Satyricon History
On May 18th, 1983, George Touhouliotis had a very successful show with his booking of the Violent Femmes at the Mediterranean Tavern (1650 W Burnside) in Portland. Successful........ but too loud. With the success of that show, he went and found a ratty bar in Old Town on NW 6th, christened it Satyricon and opened it on March 2nd, 1984, with the Boy Wonders opening for Theatre of Sheep. A legend was born.
The Satyricon quickly became a cornerstone of the Pacific Northwest's underground music scene. Located in a fairly sketchy area but still the heart of the city, this intimate venue hosted countless legendary performances that helped shape the region's musical identity.
From its humble beginnings as a small club, the Satyricon grew to become one of the most important venues for punk, alternative, and indie rock bands. The venue was known for its raw, authentic atmosphere and its commitment to supporting both local and touring acts.
Throughout its 26-year run, the Satyricon witnessed the evolution of alternative music, from the early punk scenes of the 1980s through the grunge explosion of the 1990s and beyond. Many bands that would later achieve international success played their early shows on the Satyricon stage.
George sold the venue in 2003 and it was briefly other venues before it reappeared in 2006 as a 2.0 version with much of the same energy and intention it originally had. The venue finally closed its doors in October 2010 with a series of "best of" nights featuring many of the bands that had honed their chops at the venue. With it's closing, it left behind a rich legacy and countless memories for the musicians and fans who called it home. These monthly calendars serve as a historical record of the incredible diversity of acts that graced its stage.
Help Us Complete This Archive
This site is a collaboration between a handful of individuals that had a notable connection to Satyricon and an ardent fan of supporting local music that is working on a bigger musical archive software project that this project provided a starting point to build from. This collection represents years of dedicated effort to preserve the history of the Satyricon music venue, but we're still missing some pieces of the puzzle. Your help could make this archive complete!
What We're Looking For:
• We especially interested in finding any missing monthly calendars from various years (gaps from 1984,1985 in particular, but there are some clear gaps in 1997, 1998)
• Original show posters and flyers
• High-quality scans or photos of calendars and show posters we already have, but are poor quality
• Articles, newspaper listings and any other files of artistic or redeeming historical interest.
• Photos from performances and events from significant artists
How You Can Help:
If you have any materials from the Satyricon era, we'd love to hear from you! Even if you're not sure whether what you have is useful, please reach out. Digital scans are preferred, but simple photos are fine and we can even ork with physical materials as well. At some point in the future people will be able to upload the images themselves, but for now we're curating the site, so we will be accepting images via the gmail address below.
Contact Us:
Email: satyriconcalendars1984@gmail.com
Together, we can ensure that this important piece of music history is preserved for future generations to discover and appreciate.
About This Archive
This website is dedicated to preserving the history of one of Portland's most important and legendary music venues, Satyricon. Satyricon was a cornerstone to Portland's vibrant music community, hosting touring and local bands from the day it first opened its doors on March 2nd, 1984 until it closed October 31st, 2010 (with a pause and change of ownership between 2003 and 2006), making it America's longest-running punk club west of the Mississippi. The Satyricon Calendars Archive serves as a digital museum, documenting the incredible diversity of acts that performed at the venue.
Our Mission:
To preserve and share the rich musical history of the Satyricon venue, making it accessible to music fans, researchers, and anyone interested in the Pacific Northwest's underground music scene.
The Collection:
Each monthly calendar in this archive represents a snapshot in time, showing the bands, events, and cultural moments that defined the Satyricon experience. These documents are more than just schedules—they're historical artifacts that tell the story of a community.
Copyright & Usage:
These calendar and poster images have been sourced from people's personal collections and the web and are preserved here for historical and educational purposes. If you're a band, venue, or individual featured in these materials and have concerns about their inclusion, please contact us. It is is the intent for later versions of the site to credit who's collection images come from and who the artist of the calendar or poster was.
Software Next Phase
This is phase 2 of a bigger music history archiving software project being worked on by Kurt Ruckus. The sequence of development is:
Phase 1 *done*: Calendar website, showing just the calendars.
Phase 2 *done*: Provide the infrastructure to hold images of posters of any shows for a given month that we've drilled down on from the calendar, by showing those posters in the proper day of that month.
Phase 3 *next*: Make the site database driven so that each calendar day in a calendar grid will show the artists that were booked that day. Also, provide additionaly information such as who designed the poster for a show, credit people who have donated images and information. This will potentially be the slowest portion to roll out as capturing the data for approximately 9000 days of shows will be time consuming.
Phase 4: Use the database to make the site searchable so that an artist could be searched for and all days that artist played the venue would be listed.
Phase 5: Use the build out of this site as a template that would allow for a release of a web app that could be used by any venue to build out a site like this and the web app would be part of a gig flyers type archive site, that would allow for drillable navigation across bands, venues, dates, cities, etc. The software should make it an easy process to build out similar sites for venues like the X-Ray, La Luna, The Vogue, The Central, WOW Hall, The Casbah, CBGBs, Paradiso, etc etc. Where ever music may have had a space to exist and somebody has a passion to share it's history.
Although this is a labor of love, donations would gladly be accepted to help with offset costs of providing a site like this and future versions of the software. A donation button will be coming in the near future.
