COMINGS AND GOINGS

Portland loses a practice space

By Sam Pfeifle

Sometimes, things get worse before they get better. Such is the case with Portland’s already beleaguered bands in search of affordable and accommodating practice space. The space known as Joe’s Garage, out at 1111 Forest Avenue, breathed its last in mid-February, and is no more, throwing bands including Swampwitch Revival, Eggbot, and new-on-the-scene Novadose into limbo to make room for a new auto-body shop.

Tom Pelosi owned the building, says Ron Breton, drummer for In the Red and owner of the practice space business for the past 12 years. “He’s getting older,” says Breton, “and he just didn’t want to deal with it anymore. It’s been for sale for quite a while. For him, it was just a piece of real estate.” Obviously, for local bands, it was much more than that.

“I got phone calls from like five different bands,” says Brant Dadaleares, lead-singer for Twitchboy, a band that spent two years on Forest Avenue before moving into the other half of Rustic Overtones’ space. “We actually had moved before we got booted out,” he says. “Unfortunately, the space we have only has two spaces in it.” Of the Joe’s Garage closing, Dadaleares is succinct: “It sucks. It’s a tragedy actually.”

Eggbot notes that he and drummer Triston Gallagher had only practiced once since mid-March before their Free Street Taverna debut April 11. “And that was at Prime [Artist Studios, on Thompson’s Point], which is great, $10 for the whole day during the week. But it’s a pain in the ass carrying all our gear around.” As for finding a new permanent space, “They gave us two weeks notice,” he says, “but now I think I have a line on a new place. We’ll see.”

“We got kicked out, too,” says Walt Craven, 6gig’s frontman. “We were actually on the road at the time. We had a bunch of stuff in there; we had our PA, stuff we had been collecting for years, our 4-track recorder. Now we don’t have a practice space.” He says that’s okay while they’re touring and playing a lot of gigs, but “if we weren’t playing out so much we’d be homeless.”

“It’s just a drag,” emphasizes a somewhat despondent Breton, who admits he was tiring of collecting rent and cleaning up after bands. “Some of those bands were really good,” he says, “people like Eggbot who are so dedicated to their craft. He was in there every day.”

Breton manages to sum up the popular sentiment among the displaced bands when he says, “It wasn’t much of a place. It wasn’t state of the art. [The rooms] weren’t even sound proof. But they were still a place to go, and I’m really bummed out. It was just a neat old funky place where nobody bothered you. It was just home for me.”