If you’ve always dreamed of singing in a band, a karaoke night might scratch the itch. But on Monday nights in Portland, you can actually sing karaoke with a live band at Dante’s pub. Karaoke from Hell is now a 33-year-old tradition featured in a new documentary of the same name. The documentary will be screened on Wednesday, Dec. 17th at the Star Theater in Portland.
We talk to band members Dawn Panttaja and Brian Saunders, along with co-director of the documentary Chip Mabry, about the joys of live karaoke and how Portland’s art scene has changed over the years.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Karaoke from Hell put on its first show as a live karaoke band in Portland in 1992. It is still going 33 years later. For much of that time, they’ve played Monday nights at Dante’s in Portland’s Old Town. A new documentary about the band is screening tomorrow night at the Star Theater. It tells the story of the band, which is a kind of human jukebox with something like 1,000 songs at their disposal. It also paints a wistful picture of the ways Portland has changed over the last 30-plus years.
Chip Mabry is the co-director of the documentary. Dawn Panttaja is a co-founder and rhythm guitarist in the band. And Brian Saunders is a bass player and now manages the band. All three of them join me now. It’s great to have all three of you on the show.
Dawn Panttaja: Hey there.
Chip Mabry: Great to be here.
Miller: I want to start with a short clip from the movie. This is from the very first night that, Dawn, your band did live karaoke. We’re going to hear your co-founder Tres Shannon warming up the crowd:
Tres Shannon [recording]: [Rowdy background noise from crowd] All righty, we’re gonna get this show underway. What do you wanna do? If you wanna sing, you’re gonna wanna sign up on the little slip over here. My name is Tres and please give your hostess with the mostess, Mistress Dawn, a big round of applause. And right now, we have Mr. Karaoke himself, Elvis, king of rock-n-roll, doing a Tom Jones song, “It’s Not Unusual.” [Cheering]
[Band starts intro, then singer starts.]
Miller: Dawn, what do you most remember about those first shows?
Panttaja: Oh, the chaos, the just simple joy of creating the space where everyone got to come up on stage and do what they wanted to do with a live band. We were funny. We weren’t really a band. We’re more of an art project.
Miller: What do you mean by that?
Panttaja: Well, we had a different band every single time we played, and Tres and I would invite musicians to play with us. Sometimes they never had heard the song before.
Miller: That’s where the chaos came in?
Panttaja: Yeah. So I just sort of try to start. Also I was the only guitarist. Tres did all the leads on kazoo or sang them …
Miller: As the backup singer to help the people who are going up to sing?
Panttaja: He did everything. I mean, he helped people with backing. He sang the song if the people weren’t singing it. He did the lead guitar on his kazoo. He basically did everything. And I was trying to hold down the musicians.
Miller: How much did people know what karaoke was when you started?
Panttaja: I don’t know. It was pretty new. It’s something that we had brainstormed together: “Wouldn’t it be fun to have this live band and people could come up and sing?” But it’s mostly the old-time Portland musicians who came out to see us and all the hangers-on at Satyricon. It was a wonderful group of people who didn’t have fear. They really just wanted to jump up and have a good time on stage.
Miller: How did you play a song, as a band, if the people in the band didn’t know that song?
Panttaja: Good question. We projected these charts from an overhead projector onto a small screen, like a home movie screen. And they were all scrawled, like laser printed words and basic chords scrawled in a Sharpie, and we all tried to follow them. Sometimes the song was the song and sometimes it was something else.
Miller: Chip, did you come to this project, this documentary, as a karaoke singer yourself?
Mabry: No, in fact, I’ve never sang with the band actually.
Miller: Still, you still haven’t?
Mabry: I still haven’t done it, and you never know. Maybe we’ll do it at the 33rd anniversary party. But no, I’m just an observer. I had done documentaries on a couple of other subcultures in Portland, the skateboard subculture, and then I did a documentary about the Rose City Rollers, the female roller derby league. I just like to find subcultures and explore the human condition through ‘em.
And I was friends with Tres Shannon and just stopped in Dante’s one night, and they were doing it. And when you’re a filmmaker, all the bells will hit when it’s the right idea. This is a close project to me. It’s strong characters and I just knew right away that there was a subject worth documenting.
Miller: Brian Saunders is with us as well. You joined about 15 years or so into the tenure of the band. But it’s 2007. It’s been a couple of decades since then. Why did you want to join this band?
Brian Saunders: I’d been playing in basement bands and always thought, oh, we’re gonna practice and we’re gonna get where we can go out and play a show. And then you see Karaoke From Hell and it was like the “spirit of the ‘90s” they always talk about, where people just figure it out on stage. You get on stage and everything else comes later, and it was really appealing. So I became one of those hangers-on, and just sort of got more and more involved. “Hey, I’ll do your website. Hey, I’ll help you carry that.” And then next thing I knew, it was my life. And we do 130, 140 shows a year.
Miller: Dawn, what did you see in Brian that made you eventually say, yes, you should join the band?
Panttaja: Oh, he’s just so helpful and so talented. I don’t know. I was needing a partner or somebody who could help carry the load because, to be in the long run with a band, it takes a lot of planning. It’s not necessarily talent and it’s not who you know. It’s dedication to the fine details. And Brian helps us take care of the fine details. And he’s great.
Saunders: That’s true. When I joined the band, you were doing everything by yourself. I mean, everybody else played the music. But you were carrying all the stuff, you were picking all the songs, you were doing …
Panttaja: All the charts.
Saunders: All the grunt work, yeah.
Miller: I’ve seen various numbers about the song list at this point. It says 700 somewhere on your website; I’ve also seen 1,000. Does anyone have an accurate-ish count of the number of songs that you can play, if someone says, “I want to do this one?”
Saunders: Well, there’s ways of goosing the numbers. OK, we do the Weird Al versions of these 10 songs and we do Christmas carols. But I think we’ve been a bit better about taking out songs we’re tired of. I’d say it’s probably about 800.
Panttaja: Yeah, we probably know 1,000 songs. But we don’t play 200 of them at any given time.
Miller: Chip, you’ve spent a lot of time watching the band. What kind of musicianship does it take for a band to be able to play 700 or 800 songs, with amateur singers who may or may not know how to do it?
Mabry: Well, it’s really impressive. And one thing I would like to make clear is that these are fine musicians in this band. The guitar players and drummers, I’ve heard many people say they’re among the best in the city. I went and saw them on a Thursday, probably a couple of months ago. And I remember the song “Peg” by Steely Dan came out, and it’s got a very famous, difficult guitar solo right in the middle of it. And David, the guitar player, just nailed it. I remember thinking that song may not be requested again for a year. But he has to be prepared at any moment to nail that guitar solo. So it’s really a little awe-inspiring to watch what they do and it’s no small achievement.
Miller: I want to play another excerpt from the movie. We’re gonna hear a little bit of a singer who is unnamed in the film and then a former band member is going to be talking:
Excerpt from movie: [Singing] Where you wanted to laugh at a singer who was terrible, you kind of learned that’s not what this is about. It’s not about being cool, it’s about being free. Can’t sing, can sing. You wanna do it, you can do it.
Miller: Dawn, what has it been like to see, at this point, thousands and thousands of singers going up there and singing along with you?
Panttaja: It’s a joy. I mean, I really love having the community come up and join us in this adventure of playing this song. We’re going to make it to the end. We might have a stumbling block at some part of the song, but we’re going to pull through and they’re going to feel happy at the end of the night. And that is what we want.
Miller: Brian, what’s your definition of a, of a successful song?
Saunders: That is a good question. I think they’re all successful, like Dawn says, we get to the end. If it goes badly and one person messes up, we all look at each other and laugh. It’s kind of funny when we mess up. But usually it’s just taking a singer from the beginning to the end. It’s always a good experience.
Panttaja: Sometimes the singer will start to stumble, like “where are they?” And then our host will come over. She’ll point at the chart and show them. “This is where you are.” Or, we’ll all start singing very quietly with them, so they’re not alone.
Miller: You’re a kind of safety net.
Chip, there’s a fascinating piece of this, which is that you shot the majority of the scenes for this movie about a dozen years ago, for what was the 20th anniversary of the band. It sort of ends up being a time capsule inside a time capsule. The movie is very much about the early years of this band – Portland in the early ‘90s. But then you shot it in Portland in the early 2010s. Enough time has passed even since then that that, too, is a different time.
How do you think about those two particular periods: Portland in the ‘90s and Portland in, say, 2011, 2012?
Mabry: That’s a good question. I moved here in 2007. And immediately, I began to hear of this golden age that Portland experienced in the ‘90s and early 2000s. So many great bands came out of that period. So many great filmmakers came out of that period in Portland. Rent was cheap, basements were everywhere. There was a great creative environment. And I just missed it; I moved here too late. So I always tried to look around and found that there are pockets of that energy. And Karaoke From Hell is definitely one of them, and that’s what drew me to it.
Miller: Dawn, a lot of the footage in the documentary comes from VHS tapes that you shot. What’s your best guess for how many hours of video you created yourself?
Panttaja: For just documenting Portland, I don’t know. I have a giant closet full of VHSs. My partner Craig and I filmed everything possible that came through town.
Miller: Why? What did you think you were capturing?
Panttaja: It was an amazing time period. I came from Oakland in the late ‘80s and moved to Oregon, Portland here. And I just saw the art and the bands and the vibrancy. I used to say it’s just like Paris in the ‘20s or ‘30s. Portland is still, really special. But there was that spark in the ‘90s where it was cheap, and that made all the difference.
Miller: Just now Chip called it a “golden age,” but that was a kind of retrospective longing. I came too late. And I’ve heard about this magic that used to be. So that’s a kind of in-retrospect thing. In the early ‘90s, when you were doing this, did you feel in that moment that you were living in a golden age?
Panttaja: Of course. I mean, I felt so lucky to be here. I moved from having a pretty high-powered job in Oakland, bought a house, basically didn’t have a real job for years and years and years. I just made art. I was a waitress for a little while, but everything was possible. I was out in clubs every night. I was making art every night, different side projects, millions of bands taking part in things. I knew it was really special and it was so cheap that we could do it. I just cry when I think about the artists right now and how expensive it is in Portland – and it hurts.
Miller: You say in the movie that Karaoke from Hell started as an art project, something you told us, but that it turned into a business – a fun one, you say, but it’s not just for fun anymore. Can you describe the transition even just for the band?
Panttaja: Well, it all came down to Frank at Dante’s. He was so generous. He saw us play one show at Dante’s and he loved it so much. He said, “how about a regular gig?” And he and Tres worked it out that we’d play every Monday, and we got a guaranteed income finally. Not very much, but it allowed us a chance to play on a regular basis and actually get good. And we had a real band like Vic the Stick as our drummer, Kenny Coleman as our lead guitarist, Barbecue Bob as band bass. And because we knew we could play every week, we actually got good.
Here we are now, years later, and we’re still playing. We’re getting hired for weddings, parties and corporate things. And it’s the dream.
Miller: Brian, how do you add or decide you’ll add new songs to the list?
Saunders: That’s loaded. It’s a process. Now, we’ve gotten to where, OK, if it’s your birthday, you can pick a song and we’ll do it without complaint. But we’ll still complain. But people are always requesting. That’s always a challenge to get something that everybody wants to do, but it’s hard to predict what will really explode.
Panttaja: Yeah, you think the song’s gonna be, “oh, everyone’s gonna want to sing this.” And it just sits in our catalog. We learn a song and then we don’t play it for a year. But basically, it has to be something we can pull off with our instrumentation. Tal and I sing a lot of the organ parts, so we can give a very full sound to the band. But it has to be something that people will want but not overdone. Some songs, they just need a rest.
Miller: What’s one that you don’t want to play again for 10 years?
Saunders: She doesn’t like to admit it.
Panttaja: We have sort of a rule. You’re not allowed to say that in the band because we don’t want our customers, our fans, our singers, our friends to ever think they can’t pick that song because they don’t ever want to play that song again.
Miller: OK, so you won’t, you won’t tell us?
Saunders: They’re good songs. They just need some rest, like “Creep” by Radiohead is one that we just took off the list. “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes. Yeah, we’ll still do it.
Panttaja: We know how to play it, but we just do it less.
Miller: What about if someone slips you a $20 bill? Does that help grease the system?
Panttaja: Oh yeah. Totally
Saunders: Yeah, we’ll play anything for $20.
[Laughter]
Miller: Only $20?
Saunders: Yeah.
Miller: OK.
Panttaja: As long as we know it. Sometimes if we don’t know it, we have pulled things off that we didn’t know how to play.
Miller: This is 33 years now. What’s your hope for how long this band will go?
Saunders: We were just talking about that. Until we die, I think. I mean, that’s why I don’t think ... As long as Dawn wants to keep doing it, and she’s always gonna want to keep doing it, I think there will be a group around her making it happen.
Panttaja: Yeah, we plan on the long run.
Miller: OK, die on stage.
Mabry: 50-year anniversary coming up.
Miller: Hopefully, more than that. Brian Saunders, Dawn Panttaja and Chip Mabry, thanks so much.
All: Thank you.
Miller: Dawn Panttaja is a rhythm guitarist and co-founder of Karaoke From Hell band. Brian Saunders manages the band now. He is the bass player. Chip Mabry is a co-director of this new documentary called Karaoke From Hell. You can see it tomorrow at the Star Theater. There’s also going to be a Karaoke from Hell performance after the screening.
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