Last weekend I played main stage with Dirty Martini at the NW Pride festival on Portland’s water front park. I arrived at the gig early, checked-in back stage and ended up shooting the breeze with several veteran NW musicians before our set. One theme that kept popping up during these chats was how much the price of gas was affecting touring plans. Several of these artists as well as artists they knew were canceling entire tours because the price at the pump plus the mileage didn’t pencil out.

So the mantra of late has been that since bands no longer make money on CD sales they must tour and sell merch to sustain themselves. Now it appears that even that logic is fatally flawed.

Weezer Hootenanny in Portland, exclusive video from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Portland’s local alternative radio station, KNRK 94.7, hosted Weezer’s Hootenanny at Oaks Park fairground. The station put out the call for 200 local musicians to turn up and perform with Weezer and be part of a live radio broadcast as well as be included on a limited edition CD that Weezer will compile from their west coast hootenanny jaunt. My Pampelmoose business partner Dave was able to get in early and watch as Weezer worked with all the various musicians as they rehearsed the songs.

I guess it’s been four or five years ago now but once upon a time I played with a very talented singer/songwriter/bass player named Lea Krueger. In fact she was my primary gig for several years as I had joined her band project, On a Llama, then continued to play with her when she signed with RCA records and became a solo artist. Towards the latter part of my tenure my compadres Al Toribio and Mike Walker joined the band which made for one of the most satisfying musical combinations I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. I’ve lost touch with Lea as she has been on an indefinite musical hiatus (at least as far as I know) but someone posted a few video’s from a show at our then regular haunt the White Eagle.

The song is called “My Heart’s a Liar” and judging from the video we’re playing it very early in our set. I always thought the audience “got it” when we played it towards the end of the night because the slow hypnotic groove and the epic chord changes seemed to resonate better when the band and audience had a few drinks in ‘em. That being said I think this version delivers.

While this is definitely more performance art than music Bryne does “play” the building. I’m so glad that things like this happen. There’s no real purpose to this project other than being interesting - which is so cool.

Here’s the email the Pampelmoose office got from the folks at The Filter:

1000 website bugs, 500 cups of tea and many sleepless nights later, The Filter is actually ready for the big unveiling. We had such a huge response to our private beta that we weren’t able to give everybody access to test the site in time, but we’d love you to log on now to see what we’ve been up to. It’s obviously still in beta, so we still want as much feedback as we can get - just go to the Support Forum to let us know what you think.

Don’t mean to keep the morbid theme going but we lost one of THE greats today.