Photos by Claire Evans and Sachiko Arakawa
Andrew W.K. in Portland, April 7, 2007
Cruising through to party, love, live harder
By Claire Evans
Published: April 11th, 2007 | 11:46pm
Considering the fact that he's probably most famous for bloodying his face on an album cover and the temporary ubiquity of the phrase "PARTY HARD," Andrew W.K. is actually a pretty intelligent guy. Sure, his Web site always includes a pastiche of mosh pit photographs and self-portraits among pizza boxes. Sure, it looks like he hasn't washed his white jeans in three years, and yes, his records can be so aggressively posi-metal that the well-meaning party-centric refrains are lost on most people.
There's more to W.K. (the letters stand for Wilkes-Krier, by the way, his actual last name) than stained jeans and bloodstains. To prove it, he's spent the last year rejecting concert requests in favor of a completely different kind of event: lectures. To be specific, talks. Discussions. After breaking the ice with a nine-hour lecture cycle called “The Joy Trilogy” at a small theater in New York, he's now re-branded himself as a Tony Robbins for the hipster set and embarked on a 10-date "Party Cruiser" tour, hosting ad-hoc discussion panels and late-night DJ parties all around the West Coast and Canada.
To open his Portland lecture on Saturday, April 7, 2007, W.K. admitted to the audience, with the frankness of a college buddy: "I don't feel like I have anything to offer that you guys don't already have." Sporting a knee brace because of a stage-diving injury procured during SXSW, he went on to explain that the point of these talks wasn't to impart his wisdom, not exactly, but to experiment with his own vulnerability, revel in the experience, and — most of all — try something risky. After all, he explained, the whole point of life is not knowing what the hell is going on. The 150 or so audience members sat on plastic chairs or copped squats on the hardwood floors, hearing him out.
An articulate speaker with an endless ability to ad-lib, W.K. spent most of the event fielding questions from an initially hesitant audience. What could have been a profoundly awkward afternoon turned into a bizarre, town hall-style experiment, with the main attraction of passing the microphone over for audience members’ confessions, stories, and philosophical musings. Between questions, W.K. waxed poetic on pure love, total positivity, paradoxes, and fun. As soon as the formal event, which clocked in at a healthy two hours, was over, W.K. disappeared and came back with an armload of free t-shirts; he spent the next hour posing for photographs, handing out purple tie-dye tees emblazoned with his headbanging likeness, and conversing one-on-one with literally every single person who approached him.
It was courageous and refreshing to see someone with such a larger-than-life persona make such an effort to connect with his fans (and curious onlookers) in a personal, relaxed way. For those who expected a little more, well, partying, the white-clad rocker set up camp that night across town at a packed bar in the old warehouse district of Portland. As the night wore on, a more recognizable Andrew W.K. emerged from behind an electronic keyboard: sneakers laced, sweat pouring, and his whole head of shaggy hair whirled into pure headbanging precision.
It’s hard to tell which performance took more guts.
Issue #13
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