those outlets altogether. Close to an hour later than we’d hoped, everything was stable and the show could begin.
Porchanga was well attended. Inside the house people chatted and looked out to the music through a large window. On the porch itself a handful of seats offered the most direct listening experience. Down the steps a long potluck table held everything from baked goods to salads, fresh fruit, junk food, and a grill set up with meat and fresh tortillas being made from scratch. Further out, lawn chairs, blankets, and dozens of people standing and conversing and watching from a distance. Dogs and children running in the yard and jumping on the trampoline. I had no appetite through the windy setup and technical problem-solving, but I stashed a couple of fresh baked goodies for later – and by the time I’d finished playing hours later and my appetite returned, only fresh fruit and cabbage salad remained. I ate several small plates of both standing by the fire pit and listening to Pigasus Trio close out the night.
Heather and I have been putting on events together for a few years now. Beyond our many performances together with the band Dry Spell, Heather and our bandmate Veronica Rockstar DeWitt envisioned and orchestrated Minimal Carnival – an annual one-day festival we put on in Port Orford in 2023 and 2024. We’ve hosted other house shows and events together at several locations over the years. In a sense Porchanga is a kind of mini Minimal Carnival – more intimate, centered on her porch. Both Minimal Carnival and Dry Spell deserve their own entries and will get them in due time.
Theater
Last year I was hired to shoot some performances at the Rogue Playhouse in Gold Beach, home of the Ellensburg Theater Company. I have been involved with productions at the theater since 2018, taking on various roles from providing sound and lighting to performing as a live musician and providing live foley and music during a series of radio plays. I’ve also recorded and produced radio adverts, shot photos and videos, and even hosted a Halloween film festival one year. For a couple of years before the pandemic we began hosting a regular open mic and jam night on Wednesdays, which became quite a lively event with a dedicated group of musicians and music lovers showing up week after week. Musicians would lineup on stage in a semicircle, passing the opportunity to lead a song one after another with everybody invited to join in as they liked. I spent many nights playing guitar – electric, acoustic or nylon – banjo, electric bass, and even started picking up upright bass under the tutelage of a great local musician Steve Boyer, who would bust out the craziest Balkan and Eastern European jams on his accordion. It was also the place where I first met Scott McTaggart which lead to the formation of The Planet Of. It was a great time while it lasted – but like many things, it ended when the pandemic began.
I still remain involved with the theater occasionally. Last fall I was setting up to capture video and record the audio of their latest production when Laura Barsalou, who was working stage crew during the play, sat at the piano and played some tasty jams. We got to talking and I learned that she is now the sole music teacher in the Gold Beach school district, single-handedly running the music program between two schools. We exchanged info and kept in touch about collaborating at some point. It had been many months since I shared some of my most recent demos and invited her to help develop them – she expressed great enthusiasm but in the winter months when I expected to be home locked away in stormy weather working in the studio, we instead had the driest North American winter season on record and I spent half of it traveling between California and Oregon. The anticipated storms never came. Come May, Porchanga was on the horizon and I reached out asking if she’d like to perform on Heather’s porch. And so our musical collaboration began.
I love performing with others. Most performances I’ve done in my life have been in the context of a band and whatever the gig I love to lock in and connect with those I share the stage with – something I don’t get to experience when playing solo. Solo playing is a much more vulnerable and awkward experience for me, something I’m still trying to understand on a deeper level and build confidence in. It’s so much easier to perform when you can rely on those beside you, listen and communicate with them, go wherever the music takes you together.
One of the largest demotivating factors for performing with a band is simple logistics. Coordinating schedules involves people with different lifestyles, different obligations, different geographical locations. Rehearsing means finding a day and time where everyone can reasonably travel to the same location for long enough to make some progress. Most bands I’ve played with push for once a week rehearsals of no more than a few hours – enough to get some material together and get to know each other for a performance or recording, but hardly enough to go deeper, to build substantially more material. Many bands I’ve played with have fallen into the trap of putting together a bare minimum of material to fill the expected playtime and once that time is filled the gigs get booked and any rehearsals become more about keeping the ship shape than sailing into new waters. I grow fatigued playing the same material all the time. I want to play new songs. I want to take different approaches. I want to experiment. I want to take the same songs and mix them all up. I want every show to be a new experience, an opportunity to try something different.
For this I’ve been greatly appreciating the projects and performances we’ve been putting together with Ben, Ryan, and Jeff. None of us are precious about a particular branding or style and we’re happy to entertain any idea that comes into the mix. But even then we’re lucky if we can get together once a week. Jeff now has three boys under the age of five. I find myself getting quite busy as the weeks go around, often away traveling or spending time at my alternate home base across the Oregon/California border.
There’s also my own motivation around pulling together and maintaining a regular project. The difficulty is in reaching out – whether I feel like I might be bothering somebody, or I don’t feel ready or confident enough in the material or the vision, or I just don’t know when I’ll have the time or if the person will even enjoy playing together. I recognize that a lot of the hesitations I have around reaching out and pulling a band together are rooted in my own head. Yet I feel best when I play with others and what consistently pulls me out of these thoughts is playing with the right people. People that are motivated and excited to play make all these worries wash away. I’ve been fortunate and grateful for those I’ve been able to play with over the years.
Putting It Together, Together
I don’t look at any instance of a song as being the definitive version. I look at each of my songs as having infinite potential for reinterpretation – different arrangements, different stylistic choices, changes to form, instrumentation, tempo, dynamics. Playing with a band presents an opportunity to take a song to a new place and invite input from the other musicians involved. I will provide demo recordings when presenting a new song, but with that said I take a pretty open approach when it actually comes to putting a piece together. The best experience playing with others comes when everybody is contributing ideas, following their own instincts about what to play and when. I prefer for the musicians I play with to follow their own ear and imagination, to feel comfortable making suggestions, and I’m always willing to try things out. When I have a new idea I will always ask for their feedback and trust their instincts. I don’t believe my ideas are best simply because it’s my song. There will be times where I’ll request a specific approach or specific rhythm/melody, but in general the best collaboration comes when each musician gets to inject their own spirit into the performance. It gives that particular performance and arrangement a unique identity that comes from all of us, not just one person.
Working through each song with Laura brought the opportunity to explore the harmony written within each piece and explore potential for vocal harmonies, more interesting textures between guitar and keyboard parts. I relied on her and the rest of the band for key decisions rather than having everyone learn the recorded parts to play them as recorded. There was a lot of discussion about possibilities and approach before trying different things out and seeing what worked best. Together with Laura we took a demo like Sweetheart, which starts full on with guitars, bass, and drums, and came up with a new form which introduced elements gradually between sections – making it entirely through the first verse and pre-chorus with just the two of us before everything locked in for the second verse.
The logistics of rehearsing with four people across different schedules meant we had to be strategic. A series of one on one rehearsals with Laura and I laying the foundation, a single rehearsal with myself, Ben, and Ryan, another with myself, Laura, and Ryan, and finally the week of Porchanga, our first and last rehearsal as the full four piece band.
The performance opened with Laura performing a piece by Joe Hisaishi, composed for the Studio Ghibli film Howl’s Moving Castle. It was a natural opener given that Sweetheart, the first song of our set, was itself inspired by that film – about wizards and witches, curses, chosen family, war and love. I thought it could be nice to start with a bit of fantasy before moving into more grounded territory.
One of the things I was most excited about for the performance was a blues vamp I’d envisioned as connective tissue between songs. Rather than filling the transitions between songs with awkward silence, tuning, and pedal fiddling, we would return to a repeating riff that held everything together. It worked exceptionally well even beyond my expectations. Although the vamp was initially based on one chord, during the one and only full band rehearsal as we jammed on it I started to superimpose an instrumental piece I know from the great Big Bill Broonzy called Hey Hey – which introduces the IV and V chord for a proper blues form. People were dancing and reacting each time we went back to it. It became a sort of refrain that people came to expect, almost like the experience of playing a song that everyone knows. There was a familiarity and excitement about it. At one point we went to the vamp quickly and stopped, and our friend Yana from Rogue Strings who had been dancing exclaimed “god damnit Eric!” I was sorry to interrupt her dancing but found it hilarious. Another friend asked me the following week what the story was with that little vamp we kept playing.
Excluding the vamps the setlist was as follows:
Sweetheart
Only Murder
Perfect Time
Another Day Another Dime
The Vortex
Our Golden Days Have Passed
This particular set of songs came about in a single night of playing. I didn’t pull up a list or put much thought into the order before diving in. Instead I began with Sweetheart and moved from one song to the next following instinct, playing whatever felt right next. A progression began to reveal itself between songs, beginning with themes of fantasy and love before moving into social tensions and fear, through grief, acceptance, and resignation. In hindsight these may have been heavier themes than appropriate for a party – but they represented the emotions I was going through at the time.
Only Murder was written in the wake of a series of high profile murders that dominated the talk of the internet over the course of several months last year. I know I wasn’t the only one experiencing the phenomenon of opening up Instagram or Facebook and seeing footage of people getting shot – more and more angles released and shared and scrutinized. Something deeply upsetting about it not only for the sheer violence but for something voyeuristic about witnessing somebody’s final moments, a stranger, and sharing in this as some kind of overnight cultural phenomenon. People watching, analyzing, making judgments, sharing opinions, arguing over the right and wrong of a person getting murdered. Turning murder into political talking points and as I write in the song into fuel for our agendas. Not the ideal subject for festive jubilations perhaps – but man I been feeling it.
Perfect Time and Our Golden Days Have Passed both have full entries written around them. Another Day Another Dime and The Vortex will get their own entries in due time.
There were quite a few moments of improvisation throughout the performance. Some of the songs relied on it entirely. I encouraged Ryan to play very busy bass parts throughout Another Day Another Dime. Laura was encouraged to improvise during pretty much every instrumental break in each song, taking most of the leads.
The set flew by. We all agreed by the end that it went much better than we were expecting and better than it had during rehearsal – there was at least one song we never actually managed to play through in its entirety, only discussing song form and making decisions about parts. Ben expressed that he was happy with the performance and happy to hear the songs sounding more like songs and less like rough sketches or ideas. I couldn’t agree more. There were moments that were rough around the edges and I can’t say I was fully content with my own vocal performance – I couldn’t hear myself too well by the time I came to play and with all the delays I wasn’t going to put more time into dialing that in. But it went well.
There is always a natural high that follows a good performance – a sense of excitement, even euphoria, that can last for hours and make it difficult to get to sleep. I often go home after a show and stay up late feeling inspired to write, to play, to dream. The decompression after performing is like an essential part of the ritual – chatting with friends and bandmates, getting props and feedback from the audience, and inevitably the least glamorous part – tearing down gear.
In the case of Porchanga we had no time for any of that. We hopped straight into swapping out gear and places for the Shred band. After a little switcheroo of Ryan heading over to guitar, myself to bass, Ben keeping his seat on drums, and Laura heading off into the crowd to watch us play many more notes, we got set up and started playing. This was only the second performance of this particular project but our set had doubled since the first and we played a solid 40 minutes of guitar instrumentals. There were a few guitar nerds in the crowd but a lot of the attendees weren’t familiar with this type of instrumental rock. The reactions surpassed any expectation I might have had. People were impressed and entertained by the musicality and coordination involved – not easy pieces to pull off, especially not with the wind still blowing hard after several hours and having already played one full set. Cold fingers and all, we powered through and pulled it off.
By the time we finished and packed down it was Pigasus Trio’s turn to close out the night. I grabbed a plate of whatever was left at the potluck table and stood by the fire pit while they ripped. It was a good night.
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