Ask folks who frequented the Portland nightclub Satyricon during its glory days about the most memorable nights there. You'll get lots of different responses. The most mentioned probably would be the New Year's Eve show Nirvana played to close out 1990, not too many months before that band brought a scruffy underground aesthetic into the mainstream with the colossal (and unexpected) success of "Nevermind."
Pearl Jam played there shortly before the release of its debut album. The very first show by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl's band Foo Fighters was there, too.
But ask George Touhouliotis about memorable moments, and he starts with the start.
"I still think one of the greatest nights was the very first night."
In late 1983, Touhouliotis, then 35, took over what had been Marlena's Tavern, a dark, narrow barroom on a seedy stretch of Northwest Sixth Avenue in Old Town. A few months later, around January, as he recalls, some younger friends of his who'd organized a series of shows they called the Urban Music Exposition needed a place to do their thing.
"It was a Thursday, and there was no sign outside the club," Touhouliotis says. "They just said, 'Let's bring the bands down there.' It was, like, seven bands -- until a year or two ago I could remember them all -- the Jackals, the Boy Wonders, the Motives (who played first), Billy Kennedy. ..."
"It was an absolutely beautiful night. The place was packed and people were happy."
For a couple of decades, Satyricon often was like that.
"Then there was a night when that band the Mentors played," Touhouliotis says, "and three people broke their legs or ankles, it was such a wild, crazy mosh thing."
Satyricon could be like that, too.
The ratio of grievous bodily harm to righteous good times was pretty small, all told. As Satyricon winds down toward its final show later this month -- a Halloween-night bill headlined by Poison Idea -- its place in the collective memory of the Portland music scene is as lofty as the club itself was down to earth. To clubgoers of a certain age and aesthetic bent, the series of reunion shows throughout October are both a sustained rush of nostalgia and a very fond farewell.
It's an overdue farewell, too.
For the past few years, a club has been open in the same place at 125 N.W. Sixth Ave. and has called itself Satyricon. But it hasn't been Satyricon.
The original Satyricon -- oh, why pussyfoot: the real Satyricon -- closed in May 2003. But it happened fast -- George (everyone still just calls him George) said that a deal to sell the place fell through then was revived suddenly -- and no farewell show ever took place. Satyricon was just gone.
"By the end, I had gotten tired," George admits. "A place like that runs on creativity and energy; it's not automatic. And by the late '90s, the turn of the millennium, my energy wasn't there."
Ah, but there was a time when George and lots of other people had energy, and Satyricon was its hotbed.
Perhaps this is the skewed view of a partisan, but it strikes me as difficult to overestimate the importance of Satyricon -- to the local music scene, to the broader development of rock tastes and to the cultural evolution of Portland into a "young creatives" magnet.
It's been said that Satyricon was Portland's version of CBGB, the legendary New York club that served as the incubator of American punk and New Wave in the mid-1970s. But I tend to think of it as more akin to Great Britain in 1941 -- a solitary holdout against forbidding forces.
That's overly dramatic, I'll grant. But there were years when Satyricon was the only home in these parts for the adventurous aesthetic of the post-punk underground -- which, to its adherents, really was like a bulwark against a pre-Internet popular culture that was relentlessly top-down in its operation.
Satyricon had its predecessors (the groundbreaking Urban Noize, the Met) and periodic fellow travelers (13th Precinct, the Blue Gallery, etc.). But no place lasted as long, hosted as great or as varied a roster of musicians and other artists, or created such a distinct and powerful social gravity.
Music was the heart of the matter, and it wasn't just sludgy, punk-ish hard rock (call it "grunge" and you'd have outed yourself as either a tourist or a lazy rock critic). The sounds of the '80s rock underground (sometimes called "Amer-indie" -- short for American independent -- or "college rock") ranged widely, from the primitive to the arty. Satyricon was open to free jazz or funk, too. Even the bigwigs of the mainstream local scene of the time (the Crazy 8s, Nu Shooz, Cool'R ...) played there.
But there also were regular poetry readings, often curated by Walt Curtis, who was a sort of spiritual uncle to the place. And the place held visual arts exhibitions before First Thursday made them commonplace.
When it comes to cultural evolution, cause and effect are tough to pin down. But even if Satyricon isn't responsible for Portland's current status as a hotbed of hip creativity, it was the most fully realized expression of that ideal that we've had.
"It wasn't just a hardcore stinky bathrooms music club," George says, noting that the club's public reputation somehow became simplistic, about wildness instead of about art.
True, wildness seemed part of the Satyricon's DNA. The heroin scourge of the early '90s took more than its fair share of a toll on the club's habitués. And public perception wasn't helped by an infamous kerfuffle with police in 1990, euphemistically called "the Satyricon riot": An officer tried to arrest George for urinating in a vacant lot outside the club and a handful of employees and regulars resisted the heavy-handed treatment.
But especially in the early years, the place was a haven not just for disaffected young adults, but for intellectuals and artistic adventurers. As George puts it, "I wanted to have a place about freedom of expression for the artists."
You can find a lively dose of Satyricon nostalgia on Facebook, where a page called "I hung out at Satyricon back in the day" has about 2,000 fans. The page is a repository of reminiscences, personal anecdotes, photos and so on. There are threads of collective detective work concerning the current whereabouts of old friends, breathless conversations about bands burned into memory, rueful recollections about the infamous trough-style urinal in the men's room. A few days ago, someone even posted a link to a site that sells, of all things, a thong emblazoned with the face of Jackals guitarist Dave Corboy.
George says he's noticed the page, but he doesn't take part. He keeps himself busy these days helping his wife with her two restaurants, Eleni's Philoxenia in the Pearl District and Eleni's Estiatorio in Sellwood. A year or so ago, Dimitrious Touhouliotis, George's brother, sold the building that houses Satyricon, and neither brother has been involved in the feting of its demise.
Apart from a wall pushed back here or there, the club looks much as it always did -- a dark cave covered in graffiti and stickers, the kind of place that's so worn that you could scrub it for days and it'd still look dirty. For those who knew it when (George says -- and I agree -- its greatest period was its first four or five years, before Nirvana's commercial breakthrough so radically altered the landscape), it's like a treasure chest of great memories.
"I see people on the street and they talk to me about the old days, as they call them," George says. "And to my amazement, the place means a lot to them. It was a moment. Life goes on, and a lot of them now have bald heads and pot bellies and regular jobs.
"It was really their club more than mine. For me it was nice to be able to offer that place for them to perform and set the stage and realize their dreams."
