THE WOODS And so the Great Hipster Exodus began....

THE NEWS THAT the Woods is shutting its doors this week is a bitter pill, but it isn’t entirely a shock. The sumptuous music venue was a dicey proposition to begin with: a music club located in the mellow suburbs of Sellwood, far from the downtown crowds and the hip hangouts of central Eastside. Its owners, Ritchie Young, Vivien Lyon, and Yoni Shpak, were unseasoned in both running a venue and in booking shows, a sometimes cutthroat business where commerce and art collide, and not always prettily. The digs themselves—a funeral home built in 1928—seem too nice for your typical rock show. The stage boasts an actual, honest-to-god piano for bands to use. The furniture and décor are tastefully ornate to the point of making the Woods feel like your grandmother’s place, if your grandmother had impossibly cool taste, a fully stocked bar, and a habit of hanging local artists on the walls. The tip jars are birdcages. There’s an organ in the bathroom.

In short, the Woods was too good for this world, and while it’s an absolute shame that its intimate shows are not going to continue, the finality of its history offers the realization that, yes, during its too-brief two-and-a-half-year run, the Woods was as wonderful a place as it seems in the mind’s eye.

Young says, “I think we wanted more of a clubhouse feel for adults, instead of, ‘This is a music venue and we sell Red Bull and vodka behind the bar.'” The Woods’ adventurous programming encompassed not just concerts, but readings, comedy, and theater. For me, the venue holds no shortage of vivid memories. I saw Island Records producer Joe Boyd read passages from his exceptional memoir of 1960s London, White Bicycles, as Robyn Hitchcock stood next to him, playing the songs Boyd described. I saw blind Oregon songwriter Bob Desper perform his first public show in decades, accompanied by Al James and Jon Neufeld of Dolorean—one of the most uplifting, hopeful sets of music I have ever heard. I danced at DJ Cooky Parker’s monthly soul nights. I sat cross-legged on the floor during A Weather’s release show. I drunkenly sang karaoke at Baby Ketten, once.

Claybourne Commons, LLC, bought most of the Sellwood block where the Woods is situated, back when Portland real estate was booming. But as the market tumbled, renting it profitably or reselling it was, for the time being, impossible. “One of the reasons why we even got the place is because we were the only date in town, essentially,” Young says. “But because we didn’t know what we were doing, we just were paying way too much a month. So we fought that with the landlords for two and a half years.”

When the opportunity came to renew the lease, the Woods crew attempted to renegotiate. “It’s kind of one of those battles that no one can ever win. We wanted to pay less so we could survive, and they wanted us to pay more so they could pay off their mortgage.” Now, according to Claybourne Commons’ redevelopment proposal on file with the city’s Bureau of Development services, their hope is to move the actual building back a block (demolishing a couple houses in the process), and use the prime real estate on SE Milwaukie for development.

Meanwhile, the Woods will go out with a free show from Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside, AgesandAges, and Brothers Young. And a late-night dance party is not out of the question, says Young. “The day that we opened was the day that Michael Jackson died, and the place was creepy and weird. Then as soon as we had people in, we turned Michael Jackson on and everyone danced ’til three in the morning.”

The Woods’ Farewell Night

Sat Jan 7
The Woods
6637 SE Milwaukie

Ned Lannamann is a writer and editor in Portland, Oregon. He writes about film, music, TV, books, travel, tech, food, drink, outdoors, and other things.

12 replies on “Into and Out of the Woods”

  2. First of all, technically The Woods is in Westmoreland, second, both Sellwood and Westmoreland are within the city limits of Portland, so therefore, not suburbs. But if the hipsters think it’s too far to come, that is OK by the residents. I had high hopes for The Woods as a long time music lover, so am sad to see it go, but really only found a few shows I had to go to there – the Boyd/Hitchcock show and Sean Lennon were standouts…and it will suck that it is going to be another high rise condo ghetto…

  4. TECHNICALLY the Woods is in the neighborhood of Sellwood-Moreland, and I used “Sellwood” as shorthand for that, as almost all Portlanders do. And I meant “suburbs” both in the textbook definition of “an outlying part of a city or town” and the colloquial sense of any part of town that is primarily residential, as opposed to the denser, taller buildings of downtown. If I meant to suggest that Sellwood was a separate city from Portland, I would have called it the “suburb of Sellwood,” not “suburbs.”

    If you’re going to split hairs, @2 and @3, I can do it, too.

  7. The only thing I’m seeing here is that you guys are acting like idiots arguing about a completely irrelevant side detail. Who gives a fuck if Sellwood is a suburb or not? It’s so small it doesn’t even matter anyway. If it disappeared no one (or maybe one) would even notice. Even Portland is a small little town. You can’t even get a direct flight to most places a person would want to go to. Probably because its assumed that most people just want to listen to metal and eat cheese, which you can pretty much only do in the back woods here. So there is no reason to have clothing stores with good style, or airplanes that fly to places of good taste. It’s too small to even have a suburb, and it’s pretty clear to me that you’re all pretty “small town” as well for even giving a shit about Ned’s semantics.

  8. I had a really fun Halloween there a couple years ago. Where’s Cooky going to DJ now? There’s not many good soul nights in Portland (with the grand exception of Hole In My Soul).

  9. Cooky’s going to move his soul night each month to a new venue for, at least, the next six months. February’s will be at the Doug Fir, but he’s trying to find some more offbeat places for each of the following months.

  10. Hello notaportlander.. for not liking Portland you sure seem to spend a lot of time ranting about it. Oh, and I’ve taken planes from Portland to go see Europe, Central & South America, Israel, and others. So if you are missing out on the interesting parts & people of Portland, that is your own useless fault. Now you can get back to your cheese.

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