If it's movement he wants, he and Mad Red certainly don't get much once we arrive at Rotture, the venue in an industrial neighborhood of Portland where the group is set to open for hometown favorite Jaguar Love. Here, less than a hundred cooler-than-thou kids sit around waiting to be impressed. It's a stark contrast to Mad Rad's show the previous night at the Comet, which had a line wrapped around the corner. In Portland, unwavering support is not in abundance, and winning over this crowd with both style and substance is a must.
When the show starts around 10:30 p.m., there are, at best, 20 people on the dance floor. But that's of no concern to DJ Darwin, who's going epileptic behind his laptop: cuing up dancehall, air horns, electro—anything to help bring this crowd to life. Radjaw, easily the group's most lyrical MC, is hitting folks with his old-school rap delivery; Madonna has his shirt off and is writhing around, muscles taut like a young Iggy Pop; and Smoov, now sporting black shades, looks like the Johnny Cash of party rap.
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As they shift from songs like "Glitzerland," "Superdope," and "My Product," the number of folks on the dance floor doubles. The passion of Mad Rad's performance is winning people over even more than the music itself is. Just when the room's energy feels overwhelmingly in Mad Rad's favor, a DJ cord gets unplugged, the sound cuts out for 20 seconds, and the dudes end up starting a song over. It's a fairly insignificant delay, but later in the van, as the crew heads to their second performance of the night, Smoov lets Darwin have it.
"Why the fuck does that keep happening!" he yells. "We should just use CDJs [turntables that play CDs] and not have to deal with this shit." It's a diss against Darwin's skills in front of everyone, and a rather uncomfortable moment. But a few minutes later, everything eases back to normal.
The night's second gig is in the basement at a raging house party, and is set to go from midnight to 6 a.m. In typical Portland style, half the folks have ridden their bikes to the party, and every stop sign and lamppost in sight has five or six bicycles chained to it. There are a ton more people at this underground music venue than there were at Rotture, and as Mad Rad walks into the place, partygoers point, step aside, and seem to be well aware of who they are. It's set to be the redemption show of the weekend—but unfortunately the speakers barely work and the sound system is shot; and despite the fact that the foursome has a hard-on to finally rock the fuck out, it can't happen.
"We want nothing more than to perform for you," Madonna tells a basement full of people while holding a microphone, "but we got to get these speakers right." Unfortunately, they never rap a single lyric. But rather than pout, they attempt to finally relax. The stress that Mad Rad's felt for the past few hours, however, shows that they aren't as carefree as most people might assume.
There have been times when the group's been too careless, with negative results. In December, the owners of Chop Suey were sued by Gerald Simonsen, the owner of the Capitol Hill building where Amante Pizza is located, after Mad Rad members admittedly wheat-pasted large posters on the side of the building to promote an upcoming show at Chop Suey. Simonsen asked Mad Rad to remove the posters, and it should have been an easy fix. But by the time he called with the simple request last November, Mad Rad was on tour promoting White Gold and were unable to do it. Simonsen eventually sued Chop Suey for damages. Chop Suey demanded that Mad Rad simply cough up the $400 it would take to clean up the mess, but they didn't. According to Radjaw (real name, Gregory Smith), they didn't feel responsible financially.
"I said I don't want to pay it. I want to fight it," Radjaw says. "That's some vandalism shit, but if they can't even prove that we put those posters up, we're not responsible."
It was an immature reaction that left bad blood between the group and Chop Suey. Pete Greenberg, the lead talent buyer at Chop Suey, refused to comment on the story, but according to Mad Rad that's the real reason they were banned from the club. And it's highly possible that the bad karma of that event is what sent their popularity spiraling in the wrong direction.
Roughly a month later, on January 10, when Mad Rad showed up at Moe Bar to continue an hours-long drinking bender, they didn't think anything negative would happen—even though they were trashed off of E&J and had just acted like asses at a dinner party for local hip-hop figures that evening, and even though Madonna had gotten kicked out of Neumos a few days earlier by the same security.
According to Steven Severin, co-owner of both Neumos and Moe Bar, the infamous altercation which led to Mad Rad being banned from most places on the Hill was completely the band's fault. "They were being nuts, jumping around, causing trouble, climbing on top of shit, so we kicked them out," Severin says. "One of the guys in the group said something to our head of security, and then he punched them."
