Stay Gold

Patrick Foss makes a good point: “The local media likes to
paint us as beer-swilling, dive-bar loitering plebeians,” he writes in
a recent email. He’s right. (Granted, he later discussed this point
with me as we swilled beer in a dive bar, but that is beside the
point.) In the past I have personally used this paper to saddle his
raucous musical outfit, Pure Country Gold, with such incendiary
descriptors as “debaucherous,” “last-call drunken rabblerousing,” and
“badassery.” I stand by the latter (even if “badassery” is not really a
word, per se), but Foss is right—Pure Country Gold has been
musically typecast as troublemakers, a drink-you-under-the-table duo
with little moral fortitude. For that, I offer my most sincere
apologies.

In fact, Pure Country Gold—Foss on guitar and vocals, Jake
Welliver on drums—are smarter than all that. While some bands
approach music making as performers first, their own fandom a distant
second, Foss is a music obsessive more than anything else. “I
definitely think of myself as a fan first, because that’s just the way
it works.” He continues, “I’m influenced by everything and I listen to
everything.”

Originally intended to be a larger vintage-sounding rhythm and blues
act, complete with blaring horn section, Pure Country Gold could never
get past the hurdle of finding a bass player, and killed that plan
before ever recruiting their brass backing. “I really wanted this to be
like an R&B revue,” Foss says, before owning up to the reality that
he’s happy the way things are: “We never rule out bringing somebody in,
but I think we’re too lazy to make it happen.”

With their R&B wings thus clipped, the band tumbled to earth
with the more reckless sounds of no-frills punk, and the simplistic
pleasures of squealing garage rock. With a ferocious backbeat
established by Welliver, Foss assumes the role of the red-faced
maniacal pitchman, delivering his raspy-voiced punk rock sermons in
short blasts of deafening volume.

The Pure Country Gold noise traveled all the way to Oxford,
Mississippi, where it caught the ear of Fat Possum Records’ Bruce
Watson, who drafted the band to record for his Big Legal Mess
subsidiary label. The result of this is the band’s forthcoming 7-inch
slab—the artwork of which includes the presumably tongue-in-cheek
tagline “arguably Portland’s greatest bluesmen”—featuring their
ode to Armageddon and domestic beer, “Yellow Bubbles,” plus B-side
track “Millionaire.”

And while the band hasn’t completely avoided the convenient call of
compact discs, Foss acknowledges that when it comes to Pure Country
Gold, and truly appreciating music, nothing topples king vinyl.
“There’s just more of a ritual about it. It makes listening to music
not a secondary event.” He adds, “It’s more of a you-and-the-music
thing. Instead of just throwing everything on random and just doing
your thing, this requires your interaction.”