A Review of Our Portland Event

This is one of the most interesting band trips I have ever had. I can’t really put my finger out why though. Portland has always seemed like this amazing city out on the coast where everyone recycles and exercises everyday and has all of their crap together.

I was in Portland for about 14 hours and I slept about 9 of those. We go there last night at 11:30 and hopped on the city train. That is a pretty great feature of the city, but it is not the most fun thing to do at midnight. I believe everyone we talked to was drunk or high and freely admitting to being so. The first fellow I interacted with was probably 19. High as a kite in the most out of it, bloodshot-eyes way. He was drinking some sort of concoction out of a 2 liter bottle that used to be orange Fanta. I don’t even know if he was drinking it actually. He would take the cap off and suck the air out of it. He bumped into me as he was boarding the train and gave me a look that said, “If I could walk or comprehend things right now, I would punch you.” He then asked me some sort of question that ended with the word cigarette. I just answered, “no.” seemed like the best answer.

We finally get off the train and have to walk a few blocks to hotel. The streets are filled with the craziest mix of people you have ever seen. People sleeping, people yelling, people drunk, people dry humping each other as they are walking, people just leaving nice romantic dinners, security cops walking around. It was surreal. I have been in tons of city’s and spent some late nights in Chicago in places I should not have been, but this is the weirdest I have felt in a city.

By this time it is midnight and Tim and I are starving. We finally eat and get to bed. It is 1:15am Portland time, which was 3:15 Nashville time. I am feeling a little anxious about the show tomorrow and intimidated by this city. I wake up around 7 and still feel this strange pressure. I decide in the shower that I am done feeling that way and that we are going to own this day and not be intimidated. If God is for us who can be against us? I know God wants us here and has us here for a reason. I read my bible next and the passage was Deuteronomy 20. When you go into battle, the Lord is with you, he will defeat your enemies. I knew we were in for a battle today. We have work to do though.

Once we get to the arena we see the stage is set up kind of far from where the beginnings of the crowd were. It is never fun to try and develop a relationship with someone who is 300 feet away. So we start playing and the crowd is not responding at all to what we are doing. They are just too far away. It is nothing against these people really, they just had no context for what we were trying to do. It was weird. It felt like my old band in a dive bar with 3 people watching and giving you the courtesy shrug. I start to sweat. We have 45 more minutes of this? My brain is going 1000 thoughts a second trying to think of how we can make this not suck. I, the meantime I forget the words to our first song! Which is normally ok, I like the crowd to feel like they are in on the mistakes when they happen. I want them to be a part of it. However, to people standing so far away it just sounded like we sucked. We got it rolling again, but even as we were playing really great we could not connect.

I thought well we are either going to just have an hour of awkwardness with these people or we can do something about it. We did not fly across the whole country to waste our time and not make a difference with these people. This is not how this is going down. I lean over to Tim and say, hey let’s just unplugg and go over to them, he says that sounds great. So, we unplugged the guitar and picked up the djimbe and went over to the crowd.

Then we had them.

We had them singing and happy once we were close to them. It is easy for people to ignore you when they can’t really see you. People just want connection. They want to be part of things. If things aren’t working change them, go to the people. Unplug and go get in their faces. Don’t accept failure.

Here is some footage from what happened. The crowd eventually got too big and could not even hear us so we went back to the stage a finished up there. This was a tough show. No doubt, but I feel so much stronger because of it.