Culture Stew at Mall America

If you hear the rumble of bass, drums and quaking riffs from Tanger Outlet Center after dark, do not be alarmed. It is only a series of soundwaves emanating soon from Output Music’s new store along the northerly stretch of the mall’s pedestrian-friendly walkways.
Those soundwaves, percolating in more sanctioned forms in almost every store in the mall shopping to the hip-hopping of piped-in music for a youth culture, already power the sonic environment of consumer culture anyway.
Alternative music culture is pulsing now, and mutating as we speak, into a form of mainstream culture. Anyone who questions this phenomenon needs to replay this year’s Super Bowl, featuring a Rolling Stones’ sound-check at halftime.
Output Music’s move from the main drag of historic Highway 101 will likely be a showcase for local tastes in music, and a venue for pop culture’s original source, which is, some place local, some place small.
“We will open the new store on March 11,” said T.J. Richardson, owner of the store. “We will have a grand opening on March 17 with live in-store music and a concert in the store after the mall closes.”
One curiousity about his entry into the land of name brand outlet stores is Output Music isn’t a name brand. It will be another mom-and-pop-style, one-of-a-kind store in the land of giants. Also, in addition to new titles based on the hard-edged, idiosyncratic music tastes of those who work there, Richardson has also been busy buying used CD collections from dealers all over the coast. Thus, in a rather subtle but revolutionary way, antiques will be for sale at bargain-basement prices along the shiny new main street of retail-priceland.
Some might wonder if Output will be an attractor for too many tatooed, earring-wearing dudes with skateboards. Of course, those same critics need to wake up: Those darned kids, with their expendable income, conquered Mall America a long time ago.

Foreigner was right about tight being right

Foreigner came out in 1977, just as the last wave of the British invasion was beginning to crest for many bands such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and The Who: They just didn’t know it yet.
Though less adventuresome than their so-called “classic rock” (We call them that now) contemporaries, the band, led by British journeyman rocker Mick Jones, came out slugging like champs. Before they were finished with their chart-topping days, a full 10 years of steady success, they had successfully made themselves permanent landmarks on the rock-radio landscape.
Of course, some might argue the band, with tighter arrangements and more straightforward songwriting, was there to deliver the deathblow to good ol’ AOR (album oriented rock) radio by simply being so good at churning out hits. Bands such as Journey and REO Speedwagon couldn’t help but follow the same lucrative formula that less was more (nobody had the patience to listen to 12 minutes of “Freebird” anymore, anyhow).
But some of those same detractors will likely be in the audience this weekend for two sold-out shows at the Chinook Winds Casino Resort, waiting to root and rock to such punchy hits as “Cold as Ice” and “Hot Blooded.” After shorter, tighter songs became more the norm in the post-punk and new wave era of the 1980s, Foreigner showed they had more listeners in mind than most of the extended jam bands and artsy prog’ rockers they displaced.
When Lou Gramm, the group’s original singer, left the band for the first time in 1988, it appeared the gig was up. But then the band reformed in 1992, again with Gramm as singer. But he left again, then came back as he recovered from health problems related to a benign brain tumor. Now, Jones is the remaining “Foreigner.”
With the re-emergence of so many bands with listeners linked up through fan sites on the Internet, the band has proven that despite multiple lineup changes, they can draw big audiences indefinitely. And like the original African-American bluesmasters their rock is built upon, there’s always one reliable, incontrovertible fact for many of these live acts: The older they are, the better they get.

The Lloyd Jones Struggle

The “struggle” continues for Portland-based bluesman Lloyd Jones, who finds himself carrying on a tradition he started to absorb before many of the parents of those who now attend his shows were of drinking age.
“I have to remember that the ones out on the scene right now may not know about the fact that I’ve been around, and them some,” says the 55-year-old Jones, who was the leader of one of Portland’s most popular bands, Brown Sugar, during the first wave of the electrified blues in the early 1970s.
“I feel fortunate to have grown up during the time of its insurgence,” he says from his home in Portland. “I love it more than ever. It just gets richer and deeper and I enjoy it more and more.”
During the 1980s, he joined singer and harp player Curtis Salgado, the man who inspired John Belushi’s “Blues Brother” character, in a band called In Yo Face. Then, just as his friend Robert Cray was helping the blues to re-emerge for an extended renaissance period in the late ’80s, Jones formed the Lloyd Jones Struggle. That band has been together, walking a tight line between blues and R&B, ever since. Two of the players in his band, keyboard player Glenn Holstrom and tenor- and baritone-sax player Rudy Draco, have been jamming together for the better part of three decades.
As some of the great blues figures Jones has learned from and shared the stage with pass away (including Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and S.P. Leary, who was in Muddy Waters’ band), Jones finds himself an ironic inheritor of a legacy. He keeps on rockin’ along a road blazed by Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson and B.B. King, continuing to pursue the traditions of African-American music history extending back to Congo Square in New Orleans and before.
And since the blues was born out of the struggle of African Americans trying to find their place in America, Jones frequently marvels at being one of the so-called keepers of the musical flame.
“Imagine trying to be a white guy from Oregon playing this music,” he says. Hence, the reason why he calls his band the Struggle. One day, a long time ago, Leary, who was playing for both Waters and Big Walter at the time, told Jones, “Man, I’m getting old. You gotta keep it alive. It’s a struggle sometimes, but if you love it, you keep on struggling.”

Radio Free Oregon

Remember or forget the name: Debra Arlyn. Remember or forget that she had a series of performances at Chinook Winds Casino on Thursday nights during that weirdly rainy winter of 2006, but you missed those gigs due to must-see TV. Remember you could have seen this telegenically apt talent relatively cheaply, comfortably. Remember or forget that, perhaps after reading this, you thought, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard it all before.”
Remember or forget you were told about the way that, after a full day of promoting her first album in Lincoln City, a DIY product with nontheless a lot of pretty good spit and polish, called “Thinking Out Loud,” she came to perform out late that night like a trooper, and wowed the few who were there to hear and see it. Remember or forget that you were told she was the winner of the Oregon Idol in 2003, a precursor to an appearance on “American Idol,” but she never got a chance to play “Simon says.” That Randy Jackson, one of the famed trio of “Idol” talent judges, had later privately advised her and her father, producer/manager Tony Arlyn, they were already beyond what the show already produces: singing manikens.
Forget that music biz magazines such as Music Connection have been with her on their “Top 100 Unsigned Artists” list, but remember you heard this: There is something about the way she sings, something in her melismatic style of pop and R&B, something about the purity of her emotion when giving herself away on stage, something about the way she gets lost in a song ... yes, there’s something to lead a lot of smart music business people to believe this 20-year-old diva-in-training just might have “it.”
Last week her father said Jim Martone, an music industry player who helped to uncover such talents as No Doubt and Bush, is working on her behalf to get her signed to a major-label deal at such places as Capitol Records or Epic. Indeed, they are going about the whole “discovery” process in a professional, step-by-step manner.
“We have got a management team of industry people together who believe it’s only a matter of time,” said the father of the Corvallis-born native, who had his own 20-year career in the music business, performing in show bands on the East Coast. “This is a craft and there’s a process of growth to this.”
The father-daughter part of the “team” said they’ve already been through a kind of labyrinth of learning lessons. “We got beat up early,” her father said. According to Debra: “Musically, I have to find my own direction. A lot of people were influencing me when I was younger.”
Younger? Yes, that means much has already been learned during childhood, when she was singing shortly after being born. Now, at 20 years old, she’s a polished performer with notches showcasing her talent in Nashville and Los Angeles. With 10 gigs a month, she’s already a working musician in Corvallis, Portland, and on Thursday nights at 8 p.m., in the Rogue River Restaurant & Bar through February.