The Sideman

[January 27th, 2010]

Thirty years ago, Norwich, Kan., wasn’t really a rock ’n’ roll town. Luckily, a teenage Mike Coykendall had an older brother with a guitar and an amp. “He could play ‘Day Tripper’ and ‘Interstellar Overdrive,’” says Coykendall, wrapped up in a gray fleece coat and ushanka outside Southeast Portland’s Albina Press. “He was kind of a wild child. [So] I knew about some stuff no one else really knew about.”

Were it not for that electric guitar—and the 8-tracks older siblings left behind when they moved away (“Magical Mystery Tour, Band on the Run, Goats Head Soup and T-Rex’s The Slider—those were the ones that rode around in my car”)—Coykendall wouldn’t be the man he is today: one of Portland’s premier producers and iconic sidemen, and a fine solo artist in his own right.

For Coykendall, the path out of Norwich included layovers in Dodge City, a “cow town” where he attended community college and played in a cover band (“We had one original per set, and that’s when everyone’d sit down”); Wichita, where he worked for a savings and loan, dabbled in bar rock and got his first 4-track; San Francisco, where he and his new wife, Jill, founded the Old Joe Clarks, a still-active, downbeat alt-country act that garnered the songwriter/multi-instrumentalist’s first real attention; and finally Portland, where he landed in 1999.

Coykendall and his wife had a handful of friends in Portland, including singer-songwriter Fernando Viciconte, who began introducing Coykendall to members of the community. For fun, Coykendall began producing Portland musicians in his attic studio—Viciconte’s Dreams of the Sun and Sky would be the first album recorded in the Southeast Portland house. Coykendall had dabbled in production while living in the Bay Area, and after years as an obsessive 4-tracker, he had graduated to more elaborate analog equipment, giving his recordings a refreshingly old-school sound in an increasingly digital world.

It was Coykendall’s collaboration with another new Portlander, M. Ward, that would cement the fledgling producer’s local reputation. But Coykendall never intended to be a full-time producer. “I thought, ‘Well, I’ll have my home studio and I’ll occasionally open it up for a project or two.’ It went the other way—which is great, because for the first time in my life I don’t have to work.”

While Coykendall may not consider it work, he’s stayed busy with studio engagements with artists like Ward, She & Him, Blitzen Trapper and Richmond Fontaine. It’s in the cracks between these projects that Coykendall constructs his solo material. All that work has kept his own music’s release schedule sporadic (this year’s The Unbearable Being of Likeness is his first album in five years, and most of it was recorded about four years ago), but it has also given him the financial and creative freedom to make his solo records as free as he wants them to be. “There’s no pressure on me to prove myself through my own stuff,” Coykendall says. “So I can do what I want.”

That freedom is evidenced by the spacey pop jams on Coykendall’s 2005 debut, Hello Hello Hello, which pushes everything from distortion-heavy shoegaze (“Top of the World”) to Traveling Wilburys-esque road jams (“Driver Carries No Cash”). But The Unbearable Being of Likeness takes Coykendall’s studio playfulness one step further. “Luna Momma Less Dip” blasts lo-fi hooks à la early Spoon, while “Disco Next Door w/Clicker” takes listeners on an unexpected romp into bass-driven dub (and features at least one musical allusion to “Little Drummer Boy”). All of which make Coykendall’s straighter, heartfelt material—the infectious and sweet “First Shot, Best Shot”; the heartbreaking closer, “Wonderland”—more touching.

“With the Old Joe Clarks, I put limitations on it—it has to be realism, to an extent,” Coykendall says. “But with the solo stuff that I do tinkering around the studio, half of it is just to have fun with my toys—when I’m amusing myself. So there’s no limitations whatsoever.” That’s what’s so cool about The Unbearable Being of Likeness: It’s the record Coykendall made when he let his mind wander. If that mind occasionally wandered back to a childhood filled with T-Rex, Pink Floyd and the Beatles—well, it sounds like we owe a hearty thank you to Norwich.