Portugal The Man plumbs the “madness in us all”
Usually, when a band releases a hit song big enough to crack 300 million plays on Spotify, an appearance on “Ellen,” and — holy among holies — a remix by Weird Al Yankovic, its days of playing barrooms are over.
Alt-rock outfit Portugal The Man has gleefully made itself an exception. The Portland-viaAlaska five-piece came through Denver last week to play Blake Street Tavern and the Museum of Contemporary Art, a pair of venues that, size-wise, would be modest for some local bands.
First up that day: a 9:30 a.m. show for KTCL’s Keggs and Eggs, the notoriously rowdy St. Patrick’s Day event that has Blake Street Tavern busting out barrels of green beer at sunrise. The gig can be intimidating, even for a band like Portugal The Man, which is headlining Red Rocks with Oh Sees on Aug. 8.
When the band showed up, Eric Howk, guitarist since 2015, wasn’t sure if it was going to be the scariest or most fun show of Portugal The Man’s current tour.
“It turns out it was the most fun,” Howk said in a phone interview after the concert. “It felt like home. You don’t see a lot of stage diving and crowd surfing at 9 a.m. — you see it in Anchorage and you see it here.”
Its next Denver performance, though, would be arguably more memorable — both for its less snockered audience and its striking setting. That night, the band played a one-hour show on the second floor of the MCA, its stage framed by the work of visual artist Cleon Patterson.
The show was free to the 120 lucky fans in attendance who were selected via an Instagram lottery. (Staff and VIPs also numbered among the audience.) At the MCA Café on the top floor, they grabbed drinks a few rooms away from the band, which had transformed the Teen Zone into an ad-hoc green room.
At one corner table, a few MCA board members — including Mike Fries, its chairman — shared drinks before the concert.
“The museum has a bunch of diverse programming in addition to great exhibitions,” said Fries, the CEO of Liberty Global Inc.
and frontman of Denver’s all-CEO band, The Moderators. “It’s trying to reach out to the community and create exciting moments like this.”
Downstairs, fans wandered around with the giddy excitement of kids on a private tour of Nickelodeon Studios.
Zach Smith, 29, credited his work-from-home job for giving him the time to enter the contest. He’d only just recently started listening to the band, but thought it would be a fun night for his friend, Adam Stroup, who’s followed Portugal The Man since 2013.
“I saw that Zach entered the contest, and was like, ‘That’d be sick to go to that,’ “Stroup said. “Then, he texted me (about winning the lottery), and I was like, ‘What?!’ ”
Patterson is a friend of the band — they have breakfast together when Portugal plays L.A. — and suggested the collaboration as a way to combine their art worlds, and “make something with energy.”
Even without a concert pulsing inside of it, Patterson’s exhibit “Shadow of Men” — which fills out the entire second floor and even wraps the exterior of the MCA — is virile. On wall-to-wall murals, prints and one hulking statue, cartoonish black-andwhite figures wrap around one another in a mortal struggle. The black figures — ostensibly representations of humanity’s dark impulses — win out, driving their swords and daggers through the backs and flanks of their counterparts.
It’s evocative of lyrics from the Portugal The Man song “So American,” which it played near the end of Friday night’s set: “There’s a madness in us all.”
Patterson stood along one of the walls of his exhibit, looking on quietly as the band slashed through its set.
“We develop an apathy because we’re so used to seeing images,” he said. “The art space is somewhere you can go to meditate on what’s in an image, and apply it to yourself — where you fit into what’s going on outside of the world. I think the music space is like that, too.”