portland – Cowboy Junkies

8 Oct 2010 Tour Diary Bend, Cowboy Junkies, Grants Pass, portland, Tour Diary

Tour Diary – Bend, Portland and Grants Pass, OR (Oct 5 -7, 2010)

Bend 2

Bend, OR: It would be difficult to find a nicer town than Bend for a day off: lots of locally owned shops, good coffee, a brew pub on every corner and a beautiful river cutting through the town with a huge public park along its banks. We stayed at a very funky (in a good way) hotel…the building and compound once housed an old school and it has been converted with warmth, comfort and history in mind: a nice combination The many different bars and restaurants at the hotel seem to attract the locals, which is also a good thing. There seems to be a bit of money in this little enclave in Central Oregon. We had a sold out show tonight with a very receptive audience and we delivered. A very refreshing couple of days.

Portland, OR: It was a very full day in Portland, one of my favourite cities in the US. We arrived early in the morning, so Tim and I took the opportunity to head over to the Doug Fir restaurant for a very tasty breakfast. Jeff, Margo and I then headed downtown to KINK-FM for a live performance in their new, beautifully put together, performance space. Jeff and I then headed over to Powell’s, the greatest bookstore in the freakin’ world, where I kept a check on my impulses and successfully kept my bill well below $100. Then it was back to the Aladdin Theater for soundcheck and the show. It wasn’t sold-out tonight which is a little worrying because Portland has always been such a great town for us. Perhaps we have been through here a little too often in the past few years. In any case, those who did show up were in fine form and more than succeeded in holding up Portland’s rep as having some of the best audiences in the US. We had a very, very fun night.

Grant’s Pass, OR: We have definitely stayed in this town before but I don’t think we have actually played the town. After tonight I have a strong feeling that we’ll never play here again. A shockingly thin audience tonight. The numbers were kind of confounding to us and the promoter, but if the town itself is any indication, this area has been hit hard by the recession: a lot of empty windows on Main Street and way too many pawn shops, thrift stores and so-called antique stores, a sure sign that there are many people around here in desperate need of cash. It’s a beautiful area, though, with some spectacular white water rafting and hiking nearby and all sorts of other healthy, fun and dangerous things to do. Tonight was not a good night on-stage, despite performing a triple shot of Neil during the set….as the song says, ‘we tried to do our best but we could not”.

8 Sep 2010 Tour Dates Bellingham, Bend, Covington, Edmonds, Grants Pass, Napa, portland, San Francisco, Vancouver

September / October Tour Dates

Michael Timmins

We’ll be in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California in late September and early October. Come out and say hello to us in Bellingham, Edmonds and Covington, WA; Vancouver, BC; Bend, Portland and Grants Pass, OR; and Napa and San Francisco, CA.

20 Jul 2009 Tour Diary jacksonville, portland, saratoga, son volt

Tour Diary – Saratoga, CA – Jacksonville and Portland, OR (July 17, 18 and 19)

Michael Timmins

Sacramento, CA – Jacksonville and Portland, OR (July 17, 18 and 19)

Northern California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho; my favourite part of any west coast swing. I love this area of the country. Tonight we were at the Montalvo Arts Center on the outskirts of Saratoga. Our regular play in this area for the past decade has been the Mountain Winery, one of our favourite venues in the country, but they recently did an upgrade to their facility and added 750 new seats which made the venue a little bit too big for us. Fortunately the Montalvo Art Center is about as perfect a replacement as one could hope for. This is a beautiful outdoor venue. The building that now houses the art center was built as a private house in the early 1900’s by James Phelan, the youngest mayor in San Francisco’s history and a US Senator. It was the center of political and social life in Northern California. Phelan invited artists of all stripes to visit his home and to use it as a retreat to work on individual artistic projects but in an environment conducive to cross-discipline dialogue. On his death Phelan willed the villa and the 175 acres of property to become a public space dedicated to the development of art, literature, architecture and music…and so it is. It’s an incredible piece of land, set a few hundred feet above the city on the side of a hill populated by redwoods, spruce, cypress and many more that I couldn’t identify: a spectacular place….in some ways it’s even better than the Mountain Winery.

We had a good show tonight, I think. I didn’t personally have that good a time. I’ve lost my mojo, which can happen from time to time. So my feel for what is going on, on stage is heavily skewed by my own troubles. It’s a loss of touch, a loss of feel for ones instrument and an inability to feel the connection through the instrument to the other players on stage. When this state of being strikes, one has to put down ones head and gut it out, search for that performance that will lift you out of it, dig for your mojo.

It was a good size audience tonight, with a lot of enthusiasm. I thought Son Volt sounded excellent.

moutain

We’ve played the Brit Festival in Jacksonville three or four times in the past and it is always a very welcome stop. This area is a spectacular little piece of Oregonian paradise and this venue is about as beautiful as they come. The venue sits on the side of a hill just above the town, the stage facing up the hill to the audience who sits in amongst giant Ponderosa Pines. People come with their family and picnics and set up for an evening of music. We had a very good show; lots of energy from the crowd, which helped our own energy. I think I found my mojo. It was hiding in one of the travel cases, now I just need to coax it out.

Portland has for many years been one of our favourite cities to visit in North America (it might even be our favourite). Over the past two decades of coming here it has slowly grown and evolved but it seems to have evolved for the better and not lost that peculiar flavour that makes it such a good place to hang out. There is a popular bumper sticker in town that states, “Keep Portland Weird”, which kind of sums it up. The locals seem to know what they got, and aren’t about to let it go without a fight. Unfortunately our hotel was way the hell out of town and the gig (the Aladdin Theater) was also across the river from the downtown core, so there were no easy walking excursions available. Some of us weren’t going to be robbed of our Portland fix, so Al, Tim and I jumped in a cab and headed downtown. Tim and I scoured some of the finer instrument stores, made the pilgrimage to Powell’s (the best book store on the planet), bought a dozen doughnuts at Voodoo Doughnuts (one of the best doughnut makers west of the Doughnut Plant in NYC), stocked up on some See’s Candy lollipops (to appease the rabble back home) and called it a day. The gig tonight was awesome…and it’s all because of the audience: another reason that Portland is so high on our list, the audiences are amazing. This was our sixth show in six nights, our eleventh show in twelve nights, but the audience refused to let our energies flag. Their enthusiasm was infectious; they coaxed my mojo out of the travel case and back in my pocket where it belongs. It looked and sounded like Son Volt had an equally great time…they were full on rocking tonight. Tomorrow we have a much needed day off in Vancouver. I plan to do a whole lot of nothing.