By Grayson Currin
he people aren’t just waiting. They’ve been waiting—for hours, some since noon, in lawn chairs or with their prats warming on sidewalk concrete. And of course they have been. Last night, The Avett Brothers’ bus—a long, polished, burnt sienna beauty with Tennessee plates and a retractable living room— roosted in front of the Crystal Ballroom, a historic and high-ceilinged hall about a mile from the wide Willamette River in Portland, Ore. Iron shavings drawn to their magnet, the people—Team Avett, The Avett Nation, Avett Brothers fanatics by any name—arrive in a steady trickle. They drift to the door for hours, and by show time, 1,600 of them have overrun a city block. They don’t just wait, though: Avett Brothers shows suggest reunions of a very extended family, where the rock club is
14 shuffle six Avett Brothers
the community building and the band’s eight-album, four-EP repertoire is the heritage. They swap stories (“My first show was…”) and share songs (“You know, ‘Pretty Girl from…’”). Bound-for-Avetts graffiti covers car windows, and homemade T-shirts—surprisingly de rigueur for a band that sells so much merchandise—clothe bodies. Some garments reference songs not yet released (“I am a breathing time machine,” reads one) or pun on an album months from store shelves at the time of this show (“I and Love and The Avetts,” goes another). A string band busks in front of the bus, beating its instruments and howling its tunes with a distinctly Avett charisma, hoping to raise enough money to scalp a few tickets into tonight’s show. People sing and smile along, and, sure enough, the boys in the band get through the door. As cheesecloth and obsessive as
All photography by Jeremy Okai Davis unless otherwise noted