I feel so lucky to be living here in Portland. It’s the middle of August, and it’s absolutely beautiful. The Pacific Ocean is but a couple hours drive away. The Gorge is even less in the opposite direction. Amidst the beautiful landscapes is our little-big city, a community of DIY artists supporting each other. It is in this spirit that the PDX Pop Now! Festival was birthed. The festival began as a complaint registered on an online forum about how difficult it could be for a band to play a venue without being signed to a label. Since the post, the idea of setting up a festival celebrating Portland music has snowballed into this: a free, all-ages, three day event with emerging and established acts within the area, and a double CD compilation, featuring acts such as Sleater-Keany, The Thermals, and The Decemberists.
In its second year, PDX Pop Now! boasted a line-up of 46 of some of the best bands in Portland. Attending the event can be dizzying in the sense that one begins to realize how much talent exists in this little city. The duo Nice Nice completely blew my mind. The Roots-like hip-hop act Quivah reminded me how much I like hip-hop, and how long it’s been since I went to a hip-hop show. Wet Confetti rocketed into the Portland limelight by playing the festival last year, and though they encountered a snag on their set this year (a crowd of unruly teenagers bum-rushed the stage to express their, um, “unique” rage towards what they erroneously labeled as emo), their star will continue to burn brighter.
Despite everything, the festival in itself felt like a gigantic hug from the community. The people vote for the bands they want to see, and the bands are treated like gods (they gave the members of each band five-minute massages, among other perks). The coolest thing I witnessed emerged in the form of the married rock couples bringing in their children to see the show (featuring an adorable little girl wearing an “I Heart Rockstars” T-shit).
I spoke to Greg Borenstein and Mike Deresh, a couple of the organizers of PDX Pop Now to get their take on the festival as well as a few of the acts that played. Mike (whose band Tea For Julie played last year’s fest) headed artist relations and hospitality, while Greg handled sponsorship.
What is PDX Pop Now!?
Mike: It is a music festival and a double CD compilation that is completely Portland-centric and is a “for the people, from the people” event. The idea is to celebrate the Portland music scene and all the great talent here to give the smaller bands a chance to be linked up with the bigger bands. The main goal is that all year round, you’d hope that more people are out at all these great bands’ shows, to generate excitement once a year, and give everyone a chance to be collectively heard without coming from some press source or a record label. It’s really just done for the love of it all. The idea is for the festival to be free, all-ages, and a safe fun environment for everyone. The styles of music to come, and celebrate everything Portland has to offer.
So what was its inception?
Mike: Originally, Rachel Bloom from The Decemberists (a member of the PDX Pop mailing list, a forum for people to do everything from listing gear they’re selling, to look for shows together) was out on tour with the band and wrote an email to the list basically commenting that the rest of the country seemed to know how cool Portland was, and how much great stuff was going on here. She wished Portland knew how great it was, and wished they celebrated themselves a little more.
So, that, and a combination of these females that were going around talking about a musical festival they used to have (The Ames Festival), which was very small in its scope, not nearly as big in breadth of depth as PDX Pop Now. Everyone was kind of like “yeah, it would be really cool if there was a festival that wasn’t scattered all over town.” A lot of the weeklies, when they put on festivals, its mostly record labels that have their showcases, and there are very few slots for local bands to hope to have a chance to play if they’re not on a label.
Greg: Other music festivals are entirely chosen by music professionals and the weeklies. A lot of inside politics with other labels. This festival is more directly by the bands, and what we want to hear. It’s a little more open and democratic.
Mike: So we were like “wouldn’t it be cool to have a festival that kind of celebrated everything that was going on and raise people’s awareness and say ‘Hey look at all these amazing bands in town right now.’” Everyone knows individually, but when they see the list collectively, all of a sudden they’re all “Wow, I guess we really have something going on here.”
Greg: There were a bunch of bands on our compilation and at the festival last year that got a better chance to get a bigger audience, and that’s a really exciting thing to see. Some bands like Wet Confetti and TalkDemonik played the festival and were only a little known last year. Then they came back having had a great year full of success. I like to think the festival played a little part in that. Other festivals, you have to be of relatively high status to get a chance to play.
Mike: The CD comp was actually an afterthought that came up later down the road, and became a vehicle to help support putting the festival on. Last year we got a ton of sponsorship all around. The whole community just came together and thought it was a great idea, and made it happen for us.
So how are the bands selected?
Greg: We do a voting system online to the public. I think we received 6,500 votes online. We do our best to work in the bands people want to see, then we try to work in some smaller bands, and some genres that don’t have the same size following. We got 46 bands this year.
Mike: It’s a combination. The voting is held open for a full month to let the public’s voices be heard. Of course, some bands are more internet savvy than others, and have more of an internet fan base. The ballot boxes were there as efforts to balance that out. Of course some people have family back in Oklahoma, and send it out to all their family. You can tell where the votes come from, so we use that as a guide to work by.
Part of it is curated. The bigger bands we assume people want, so, we try to start before the voting even goes online so we can actually get them. Their agents and labels book them out so far in advance. It’s really a combination of using the voting as a handbook and a little bit of curation in making sure that other genres are represented so that it’s not just indie rock. We would look at who are the vote getters of hip-hop. They weren’t necessarily the highest vote-getters of all, but in their genre, they were. So we try to look at everything to make it a well-rounded festival, and hopefully expose people to some other bands they haven’t heard already.
Greg: The democratic aspect lets in smaller bands, and maybe people won’t like all of them, but there might be some hidden gems.
How will this year’s festival differ from last year?
Mike: A lot more help this year. We had a huge turnout of volunteers, and that’s going to take a lot of weight off of us, so that all the hard work we’ve put in over the last seven months, we can actually somewhat sit back and enjoy ourselves more (laughs).
We tried not to fix what wasn’t broken in a lot of ways. We kept the same venue, and the same structure of how things were going to flow. One big difference is the bands playing, in that there was a huge effort to have a very high turnover rate. Really, there are only a handful of repeat performers from last year. We do think about the criticisms we’ll get in advance. One of those was “Oh, it’s the same bands as last year. I guess if you’re in you’re in, and if you’re friends with the organizers, you’d be in,” which wasn’t true at all. We went out of our way to book an entirely different group of bands from last year, which shows how much talent there is in Portland.
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