Portugal. The Man Aims To 'Dig Deep' Into Back Catalog on Current Tour

Even though he isn’t a founding member of the indie rock act Portugal. The Man, guitarist Eric Howk grew up in Alaska with the band’s two core members, bassist Zach Carothers and singer-multi-instrumentalist John Gourley. He fondly recalls that formative time period.

“We were pretty remote,” says Howk via phone from band rehearsals in Portland, OR. Portugal. The Man performs at 7 p.m. on Sunday, May 12, at the Agora. “He had an hour-long bus ride, and I had an hour-long bus ride. I’ve known John since the second grade, and I met Zach through school band. We were learning how to play jazz standards..

Howk then found out that Zach had his own garage band that rehearsed in his mom’s basement. They were called the Dependable Letdowns.

"He had three originals but knew something like 20 covers," says Howk. "He was the first kid I saw on a microphone. That the first time I saw a child wearing skate shoes and baggy jeans and playing a guitar like crap and singing Dead Kennedys and Helmet songs.”

During that time period, Howk says he mostly sat in his room and learned to play solos, but seeing Carothers perform left a lasting impression.

“I learned a lot from Zach, who had this knowledge built into him,” he says. “He had never played outside of Alaska but knew that practice was important and even if were building bad habits, we had to play the song over and over until it almost sounded like the song we were trying to cover.”

While Carothers and Gourley started playing together in Alaska, they quickly found that touring from the remote state would prove to be too difficult, so they relocated to Portland and launched Portugal. The Man in 2004. The band has steadily toured and recorded since issuing its 2006 debut, Waiter: “You Vultures!”

Early on, the group took a “Beatles in Hamburg” approach and tried to play as often as it could and release as an album a year. In 2010, that approach yielded great dividends, and the band signed with Atlantic Records and began to see its popularity increase with each album. In the wake of 2011’s In the Mountain in the Cloud, the group would hit the festival circuit and performed at fests such as Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza.

“At that point, I had made a few attempts to jump onto the Portugal. The Man freight train," says Howk. "They’ve always had this unbelievable work ethic. Even with no budget for touring, they were playing 200 shows a year. To commit to that meant ‘goodbye life' and 'hello back of the van eating unseasoned rice.’ It was a commitment.”

Howk, who now uses a wheelchair, was on the verge of joining the band in 2007, but a spinal injury “put a pin in a lot of things.” But then, in 2013, he came on stage and jammed with the band. It wasn’t long before he became an official member.

“At that point, my whole idea of a band was that you have your songs that you recorded, and your job is to play them perfectly as they were recorded and then play the next song, and that’s that,” he says. “The beauty of jumping into a band like this is that there is a flow to it. You stop trying to executive it perfectly. Everyone was looking around and giving each other insider baseball signals, and I was hooked.”

The band's popularity soared in 2017 when "Feel It Still," a funky song with a thick bass riff and falsetto-like vocals, became a huge hit. Howk says the group still enjoys playing "Feel It Still" but is "really digging into it" during the current rehearsals to unearth tracks from the now-extensive back catalog.

“In the past, we’ve been a band that’s peppered in a fair amount of covers and song references and things like that,” he says. “We’re at the point where we’re realizing that we’re 120 songs deep and have a bunch of records in our pocket. We’re starting to reference ourselves, and we’re trying to do a proper retrospective. We’re playing stuff from the first record. It’s been good for us. It’s been great. We’re playing the hits but also diving deeper into where we’ve come from.”

He adds that the group hasn’t yet figured out its intro. Last year, it started shows with metallic riffs from “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “South of Heaven” and “Cowboys from Hell.”

“The metal thing is super fun and very bombastic and theatrical," says Howk. "We’ve been doing a few things with Cheap Trick, and it’s given us an appreciation for the band. They got their name because [guitarist] Rick Nielsen saw Slade in concert and said that they did every cheap trick in the book. Opening with Slayer and Pantera is definitely a ‘cheap trick.’ We come out and shred. It’s the opposite of what you’re supposed to do. It’s playing the most technical metal without warming up. Some nights, it was great, and some nights, I don’t know. I think we’ll try to recreate some of that bombast in a homebrew kind of situation. We might try to come up with a recipe of our own with our own ingredients. But we might just do the metal if we can’t beat it. It’s pretty tough to beat Metallica in the shock-and-awe department."

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