Tickets are $15 general and $10 for HSU students. Tickets are available at the University Ticket Office and at humboldt.edu/aspresents.
Wild Flag is a Portland, Oregon and Washington, DC based quartet consisting of Carrie Brownstein, Rebecca Cole, Mary Timony, and Janet Weiss. The members of Wild Flag have played in numerous and notable bands including Sleater-Kinney, Helium, Quasi, The Minders, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, and others.
The four musicians who make up Wild Flag have known one another for well over a decade. Brownstein and Weiss were in Sleater-Kinney and toured with Timony’s band Helium on numerous occasions. Brownstein and Timony played in a side project called The Spells. Rebecca Cole’s Portland-based band The Minders was a frequent opener for Sleater-Kinney. Weiss and Cole play together in the 1960’s garage-rock cover band The Shadow Mortons. If someone drew a visual representation illustrating the ways in which all indie bands are interconnected, Brownstein, Cole, Timony, and Weiss would be in the same tiny sphere, so playing together felt almost inevitable. After collaborating on a score for a documentary, the ease with which they worked together proved infectious and promising. Future practices were scheduled, songs were written, Wild Flag was formed.
Yet even after the members of Wild Flag became intentional about playing together—and Mary was flying from DC to practice in Portland—the band was hesitant about naming this endeavor. Yes, they knew how to be in bands, but not in this band. Wild Flag wanted to figure out dynamics, hear how the songs breathed in a live context, build cohesion and unity, and emerge as a singular force prior to putting those sounds onto tape. Wild Flag always intended to grow organically, never wanting to take for granted that an audience existed based on previous endeavors. So, instead of recording an album and then playing shows, they went on various tours, playing tiny club shows in the US and building up a fervent audience of their own.
Opening the show will be Drew Grow and the Pastor’s Wives. The band’s sound shares the influence of many current indie artists, but carries much more meat and gristle to chew on. It feels like it was molded after a long life of ups and downs, all set to a soundtrack of the songwriting of Bob Dylan, the drowsy despair of Bill Callahan/Smog, and a thick stack of dusty Motown and Stax 45s. Casey Jarman, music editor of Willamette Week, said of Grow’s songs “This is the kind of thing you want to pop on the stereo at your favorite dive, right after the whiskey hits you and you’re feeling bold enough to actually talk to that girl.”
For more information and credit card orders call CenterArts at 826-3928 or at humboldt.edu/aspresents.