Sound Stories & Interviews

Even cowgirls get the blues. Since the official beginning of the summer concert series at Les Schwab Amphitheater in May, nine male-lead bands have taken the stage in straight succession. It's a similar story with the Athletic Club of Bend, which has featured two male acts, and Midtown Music Hall has featured a slew of testosterone-fronted acts from E-40 to the Gourds, Tiger Army and The Melvins. This weekend, two female music power acts will take the stage in Bend, within days of each other, separated by less than a mile.

Sheryl Crow plays at Les Schwab on August 28 (with emerging folk pop star Brandi Carlile) while Lucinda Williams lights up the stage four days later at the Athletic Club. Bend's recent Lilith Fair-esque turn has brought two of this generation's most influential women in music to Central Oregon and we say bring on the estrogen!

First up, Sheryl Crow, whose 10th album release, February's Detours, peaked at number two on the Billboard charts, has nine Grammy awards, a slew of number one hits … and oh yeah, she's also beat stage-one breast cancer. Hardcore? Yes, quite so. Detours, Crow's first release since her battle with cancer, adoption of a child and breakup of her very public relationship with cyclist Lance Armstrong, reflects on everything from the war in Iraq to Hurricane Katrina along with plenty of songs about endings, beginnings and what happens in between.

Didn’t get the beard memo. It's Friday afternoon and hotter than all hell as Casey Wescott and I talk on the phone. The Fleet Foxes keyboardist and vocalist is at home in Seattle and it's hot there too. So hot, in fact, that this member of one of the most talked-about bands in the country describes the rare Seattle heat as "lay-around-the-house-in-your-underwear kind of weather."

Other than discussing our heat-induced discomfort, we're talking about a video interview the five-piece band did with former MTV News correspondent John Norris. In the interview, the established music guru admitted his Fleet Foxes fandom, and had no problem touting the band's mastery directly to the faces of its members.

"It's weird and rad when anybody likes your music, but it was definitely one of those moments where you're scratching your head and realizing that people are really getting a chance to hear this. Honestly, when you make a record, you just hope people will see it," Wescott says.

Two turntables, a microphone and a laptop. On a recent Friday afternoon, we connected with one Beck Hansen (most of you know him exclusively by his first name) as he relaxed at home in Los Angeles in between a recently concluded European tour and the North American trek that brings him to Bend this weekend. It was nearly a month to the day after the release of his latest studio effort, the much-heralded Modern Guilt, a record he co-produced with mastermind Danger Mouse. A new record, a new band, a new producer and now a new tour…clearly there was a lot to talk about. Here's a portion of the conversation.

tSW: Your live show seems to change from tour to tour. I'm guessing this show is going to be different from the last time you stopped in Bend. What can we expect?

Beck: I have a new band. We just did our first tour in Europe together and there are just four people this time.

I remember seeing you on the Odelay tour in 1997 and I think there were at least 10 other guys in the band, that's a pretty big change.

I feel like every time I come through town you're gonna see a different show. It's going to be a slightly different interpretation of the songs and then obviously the presentation is going to be different. You know, last tour we had puppets. We had a miniature stage built with puppets of ourselves.

What you can expect from Dfive9 at R3 in La Pine this weekend. So, you need to raise some money for your local parks and recreation district…Bake sale? Carnival? Cakewalk? Oh, wait, no how about a mega rock and roll festival? Yeah that's the ticket!

Such is the case in La Pine, which is host this weekend to the R3 Festival (Rock Reggae Rap), a two-day romp featuring a lineup of local and regional acts that's strong on the heavier rock, but with a few reggae and hip-hop acts also thrown into the mix. The festival is headed up by the locally based Back Alley Records, who will donate a portion of the proceeds to help the La Pine Park & Recreation District, which unlike its Bend counterpart, is an unfunded special district that runs on grants and donations.

"We as a board had the idea of using our park and rec facilities for fun. We thought, 'Let's have a concert here, how can we do that?'" says Tony Debone, the chairperson of the park district's board of directors.

After collaborating with Back Alley, the festival grew legs, despite the fact that it began with basically no budget, according to R3 co-organizer Stephanie Wagner. Even with few initial resources, the R3 has managed to attract a lineup of 40 bands for the outdoor/indoor festival slated to take place at the White School Park Building. Of course it helps when these bands all agree to play pro bono.

You should see his underwear. The word "psycho" conjures many images: psycho killer, psycho ex-girlfriend/boyfriend, psychosomatic, psychologist, psychosexual, any number of suffixes will bring about an exponentially larger number of thoughts. When you attach -billy to the prefix, the visuals shift to a highly stylized music genre, which is succinctly defined by the band Tiger Army.

The trio made its stage debut in 1996, sharing a stage with nouveau goth/emo/hairspray legends AFI at the infamous Gilman Street Project in Berkeley, Calif. Tiger Army linchpin Nicky 13 formed the band out of Influence 13, bringing band mate Geoff Kresge with him, assembling a crew that has changed throughout the years, but maintains the highly stylized visual and musical aesthetic that is psychobilly. The hair is pompadoured, the arms are heavily tattooed (these guys love the ink), jeans are pegged and the bass is upright. Tiger Army is like the sober, more cynical California cousin of The Reverend Horton Heat's Texas rockabilly legacy.

Psychobilly revels in the rock-and-roll lifestyle through ballads about Betty-Page-styled beauties that drive hearses from the graveyard to the chapel and back to the crypt, peeling out in the face of the undeserving dudes-the dudes that ditched them on prom night. The world of the Psychobilly is full of supped-up classic cars, high heels below pencil skirts listening to classics like Social Distortion and the Cramps. While we might miss out on a whole host of musical styles, Bend has actually been host to numerous psychobilly acts throughout the years including the Danish Nekromantix, Sweden's Horrorpops, So-Cal's Chop Tops and, of course, Tiger Army.

Vandals shirt meets acoustic guitar. That’s a good way to describe Matt Lewis.Matt Lewis and his band live in Utah and they don't have a problem with that. Some musicians might think of Provo, Utah as about the last place they'd want to call home base. Hell, some folks, buying perhaps a bit too deeply into Utah's ultra-conservative reputation, might not even be aware that rock music is even allowed within the state - forever banned in some sort of sweeping Footlooseian state mandate.

That's not the case, because if it were, the Matt Lewis Band wouldn't have cultivated the funky rock vibrations that have earned them the ability to tour nationally, along the way selling a few thousand records without any record label support.

"It's been really difficult at times and it's also been really easy," the 30-year-old Lewis says of playing music in Utah.

"I hated growing up here as a kid because I thought the place was just so conservative. As I've grown up I've really, really started to love it here," he continues. He goes on to discuss his youth listening to punk bands like Rancid, NOFX and Social Distortion