Project unites bands for posterity and to make a joyful noise

CORVALLIS - The Corvallis Music History Project started a bit like a revolution, with a small group of like-minded individuals drawn together by a common cause. Troubador Music Center owner Kent Buys was there, and Hewlett-Packard employee Roy Bennett. Stairway Denied vocalist Noah Stroup was there, musician Otto Gygax and programmer Jeremy Smith. Later they would be joined by punk musicians and community members Robb Vancill, Alex Foss and many more.

What brought them together was a shared passion for Corvallis' music and a desire to see its history preserved for both the benefit of future generations and the musicians still trying to eke out a living plying their craft.

The result is two-fold. First, they began interviewing the musicians that have performed in Corvallis over the past 50 years, musicians such as Ramblin' Rex and Tom and Ellen Demarest, Marshall Adams and members of the Hilltop Big Band.

As Buys points out, "I'd like to have people realize that they're part of history, and it's happening right now." The Corvallis Music History Project began as an ethnographic endeavor, a quest to see that no more music or musicians were lost to the years.

"Interviewing the guys who got started in junior high, maybe a year or two older than me, maybe the same age, they had to claw that into existence," Bennet says. "There was a lot of resistance. Hearing that story is quite interesting."

That story and many like it led to another quest, when it dawned on the members of the project just how many musicians were still living in Corvallis, still looking for platforms on which to perform.

"The community is very artistic, and maybe they're not as active as they used to be or I just don't run in the same circles," Stroup says. "But they're still around and they want to be a part of it."

So, the project responded to that desire and decided to put on a concert. At first it was going to be just two four-hour nights, but that quickly grew into six-hour nights, which grew into a total of 16 hours over two days. The inaugural concert of the Corvallis Music History Project takes the stage of Old World Deli at 5 p.m. Friday, June 6, continues until closing, then resumes the next day at 1 p.m.

Bands scheduled to perform include those listed earlier, as well as: punk and rock bands such as Arcweld, Muckraker, Blood on the Banjo, The Wobblies, Tourist, Stairway Denied and Norman; folk, country and blues acts such as Cliff and Chere Pereira, Cassandra Robertson, Adam Scramstad, Gary Nolde, Nancy Spencer and Mark Weiss; jazz, improv and metal acts such as Walk the Plank, Minus, the Vanilla Syncopators and Dave Storrs; and so many more bluegrass, Latin, Celtic and undefinable other genres that to list them all would take half the space in this article.

"The number of people that signed up to perform, just the overwhelming response we've gotten just by talking about the project," Stroup, 25, says. "There's still a music community here that my generation needs to be aware of and willing to reach out to."

Buys echoes the sentiment from the other end of the age spectrum. "I'm excited to see everybody exposed to everybody else's kind of music, different genres," he says. "I'm excited about seeing what folks between the ages of 12 and 35 are doing."

While the concert might serve as the public face of the ongoing project, it also will serve as a platform for the further recording of local music history. Bennett and Buys have arranged for a videographer to record the performances, and Bennett will spend the coming years setting up an online database and archive that will include not only interviews with the musicians, but also sound and video files.

"I expect to spend the next two years collating all the interview material," Bennett says. "What I would llike to see from my perspective is that the archive be established."

That archive will also include information about the many artists that have toured through or spent time in Corvallis and surrounding areas over the years, from Muddy Waters to the Grateful Dead, from Ella Fitzgerald to the Dead Kennedies.

Both the archive and the concert should also, say the organizers, serve as a reminder of the rich history that the local community has been and continues to be a part of. But they also point out that it's up to the community to come out and support this endeavor, so that it can lead to a continuing of the Corvallis Music History Project into the future.

"When people are couch potatoes, and they watch it and they're not involved with it, they think everything happens outside of themselves, and they can't interact and grow and socialize," Buys says. "I see more and more happening in the past five years than I saw in the previous 10, so it's just constantly building up."

CHECK IT OUT

What: The first installment of the Corvallis Music History Project, a concert featuring Tom and Ellen Demarest, Minus, Arcweld, The Nettles, Stairway Denied, Ramblin' Rex, Marshall Adams, The Wobblies, Norman, Walk the Plank, Tourist, Dave Storrs, Hilltop Big Band, Jenna Summer Smith, Gary Nolde, the Vanilla Syncopators, Muckraker, Cassandra Robertson, and Cliff and Chere Pereira.

When: 5 to 11 p.m. Friday, June 6, and 1 to 11 p.m. Saturday, June 7

Where: Old World Deli, 341 S.W. Second St., Corvallis

Cost: Free

Information: For history and a complete schedule of the event, see http://www.corvallismusic.com/