River Song: The Takes Take The Troutfest Stage
Deschutes-centric tunes will waft through the air Friday evening at Troutfest, when The Takes’ Sumner and Guido Rahr perform.
A Family Tradition
Both musicians and fly-fishers know that tension on strings can produce some beautiful things. Some lucky people can appreciate this aesthetic both ways. Take The Takes, for example.
The Takes are a four-member Portland-based band who happen to love rivers. It doesn’t hurt that two of the band’s four members are the sons of a dedicated river conservationist, The Wild Salmon Center’s Executive Director, Guido Rahr.
Half of The Takes–Sumner Rahr and (the younger) Guido will play music at Troutfest on Friday, May 30th, at 6p.m., on stage at The Oasis Campground. For the Rahr brothers, performing on behalf of a gathering aimed at protecting the Deschutes is something of a dream come true. The show will certainly combine passions for them.
Hearing Trout Music
The Rahr family has a multi-generational history on the lower Deschutes, starting with a place their great-grandfather acquired near Dant. “That’s how the music connection began,” says Guido. “Around the campfire, singing and telling stories.” A river of memories and related skills were also acquired here. Guido recalls summer afternoons on the banks of the river, turning over rocks, identifying bugs, his parents over his shoulder. As he got older, the lessons got more complex. Fly rods were deployed, leading to learning the double haul and the snap-T. The family has an annual tradition of rescuing fish stranded in ephemeral Eagle Creek, netting them, putting them in a cooler and releasing them into their mother river, the Deschutes.
Casting, says Guido, might have some artistic parallels to finding a melody and putting words to it. “Both are kind of paths into a mysterious world, one where you don’t always live, but you can get a taste for if you put in the time. You’re getting to tap into natural flows, following memories, ideas.”
River Stones
For Guido, those early childhood experiences propelled him toward a degree in fisheries biology, which he fully intends to leverage into work in river conservation. “There’s so much work to do for the preservation of rivers everywhere, with climate change, dams, pollution, and I guess as a young person, my highest concern is getting people to care,” he says. “There’s so much coming at us these days, so much competition for attention span, so the question is how to get more of us to engage.”
One potential avenue for cultivating care could be the music. “Music was part of the culture of change in my parents’ generation,” he says. “Vietnam, Civil Rights, the music was part of the cultural mood, and the changes that came with the time.” While The Takes’ music doesn’t speak directly to the cause of conservation, in Guido’s mind, it’s part of the conversation. “If we can use the platform that music gives us to get any audience interested in the issue, then we’ll talk about it,” says Guido. “Any little shift to change people’s minds, change the paradigm, whatever seed we can plant in people’s minds, then we’ll use the unique opportunity we have.”
For Troutfest-goers who missed last year’s set, what kind of music might you expect to hear? General categories are often not descriptive enough to capture a band’s particular personality. You could call The Takes’ music alt-country, Americana, country-rock, and you’d have a general idea. Yet the place-specific idea is one in which their music is evocative of the melody a river makes, the song that sticks with you even when you’re walking the concrete canyons of a comparatively soulless city or suburb.
Those early childhood memories of a campfire near the banks of the lower Deschutes come bubbling up. A lyrical teaser from their single, River Stones: “Crazy as old coyote/always yipping in the night/You can grow tired/I’ll go on alone/All I need is a fire/I’ll write this story with the coals/My heart is full of river stones.”
“For us,” says Guido, “performing on the banks of the Deschutes is a dream come true. For me, it’s not something I even considered as a possibility even three years ago. It’s an incredible honor.”
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