Of all the current crop of bands fusing psychedelic music with more modern pop and more traditional rock structures, few have reached as wide an audience as Portugal. The Man. Formed in Alaska and current residing in Portland, OR, the psych-rock quintet has slowly massed a strong, loyal following by touring like a jamband and releases a series of well-crafted experimental pop albums (featuring artwork created by frontman John Gourley), After six independent releases, Portugal. The Man signed with Atlantic Records, who released the group’s well-received breakout album In the Mountain in the Cloud this past summer. Not ones to sit still, the band hit the road with Alberta Cross for an extended run that included their biggest headlining gig to take, a sold out performance at New York’s Terminal 5 during CMJ. Shortly after the show, Portugal keyboardist Ryan Neighbors discussed the band’s steady rise and latest release with Jambands.com/.
Could you start by giving our readers a quick synopsis on how you guys came together? I know that you’re originally from the Oregon area, but the band formally started in Alaska.
John [Gourley], our guitarist, and Zack [Carothers], our bass player, started the band in Alaska five or six years ago. At that time it was all Alaskans. They moved down to Portland, OR ‘cause they couldn’t tour out of Alaska—starting every tour with a drive from Alaska to the lower 48 costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. So they moved down to Portland and started doing some tours. The other dudes ended up quitting because they wanted to get real jobs and touring just wasn’t worth it for them [Laughter]. Jason [Sechrist] joined the band right before the first record so he’s been there since the beginning of the recording process. He’s a Portland guy. So they did Waiter: You Vultures! and Church Mouth. My band went on tour with Portugal right before the Church Mouth tour so I was rehearsing those songs live. And after the tour they asked me to record Censored Colors with them, which led to them asking me to join the band full-time four years ago.
What kind of music were you playing with your other band that first introduced you to the Portugal family?
It was kind of electronic weirdo rock. I guess that’s a good way to describe it. I played keys and guitar and then really decided to make keys my main thing once I started touring with Portugal. The Man. It was like, “There’s some real opportunities here if I stick with keyboards.” So that’s what I’ve been doing since.
From what I’ve read, Portugal really started as a vehicle for John’s songs and creative vision. As the band’s lineup has solidified and you have all spent more time on the road together, have you felt the group has developed into more as a band of equals, creatively at least?
John brings the skeleton. He writes on an acoustic guitar—the structure and the vocal melodies, usually not the lyrics so much—except the chorus. The chorus’ lyrics are usually the first things that come to mind. Then he’ll send mp3 demos of the songs to everybody. This usually happens when he and Zach are in Alaska through the winter, where he’s got solitude and can just sit in his room, playing an acoustic guitar without feeling pressure. And then he sends it over to us and we start to get ideas on how we’d like to color-in the song. Everyone writes their own parts, but for the most part John does the structure and the chord progressions.
Your songs are very scripted in a certain sense, but in a live show they take on a looser, more psychedelic quality. Is this an element of improvisation or is it the intensity in which you guys play that gives it that feel?
Live there’s quite a bit more improvisation. We extend the song by a couple of minutes— we add new jams, and we do covers. A lot of times with those jams it’s just like, “you know, maybe I’ll try something a little bit different here, a little more colorful.” We try not to overplay because if everyone’s just jamming it gets a little too much. But there is definitely a lot of improv in the live set, though the jams have a structure. We know for the most part where we’re going to start and stop. But what we do within those eight measures sometimes is much freer than other evenings just depending on how everyone’s feeling. I really love doing the live jamming because when most people start playing music, it’s like punk rock and rock music. Those heavy moments are just great to get back to. Like, “Oh yeah, I remember, I used to like rocking the fuck out. It’s pretty fun.”
When we’re in the practice space writing a jam, we usually head off the first day of tour with a very loose idea of how the jam’s going to turn out. We usually figure it out after a week of shows, and we’re finally like, “alright, we got this. We know where this is going now.” We’re pretty good at jamming with each other. We’ve been doing it for a long time so everyone knows how our jam will grow whether it’s a cue, a head nod, or a foot stomp. It’s just like, “Alright, we’ve got to explode here.” So I’ll switch to a beefier tone and Zack will kick on a bass distortion. We’ve gotten good at just knowing what one another will do. “You know that one thing that you sometimes do? That here? That’s cool.”
It’s a lot of fun and really cool. I got a bunch of new equipment, too—after Lollapalooza, our van and trailer got stolen. Much of the equipment got recovered, but six guitars and three keyboards didn’t. I was able to replace all my missing stuff with new gear that got me really excited ‘cause it was all brand new synthesizers that I have never played before. It’s still an adventure for me actually. I’m lovin’ it though.
I guess the small silver lining in your gear getting stolen is that it allowed you to get new equipment and everything.
Yeah, and everyone being so supportive on the Internet and on Twitter. People were really supportive of us and felt bad for us for having our stuff stolen. Everyone kind of came together. Orange Amps gave us some free equipment and Onyx microphones. Fender gave us some guitars and amps. It was really, really cool. We weren’t expecting the immediate support from so many different people. Like there’s a band based in Portland called Blitzen Trapper, and we’ve never even met them and they immediately offered us any equipment we needed to borrow for our next show through Twitter just because they felt bad for us and I think that’s great. Twitter actually had some great benefits for us in a time of need. Blitzen Trapper are actually from my hometown in Salem, Oregon and my mom knows the lead singer’s mom. Just random things you find out of nowhere. Like if I cross paths with him one day, we’ll be immediate friends just because we have that connection.
Speaking of the live show and the idea of improvisation and surprises, you guys played Bonnaroo this year. Not only did you play a proper show, but you guys did a cool surprise event after the festival’s Mardi Gras parade. Can you talk a little bit about how that came together and a little bit about that performance in particular for the people who weren’t there.
Bonnaroo is like the first major festival we’ve played so it holds special meaning to us because we had never played a festival before then. To be quite honest, we never expected we ever would. I couldn’t believe I was at a festival, let alone playing one. When I was in high school I just dreamed of going to something like Coachella and Bonnaroo to watch the bands, let alone play. So that was just incredible. So we played in 2009 for the first time and played again this year.
They approached us about doing ‘something cool’ with our band. They didn’t know what it was yet. They wanted to do something unique and interesting. We do those types of secret shows and just random cool stuff. So we were brainstorming and couldn’t really figure out what to do, but then thought a secret show would be really fun. They have this Mr. T float that has been involved in the parades they’ve done in the past, so we set up all of our stuff on the Mr. T float. We really had all these lasers and fog. It was 3 a.m. when we ended up playing, but Preservation Hall Jazz Band did a parade through the festival and ended at the float where we were playing. So the parade ended there and we kicked into our first song. It was awesome. It was one of my bandmate’s birthdays so we had a bunch of champagne on the float that we were spraying all over people.
Did you have any musical highlights from Bonnaroo?
Yeah, I’ve always been an Explosions in the Sky fan, but had never seem them live before. Live, they just blew me away. It was just loud and perfect. I talked to them and told them how much I dug their stuff. And then Junip was great as well—the Swedish group. We met them at Bonnaroo and actually hung out after we watched them play, drinking beers at the catering area. Jose Gonzalez, the lead singer and John, our singer, exchanged emails and we ended up doing a remix with them a couple of weeks later of their song, “Without You.” We started a bond with them at that festival, and it’s really cool. Another thing I like about festivals is meeting other bands that you’re fans of. And it’s great when they’re not dickheads cause so many of them are but so many of them are so great.
Let’s shift back to the album recording. When you first started working on this album, which I believe is your sixth album. At that point when you first started recording how many songs had you written and played live?
When we started recording them, we hadn’t played any of the songs live. It was the acoustic demo type of thing so we knew the basic structure of five or six of the songs, a lot of them didn’t come out—like the last two of the songs didn’t come out until the last two weeks of the recording. But we went up to Seattle to do pre-production, and that’s when we finally started jamming the songs live a little bit: experimenting, figuring out how to turn them from acoustic demos into rock songs. So we did Seattle for two weeks and we did a month-long tour and then went to El Paso to record the song, “Branch.”
What we usually do when we go into the studio is we’ll have songs half-written. I think that throws some people off because they’re expecting us to go in and just play our songs. But the way we do it, we like to add things last minute and change things last minute if we want. So with the pressure of Atlantic and everything, we just couldn’t really figure out how to make the songs come to life so we spent a month in El Paso and left with just the skeleton of three songs complete. We were obsessing over tempos and tones and other little things that we just couldn’t get our brains to cooperate with each other and actually finish this record, so we left to El Paso pretty upset with ourselves and the whole way it worked out. We spent some time in New York recording, San Diego, Los Angeles, our home in Portland, and then we ended in Seattle last December and that’s when we figured out how to do it.
We just went in with our friend Casey Bates who did the first two records in the studio that John and Zack helped build when Casey first bought it. We felt comfortable again. There was no pressure on us. We were playing video games, hanging out, talking openly about what we wanted to do with the songs instead of keeping things inside if we had disagreements, which we had been doing previously in El Paso. We ended up actually finishing the record with us just hanging out being friends again and making music fun instead of all the pressure like this has to be a great record. You know, don’t fuck this up type of talk, which was really just holding us back in the long run. We finished it on our own, and it made everyone feel really good. Like, see, we could’ve done it all along we just have to let ourselves do it. Hopefully, next time around, we’ll have learned our lesson, but all the trouble led to a good record. There’s moments in there where if we would have finished it in that first month like we planned, “Sleep Forever” wouldn’t have been on the record. That was the last song that John wrote. So all in all, all the trouble was good and we ended up being closer now because of it. Going through that tough experience, if you never had it before, it brought us together in a good way and we’re really happy with the record now.
It seems like for every band there’s a time where you’ll almost have to creatively butt heads for a second to realize how close you are.
Definitely, that happens. People just come in from different musical backgrounds. You hear an idea in your head that you think sounds a certain way. To someone else the reference point is way off. Like, it doesn’t sound like that. It sounds like something totally different. But we were able to overcome that and continue to improve and it’s tough. We all love each other, but we also fight a lot. Quite often like all bands do. We make it work.
You mentioned before how at these bigger live shows, in that old-school punk rock way and you kind of mentioned that each of the members in the band have different musical backgrounds. Can you talk a little bit about where the current band member’s original interests lie?
I know John grew up on oldies radio cause that’s pretty much all he had up in Alaska was radio that could get a couple of stations and a record player. He grew up on the Motown; he had Beatles and David Bowie vinyl records and stuff like that, which you can definitely hear in our sound. That’s where he came from. Zack grew up all about Rage Against The Machine, Pantera, and just heavy stuff. I think his first show ever was Primus. Then we did a tour with Primus, and he was like a little kid every night watching Les Claypool play the bass every night. Jason grew up with an electronic background—he was into industrial music. The band he was in Portland that Portugal first noticed him from was an electronic space-rock band and it was really cool. Jason knows a lot about the synthesizers as well. Cause the band he was in growing up had so many keyboards. I grew up singing in choir and in church and then when I started playing in bands for the first time, I was all about punk rock. Not real punk rock, whatever, pop-punk. It was cause of my age so it made sense at the time. You know, NOFX, AFI and all those bands. I got OK Computer when I was 16 and that kind of like, turned me around and made me want to play weirder, more interesting music. Like, “Whoa, I just heard an electronic drumbeat and a keyboard, and I liked it.” I used to think of techno when I heard that. ¬_Kid A_ was the record that really made me want to explore interesting musical bands and things like that.
In terms of the tour with Les Claypool, did he give you any advice that you’ve taken to heart?
He didn’t give us any advice, but watching them live every night was enough to make you want to go home and practice and you know, stick to what you do cause they’re an extremely odd, weird band and they’re very successful as well. And it’s just cool to watch them still doing it. [They’re] so much older now and put out a new record. That’s crazy that they’re still going at it. And yeah, just the musicianship is enough to inspire you every night.
You got to work with veteran producer Andy Wallace, who has worked with some of the greats like Nirvana and Phish. Could you tell me more about his involvement in the new record?
He didn’t produce our record, he mixed it, but he made that record incredible. Just the way he mixed it. He was asking us what we wanted, to give him notes and we just said, “No, you do your thing. You’re one of the greatest mixers of all time.” He mixed Nevermind by Nirvana and Grace by Jeff Buckley. He knows what he’s doing; we didn’t need to give him notes. Just ring out the parts that you like, just do your thing. He did and it was incredible. Guitar parts that I forgot were even recorded were all of a sudden the main parts in the song. But that’s what he heard that was the best so that’s what was highlighted and it sounds great. I love it.
Is John still designing the cover art and the visual aspect of the band?
Yeah, John and Austin Sellers have done every poster, every piece of album art, every t-shirt since the band began. John will draw the pictures and Austin will put it together, add color and work on the computer. It’s awesome, I’m actually impressed that they’ve managed to continue to do it and still have it be different each time around. I like consistency in album art like if someone did our album art after six records, it’d be kind of weird. It wouldn’t be as cohesive. I think it’s great when there’s kind of a timeline of the band, and it’s the same people working together the whole time. I think that creates a cool effect.
Now that you guys are playing some pretty sizable stages, both on your own and at these festivals, the visual presentation of the show has also become very three dimensional and much like an event, not just a concert. Is the visual aspect of the live show something you guys are involved in?
On the last tour we had those orbs, the bubble lights all over the stage that was totally sci-fi. It reminded me of an alien movie just looking at those every night. Like, “Man, these look weird. I bet they look rad from out in the crowd.” We met a guy named Tobias; he does lights for Miike Snow and a bunch of those Swedish bands. He’s Swedish himself. We met him a couple of years ago and John kept in contact with him. So he and this guy who works with him, Iggy, designed the light show for us. It turned out great. We love it. We’re always trying to do something different. We’ve had the same lasers for a long time. People loved them cause lasers are awesome. But on this last tour we wanted to do something different for the fans of ours that have been seeing us for six years. So we stepped up the lights and practiced a lot more before we left. All bands practice, but we took practice very seriously this time around. Seven days a week, six-hour days really hammering it out and learning new covers. We wanted to put new jams in ‘cause we’ve been doing the same couple of jams for a while. New covers and new old songs we had not played in the past. There’s a couple from the first record that no ones ever heard live before. So we just wanted to keep the live show just as interesting as the album art and the music on our record. We wanted it to be live you’re not just hearing us play our record, you’re hearing us explore a little bit and sing a little bit of the other things that we like, like a psychedelic jam out and things like that. I really enjoyed the Terminal 5 show the other day. It was awesome and rockin’ –that was actually the biggest show we’ve ever played.
