The Kids Don't Want Much
And Food Hole gives them everything they need

by Sam Soule for pdxguide.com
September 2005

Kids don't need much. A little space, an imagination — they're golden.

Following this line of reasoning, the new crown jewel in Portland's all-ages music scene is Food Hole — Food Hole is golden. Not that you would know it to look at it.

At first glance, the club seems misplaced. Situated in Old Town between a trendy space-age bar for suburbanite wannabe hipsters (The Tube) and a hootin'-and-a' tootin' binge-trough for suburbanite wannabe cowboys (The Dixie), one expects the bricked-over alley between the two to sparkle with gentrifying verve. It doesn't. Food Hole quickly reveals itself for what it truly is — a hole.

But the kids, remember, they don't need much, and Food Hole is determined to give them exactly that. In this case, not much is a room 15-feet wide maybe 30-feet long, a single-bore shot-gun space far between cleanings. At the far end of the room, the band sets up on the floor. At the front of the room, patrons enter and pay at a table. This is Food Hole.

In fact, the very term "club" seem to be out of place here, too "glorified" sounding, too "maintained". One goes to a club and expects a certain level of service: drinks, food, coat rack. Not so at Food Hole. Without alcohol, other all-ages clubs in town have dabbled with expanded food, beverage and candy services, to no great success. At Food Hole there is only one thing on the menu, the show. And the shows are pretty great.

Finally Portland has a club (yes, that word again) that operates without an artistic safety net, a music venue where there is no hope of ever appealing to middle-brow tastes. Food Hole has no pretense, overhead or space. It can risk booking acts with minority-geek appeal, drawing off an under-recognized swath of intense punk and indie underground bands just dying for a place to play where the dividing line between show and audience is blurry at best. Freakishness abounds in Food Hole, and the volume it brings is extreme.

Outside Food Hole the hip kids line up for shows like starving music fans. They look like spillage from a soup kitchen. Uniformly homeless in appearance, they shun contact from the bars to their immediate east and west, conversational amongst themselves — the culturally wounded, self-appointed. Food Hole is definitely a club.

Within Portland's hyper-developing music scene, Food Hole exists as a one-cell organism that lives by by virtue of its simple delivery system: a little space with lot's of volume. The kids like it.

Let the ears bleed.

The opinions expressed within are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of pdxguide.com or The Columbian Publishing Co.