Back Stage Bar and Talkdemonic show

Tonight Kelly and I met up with our good friend Miranda after work at a new-ish McMenamins pub called Back Stage Bar (named for it's location, behind the Bagdad Theater on SE 37th). The pub hasn't been open for quite a year yet, and was once literally the Bagdad's back stage when it opened in 1927. In the 70's it was converted to a more art house theater, but since McMenamins bought the Bagdad the back stage building has been more or less vacant until last year. When you walk in, you can't help but be awed by the height of the room. Essentially, it's the concrete shell of what looks like a 4 story building, though I could only pick out one missing floor, about 15 feet from the ground, I'm guessing that's the height of the Bagdad stage. It's really very impressive. You can also climb some stairs to two smaller rooms along the street-facing side of the building. There are 5 pool tables and one snooker table, a large bar along one wall, and a dozen or so booths. Aside from the building, the food and drink is what you'd expect from a McMenamins.

After dinner we drove over to the Doug Fir to see Talkdemonic play. This was the first time they'd played in a while, what with Lisa Molinaro having joined the Decemberists on tour. Lisa and Miranda are friends so at one point we got to meet her, and had a chat about the Decemberists tour, the future of her with them, etc. It seems that she'll be joining them on another tour sometime soon.

The second opening act was Leti Angel. Fairly good rock trio, though the vocals were pretty rough at times. That said, the male singer (there's a female vocalist and bass player in the band too) would use a sampler effect pedal and add harmonies loop vocal bites (yells, etc), which created some interesting sounds, some of which were really really cool. All in all, worth checking out their MySpace page.

Talkdemonic were, as always, great. I've talked about them before, so I won't go into great detail about them except to say that each time I see them the crowd gets bigger and bigger. They performed a lot of my favorite tracks from their albums, some of which were slightly re-worked, or Lisa would play her parts different, which was nice to hear it sound fresh… and they also performed a lot of new material, which was fantastic. More pics here and here.