"We tend to whitewash history," begin the notes that accompany the new compilation (D)early Departed: True Lies in Song Unearthed From Lone Fir, before concluding, "All the greed and cruelty in the world today was around long before Portland was born." That's a relief. The benefit album, with proceeds going to the Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery, seeks to uncover fifteen rather sordid tales from Portland's past with the help of a number of recognizable (and living) names from the local scene. Storm Large is here, as are the Adams (Shearer of Weinland and Selzer of Norfolk & Western), Amelia and Pete Krebs, too. All of the songs on the all-original collection are based on true tales of untimely deaths culled straight from the interred at the Lone Fir Cemetery, which happens to be Portland's oldest-- some of the composers taking more poetic license than others, but all of them making sure to get the end results right. It's a gloomy batch of stories, replete with madames, drunkard poets, and avenging ax murderers, but the result is a fairly gorgeous, if subdued, listen.
LiveWire's Kate Sokoloff produced the project, essentially hand-picking an inspired group of musicians who at times seem to be channeling their subjects directly. Loch Lomond's Ritchie Young (with a little help from Pia da Silva) sings of the prostitute and madame Alice Oberle, who was so beloved by her customers that they paid for her monument when she died in 1884, only to have her appalled family remove her grave and erase the inscription. "Oh, six-thousand men can't be wrong," goes Young's refrain. Chris Robley, meanwhile, sings a song based on the notorious Shanghai captain Jim Turk, a "crimper" who would steal young men away to sea for years at a time to serve as indentured servants; and Holcombe Waller imparts the tale of a doctor and a lawyer who came west together from Virginia, only to turn into doctor and patient before the Typhoid Fever that took both of them. They lie side by side in the Lone Fir.
Fascinating stuff, yeah? The stories go on and on like that, and it's difficult to remember that these characters were as real as you or I, fantastically fictional as they seem. Present meets the past full-on tonight when all of the artists from (D)early Departed take to the stage at the Doug Fir for the CD release show and benefit, with proceeds going to Friends of the Lone Fir Cemetary who plan to establish memorials to both the Chinese workers who shouldered much of the manual, menial labor in helping to build the city, and to the recognizably-named Dr. Hawthorne, who cared for the era's mentally ill and saw to it that many received proper burials in the Lone Fir. So what about the music? It's the likes of Nick Jaina, Matt Sheehy, Dolorean's Al James, The Taciturns, Jim Brunberg, and Leigh Marble, in addition to all of those mentioned earlier on the same stage on the same October night summoning the spirits of old Stumptown. Bets are on some kind of phantasmagoria going down.
Listen to samples from (and/or purchase) the album here.
Watch for our special Halloween session with some of these acts next week in the In Studio section, and on next Saturday night's edition of In House.
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