Local News

Power trio goes theatrical.The Tower Theatre is, of course, Bend's historic downtown locale for all things high art, theatrical, and relatively upscale musical acts.

Here’s a rundown of JBT’s show in Bend on Tuesday night. We’re still trying to get some video and pics up here … bear with us, they’ll be up soon.

We hadn't made it out to a show at the Athletic Club of Bend yet this
summer, but we'd heard a thing or two about how shows go down at this
venue. Rumors have graced our ears of draconian no standing/no dancing
decrees, picket fences segregating VIPS from general admission peasants
and a smattering of other no-fun policies.

So, one can understand why we had our guard up when we arrived at the
ACB last night to see the John Butler Trio drop into Bend for the
second time in a matter of nine months. But after JBT's fellow
Australians Crash Symphony opened the show and Butler walked onto the
stage much of the crowd (the one's who weren't sipping wine from Eddie
Bauer coolers) STOOD UP, in direct violation of the rumored rules. By
the time John Butler shouldered his banjo and blasted out "Better
Than," these standing folks had charged the stage, flooding what we
thought was the "reserved section" and for the next two hours, it was a
real-live rock concert. And the best part…no security or venue
management personnel did anything to stop it.

How many PBR tall boys does it take to satiate a few hundred Person People fans? We're afraid that his question falls straight into the owl with the Tootsie Pop arena of unsolved queries.
You see, when Person People launched into a loud-as-all-bejeezus set in the Parrilla Grill parking lot on Friday night to benefit the Divison Street Skatepark Project, the PBR was flowing like, well PBR.

Shelby Harwood chatted it up with Australian roots rocker John Butler and here’s the full transcript of that interview which is MUCH longer than the portion that appeared in the print edition. Enjoy all you faithful JBT fans…

It seems like you've been on tour almost non-stop since Grand National
came out last year, but you said in an interview at Lollapalooza that
you had enough songs for a new album, how do you find time to write
with such a busy schedule?

I'll actually take a bit of a break after this tour and just chill out,
write more songs and do nice things like visit the beach with my
family, and then I'll see how I go and just record an album. We're
looking to kind of probably, now that we're kind of getting more
established in all the territories we're going to give everybody a
little less. Usually what happens is you go really hard at the
beginning and kind of get everybody on board and then once everybody's
on board you don't really need to tour three or four times a year, you
know, it's actually probably dangerous to do that because everybody you
know gets sick of you. You know, we'll start coming back once or twice
a year, and that will leave a little bit more time for all kinds of
stuff. You know, it takes a long time to get it to that place - whether
it be in America or Australia or Europe - and you just kind of have to
dig in for a while you know?
I was actually living in Australia last year when Grand National came
out in March and was wondering what's it like being so huge in
Australia - getting daily radio play and being blasted over the sound
system at City Beach on a regular basis for example - and then coming
to the US as a relatively unknown act? Is it strange or do you like it
better being somewhat anonymous?

It's to be expected, you know, there's a big difference between
mainstream popularity and underground popularity, which is what I guess
we kind of have over here now after seven or eight years of [touring]
America. It just takes time, you can't expect things to transfer from
one country to the next unless you have some sort of world-wide hit,
which comes with it's own dangers. There's several bands from Australia
that have had major world-wide hits - no one's ever heard of them and
then they're big around the world and then it's hard to kind of
maintain that. So we kind of do it in the opposite way. We kind of just
build it up from the ground up and what it kind of means is by the time
you're kind of getting to where your status is in the well-known
region, it's solid and it just stays for a long time. That's kind of
what's happened in Australia, every step of the way it's grown slowly,
it's never been like a huge splash and so by the time we were big, the
roots were very deep, it wouldn't really matter what storm came by,
what we built … it wouldn't be knocked over. So that's pretty much what
we've built over in America, it just hasn't hit mainstream yet, but
it's a very solid place to be and I don't have a problem with that.