Music

Bring on the night. Nightlife in Bend is peppered throughout the downtown area (and a few, but not many non-downtown locales) but for whatever reason, it's on the fringe of downtown that live music is taking hold. On Saturday, April 26, in only a matter of a block, or maybe a block and quarter, there were four venues, with four different musical acts all playing simultaneously. All four joints were pouring beers, and all four were pretty much packed.
 
As is standard on a Saturday night, the Domino Room was bumping. It wasn't a national touring act rocking the stage but rather Bend's own hip-hop super group, Person People. While the rumors we reported of Talib Kweli and KRS-One appearing on PP's new album turned out to be unfounded, it seems that the seven hip-hoppers and their live band don't need the assistance of rap legends to find greatness.

Mo’ Betta Blues. There are few artists who just keep coming back to Central Oregon, eventually emerging as local favorites, even if the musician already has all the national and international fame and respect of which he or she could dream. While it's understandable that big-name acts with big reputations and discographies would pull the 40-foot tour bus off of I-5 long enough to pack 5,000 sun burned, grass-stained fans into the Les Schwab Amphitheater, well-recognized names are also returning to Bend to pack the Tower, or even the Sisters High School auditorium, as in the case of blues man Keb' Mo'.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Dig Lazarus Dig!!!
Mute Records
If I'm stumbling out of 7B (a quintessential drinking hole) and making my way down Avenue B, it's a record like Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! that flows through my head. The latest from Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds seems to bring me to that place - New York City. It opens with a drunken melody reminiscent of David Johansen circa 1973, closes with the Lou Reed inspired "More News From Nowhere," and in between travels across several sounds that are so Manhattan you can almost smell the street.

Not even mega fame can keep the jeans intact.The West Coast leg of KT Tunstall's current tour takes her to historic music halls like the cavernous confines of Los Angeles' Wiltern Theater, the fabled stage of San Francisco's Warfield, and the supposedly haunted Moore Theare in Seattle. Oh yeah, and she's also coming to Bend to play the less than 500 seats of the Tower Theatre.
 
Tunstall, of MTV and VH1 fame, is one of the most commercially popular acts to grace the theatre's stage in recent memory. The Scottish folk-rocker rocketed to fame in the last three years with mega hits like the thumping power folk standard "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree," as well as the girl-power fueled sing-a-long "Suddenly I See." Last fall, she released Drastic Fantastic, a record that proves Tunstall isn't the flash-in-the-pan popper that some may have written her off as.

Minus the bear brings their invisible trampoline sideshow to Bend.In the four or so years that I've been listening to Minus the Bear, I've always envisioned them as wearing white lab coats, all the time. On stage, in the studio, eating a grilled cheese sandwich - always in the white lab coats.
 
The Seattle band is often considered one of the premiere "experimental" rock bands in the U.S., which is the tag that first caught my attention, and also instilled the lab coat image into my brain. Minus the Bear bassist Cory Murchy doesn't wear a lab coat, or goggles, and, like the other four members of his band, shouldn't be cast as an Emmett Brown-like madman, tweaking massive amplifiers in a cluttered basement laboratory.
"Ultimately, we're just a rock band and making music that we're going to be excited about playing in the next couple of years." Murchy says before a show in Tucson as the band's tour heads west for an appearance at Indio, California's Coachella festival.

Whose ready to get dirty?The word dirtball conjures images of scuzzy gutter dwellers, grease under the fingernails from their day job. Our Dirtball however, is neither scuzzy, nor greasy. This Dirtball is a rhyme-spitting drummer who is more likely to be dusty from a camping trip than anything else. David Alexander, a.k.a. The Dirtball, started playing drums when he was seven and doesn't seem to have stopped since then. A true Central Oregon native, Alexander named his third major label release Crook County.
 
"I wanted to bring it home with this album. Crook County is where I raised hell my whole life. We used to party out there all the time," he said.

Weinland’s magic bus. Adam Shearer, the lead singer and songwriter of Weinland wanted to be just that. A singer/ songwriter. But his songs had a different idea.
 
"I really love acoustic music and adding every layer took a lot of thought for me," Shearer said. "For example, I was sure we weren't gonna have drums and then we ended up adding them. The band wanted to fill out the sound. I was the only one dragging my feet."
Weinland, who will be playing McMenamins Old St. Francis School in Bend on Wednesday, April 30, started out as a solo acoustic project for Shearer, who at the time, was going by the stage name John Weinland.