Flooded toilet overhead creates lasting impression of Portland for West Coast band

Caught this tidbit in the publication Seattle Weekly Monday regarding Portland, Ore., band Duck. Little Brother, Duck!

https://www.facebook.com/Ducklittlebrotherduck

(If you’re not familiar with the band, the capitalization and punctuation like that are stylized, so don’t be confused — “Duck. Little Brother, Duck!,” just like that, is all one proper noun. OK, moving on…)

In the short Q&A with band guitarist and vocalist Jon Scheid, the musician says his favorite line in his favorite song, “Calvin Young,” recalls a trip the four-member group took across country to the original American Portland, here in Maine. It’s not the sort of thing Maine’s largest city hopes to be immortalized in song for, but it doesn’t sound like the stench of the occasion ruined Scheid’s impression of the place.

I’ll let him explain, in an excerpt from the Weekly:

My favorite line in the song is “The chandelier drips water from the bathroom above. The murky tile. Go back to sleep.” It is a reference to a house we played and stayed at in Portland, Maine. We were getting ready to sleep when the toilet upstairs flooded and water literally began to waterfall through the floor upstairs and down the chandelier into the kitchen. The people in the house were very nice, and were frantically trying to stop the flow of water. They came into the living room where we were sleeping and said, “Don’t go into the kitchen, go back to sleep.” The smell was horrible. It is still a really funny memory for all of us.

If you want to hear the song in question, click below:

A year after the flooded toilet incident, the band went back and played the song in Portland, Maine. Sounds like everybody had a good laugh about it in hindsight. Again, here’s Scheid from the Weekly:

My favorite time playing it was when we were in Portland, Maine, playing in the same house that the song had been written about just a year earlier. Pretty much all of the same people still lived there, and it was a really funny thing (even for them in retrospect), for us to all get to reminisce about.

Seth Koenig

About Seth Koenig

Seth has nearly a decade of professional journalism experience and writes about the greater Portland region.