“I would pretend to be fascinated with a guitar or amp while trying to eavesdrop on their artsy conversation. “It took me a couple visits (to Beaverton Music) before I worked up the nerve to talk to them,” says Seim. “I would be running a credit-card transaction during the day and would just fall asleep.”Īccording to local drummer Danny Seim, word soon spread about the tastemakers behind Beaverton’s foremost shoegaze band. “We were probably sleeping two or three hours a night for the last couple months of recording Com Plex,” says Weikel. (Summers had left for college by the time Com Plex was recorded.) In the beginning, the boys would pull all-nighters, sweep up the shop and head across the street to Beaverton High for morning classes. The Helio Sequence would eventually record three dense, dark-star releases at the store: a 1999 self-released EP, 2000’s Com Plex and 2001’s Young Effectuals. But the (punk/grunge) community we were in were all like, ‘Get a bass player!’”īack at Beaverton Music, co-workers Weikel and Summers-younger brother Paul soon dropped out of the picture-began using the shop as an after-hours recording space.
“Which is funny, because every band in the ’80s used sequenced keyboards. “At that point, having sequenced keyboards was a crazy idea,” says Weikel. The trio performed with pre-programmed synth tracks. If it weren’t such a painfully uncool gig, the picnic could‘ve gone down as a watershed moment, not only for the Helio Sequence but for the whole of Portland’s indie-rock future. By 1996, both Weikel siblings and Summers had joined forces to play a family picnic for the Summers clan.
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While Zippers mainly did covers-songs by Nirvana, the Pixies, Green Day and Operation Ivy-Weikel was toiling in a series of badly named new-wave/punk bands such as Jefferson Dumptruck. The two initially met through Weikel’s younger brother, Paul, with whom Summers played in a band called Zippers. The shop is neither a hip, High Fidelity-style record store nor a hesher haven for Flying V guitars and gnarly effects pedals it’s mainly a marching-band instrument store located across from Beaverton High, where students Summers and Weikel played flute and drums, respectively, for the school band. “There’s no center to anything,” says Summers, “just a bunch of unconnected roads.”īut Summers and Weikel, who both grew up in Beaverton, unwittingly made their town a hub of local-band activity via their employment at Beaverton Music.
Says Weikel, “There’s nothing else we can do.”īeaverton, Ore., is a study in what author James Howard Kunstler has famously called “the geography of nowhere.” The Portland suburb is home to Nike’s world headquarters and a bland blur of housing developments and strip malls. After the show, Weikel and Summers break down their equipment, peddle their own T-shirts, load out and look forward to a late-night drive to a budget motel en route to the next tour stop. They make a visceral dream-rock noise with sheer volume, flawless manipulation of guitar and electronic sequencing by Summers, and primal drum-set domination that leaves Weikel slick with sweat. Dead-tired after a long drive from Ohio, operating on a tight budget and playing songs from an album no one has heard yet-the upcoming Keep Your Eyes Ahead (Sub Pop)- the 30-year-old Weikel and the 27-year-old Summers nevertheless proceed to astonish the curious Sunday-night crowd. Tonight, that road has led to a small club in Philadelphia, where the Helio Sequence plays to 30 people instead of the 3,000 routinely attracted by Modest Mouse. Most people would have sold out for the money.”įor Weikel, the road to fulfillment lay with his longtime pal Brandon Summers, the singer/guitarist with whom he’d partnered in the Helio Sequence.
“It’s fascinating, because he stuck to his guns. “ gave up on the number-one band in America,” says Trevor Solomon, a friend and Portland-based booking agent. I was supposed to do Jimmy Kimmel with Modest Mouse and had to say, ‘Well, I have a Helio Sequence gig booked on that day.’ Then that was it.” “They asked me fairly often, even after I’d officially left. “ wanted me to be in the band at the end (of the last tour),” he says. Over the course of four subsequent tours as a member of Modest Mouse, Weikel experienced the golden moments of success: the late-night-TV performances, the swelling crowds and bigger venues, the feeling of driving into Los Angeles in a tour van and hearing the DJ on KROQ trumpet the arrival of sure-shot hit single “Float On.”īut Weikel had already made plans to swim upstream. Weikel, a gifted drummer from Portland, Ore., had been recruited by Isaac Brock to play on Modest Mouse’s platinum-selling Good News For People Who Love Bad News. In 2004, Benjamin Weikel walked away from the biggest alt-rock band in America. Tempted to split and tested by hard times, the Helio Sequence holds steady as the constantly reinventing center of Portland, Ore.’s indie-rock scene.
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