The eMusic Dozen: The Music of Portland, Oregon

As late as the '60s, Portland was still considered a wretched hive of scum and villainy (okay, fine, so we have "shanghai tunnels" under the downtown area). So when this boozy Portland party band had a national hit with their unintelligible cover of Richard Berry's "Louie Louie," everyone assumed they had to have turned it into something dirty. This collection has all their hits and then some — their repertoire was mostly juiced-up covers (dig their ridiculous version of Huey "Piano" Smith & the Clowns' "Don't You Just Know It"), but they made a lot of them their own, especially P.F. Sloan's uber-appropriate "That's Cool, That's Trash."

Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss and singer-guitarist Sam Coomes (her ex-husband; check out his old band the Donner Party) make up Quasi, a duo that sounds like an armored legion. They've got one foot in the grandeur of classic rock (that guitar solo on "Invisible Star" is long-haired and proud of it), and the other in the indie gutter. Coomes and Weiss have been recording in their own Portland studio for the last few years, and this album, their seventh, is their most stompingly pissed-off and embittered: at political liars, at personal betrayals, at the "death culture blues."

Journalist, artist and college teacher Dougher is a Portland scene fixture — she's played in a bunch of Pacific Northwest bands like Cadallaca and the Crabs, helped get the city's beloved Rock 'N' Roll Camp for Girls started, and runs the Cherchez La Femme label. She's also a marvelous songwriter of the singer-guitarist-keyboardist stripe. Her spare, lithe solo debut, from 1999, is a little wonder of perception and tunefulness; she sings about traveling and escaping and drinking and falling out of love and Bella Abzug, and throws in a more-or-less earnest cover of the Eagles' "Take It to the Limit."

One of the advantages of Portland's high standard-of-living-to-cost ratio is that people don't have to stop being in bands and get real jobs in their late 20s. The trembling-voiced Fred Cole, who fronts this Portland institution, and his wife/bass player Toody Cole are grandparents, and they're still hammering out relentless garage rock with a lineup now in its 20th year. Like most of their records, this whomping, halfway-in-tune 1992 album — originally cut on the same lathe as the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" — sounds like it could have been a series of primitive psychedelic garage singles cut by asylum escapees in 1966.

Very few bands have ever stared straight into the face of the void — and then attempted to squash it — like the long-running Portland squad Poison Idea, fronted by 300-pound singer Jerry A. and 450-pound guitarist Pig Champion (who died in January, 2006). Their songs were brutally nihilistic, whether they were playing 45-second hardcore suckerpunches or five-minute metal piledrivers. This contentious live set from an early-'90s European tour sounds like they're about to devour the audience raw, even when they're grinding up the Go-Go's' "We Got the Beat" (as "We Got It").

Portland isn't exactly famous for its hip-hop scene, but we do have one top-notch crew, the Lifesavas team of Vursatyl, Rev. Shines and Jumbo the Garbageman. They've toured with Blackalicious, and their own 2003 debut album could pass for a lost gem from 1992: funky cut-ups that tweeze their grooves from deep in the crates (and not just the "funk" crates), and hot-potato rhyme-swapping that's as much about exploring themes as verbal pyrotechnics. De La Soul is a big reference point here — "Hellohihey" is an smartass update of De La's "Ring Ring Ring" — but Vursatyl, fittingly, reinvents his style and voice track by track.

The former Pavement frontman moved here a few years ago, and recorded his third solo album in his basement. It's a bizarre one, but a grower — its lyrics are as cryptic as any he's ever written, and he contrasts lyrical, Richard Thompson-inspired guitar solos with deliberately ludicrous arrangements (that falsetto!). A deft pop craftsman who's been making increasingly weird records to keep things interesting for himself, he still sometimes doffs a few of his stack of masks ("Loud Cloud Crowd"), or sticks "rock" inside the quotation marks he puts around almost everything ("Baby C'mon"). In the Dept. of Portland Inbreeding: Joanna Bolme, the bassist in Malkmus's band the Jicks, also plays bass on tour with Quasi, and often produces records at the legendary local recording studio Jackpot.

Portland has also got some bands that are totally uncategorizable. Violinist Béla Balogh and accordionist Courtney Von Drehle are the two longest-lasting legs of this sui generis group; back in 1997, when they recorded their debut, the other member was cellist Gabe Leavitt. (They're now a quintet with two percussionists.) The album's got hints of tango, klezmer and German art-song (a version of Hans Eisler's "To the Little Radio"); sometimes it sounds like café music from Weimar Germany, sometimes like avant-garde cartoon music. I've seen them play at house parties, a formal university concert and a wedding.