Portland Recap in Crayon: Guitar Wolf, The Coathangers, Coward, The No Tomorrow Boys

2500 miles from the Pizza FM station in the magical city of Portland, OR, I got the chance to see a great show at the legendary venue now known as Dante's. Hosting a weekly burlesque show and situated right next door to a sleazy strip club and fetish booth jack-off joint, it's a pretty interesting place to see a show.

The No Tomorrow Boys

Playing first to a pretty empty bar, this Portland glam punk band kept a high energy even though the venue was lacking it for their set. The band had some good songs but it was mostly just a typical punk band.Judges have decided that The No Tomorrow Boys gets 2 Punk Points:

• All black outfits incl. leather jackets
• Lots of tattoos (2/3 members having large chest tats and 3/3 having various arm tats)

Coward

The second band that played was a punk power-duo. I'm pretty sure that this isn't actually a band and just two guys who jam together and got a spot at this show because the guitarist also works at the bar (being a stagehand during Guitar Wolf's set). They also don't seem to exist on the internet. Their songs were rightfully loud and fast but there was not much to their show.Coward gets 1 Punk Point:

• Being really DIY

The Coathangers

This all-female punk group from Atlanta put on a really good show. Their vocals gave a nice poppy spin to their fundamentally punk songs. Some of the songs sounded a lot like Fever To Tell-era Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The band apparently has 4 members but only 3 were here for this show and each member took turns on the instruments, occasionally switching off between drums, bass, and guitar.The Coathangers have received 3 Punk Points:

• Not having any roadies
• Being instrumentally versatile, because fuck labels
• Each member having a tall glass of tequila on stage

Guitar Wolf

The Japanese power-trio, all clad in leather jackets, leather pants, and sunglasses put on one of the most ridiculous shows I've ever seen. Right after the strange video introduction of the band, the 6-time Guitar Wolf concert attendee next to me told me "Get ready man, your ears are going to be ringing for three days." The drummer, Toru (Drum Wolf), looking like a Yakuza, came on stage followed by the long-haired bassist U.G. (Bass Wolf) who was then followed by the hyper-energetic lead man Seiji (Guitar Wolf), to much applause. Seiji chugs the full cup of beer he had on his amp and then the band jumps into their fast, noisy garage punk for literally an hour with no breaks between songs. The only pauses were the natural pauses in the songs. In the set Seiji hit foam balls into the crowd using his guitar like a baseball bat, kicked over monitors, and pulled a random guy on stage to play the guitar while Seiji crowd surfed and crowd walked. The guy he pulled up had clearly never played a guitar before but because of all the distortion and the nature of the music, the simple rhythm he strummed while barring some strings sounded surprisingly good.After the set ended, the band finally took their first break and went offstage for about 5 minutes. In the next 45 minutes after that, the band did three encores. The first encore was mostly the same as the main set. In the second encore, Seiji pulled 9 people up on stage, constructed a human pyramid out of them, climbed on top, and started singing from atop this mountain of humans. The pyramid stayed up for a minute or two before collapsing. All the people he pulled up on the stage then stage dove into the audience. For the third encore the stage was straightened up by the venue staff and the band performed three more songs, with Seiji throwing mics into the audience and tangling everything back up again. He even took some mics off the drum kit and tried to sing into those since the other ones were tangled up and out of reach.As I am typing this 24 hours later, there is still a noticeable ringing in my ears. I was hoping he was exaggerating, but I'm going to assume that Guitar Wolf super-fan was right and prepare for 2 more days of this.Impressing all the judges, Guitar Wolf receives 7 Punk Points:

• Pissing off venue staff by making a mess of the whole stage and equipment, requiring stagehands to help out mid-show many times
• Songs being so loud and distorted that I can barely differentiate any of them
• Seiji sweating more than any person I have ever seen. Imagine doing 90 minutes of cardio in leather pants and jacket under a heat lamp.
• More leather than a kinky sex shop
• Flagrant disregard for expensive equipment
• Spitting constantly onto the stage
• Permanently damaging my ears