Hutch Harris has been making music out of Portland for 20 years – the past 13 as a member of the post-pop-punk band The Thermals, which he co-founded with his musical partner, Kathy Foster. The group plays as a trio with Westin Glass.
For the past year, Harris has been dipping his toe into the waters of the Portland comedy scene, and making somewhat of a splash.
This year, Harris and Foster toured as an original iteration of themselves, revisiting the album “Hutch and Kathy,” which the duo released in 2002, before The Thermals were formed. The album has a more pop folk feel than the pop punk of The Thermals’ sound. The label, Jealous Butcher, decided it wanted to put out a re-issue of the LP. It was a vinyl press.
You can catch Harris many nights of the week doing stand-up in town. A quick glance at his Twitter or Facebook feed will tell you where to find him next. It’s all a matter of finding a balance.
“It’s easy. We do music during the day, and I go out and do comedy at night. Our practice space is close to Helium, so there are some nights where we’ll practice and I’ll just go straight over to Helium. It’s awesome.”
Sue Zalokar: Hutch is a curious name. What’s the backstory on that?
Hutch Harris: Hutch is my mom’s maiden name. It comes from the Italian “Ucci.” When her grandparents emigrated from Italy, they just changed it to “Hutch” at Ellis Island. I don’t know where they got that from. But it stuck. I didn’t like growing up with the name Hutch at all. I like it now.
S.Z.: It’s been 13 years since you went on tour as Hutch and Kathy. What was it like to revisit that manifestation of a collaboration that spans decades?
H.H.: It was great. Kathy and I have been playing music together for like 20 years. We’ve been friends for longer. We met in 1993 or 1994. She’s my best friend in the world. I haven’t been on tour without her in 15 years.
The tour was great. The record had never been on vinyl, and the Portland label, Jealous Butcher, they decided to re-release the record for Record Store Day this year. We decided to do some touring for it. It was pretty quick. We did a week and half on each coast. It was great.
S.Z.: Any interesting stories from the road?
H.H.: We did some touring with Allie Goertz, an L.A.-based songwriter, comedian. That was really cool. I’ve been doing stand-up for almost a year now. These are much quieter, more intimate shows than the shows The Thermals do. They were really fun shows and funny. We got to talk and interact with the audience a lot.
S.Z.: You’ve had some different manifestations of the band, but you and Kathy have been there since the start. What is the trick to collaborating well?
H.H.: You need to find someone who has similar tastes as you, but not identical. Kathy and I agree on a lot of things. Another important thing is to find someone whose opinion you trust. So that you can run an idea by them and if they don’t like it, it’s not something you will fight over.
Kathy is brutally honest, so she will tell me right away if she doesn’t like something, but I trust her opinion enough that I don’t take things personally. It makes things way more productive.
You don’t want someone who just agrees with you on everything because then you might as well be working alone. And then you don’t want someone who shoots down everything you come up with. It’s too disheartening.
S.Z.: Tell me the creation story of The Thermals.
H.H.: It was 2002, and I was living alone in this really tiny house on Woodstock. Kathy and I had just finished that Hutch and Kathy record. We recorded it ourselves. We really took our time with it and did some touring. When we got back from that, I wanted to make something that was quick and fun as opposed to laboring over a record for a long time.
The first Thermals record, I actually just did it myself. I recorded all of the instruments on a 4-track cassette machine in the house where I lived. It was a fun little project I was doing. Once we started giving copies to people, they really liked it right away, and then labels got interested. It just happened really fast for us after that.
S.Z.: You broke your chops a bit at Amy Miller’s Midnight Mass and at a local Moose Lodge in a Southeast neighborhood – doing stand-up.
H.H.: Amy’s so great. She had a big hand in getting me started doing stand-up, too. I followed the Portland comedy scene for a while before I got involved in it. I was really into comedy.
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So for the first anniversary (of Midnight Mass), she asked me if I wanted to perform. And I was like, “Do what?” And she said, you could play a song or you could do stand-up. And I was like, Oh my God! I can’t do stand-up.
I started getting involved in the comedy scene. I had wanted to do stand-up for a long time; I was just scared to do it. I finally did it. My first show was November 2014 at Midnight Mass.
S.Z.: A year or so later, you are making waves and getting gigs.
H.H.: Comedy really makes me happy. I really enjoy it. I like writing and performing. It feels so different. It’s really exciting, after doing music for so long, to have a new area of performance.
S.Z.: Writing and performing music and comedy. Are they similar processes or unique?
H.H.: For me, they are very different. To write a song, I will sit down with a guitar and I’ll just kind of start playing and see what I come up with.
Comedy I get from the world around me. A lot of times I just go to an open mic and kind of work it out on stage. Obviously, a lot of comedians do that. It’s really exciting. That part is so different from music because you never take half a song and take it to an audience and see what they think. Whereas comedy is so different than music, too, because you are constantly rewriting stuff based on audiences’ reactions. With music, I write a song, and when the song is done, it’s done. People like it or don’t like it; that’s fine. But I don’t go back and rewrite a song based on an audience’s reaction.
S.Z.: What impression do you want your comedic audience to walk away with?
H.H.: It’s hard for me to talk about my comedy because I’m so fresh at it. I have no idea. I do not call myself a comedian. I am someone who is working on comedy and doing stand-up. Really right now I’m just trying to figure out how it works. I try to go to shows as much as I can.
Like anything, when you’re starting out. You learn something new every day. For me, that is part of the fun.
S.Z.: You sell your own merch, but I can go to iTunes and buy an album there, too?
H.H.: Yes. You can get our stuff from iTunes, or from the label or from us.
S.Z.: Of course, it’s most productive for you if people buy directly from you.
H.H.: Definitely, we make more money when we sell it directly. And people enjoy getting it from us because they know they’re supporting us. There is a personal touch when it’s coming right from us.
S.Z.: What about fans who download your music through alternative methods, circumnavigating iTunes, you and your label?
H.H.: The effect that has on me is, well, I’m never going to feel bad about downloading someone else’s record because no one ever felt bad about downloading mine. (laughter)
Yeah. It was weird at first. But with streaming, it’s kind of (a moot point). We’re getting to the end of ownership of music at all. Or of any media. It’s OK with me. I almost exclusively just stream stuff.
Sometimes, when people send me their record, email me the files, I’m like, what am I gonna do with this? Give me a link I can click on. I listen to more music than I ever have. I have always listened to music, but more than ever now because it’s all just at my fingertips.
S.Z.: What kinds of things are you listening to?
H.H.: I’ve been getting up super early lately, and I put on The Ramones right away! I’ve been listening to this band, Beach Slang.
S.Z.: Beach Slang?
H.H.: Yeah. They’re from Philly. They have a couple singles, and then their first record comes out this month. There are a ton of good bands from Philadelphia right now.
Then just before you called I was listening to Screaming Trees. I grew up in the ’90s, and all my favorite bands are still – like Nirvana and Pearl Jam and The Breeders – mostly ’90s bands.
S.Z.: How has Portland changed in the time that you’ve been here?
H.H.: Oh God. So much.
S.Z.: For the better? Or worse?
H.H.: Um. Both. Mostly better. I moved here in 1998, so it’s almost 20 years.
I lived at 13th and Failing for the first couple of months. Alberta and Mississippi are so different. Killingsworth. The major changes have happened in the last 10 years, maybe seven. A lot happened really fast.
I like complain and joke about Portland a lot.
S.Z.: It’s easy to do, isn’t it?
H.H.: It’s incredibly easy. There are so many things. I would have never predicted that Portland would become a “foodie” town. Because there was like nowhere to eat when I lived here.
People were already moving here in normal amounts, but I wouldn’t have guessed that it would become as trendy as it is.