On August 23, 1964, the Beatles played at the Hollywood Bowl—a
landmark outdoor amphitheater in Los Angeles—to a
sold-out-and-then-some crowd of 18,000 frenzied fans. One of the
ecstatic teenagers who made up the bulk of the audience, and whose
crazed shrieking doubtless overwhelmed the amplification technology of
the day, was my mother, age 14. Though my mom has since been to
countless concerts at the Bowl, this is her first memory of the place,
the experience that established her relationship with it, and the one
she giddily recounted to me every time we went there together when I
was growing up.
That foundational Beatles concert imparted some magic to the Bowl
for my mom, and its afterglow was surely in some part responsible for
her deciding to spend so many more evenings there—many of them
with me, once I was around—taking in performances by the Los
Angeles Philharmonic, who made the Bowl their summer home. Due in no
small measure to these desert nights spent listening to live
performances of works by Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Beethoven, I grew up
so loyal to these composers that when some of my fifth-grade classmates
said that they were going to come to school the next day with mohawks,
I retorted that I would come wearing a powdered wig. And so, two
generations of love for classical music, my mother’s and my own, can be
traced back to the Beatles at the Bowl—a pops concert at the
symphony.
It is therefore only natural that I should be heartened that the
merry, brass-playing pranksters of Portland’s own MarchFourth Marching
Band—fresh from a cross-country tour, and with a new live album
to peddle—will begin a three-day stint sharing a bill with the
Oregon Symphony at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Saturday,
November 24. I can think of no local ensemble more populist and
eminently likeable than MarchFourth who, with their funkadelic sound,
stilt-walking, unorthodox facial hair, and Pied Piper appeal, sell out
all-ages matinees as consistently as all-night bacchanals. Ideally,
their multigenerational legion of fans, younger than the usual
symphony-going set, be they diaper-wearing or diaper-changing, will
come to the Schnitz to see MarchFourth, and stick around to watch the
Symphony live-score the classic Harold Lloyd silent film Safety
Last. And with any luck, some of these toddlers, teens, and
twentysomethings will take to the symphony and come back for more. By
holding cross-genre concerts at the Schnitz, the Oregon Symphony is not
slumming, as critics might claim, but rather embracing Portland’s pop
riches to attract a new audience—an imperative for the
institution, which, like most of America’s orchestras, has been plagued
in recent years by mounting expenses, massive debt, and dwindling
attendance. Now, give us our orchestral Decemberists concert!