"I think we gotta get back to keeping Portland sketchy," he says. "All Old Towns in major metropolitan cities are sketchy. We should be rough and rowdy. We should get back to it."
But isn't Voodoo merely packaging punk vibes into tourism dollars?
"We just saw people puking in front of my business," Shannon replies.
The obvious next step is to open a bar.
The phone is ringing at the Portland P Palace. When Shannon finds the cordless receiver, it's a wrong number.
"This is the Portland P Palace," he tells the caller. "Soon to be legendary."
Shannon's new venture on Northeast Sandy Boulevard and 24th Avenue still looks a lot like the Timberline Tire Factory and Auto Service Center it used to be. But where the ovals painted on the windows once advertised tune-ups, they now read: "PUTT-PUTT. POOL. PINBALL."
It's a Wednesday night, and Shannon is giving me a tour of the dream he's had since 1988: A bar and fun center where everything starts with the same letter as Portland.
There's a nine-hole putt-putt golf course installed on the concrete floor. Three pool tables, including what Shannon says is the only Fusion table on the West Coast—it looks like two rectangles attached at the hip. Pinball machines. Punching bags. Pop-A-Shot. Glossy photos of Parker Posey, Pope Benedict XVI, Pepe Le Pew and Packy the Oregon Zoo elephant. A floor-to-ceiling mural of Steve Prefontaine.
And, of course, there's a picture of Peter Pan.
There will be Pabst Blue Ribbon: Shannon has applied for an OLCC license. The menu will include panini, pierogi, pizza and peanuts.
Not everything will be 'P,'" Shannon says. "We're going to serve some hot dogs. But maybe they'll be Polish dogs."
Shannon bought the tire center with two septuagenarian business partners: John Hunt and Buzz Gorder, who he met through his mother.
"John Hunt and I were kind of questionable about the name," says Gorder, who builds corporate trade-show exhibits at Gorder Designs. "But how can you go against somebody who sells [millions of] dollars of doughnuts?â
Shannon wants to open the Portland P Palace on Jan. 2—his 46th birthday—but he's still waiting for city permits.
"This is the business plan," he announces, pulling a sheet of paper from his pocket. It is covered in doodles and what might be a map. "There's professors and pornography and pianos."
He looks through the Palace's giant glass windows into the parking lot, and says he hopes to install a deck and fountain.
"In an ideal world," he says, "it'd be like Vegas, and every hour Mount St. Helens would erupt."
Shannon is not the chief investor—he calls himself "the chatty partner"—but he's setting out without longtime cohort Pogson, whom he credits as the practical one behind Voodoo's success.
"He's venturing out a little bit," Pogson says. "Just to have a solo gig is tough. But he's always been a guy who's had a couple street things going on. It's just they're getting bigger and more powerful now."
Pogson is staying out of the Portland P Palace to spend more time with his wife and kids.
Shannon has no children. He's been dating a New Seasons Market deli manager named Michelle for more than a year.
He says his dating relationships always seem to last roughly three years: "Something happens, or they die, or they break up with me."
On Nov. 26, 1998, a Thanksgiving afternoon, his girlfriend Catherine "Cassie" Jean Wright drowned when she was sucked into a Willamette River whirlpool near Oaks Bottom. News reports say she dove in the river after Shannon, who was trying to save her dog, another black lab. All three were pulled into a concrete pipe by the flooding river. Shannon and the dog survived. He was found in an eddy when passersby heard his screams.
Shannon won't talk about it, except to call it "just a shitty day." Friends say only in the last few years has he been able to celebrate Thanksgiving
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YogSoggoth ago
Yeah, everything starts with P except hot dogs. Pretty telling right there.