Here begins my new blog on the Waterfront Blues Festival, offering you a glimpse into the trials, tribulations, late hour jam sessions, haggling, multi-shot lattés, promo-pack sorting, gig-hopping, and concert binging that goes into putting together the lineup for the West Coast’s largest blues festival. A hundred acts on four stages and five blues cruises, but, more to the point: 200-plus hotel rooms, 80 or more limo runs to and from the airport, bands with bass players flying in from Austin and drummers from New Orleans, rider demands that range from vegan pasta dishes to pork rinds, and demands for odd and obsolete keyboards (anyone know where I can find a Vox Continental?) no one has performed on live in these parts for three decades.

You have a special question about how all this gets put together? Wonder how I find and decide on the acts that make it into the program? Want to know why on earth B.B. King is playing Bend and Jacksonville over the July 4 weekend but not Waterfront Park (I’ll get to that one later)? Want to know how to put your little brother’s bar band from Bakersfield on my radar? Have a suggestion you’re convinced will improve the look, feel or vibe of our event? A favorite act you’d like to see on our stages? Well, I will likely be too harried between now and opening night to respond to any of these, but it’s worth a shot. Send me your questions, suggestions and tirades to the email link below and we’ll see how much of this I can stomach. Starbucks virtual gift cards accepted.

-Peter Dammann, Talent Coordinator

P.S.: If you want to know more about me, and the circuitous path that led me to this strange gig, you can check out Tom D’Antoni’s piece for Artbeat on Oregon Public Broadcasting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN0ePVQbQjU, or Marty Hughley’s profile that ran off the front page of the Oregonian on July 5, 2004…

The Monday Profile: Peter Dammann
Bluesman feeds festival and vice versa

Monday, July 05, 2004
by MARTY HUGHLEY

There was a time, strange as it now might seem, when Peter Dammann had to make excuses for the blues.

At least to his parents, that is.

The son of a prominent lawyer who’d attended Harvard with John F. Kennedy and served as general counsel for the Securities and Exchange Commission, Dammann had skipped the family profession in favor of alternative journalism. Now this: He was giving up writing to play in a blues band.

 ”I said, ‘Don’t worry, Mom. I’m just going to do this for six months and get it out of my system,’ ” he recalls.

Seventeen years later, however, the blues is Dammann’s system. Not only is he still in that band—Portland’s internationally respected Paul deLay Band—he’s its manager. He also plays guitar regularly with another of the city’s blues veterans, pianist D.K. Stewart.

And perhaps most significantly, as talent coordinator for the Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival, he’s the Northwest’s most influential blues presenter, the savvy tastemaker and organizational master who sets the tone of the Rose City’s favorite Fourth of July party.

Helping to maintain the success of an event that entertains as many as 25,000 people in a day is nothing to be ashamed of. But there’s a particular pride to being involved in the Waterfront Blues Festival, which ends its 17th run today in Tom McCall Waterfront Park, because of its function as a key fundraiser for the Oregon Food Bank.

Other members of his family have been active in labor issues and Democratic Party politics; Dammann opted to express his civic concerns in other ways, writing about the poor and homeless as a journalist when he first moved to Portland, and now helping to feed them. 

“I feel very aligned with this work on a political, social and ethical level,” he says of working with the food bank. It’s a job, he says, that has “allowed me to use all my disparate skills and interests.”

Judy Tint, a New York entertainment lawyer and board member of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation, puts it a different way. “I’ve always talked about music saving the world. I smile when I say it, but I’m serious. Peter always got it: That it’s about the music, but it’s also about more than the music.”

The Waterfront Blues Festival was already a successful annual event when Dammann signed on as talent coordinator. But during his 11 years on the job, it has come to reflect his personality in ways large and small.

“He’s all over that festival, literally and figuratively,” Tint says. “He manages to be at all four stages simultaneously, it seems, and keep everyone calm, and still slip in a killer solo here and there.”

Tint and others praise the festival’s expertly organized yet easygoing atmosphere backstage and the treatment given to artists of whatever stature, and they see these traits as an extension of Dammann’s character.

“There’s always going to be someone unhappy because they didn’t get the time slot they wanted or whatever,” says organist Louis Pain, a former bandmate of Dammann’s. “But even if they don’t get exactly what they wanted, he makes them feel respected.” 

Reliable variety

What you’re more likely to notice on the other side of the stage is that Dammann has made the festival reliable instead of predictable. In its early years it often seemed as if every band was playing the same set of rote shuffles and bar-band boogie fare. Dammann has made the offerings broader and deeper, edging out on the one hand toward soul, gospel and New Orleans funk, while digging into the continuing folk-blues tradition of the Mississippi Delta to find little-known yet revelatory performers.

Dick Waterman, whose many jobs in the blues world have included managing Bonnie Raitt’s career, says that Dammann’s booking is especially impressive given that the festival takes place in a “national corner,” where fewer artists might already be routing their tours, and because the festival’s length varies depending on when the Independence Day holiday falls.

“I especially admire Peter’s determination to bring to Portland not only the musicians that they want to hear but also the ones that they need to hear,” he said in an e-mail, lauding the choice of such “under-appreciated performers as Howard Tate, Solomon Burke and Bettye Lavette as well as such established veterans as Etta James and Bobby Bland.”

“If I’m going to be down here for four days,” Dammann says, surveying the festival site a week before the stages go up, “I have to find it all compelling.

Stumbling into the blues

Dammann learned about the great stuff early and up close. Growing up in the Chicago suburb of Northfield, he was a high school football team co-captain and all-conference defensive back who had a British Invasion-style garage band with some of his teammates.

“We’d heard there was this band called Muddy Waters giving a free concert,” he recalls, smiling to think he didn’t yet know one of the pioneering proponents of electric blues. “I thought maybe it was a Southern rock band. We skipped out on practice and went to what turned out to be the first Grant Park Blues festival. In one afternoon I saw Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Otis Rush, Luther Allison . . . everybody active in the Chicago blues scene then, which was the summer of ‘69.

“I felt like I had never heard music before. And I’d been singing Handel’s ‘Messiah’ at school and playing in this little band. But seeing Otis Rush for the first time, it was like having ice water poured down your back, it was so intense. So we turned into a blues band the next day.” 

Soon he and his bandmates (who included future Robert Cray Band keyboardist Jim Pugh) were visiting the Maxwell Street Market and being invited to jam in the seedy clubs on the South Side. “We were about the only white kids around. And they treated us like we might as well have been Prince William.”

Struggling with writing

But Dammann figured his blues life was over when he left to attend Hampshire College in Massachusetts — “the experimental wing of the Ivy League,” he calls it — and even more so several years later when he landed in Portland in 1980 to write for Willamette Week.

“The first week I was here I saw Robert Cray at the Last Hurrah and Paul deLay at Sacks Front Avenue. I thought, ‘What is going on here?!’ It was two of the best club shows I’d ever seen.”

He wrote about music sometimes, but mostly reported on “the effects that the early part of the Reagan era was having on people at the bottom economic ladder.” He didn’t find it easy. To Willamette Week staffers of the period, “Peter Dammann’s Disease” referred to a bout of all-night anguish and struggle over an article that came out graceful and strong.

Gradually he returned to music.

Walk into the North Portland bungalow Dammann shares with his wife, visual artist Kim Ray, and their two children, and you won’t have to guess whether a musician lives there. There’s a piano in the living room, a Hammond organ and a cheap, plywood acoustic bass in the dining room, clusters of guitar cases here and there. Upstairs in his office, old produce crates serve as bookshelves, and his 2001 Keeping the Blues Alive Award from the Memphis-based Blues Foundation is displayed no more prominently than any other festival-related tchotchke.

Pride of place goes to his Power Mac G5 computer. Images of his 10-year-old daughter, Isabel, a budding violinist, and 5-year-old son, Jesse, an aspiring boogie pianist, float across the screen. The computer tower itself is home to the copious spreadsheets on which he keeps track of everything from who’s playing where and when, to who gets fish instead of chicken, to what day he’s mailed which parking passes— transportation, lodging, equipment and assorted logistics for four stages and a couple dozen bands.

“Today I scheduled 115 limousine trips between the hotel, the airport and the festival. It’s hundreds and hundreds of little pieces of information,” he says, “and if I put them in the right boxes, everything’s OK.”

Despite the months he spends staring at these little boxes on a screen, trying to anticipate every detail, things still can go wrong. Such as the time he stepped off the stage after playing a set with the deLay Band and immediately was told that the next night’s headliners were heading back to the airport because they’d been turned away at their hotel.

Although he credits the festival’s karma with keeping that and other crises in check, others say it’s Dammann’s steadiness and affability that save the day. “He’s so efficient,” says Jean Kempe-Ware, the food bank’s public relations manager. “He never gets ruffled.”

“Thats true, “Dammann says with a chuckle when the comment is repeated to him. “I just implode.”

“But really, I guess that’s what the gym is for. And that’s why I keep the Monday night gig with D.K. Stewart. Through all of this, playing really is my salvation, emotionally and spiritually. Its great to just get up there and blow it all out.”        

For Dammann, however, even blowing it all out is done with taste and integrity. Digging into the funky grooves Stewart favors in his weekly shows at downtowns Candlelight Cafe & Bar, Dammann’s a consummate team player, locking in tightly with the rhythm section, playing just enough to help the music keep driving forward, inexorable yet relaxed. Yet when Stewart calls for him to solo, he bites his lip and lets it rip, not with a rapid spray of notes but with taut, nuanced phrases that speak of an essential connection between soul, sinew and string. He’s well-steeped in the blues, of course, but there’s subtlety and sophistication not surprising from some one who once played bebop in a college lab band directed by jazz giants Max Roach and Archie Shepp.        

“He can play alongside a really flashy player and steal the show just by being so tasty and under-stated,” Tint says. “And that’s rare in a guitar player.”

Musicians often praise how smoothly all aspects of the Waterfront Blues Festival seem to run — especially for an event with a volunteer crew. Dammann is apt to point to festival coordinator Clay Fuller, the nuts-and-bolts man he calls “the real unsung hero.” Or laud the value of Mike Lindberg, the former city commissioner who sits on the festival’s board and is adept at smoothing any issues with governmental bureaus. Or credit the unique attractiveness of the downtown/outdoor setting. Or talk about the value of the Food Bank, or “the nature of Portland, the populist esprit here.” 

“I just think it’s a great representation of Portland and the ultimate Fourth of July celebration of what it means to be an American — not in a jingoistic way, but (in terms of) diversity, music and freedom of expression,” he says. 

He’ll leave it to others to focus on his unlikely combination of aesthetic acumen, organizational skills and personability. Pain says that Dammann made his bandmates nervous whenever he began humming to himself while driving — “Invariably, that meant we were lost!” But amid the myriad demands of the blues festival, he’s a model of grace under pressure. 

There are times at the festival when Dammann wears simultaneously his guitar, his all-access credentials and his walkie-talkie, a combination of gear he once described to Tint as the mark of “the ultimate blues dork.” 

Tint describes him instead as “somebody who manages to walk the line between artist and friend of the artists on one hand, and impresario and slave to corporate sponsors on the other hand, without falling off the balance beam. And believe me, that’s hard to do. He’s just a gently fierce soul.”