Online Feature: Local band VCR releases debut album on cassette. See our audio slideshow at Dailyemerald.com.              

On a cool April night, the band members of VCR — Chase Clark, Emma Hurt and Tyler Howard — climb into Clark’s 1994 Buick Regal Sport. This ride has a purpose. The Eugene group has just finished recording its first album, Season One! and wants to experience it on the open road. As the first track, “Feelin Alright” buzzes warmly through the speakers, the album’s summer inspiration is already clear. Despite the chilly Oregon breeze and the dark, maroon interior of the car, it’s easy to be quickly transported to a sunnier time, one defined by Clark’s crunchy guitar, Hurt’s melodic bass and Howard’s aggressive drums.

VCR isn’t a group prone to honing in on a singular sound; Clark admits they never play a song the same way twice. The band’s flexibility holds true on “Season One!” which ranges in sound from ‘60s sunshine pop to punky low-fi. But overall,

VCR says they wanted to create an album that simply “feels good.” “Everyone goes through summer,” said Howard. “Everyone has thoughts they associate, emotions they associate with summer. It’s just a good common place to make noise and sing about.”

Ever fixated on the antiquated technology, VCR’s new album was released as a cassette last Friday, Aug. 12 through Eugene’s House of Records, Skip’s Records, CD World and on VCR’s Bandcamp. As for VCR’s future plans, the band is already working on its next studio album, Season Two! which will explore the season of fall and embrace darker themes.

Written by Franziska Monahan and Hannah Steinkopf-Frank. Go online to dailyemerald.com see our video about VCR.

—

Tuesday, August 16

Howling Mad: A forum on wolves, politics and restoring Oregon’s environmental leadership — University of Oregon School of Law (1515 Agate St.) — 4-6 p.m. — Free.

Don’t call it a comeback: Wolves still have a problematic relationship with Oregonians. Wolves might not have yet forgiven us for the wolf bounty, which lasted from 1843 to 1947 and decimated the state’s wolf population. It wasn’t until 2008 that the state’s first wolf pack since the bounty’s end was discovered. This Tuesday, conservation experts and congressman Peter DeFazio are hosting a panel discussion on wolves and their role in Oregon territory. According to Oregon Wild’s website, the discussion will cover “the political mayhem surrounding wolves’ ongoing comeback story, the hopeful progress being made, and how Oregonians can contribute to the return of this keystone species to our wild places.” Visit http://www.oregonwild.org for more information.

Wednesday, August 17

People Under the Stairs plays at HiFi Music Hall (44 East 7^th Ave.) — Doors open at 8 p.m., show starts at 9 p.m. — Tickets are $21 in advance; $25 on day of show. — 21+.

L.A.-based hip-hop duo People Under the Stairs sidestep some of the typical styles of modern rap where other rappers succeed; Christopher Portugal (Thes One) and Michael Turner (Double K) don’t use their music as a political soapbox, boast about material wealth or dial up the braggadocio to insufferable levels. Rather, PUTS keeps it simple, rapping about day-to-day pleasures and pursuits, often layered over funk and jazz samples. Doors open at 8. Show starts at 9. DJ Crown opens.

Thursday, August 18

Full Tree Moon Climbing at Mount Pisgah Arboretum (34901 Frank Parrish Rd.) — Admission is $45 (registration required) — 7-9 p.m.

See the full moon in its proud, robust form from the comfort of an Oregon white oak tree. Mount Pisgah Arboretum is hosting this special tree-climbing event in conjunction with Eugene Parks and Recreation. Climbing instructions and safety equipment provided. Visit http://bit.ly/1Kt6Fvr to register or check out http://www.mountpisgaharboretum.com/festivals-events/ for more information.

Friday, August 19

Little Women presented by the Eugene Roving Park Players at the Petersen Barn Park (870 Berntzen Rd.) — 6-8:30 p.m. — Free.

This Friday, director Victoria Harkovitch’s adaptation of the 1868 Louisa May Alcott novel Little Women is coming to the Petersen Barn Park. This story is the epic account of the four March sisters who live with their mother in New England as their father serves as a chaplain in the Civil War. The show is presented by the Eugene Roving Park Players, a non-profit community theater company that adapted Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor earlier this summer season. Visit www.rovingparkplayers.org/ or call (541) 914-2374 for more details and dates.

Saturday, August 20

Eugene Emeralds vs. Everett Aquasox — (2760 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd.) — 7:05 p.m. — Tickets are $8-$14.

Everett, Washington’s Aquasox (27-24) face off the Emeralds (36-15) this Saturday in game one of the series. This game at PK Park will also feature Daniel Browning Smith, deemed The World’s Most Flexible Man. The 37-year-old contortionist’s stunt and acting IMDb credits include Minority Report (2002), Men in Black II (2002), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) and Paranormal Activity 3 (2011). Due to medical condition Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, Smith’s flexible body allows him to dislocate his limbs and twist his head 180 degrees. Visit the Emeralds’ MILB website for more info: http://www.milb.com/index.jsp?sid=t461

Sunday, August 21

Love’s Labor’s Lost at Amazon Community Center (2700 Hilyard St.) — Every Saturday and Sunday of August — 6-8 p.m. — Free.

One of the immortal Bard’s first comedies and most obscure works is coming to Amazon Community Center this weekend, directed by Sarah Cassidy, with performances on both Saturday and Sunday as part of Free Shakespeare in the Park’s 18th season. The play centers on the King of Navarre and three of his men who take an oath to not get romantically involved with any women — which doesn’t quite work. This play also features the longest word in any Shakespeare work —“honorificabilitudinitatibus” (meaning “the state of being able to achieve honors.”) This play is presented by City of Eugene Recreation and Free Shakespeare in the Park. Call the Amazon Community Center (541) 682-5373 for more information.

If you associate any image with Dandy Warhols, it’s almost certainly the unzipping banana. It’s printed onto the band’s drumhead and the cover for the 2003 album Welcome to the Monkey House, named for the Kurt Vonnegut short story of the same name. The Warhols’ stage at the WOW Hall last night was covered in iconography, but there was only one banana.

This show on the night of Friday, Aug. 13 was the Warhols’ second stop in Eugene since last November.

Earlier this year, the Warhols, a Portland alt-rock staple, put out its tenth studio album, Distortland. Anyone is allowed to read into this however they please. Distortland features a single “Catcher in the Rye,” which indicates that they’re still mining influence from high school literature.

The Dandy Warhols’ records Welcome to the Monkey House (released in 2003, left) and Distortland (2016, right).

The stage boxes were tagged “T D W” and cloaked in decorative blankets. One blanket had a beaver illustration on it. This makes sense. The band hails from the Beaver State. But the two other blankets were of a skull and crossbones. This is more puzzling. In fact, skulls and crossbones were nearly ubiquitous on stage, also present with guitarist Peter Holström’s jewelry and drummer Brent DeBoer’s t-shirt. Holström regularly knelt down to fiddle with the mess of knobs and pedals at his feet, which revealed his steel skull ring.

It was a decidedly impersonal show, and the group has an almost hilarious anti-charisma, since I cannot recall if they ever addressed the audience for any real amount of time. Realistically they talked to one another more than the audience. Pauses between songs were filled with drone from Holström’s guitar or lead vocalist/guitarist Courtney Taylor-Taylor seizing the moment to cut his fingernails.

Taylor-Taylor clips his fingernails during a Aug. 12 show at the WOW Hall in Eugene, Ore. (Emerson Malone/Emerald).

Byavoiding the chitchat, the Warhols for the most part surrendered its identity to its sound and the visual images surrounding them.

Their sound is still colossal, commanding and fun. The set was spanned the band’s 22-year career. At one juncture midway through the set, three of the four members abruptly trotted offstage (keyboardist Zia McCabe hopped off into the audience and beelined to the back of the WOW). This left lead Taylor-Taylor alone, during which time he did a marvelous solo version of “Every Day Should Be A Holiday.”

“This song is quickly becoming the potty break song, which I’m okay with,” he said.

The next time Taylor-Taylor spoke to the audience was near the end of the set, he was muddled and incoherent. His words – be they a sentimental thanks, an ode to the venue, to fans, a few words of gratitude – were totally obliterated under the noisy feedback from Holström fiddling with his pedals, which emitted a piercing, chopped squeal over Taylor-Taylor. Intentional or not, this was very funny.

Naturally the set also included “Bohemian Like You, “Not If You Were the Last Junkie On Earth” and “We Used to Be Friends,” which were indispensable and paid off handsomely. Some tracks from Distortland include “STYGGO” and “Pope Reverend Jim,” which harness the youthful synth-pop that embodies the best of the Warhols.

Dandy Warhols drummer Brent DeBoer during a Aug. 12 show at the WOW Hall in Eugene, Ore. (Emerson Malone/Emerald).

Dandy Warhols guitarist Peter Holström during a Aug. 12 show at the WOW Hall in Eugene, Ore. (Emerson Malone/Emerald).

Dandy Warhols guitarist Peter Holström frequently calibrated the knobs, pedals and buttons at his feet during a Aug. 12 show at the WOW Hall in Eugene, Ore. (Emerson Malone/Emerald).

Keyboardist Zia McCabe during a Aug. 12 show at the WOW Hall in Eugene, Ore. (Emerson Malone/Emerald).

Eugene’s own Egotones and Snow White joined Seattle’s La Luz for an impressive lineup of Pacific Northwest-based surf-rock bands that played the W.O.W. Hall last night.

The instrumental-heavy genre has some basic ingredients — bass, guitar, drum and organ/keyboard — which is a short checklist, but the different approaches that the bands took was really what made it rich.

Egotones, a self-described “Japanese cowboy surf spy rock from Mars” group, fits the bill well. It’s an underrated quality for bands to brick-layer their sounds one at a time into a loud, tight collage, then pull them all away to focus on one element, like the organ’s wobbling chords, before bringing it back.

Snow White really delivered. Lead vocalist Lauren Hay is intense. She has an frayed, chaotic stage energy as she swings her blonde mop of hair around, slams on the keys and belts out the words.

Lauren Hay of Snow White at W.O.W. Hall on Thursday, August 11. (Emerson Malone/Emerald).

The entire band is excellent. Bassist Max Knackstedt leaned up against the W.O.W. Hall speakers for a languid bass solo before guitarist Tim Khadafi reeled him back in by scraping his guitar with a pick. At the set’s end, Knackstedt’s calamitous bass feedback combined with Hay’s frenetic screaming in joy for a distressed, awesome finish.

Seattle’s La Luz has been playing shows around the West Coast this summer, with stops including Pickathon Music Festival last weekend and Sasquatch! Music Festival in early May.

Almost immediately, guitarist and lead vocalist Shana Cleveland came out and apologized, croaked into the microphone that her voice is shot and tonight would be a very short set. In the next half hour, the band ran through roughly ten tracks. (Sometime that evening, Cleveland posted on Instagram that she “lost about 5/6^th of my voice due to a nasty combination of sudden illnesses and now I’m gonna try and play this show. I’m sorry for whatever is about to happen Eugene. I’ll try my best.”)

https://www.instagram.com/p/BI_yuxZBcQj/?taken-by=crawdadcleveland

Hey, we’ve all been there. Who among us hasn’t fallen ill, had to slog ourselves through our daily obligations, and wanted to open the window and tell the town: “I’m sorry for whatever is about to happen, Eugene”?

Shana Cleveland of La Luz at W.O.W. Hall on Thursday, August 11. (Emerson Malone/Emerald).

But damn it, La Luz brought the light to the W.O.W. Hall. Literally — Egotones and Snow White were basically playing in the dark.

Since Cleveland’s voice box was out of commission, the set was largely instrumental tracks to give her a break. It was sweet to see keyboardist Alice Sandahl and bassist Lena Simon step in to assist Cleveland with some lush, vocal harmonies.

Allusions to surf-rock titans like Link Wray or Dick Dale are inevitable and nostalgic, but totally miss the mark. The La Luz sound is inventive and sublime in its own right. Lyrically, the band’s got nothing to do with surfing. No chance you’ll hear a “Surfin’ Safari” cover anytime soon. There are times when the drum rolls mimic a tidal wave crashing, but no one’s screaming “Wipe out.”

Cleveland cuts some proverbial rug at W.O.W. Hall on Thursday, August 11. (Emerson Malone/Emerald).

Just listen to La Luz’s second album Weirdo Shrine, which was produced by Ty Segall and literally recorded in an abandoned surfboard warehouse. Dark and heady, Weirdo came out almost exactly a year ago. It’s a declarative statement that the band isn’t just rehashing an old trend; it’s a profound subversion of what you’d expect from the genre.

After the show, La Luz’s Instagram posted a picture of the band taken from the mural outside Sundance Natural Foods.

“We’ll come back and make it up to you. I promise,” the post reads. “Also your food coop is delicious.”

Eugene still loves you, La Luz.

Thank you good people of Eugene, y'all are the best. I'm sorry I had to go and lose my voice on you! This is so messed!We'll come back and make it up to you, I promise. Also your food coop is delicious. Yrs, @crawdadcleveland

A photo posted by La Luz (@laluzband) on Aug 11, 2016 at 11:57pm PDT

Listen to “You Disappear” by La Luz below.

Even in the secluded woodland utopia of Pendarvis Farms in Happy Valley, Ore., where the 18^th Annual Pickathon Music Festival took place this past weekend, you can’t escape the 2016 presidential election.

From the guy wearing the “A Vote For Donald Is a Vote For Fun” t-shirt to the fairly popular Bernie gear, Pickathon was strangely political this year.

Indie-rock group Wolf Parade played two sets at this year’s Pickathon. The band, whose best work is its 2005 debut record Apologies to the Queen Mary, recently regrouped and began touring again after a five-year hiatus. This inspired some in the crowd to chant: “Four more years! Four more years!”

Sometime early on, I spotted someone wearing a red cap that read “Make Wilco Great Again.” This seemed arbitrary until Saturday evening when Jeff Tweedy played the first of two solo acoustic sets and honed Trump’s self-aggrandizing rhetoric: “I have the best songs,” he jested after playing “Misunderstood.” “Nobody has better songs than me. Everybody always tells me I have the best songs.”

Someone in the crowd shouted: “Tweedy twenty-sixteen!”

Check out our photos from this year’s Pickathon:

Recap continues below.

With the exception of some acts like party architect Dan Deacon and Detroit post-punk group Protomartyr, the festival’s music lineup primarily focused on folk and indie pop. Some other highlights:

• Canadian indie rock group Alvvays brought a nice pop effervescence to the Galaxy Barn. Lead vocalist Molly Rankin wore a western fringe shirt, said she didn’t realize they’d play in a barn when she chose to wear it. Rankin’s inflection made “barn” sound like “bern” and the members poked fun at one another’s Canuck parlance.

• Adia Victoria brings an original, powerful take on delta blues. She covered Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues,” dropped lines from Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” and sang “Stuck in the South” from her 2016 album Beyond the Bloodhounds. With an aching, pained voice, she sang about growing up in the small town of Spartanburg, South Carolina: “I been itching like a bitch with fleas / And I’m too cold in the summer heat / Saying please get me out / Lord God, put me down.”

• Tweedy‘s set spanned his long tenure with Wilco, his father-son project and early Uncle Tupelo cuts. Interestingly, and perhaps nerdily, Tweedy adjusted the lyrics to “Ashes of American Flags” for inflation, as a Diet Coke and pack of cigarettes now cost $6.53. Also: I choked up during “Jesus, Etc.” There, I said it.

• Pickathon is probably the only music festival I’ll attend that has some pretty rad horses living in a stable on the grounds.

• Boston’s Palehound is fronted by guitarist-songwriter Ellen Kempner, who played the power-pop band’s first set in Galaxy Barn. Surrounded by rusty antiques and mercantile farm wares, she noted that she thought she’d never play in a venue like this in real life, only in Guitar Hero World Tour.

• Thao & The Get Down Stay Down is a force to be reckoned with live. Thao Ngyuen switches between several stringed instruments and carries a contagious, inexhaustible amount of energy and panache.

• Singer-songwriter Margo Price had an immaculate set in the Galaxy Barn. Even if conventional bluegrass is not your bag, Price’s outlaw country style is electrifying.

• Sunday morning: NPR Music’s Bob Boilen spoke with Price about how Kris Kristofferson’s cover of “Me and Bobby McGee” changed her life. Boilen also shared his backstory with working at NPR, choosing the music that plays between news stories, and how this dovetailed into his program All Songs Considered and the development of the Tiny Desk concerts. At a young age, Boilen listened to The Beatles’ “A Day In the Life” every day. He picked up a guitar, and his music teacher told his mother he had no talent. This was the second time I choked up this weekend. Soon Boilen took a seat on the stage and we all collectively listened to the Beatles track in its entirety. Boilen, a newbie to Pickathon, admitted he’s not a big fan of most music festivals, but said this wouldn’t be his last Pickathon. He meandered between several shows this weekend, often scarfing down ice cream cones from Fifty Licks. (Check out our review of Boilen’s book Your Song Changed My Life here.)

• The final final show of the festival came at 1:20 a.m. in the Galaxy Barn, which Thee Oh Sees effectively destroyed. The San Francisco-based garage rock band is a four-piece and plays with two drummers, each playing in tandem. It might sound excessive, but it’s impeccable. A loud, bruising and lovely show to close out the weekend.

There’s a learning curve to conquering a music festival, and this is especially true for Pickathon: for those who camped out for the weekend, this necessitated hauling gear uphill into the woods until finding upon an available site, often on uneven, dusty, or ivy-covered terrain.

This made for a lot of impromptu, primitive campsites, which made the woods feel like a refugee settlement, just with more Grateful Dead tapestries. The experienced campers quickly set themselves apart, as they brought wagons to carry their wares uphill. Smart.

Children 12 and younger get into the festival for free (plenty of activities and live music for the kiddos), so the entire weekend was an interesting mix of adults and youngsters. My campsite resided between mothers with their babies, and some twenty-somethings who debated the merits of ordering a cocaine delivery from Beaverton.

Unlike the typical fest, Pickathon has a nice sustainability code, but this adds to the steep learning curve. The day-to-day lineups aren’t printed out and given to each patron, but instead posted on modest-sized spreadsheets throughout the grounds. The solar charging station drew a lengthy queue and charged $5 to charge any device. To order any food or beverage, you’d first have to buy a $10 token to obtain reusable bowls, wooden sporks and a steel pint.

This is admirable and alleviates the problem with litter that plagues most big festivals. It’s awesome how clean the grounds are by nighttime. This would probably be John Muir’s favorite music festival. Pickathon’s modest size, killer lineup, environmental integrity and local, reasonably priced food offerings made for a supremely well-organized event.

In his book Your Song Changed My Life, NPR Music’s Bob Boilen has a simple inquiry for the musicians whom he interviews: what is a musical experience you’ve had that fundamentally changed your life?

Boilen’s book is a great compendium of essays, almost all of which offer poignant insight into musicians and their formative years. For anyone interested in contemporary music culture, Boilen crafts a must-read here. He compiles conversations with plenty of his faves: David Byrne, Jónsi, Philip Glass, Jeff Tweedy, Justin Vernon, Colin Meloy, Cat Stevens, Carrie Brownstein and Courtney Barnett among them.

The chapters lend themselves to some colorful anecdotes, like how St. Vincent’s Annie Clark can stick a pin in the incident that changed her life: Dallas, Texas in the early nineties, when a box of CDs bounced off a truck in front of her house.

Or in the essay on Michael Stipe, Boilen remembers how his friend Greg was also in a band called R.E.M. at the time and was nervous about this other band. Bob tells his friend not to worry about “these guys from Athens.” He writes: “Disregarding me, Greg changed his band’s name to Egoslavia. Looking back, I love how wrong I was.”

The answers Boilen receives aren’t always so straightforward, as many artists pick an album or a musician, defying the titular guidelines: Phish’s Trey Anastasio picks Steven Sondheim’s score to West Side Story; Jenny Lewis is enamored with early-nineties hip-hop, namely A Tribe Called Quest’s record The Low End Theory.

Fans of All Songs Considered, the NPR program for which Boilen serves as creator, co-host and prolific dilettante of music culture, may not know much of Boilen’s backstory, outside of his endless fondness for rainbows. Here, he weaves his personal life into the story: In 1988, Ira Glass, then-director of NPR’s All Things Considered, gives him a shot at audio engineering for the station. Boilen also covers the more personal info, like in the Cat Stevens essay, in which he recalls being a 17-year-old summer camp counselor in upstate New York, trying to buy hashish but getting swindled and ending up with “a ball of bubblegum and crushed incense.”

‘Your Song Changed My Life’ by Bob Boilen.

With an air of casual accuracy, Boilen has a real gift for the often difficult, abstract task of music criticism. He notes that Philip Glass’s music “owes as much to Bach as it does to trance.” In the essay on Conor Oberst, Boilen compares the stanzas of Don McLean’s “American Pie” and Bright Eyes’ “At The Bottom of Everything.” It seems like a stretch, but Boilen does it masterfully.

He himself picks the Beatles’ “Day In The Life” as his life-changing song and writes about Sgt. Pepper’s: “It’s important to note that music had never sounded like this before. Imagine growing up in a city and walking into a forest for the first time — that’s what the experience of this album was like for me.”

A natural radio host, Boilen may have had broadcast on his mind as he wrote this book. I haven’t heard the audiobook (which I bet sounds wonderful coming from Boilen’s honeyed baritone) but it could be a more forgiving format, given how he pulls paragraph-length, often-incoherent quotes from these interviews, as James Blake bumbles:

“I feel like [my voice] was something that could grow. And now I feel like I’m getting somewhere, where, you know, I could do something. I could sit and I could put myself amongst my favorite singers. At some point, I’m not saying that I am already, but I’m saying – I feel vocally, now, I’m getting to a point where I’m solid.”

Your Song is a stellar collection, but if you scan over the chapter titles, you’ll find among the 35 musicians Boilen writes about, they’re overwhelmingly white people. Only a few artists of color are profiles, including Jackson Browne, Smokey Robinson and Leon Bridges. It takes until page 200 before the book reaches his first rapper, English poet Kate Tempest.

It’s ironic for the book with such a low degree of diversity to kick off with Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, a man who built his career ripping off black musicians.

Some chapters later, Isreali musician Asif Avidan tells Boilen about discovering Led Zeppelin and finding out about their black music roots: “It’s almost like, that’s the coffee beans, you know the rest is just the water.”

This weekend, Bob Boilen and special guests will have a discussion on life-changing songs during the Pickathon Musical Festival in Happy Valley, Oregon. For more info, visit http://pickathon.com/artist/song-changed-life-bob-boilen-guests-discuss-life-changing-songs/

Follow Emerson on Twitter @allmalone

August 1: Buster Keaton Genealogy Display – Cottage Grove Community Center (700 E Gibbs Ave)

The Shining, Animal House, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are among the most popular movies that were filmed around Oregon. This summer marks the 90^th anniversary for the Buster Keaton silent picture The General, which was shot around Cottage Grove in 1926. “Buster Keaton Days” take place every five years in recognition of the film’s anniversary. Starting on the first, the Cottage Grove Community Center will host a genealogy display about Keaton’s life and family. For more information, visit www.cgchamber.com.

August 2: Ninkasi Pints for a Cause for Nearby Nature – Ninkasi Tasting Room (272 Van Buren St.) All day

MillerCoors may have absorbed Hop Valley this past week, but Ninkasi still stands as Eugene’s largest independent local beer producer. As part of its continuing charitable initiative, Ninkasi’s Pints for a Cause event this Tuesday will send $1 from every pint sold to Nearby Nature. Nearby Nature is a local non-profit and summer daycamp for children aged 3-13 focused on outdoor activities like hiking and canoeing and educating students about ecology and science. For more info, visit www.nearbynature.org/events/august-2-ninkasi-pints-for-a-cause

August 3: Comics Workshop for Teens with Phil Yeh – Eugene Public Library (100 W 10th Ave) – Free

Graphic novelist Phil Yeh, author of Even Cazco Gets the Blues (1977), will visit Eugene this week. Yeh will lead a hands-on comics workshop at the Eugene Public Library this Wednesday at 2 p.m. about the craft of comic storytelling, how to develop characters and illustrate a compelling graphic novel. The workshop will also take place at the Bethel Branch on Thursday at 2 p.m. and the Sheldon Branch on Friday at 2 p.m. For more info: www.facebook.com/EugenePublicLib

August 4: Game One: Eugene Emeralds vs. Vancouver Canadians – PK Park – 7:05 p.m. – Box seat tickets start at $3

Much like the music of the Grateful Dead, baseball can be unpredictable but often rewarding and gratifying. It’ll take a group of boys on a wayward journey, making stops throughout the country with nights that pivot between joyous revelries or deplorable flops. This Thursday evening, the Emeralds will face off the Canadians at PK Park in game one of five on Grateful Dead night. Box seats are $3 on Thursday. For more info: http://www.milb.com/index.jsp?sid=t461

August 5-7: Pickathon at Pendarvis Farm (16581 SE Hagen Rd, Happy Valley, OR) – Tickets are still available: $25 to $600

Beach House, Mac DeMarco, Yo La Tengo, Thee Oh Sees and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy are among those slated for this year’s Pickathon, which will doubtlessly be the indie music festival’s most prolific lineup to date. Bob Boilen, creator of NPR’s All Songs Considered, will also host a live interview on Sunday centered on his new book Your Song Changed My Life about musicians’ favorite life-altering tracks. This year will also mark the debut of Pickathon’s comedy element, with a lineup curated by Portland comic Amy Miller. For more info: http://pickathon.com/tickets/

August 6: Miike Snow at HiFi Music Hall – doors open at 7:30 p.m., show starts at 8:30 p.m. – all ages – tickets are $25 in advance, $30 at the door.

Even if you don’t think you’d recognize the songs of this Swedish indie-electronic trio, whose songs like “Animal” and “Silvia” were unavoidable in 2009, you may recognize their work with Britney Spears’ “Toxic” and Bruno Mars’ “Grenade,” which were written by the members of Miike Snow. Why do the Swedes have such a firm grasp on pop music? This tour comes on the heels of iii, the band’s third album, which came out in March. Hayley Kiyoko will open. For more info: http://hifimusichall.com/eventz/miike-snow/

August 7: On the Town – Jaqua Concert Hall at The John G. Shedd Institute (868 High St) – tickets are $14.50 to $38 

This musical, performed from July 29 to August 7, focuses on three American sailors who have a 24-hour shore leave in New York City and use their time to find love. On the Town opened on Broadway in 1944; the music is from mastermind Leonard Bernstein, who’s also composed music for West Side Story, On The Waterfront and Peter Pan. The show is the seventh Shedd production directed by Peg Major, who’s also led Babes in Arms, Mary Poppins and Funny Face. Visit https://www.theshedd.org/ or call (541) 434-7000 for more info.

In a little under two hours, Weird Al played thirty tracks, both parody and original, spanning his 33-year career. That, alone, is really something to behold.

There’s no single demographic that is drawn to Al’s music, as demonstrated by the vast array that came to the Cuthbert Amphitheatre for his Mandatory Fun tour on a punishingly hot evening on Friday, July 29. There were young children, like the kid who brought a mop to the costume contest in the VIP section and exclaimed “I’m the guy from UHF!” And slightly older fans, like the millennials who wore helmets made with Reynolds Wrap, a nod to Al’s song “Foil” or the adults who’d waxed and permed their hair and sported Hawaiian tees — a fashion statement that Al himself pioneered.

It was an audience so diverse and varied that the only unifying element must have been a strong adoration for Al. Anyone who’s exposed to the relentless ubiquity of pop radio hits needs a remedy. And Al has it in spades.

As Al’s backing band began their set, The LED screen above the stage showed Al wandering through the park outside the venue as he sang “Tacky”: “Now I’m dropping names almost constantly / That’s what Kanye West keeps telling me.” But the stage and the LED screen were still glaring with sunlight as he eventually made his way on.

Yankovic made it through “Lame Claim to Fame” and then told the crowd: “When I was organizing this tour, I asked my booker if we could have at least one place where the sun was shining directly into my eyes.”

Al regularly trotted off-stage while clips from film and TV played in the interim, including cameos, sketch comedy skits from Comedy Bang! Bang! and miscellaneous instances during which he’s been name-dropped in pop culture. This included scores of late night talk shows, game shows like @midnight and Jeopardy!, animated and live-action sitcoms (a clip from How I Met Your Mother shows Marshall reading his vows to his fiancé Lily: “I vow to finally stop petitioning Paul McCartney to let Weird Al record ‘Chicken Pot Pie’ to the tune of ‘Live and Let Die.’ It’s over,” he sighs. “I’ll let it go”), children’s shows including Adventure Time and My Little Pony, Al’s own Vine videos, and plenty more, including the fake Weird Al movie trailer from Funny or Die, featuring Aaron Paul as Al, among other celeb cameos.

Read on: We asked Weird Al if, after McCartney turned down “Chicken Pot Pie,” he felt like a bad vegetarian.

More than anything, it’s just impressive that one person can steep into our culture the way Al has. These clips were interspersed throughout the set, which gave Al and the band time to make one of their several costume changes, like the purple octopus jacket and ice cream cone hat during “Perform this Way” (a pastiche of Lady GaGa’s “Born this Way”) or the Robin Thicke á la Beetlejuice suit during “Word Crimes” (a take on Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.”)

In one fell swoop, Al sprinted through “Party in the U.S.A.,” “It’s All About the Pentiums,” “Handy,” “Bedrock Anthem,” “Another One Rides The Bus,” “Ode to a Superhero,” “Gump,” “Inactive” and “eBay.” Then he and his band executed acoustic, doo-wop versions of “Eat It,” “I Lost on Jeopardy,” “I Love Rocky Road” and “Like a Surgeon.”

During “Wanna B Ur Lovr,” a saucy, grotesque come-on, Al sported a suit jacket covered in flame patterns, meandered into the crowd and hassled specific audience members with lines like, “I’ll bet you’re magically delicious / Like a bowl of Lucky Charms / You’d look like Venus de Milo / If I just cut off your arms.”

If there was any doubt beforehand, Al isn’t just a master parodist. He’s hilarious, no doubt; his songs continue to make me laugh out loud, even when I’m hearing them for the thousandth time over. But Al is respectable beyond his transcendent humor, his demanding stage presence, his unflappable confidence and excellent backing band. His shows speak to so many people because they’re so precisely choreographed and executed to flawlessness that he’s simply an excellent showman. Bravo.

During the encore, Al came out in Jedi robe regalia, accompanied by several stormtroopers and a Darth Vader for “The Saga Begins” and then Al and the band did “Yoda.” The latter spun out of control as the crowd sang the Ya-ya-ya-ya-Yoda hook, a parody of The Kinks’ “Lola,” which soon derailed into Oktoberfest beerhall chants (“Ziggy Zaggy, Ziggy Zaggy, Hoi Hoi Hoi!”) then, unexpectedly – and this is a testament to Al’s audacity –  “Crapa Pelada,” a track from the Italian quartet Quartetto Cetra, possibly better known for its morbid use in an episode of Breaking Bad.

Following the show, from the other end of Alton Baker Park, you could still hear a loud fan, screaming something at the top of his lungs that likely everyone could get behind:

“WEIRD AL FOR PRESIDENT! WEIRD AL FOR PRESIDENT! WEIRD AL FOR PRESIDENT!”

Setlist:

1. Tacky
2. Lame Claim to Fame
3. Now That’s What I Call Polka!
4. Perform This Way
5. Dare to be Stupid
6. Fat
7. First World Problems
8. Foil
9. Smells Like Nirvana
10. Party in the CIA
11. It’s All About the Pentiums
12. Handy
13. Bedrock Anthem
14. Another One Rides the Bus
15. Ode to a Superhero
16. Gump
17. Inactive
18. eBay
19. Canadian Idiot
20. Wanna B Ur Lovr
21. Eat It
22. I Lost On Jeopardy
23. I Love Rocky Road
24. Like a Surgeon
25. White & Nerdy
26. Word Crimes
27. Amish Paradise
28. We All Have Cell Phones (a reference to Al’s Michael Stipe interview)
29. The Saga Begins
30. Yoda

Listen to “Wanna B Ur Lovr” below.

It’s especially poignant whenever satire eclipses the thing that it was meant to spoof.

Take, for example, when you hear the nimble strings from the 1876 ballet “Dance of the Hours.” You likely don’t think of Italian composer Amilcare Ponchielli, but rather Allan Sherman’s perky lines: “All the counselors / Hate the waiters / And the lake has / Alligators” from “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh.”

In the case of “Weird Al” Yankovic, who’s visiting the Cuthbert Amphitheatre this Friday, his parodies supplant the original all the time. On YouTube, his 1998 song “Amish Paradise” has more than twice the plays of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.”

When Weird Al’s career began, he was disregarded as a one-hit wonder with his early tracks such as “My Bologna” or “Eat It” (parodies of The Knacks’ “My Sharona” and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” respectively). And it’s still easy to pigeonhole Weird Al as some kind of bygone act, but that would be just as delusional as his early critics; in fact, his career has never been more pronounced and successful than it is today.

By keeping a finger on the pulse of pop music, Yankovic effectively insulated himself from cultural irrelevance. In 2014, Yankovic released his most recent album Mandatory Fun, on which he puts the likes of Lorde, Pharrell, Robin Thicke, Cat Stevens and Iggy Azalea in the crosshairs.

The album reached no. 1 on the Billboard 200 charts and was the first comedy album to do so since 1963, with Allen Sherman’s My Son, The Nut (which features the enduring classic “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh.”). Mandatory Fun also won the Grammy for Best Comedy Album, which marked Yankovic’s fourth Grammy since 1985.

Al said he’s prone to receiving suggestions from fans who sometimes pitch him song parodies of their own.

“That was the bane of my existence,” he told the Emerald, “walking down the street or in the supermarket and somebody says, ‘Oh, I’ve had this great idea since the third grade and I finally got a chance to share it with you…’ And it’s almost always something horrible.”

He added that since the advent of YouTube, he’s been pitched much less often.

“Now if someone has a great idea,” he said, “they can just go do it themselves.”

In February, Al, his wife and daughter took part in a “Ham4Ham,” in collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda, the lyricist and composer of Broadway’s Hamilton, to perform the song “Right Hand Man” from the musical.

Yankovic said he and Miranda have been mutual fans of one another for a number of years. Miranda listened to Yankovic’s albums as a kid, and Al was a fan of Miranda’s 1999 Broadway musical In the Heights.

“We’ve been sort of talking about the possibility of writing something together,” said Yankovic. “I think that’s been put on indefinite hold because he’s got other things on his plate right now, but it’s been a real joy for me to watch all the success that Lin has had in the last year or two. It seriously could not have happened to a nicer guy. He’s the greatest guy in the world.”

Earlier this year, Yankovic took on the role as bandleader on the irreverent comedy talk show Comedy Bang! Bang! on IFC, following the show’s prior bandleaders Reggie Watts and Kid CuDi.

“I did wind up getting the same rig that Reggie had, the same gear, because I wanted to try to emulate him as much as I could while still bringing my own thing to it,” said Yankovic. “And Reggie’s always been great. He’s sort of the gold standard for Comedy Bang! Bang! bandleaders, so I wanted to try to – as much as I could – do justice to the job.”

At the start of his career, Al was a college student studying architecture at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, but soon realized that his major wasn’t his passion.

“I think that what I learned is if you’re not passionate about something, don’t do it, if you can help it,” he said. “You’ve got to eat. You’ve got to pay for the macaroni and cheese. But I figured out about my third year in architecture school that it wasn’t my muse. It wasn’t my passion.”

He went on, “There were people in my architecture labs that cared about it and were excited about it and that wasn’t me. That wasn’t what I was – I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that. It was kind of a confusing point in my life because I certainly didn’t think I’d be able to make a living in show business. That seemed like crazy talk. But I knew that comedy was my passion and music was my passion. And I thought, well, I’m young. I can still give this a shot and see what happens.”

As a student, he’d play local coffee shops during open mic nights; while most amateur musicians went up to the microphone to play earnest acoustic ballads, Al would go up with his accordion and play “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” better known as the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As Al’s career took off, so did the quality of his production. Just listen to “Another One Rides the Bus,” or virtually any track from his 1984 self-titled debut record. Heavy on accordion and reliant on the stomping-clapping rhythm, it sounds like it could have been recorded in a dorm room. In fact, Al recorded early demos in dorm restrooms, where he went for the acoustics.

But very quickly, Al and his backing band began working meticulously to emulate the sounds of the musicians they parodied. Mandatory Fun’s “Word Crimes” is an excellent example of this, as Al and his band expertly replicate the textures in Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.”

Even though he’s not required to by law, since fair-use copyright law covers satire, Al still makes an effort to clear permission from the artists whom he’s copying out of consideration.

With Mandatory Fun, Al had a 100-percent success rate. But in the past, some artists have given him a harder time. When he sought permission from Prince, his requests were always rejected. Prince’s lawyers allegedly sent Al a telegram demanding that he not make eye contact with Prince when the two were assigned to sit in the same row at an award show.

Famously, Paul McCartney turned down Al’s request when he wanted to spin “Live and Let Die” into “Chicken Pot Pie” (the explosive horn melody was swapped for chicken squawks). McCartney, a strict vegetarian, couldn’t let it happen with a clean conscience, on the grounds that it may endorse eating animals.

Puzzlingly, Yankovic, who’s also a vegetarian, probably sings about meat more than anybody else: “Spam,” “I’m Fat,” “Eat It,” “My Bologna,” “Trapped In The Drive Thru” and “Don’t You Forget About Meat” are among his carnivorous tracks. Wouldn’t McCartney’s denial give Al second thoughts about singing about meat? Does he feel like a bad vegetarian?

“No, because I sing about a lot of stuff I don’t do,” Yankovic laughed. “I sing about decapitating people. I sing about a lot of things that don’t reflect my value or my taste because I’m not singing from an autobiographical or personal perspective. Virtually all the songs I do are in character. And some of those characters are not that nice. I have to assume some of those characters eat meat, you know?”

Yankovic has permeated our culture with his storied career, which spans music (both parody and some great original tracks), film, television (you can hear him on the new season of Netflix’s BoJack Horseman as well as the title character in Disney’s Milo Murphy’s Law), and a few children’s books. His impression on our culture is just about everywhere.

In the video for “The Saga Begins,” Al’s revision of Don McLean’s “American Pie” about Star Wars Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace, Yankovic sports Anakin Skywalker’s rattail, walks the sandy desert of Tattooine, uses the force to summon an acoustic guitar and plays with the cantina band. Allegedly, McLean’s children have played Yankovic’s version for him at home so often that it’s messed him up while playing it live.

And The Presidents of the United States, whose song “Lump” Yankovic amended to focus on Forrest Gump, have changed the way they play the song live by closing it the same way Yankovic does, with Gump’s saying: “And that is all I have to say about that.”

After Chamillionaire took home the Best Rap Song Grammy for “Ridin’,” he allegedly approached Yankovic on the red carpet to thank him for his parody “White and Nerdy” on 2006’s Straight Outta Lynwood.

Maybe in the future, we won’t be able to remember Pharrell’s “Happy” without first thinking of Al’s “Tacky”: “I would live-tweet a funeral, take selfies with the deceased!”

One can hope, at least.

Watch the video for “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Tacky” below.

“Weird Al” Yankovic brings his Mandatory Fun tour to the Cuthbert Amphitheater this Friday, July 29. General admission tickets are $33; reserved seats are $45-$55. VIP ticketing options are also available through TicketsWest. The gates open at 5:30 p.m. The show begins at 7 p.m.

In the newest film from writer-director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), imagination and intellect are the formative hallmarks of youth and young manhood.

Microbe and Gasoline focuses on Daniel Guéret (Ange Dargent, in his first acting role), a young teen given the grade school nickname “Microbe” for his stunted growth, and transfer student Théo (Théophile Baquet), whose gearhead predilection earned him the moniker “Gasoline.”

The pair, one full of shame and inhibition and the other boisterous and confident, are bound by their mutual nonconformity and become tight friends. After Théo gets hold of a motor, the two become amateur junkyard scrappers and engineer a vehicle to hit the road that summer. The end product is an rickety cottage on wheels that scuttles through the French countryside.

Gondry’s creative impulses, while immaculately envisioned, can overshadow story. In the past, he’s turned The White Stripes into Lego figurines (the “Fell In Love With a Girl” music video), created a morning talk show set with walls lined with eggshell cartons (The Science of Sleep), and hand-drew a 90-minute animation for a conversation he had with Noam Chomsky (Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?) But this isn’t the case with Microbe, since there’s a stark absence of computer graphics or outstanding visual effects. The emphasis isn’t so much on the idiosyncrasies of Daniel and Théo’s world (of which there are plenty), but the genuine friendship that befalls the characters. Still, the movie is effortlessly sharp.

It’s full of countless moments that are quietly hilarious: Théo, whose age deters him from a driver’s license, outfits his fixie bike with a speaker to make it sound like it runs on a gas-powered motor; Daniel, an aspiring artist, hosts a gallery exhibition of drawings of his brother’s punk-rock friends. When no one shows up, Théo arrives and comments, “What a success!” He sidesteps through the empty gallery, pretends to introduce himself to other attendees, including heads of state and naval officials.

Gondry has a sincere love and a sense of humor for his characters. He situates you inside a 14-year-old’s worldview; stakes seem dauntingly high, but whenever they fall into a gutter, they always bounce higher.

In lesser hands, the story in Microbe could have fallen ill to ham-fisted schmaltz and excessive sentimentality. But this is an unexpectedly straightforward movie from Gondry. It’s a solid buddy movie and a great road movie. As one Bijou employee put it: “This is Y Tu Mamá También for kids.”

Microbe and Gasoline, which is in French with English subtitles, is, confusingly, rated R. It’s playing at the Bijou Art Cinemas (492 East 13^th Ave).

This week in movies in the park:

Hook (1991) — Friday, July 22 at 7:30 p.m. — Royal Delle Park (401 Blackstone St, Springfield, OR) — 2 hr, 22 min — Rated PG.

Peter Banning (Robin Williams) is a middle-aged corporate lawyer living in San Francisco who’s roped back into his old identity as Peter Pan when Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman) kidnaps his children and whisks them off to Neverland. Also starring Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell and Phil Collins as Inspector Good. The event, which also includes a treasure hunt in the park before the film, is hosted by the Willamalane Park and Recreation District. Movie begins at 8:30 p.m.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) — Friday, July 22 at 9 p.m. — Maurie Jacobs Park (Fir Lane) — 2 hrs, 9 mins — Unrated.

Back in the days when he wasn’t a surly old racist, righteous lawyer Atticus Finch (played with charismatic magnetism by Gregory Peck) defends an innocent African-American man against a bogus rape charge in Depression-era Alabama. The event is hosted by EugFun 2016.

Pixar’s Brave (2012) — Saturday, July 23 at 9 p.m. — Awbrey Park (River Rd & Spring Creek Dr.) — 1 hr, 3 mins – Rated PG.

Iconoclast 16-year-old Princess Merida (voiced by the superb Kelly Macdonald) defies the matrimonial customs that await her, which sends her kingdom into disarray. She has to rely on her archery prowess to undo a curse that turns her mother into a bear. The event is hosted by EugFun 2016.

This week in Eugene:

Monday, July 18 — Eugene Emeralds vs Hillsboro Hops at PK Park at 7:05 p.m. Tickets start at $8 online.

The Hillsboro Hops play the Emeralds during the first of three games on home turf this Monday, which is Good Karma Monday at PK Park. Fans who come to the Emeralds Box Office can name their price for their tickets. Fifty percent of what you pay will be donated directly to the Special Olympics, the charity partner for Monday’s game.

Tuesday, July 19 — Musical Petting Zoo at the Eugene Public Library (100 West 10th Ave) at 1 and 3 p.m. — Free.

Musicians from the Eugene Symphony will play string, brass, woodwind and percussion instruments. Afterwards, children can touch and try out the musical contraptions. The Musical Petting Zoo will also visit the Bethel Branch (1990 Echo Hollow Rd.) at 11 a.m., and then the Sheldon Branch (1566 Coburg Rd.) at 2 p.m. on Wednesday.

Wednesday, July 20 — Artist’s Talk: Latin@ Art and Identity Across Generations at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on campus (1430 Johnson Ln.) at 5:30 p.m. — Free.

In the ¿Identity? exhibit, currently at the JSMA until Sept. 18, artists Victoria Suescum and Lee Michael Peterson approach the question of Latino/a identity and its place within American culture. Suescum’s paintings are inspired by hand-painted storefront signs. Peterson often uses technology as a catalyst for his drawings by “googling the names of his friends and creating portraits of other people with the same name,” according to the JSMA website.

Thursday, July 21 — Kansas at the Lane County Fair (796 West 13th Ave) at 7:30 p.m. — Tickets are $35 for standard and $45 for premium.

You may know Kansas because some classic-rock stations have a predilection for playing “Carry On Wayward Son” and “Dust In the Wind” on an infinite loop. Kansas is touring without founding member Steve Walsh, who retired from the band in 2014. The band is playing in support of its newest album, The Prelude Implicit, which comes out this September.

Thursday, July 21 — Lakou Mizik at the W.O.W. Hall (291 West 8th Ave) — Doors open at 8:30 p.m.; show starts at 9 — Tickets are $13-$15.

The Haitian music collective culls inspiration from Haiti’s African, French, Caribbean and American cues. Lakou Mizik’s groovy sound is the result of Haiti being the epicenter of multicultural influences. The nine-person ensemble, aged from their early twenties to late sixties, all hail from Haiti’s diverse musical backdrop. The band’s sound ranges from the buoyant drawl from an accordion, playful guitar noodling, vodou drumming and a healthy dose of Afro pop and Motown thrown in for good measure. The group is touring the U.S. in support of its debut album Wa Di Yo.

Listen to Lakou Mizik perform “Panama Mwen Tombé” below.

Friday, July 22 — The B-52s at the Lane County Fair (796 West 13th Ave.) at 7:30 p.m. — Tickets are $40 for standard and $50 for premium.

In spring 1980, John Lennon was in a post-Beatles slump and his music career had been on pause for nearly five years. He was evidently spurred to record again after hearing the B-52s’ “Rock Lobster.” So if you see the new wave band when they stop at the Lane County Fair this Friday, you can thank them for Double Fantasy.

Friday, July 22 — Life During Wartime at the HiFi Music Hall (44 E 7th Ave.) — Doors open at 8 p.m., show starts at 9 p.m. — Tickets are $10, day of show: $13 — 21+

The Portland-based Talking Heads tribute band will stop at HiFi this Friday to play the phenomenal live album Stop Making Sense in its entirety. The album is from the admirably weird concert film of the same name, which features frontman David Byrne and his increasingly ballooning suit.

Listen to The Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” from Stop Making Sense below.