Unfortunately, I missed the big show. But the following night, Saturday, I took a train down to Portland and watched another show at a much smaller venue, the Blackbird. The city--if I can describe the taxi driver who transported me to the club as an adequate representative for Portland's then-present mood--was still vibrating, still heated by the triumphant energy that the previous night had generated. The driver was hardly a hiphop type; he looked like a laid-off lumberjack who might say something along the lines of, "I like my spotted owl fried." Instead, when learning that I was working on a story about the Lifesavas, he said something close to, "That group is great. They've really come a long way.... I'm proud of what they've done." I gave him a handsome tip.
When I entered the Blackbird, an indie rock club on the edge of Portland's Hollywood District, there wasn't a soul along the bar or near the cramped stage on which a DJ spun percussive, Brazilian-bright dance music. Only 20 or so people sat at large wooden tables at the back of the club, and the doorman (one of four employees) was a member of the Hells Angels (or at least he looked that way). In a word, nothing in this minimal and mostly dark space said "hiphop" to me.
Jumbo the Garbageman, the rapper and beat producer for the Lifesavas, was to perform later that night with Squall, a Portland band led by Dave Allen, former bass player for Gang of Four. Around 11:00 p.m., the lively DJ concluded his set, and was replaced by a turntablist, a drummer, guitarists, a keyboardist, and a percussionist. This was Squall, and they played a mix of late-rock, late-hiphop, and late-jazz. Sometimes they sounded a little like Modest Mouse's "Heart Cooks Brain"; other times they were in the vicinity of Freestyle Fellowship's "Inner City Boundaries"; and throughout the performance they maintained a slow pace that was interrupted by random scratches and rare electric noises.
Jumbo arrived around midnight, and 30 minutes later began to rap to Squall's improbable/improvised music. The small, but now slightly expanded, crowd gathered, watched, and swayed. Jumbo's raps were utterly mysterious, wandering dream-wise from thought to thought, idea to idea, word to word. There was barely a rhyme and often little reason to the odd flow of sounds and phrases he produced in a near somnambulistic state. The music that accompanied him also had no fixed point or gravity or real momentum, but was sleepy-slow and fueled, as it were, by a mild intoxicant. Near the end of the set, a singer, Leah Hendricks, joined Jumbo on stage and surprised me (and everyone else, for that matter) with her remarkable voice, which had the languid quality of Martina (Tricky's singer on his early CDs) but without any of the hurt or melancholy.
When the experiment ended, Jumbo seemed pleased with the results, taking, it seemed, mental notes of the interesting things he had stumbled upon while rapping/roaming under the soft spell of Squall's music. As people left, he and the singer sat at a table with me. I asked him how he started performing with Squall, a band that has almost no similarity to the work he does with the Lifesavas--which is a sober, focused, rational, and deeply structured hiphop group. "Portland is a small community. Everyone knows everyone. So when Dave asked me to rap for his show tonight, I said yes. That's how it works around here. I wanted to help him out, and he has helped me out. We help each other out here," he replied, with the noble features of his face partially in shadow, his netted dreadlocks rising up into a weak pool of bar light.
"But he improvises," I said rather stubbornly. "And musically your group [the Lifesavas] tends to do the very opposite."
He answered, "I really like the freedom. I like to try out different things and styles. It's liberating."
Though I understood and appreciated his explanation, I was, admittedly, still baffled by the whole experience, as anyone even mildly familiar with Lifesavas shows and music would be. Though by no means simple or predictable, there is nothing really experimental about the Lifesavas' recorded music and live performances. In both cases, they produce nothing but solid hiphop: Their songs are built on a hiphop foundation; their shows are informed by the founding ethics of hiphop showmanship--keep the crowd moving, and keep it involved by dissolving the line between MC and audience. The show at the Blackbird was almost the complete opposite: It was hardly a party or a blowout jam, but much, much nearer to the avant-gardisms of free jazz or atonal classical music.
The fact that Jumbo could go from one extreme to the other with such ease was impressive (if not schizophrenic); even more impressive yet, during our entire early-Sunday-morning conversation, Jumbo's face and tone never expressed bewilderment or displeasure at the fact that the night before he had performed for well over 1,200 people as a new member of one of the most recognized underground hiphop labels in North America (Quannum Projects, which counts DJ Shadow as one of its members), and tonight he had performed with a practically unknown experimental group for barely 40 people who, by any stretch of the imagination, could not be described as hiphop headz.
···
Spirit in Stone, the new CD by the Lifesavas (Vursatyl, Jumbo, and DJ Rev. Shines), is one of the best hiphop releases this year, and certainly a Northwest masterpiece. Containing a healthy (or even earthy--not in the hippie/brohemian sense but in the spiritual sense of the word) 16 tracks, the CD is thick with beats that, unlike so much underground hiphop, are robust and festive.
It's easier to make reflective, gloomy underground hiphop, as it directly expresses a feeling of sadness at the current state of things in the kingdom of hiphop, with its current lack of creative energy, its deepening and deadening commitments to the bottom-line interests of music corporations, and its standardized puerility, as rappers compete to see who can say the most inane things possible. (Indeed, rappers used to send rhymes "down the Nile," as modern rapper Rakim once put it; these days they send them down the pisser.) But under these bleak conditions--conditions that are further compounded by the fact that the Lifesavas come from a rather gloomy city (something which the Portland members of the Oldominion crew capitalize on)--they make beats that never leave the bright light of the day, bumping and bouncing with an enthusiasm that recalls the early sunny years of hiphop and its defining groups--Doug E. Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew, Whodini, the Fat Boys, Salt-N-Pepa, and Kurtis Blow.
The day following Jumbo's performance at the Blackbird, I met with the Lifesavas at Vursatyl's house in Northeast Portland, sitting under a lone, leafy magnolia tree to escape the sun. The neighborhood, with its mix of established black American families and newly arrived white American couples, constituted Vursatyl's world, as he grew up two or three houses down 14th Street, where his father, a prominent pastor, still lives.
After discussing the genius of Detroit producer Jay Dee--whose music Jumbo had just played from his car for us--I explained to Vursatyl that because of their membership in the internationally recognized Quannum Projects, the Lifesavas were pretty much the biggest hiphop crew to come out of Portland since... the U-Krew--an early-'90s hiphop group that produced two hits: a very big one ("If U Were Mine"), and a very small one ("Let Me Be Your Lover"). Vursatyl, who sat on a garden chair in the manner of a benevolent king, thought for a moment and said, "But the U-Krew was not really a hiphop band; they were more like Whistle, pop rap."
"Or the Boogie Boys," I responded, launching us into a plane of discourse I can never get enough of--hiphop esoterica. We discussed the rise and fall of Whistle's and Boogie Boy's mastermind/producer Kangol Kid and the early-'80s hiphop act he led, UTFO. But I knew a lot about the past and UTFO and not nearly enough about the present Lifesavas, who, before their CD release party, had only been written about in any depth by Seattle magazine Bandoppler and the Portland Mercury. (The act has now received reviews/mentions in Rolling Stone and the New York Times, though.) To help format their history in print, I asked basic questions, like how they got their start.
"We actually formed in 1992, and used to be called B.R.E., Black Radio Exclusive," answered Vursatyl. "We had two other members back then and hooked up with Sir Mix-A-Lot's manager. We could have gone major, because our manager was connected with Rick Rubin [the cofounder of Def Jam Records, who at the time was president of Sir Mix-A-Lot's label, Def American], and he was a big deal back then. But we didn't. We wanted to be more like Hieroglyphics [a crew that's based in the Bay Area and cofounded by Del Tha Funkee Homosapien]. We wanted things to happen at an independent level, selling tapes out of the back of cars, doing shows. You know--West Coast indie! In 1997, we became the Lifesavas, and we meet up with Shines through a friend. He became our DJ. (Jumbo used to be the DJ but we decided that he should focus on rapping and producing.) That's the year we came out with 'Grand Larceny,' a cassette single we sold wherever we could."
My next basic question: How were they discovered?
"Back in 1999, Chief Xcel [of Blackalicious] was in town shopping for records at Jump Jump, a record store that sells rare grooves," answered Vursatyl. "The manager of the store gave him our 'Grand Larceny' tape, which at that time was two years old. Xcel liked it a lot and asked us to go on tour with Blackalicious in Europe. In 2000, Quannum [Blackalicious' label] released 'Headexercise,' and we continued to tour like crazy, selling tapes and records at shows."
"We toured so much," added DJ Rev. Shines, "that it was hard to find time to work on our album. It was kind of strange in a way, touring for three years without having a full-length album. But it helped us in many ways. We could test and work on songs, and also just think about what we wanted to do, what direction we wanted to take. Though touring slowed us down, I think it really helped us make a stronger record."
"It also helped us promote the album," reentered Vursatyl, "because we don't have a video, and no one plays us on the radio, so the only way we could promote our music in those markets around the country was to get in front of people's faces."
My next basic question concerned the making of Spirit in Stone: What kind of freedom did they have while producing it?
"Quannum gave us complete freedom," Jumbo admitted. "They wanted it to be a Lifesavas record, not a Blackalicious record, or Latyrx record, or a DJ Shadow record, but the Lifesavas. They liked our sound and that is what they wanted."
I had one more basic question before I could return to our conversation about UTFO: I wanted to know about the show, about its success, and what it meant to them.
"There were over 1,200 people at the show," Vursatyl said with great astonishment. "I don't think anything like that has ever happened in our city. It's surreal. All sorts of people were there, people who are into hiphop and people who are not. Some people even knew the words to our songs, and after the show they approached me to discuss a rhyme, asking what it meant or pointing out what they liked about it. It was surreal."
"It's Northwest pride," Jumbo said. "It's definitely Portland music. A Portland experience with a broad perspective. Local music that is seeing things at a national level."
I was now ready to return to the deep past, to spend the rest of my interview time (my train back to Seattle departed in just over an hour) discussing various parts of hiphop history, when in a burst of unexpected and burning honesty, Jumbo said in conclusion: "I won't lie to you, man. I was very happy about [Spirit in Stone's] release. I mean, when it came out this week, I couldn't even wait for Quannum to send my free copy; I just went to the store and cold bought it. I wanted to put the needle on the record and hear the hiss, the crackle before it started. I have done this with so many other records before, records that I love. I bought them and put the needle down. But now when the needle was down, and the hiss ended, and the music started, it was my own song. My music was playing."
The Lifesavas' new record, Spirit in Stone, is available now on Quannum Projects.
