Music never stops in Portland, a city that might have more bands than craft beers. Every night, touring artists play to sold-out theaters, local bands fill clubs across town and boozy crowds keep up our reputation as America's capital of Pabst.

Unless you're under 21.

In Portland, once a place where downtown venues were all-ages destinations for a thriving rock scene that birthed national stars, reaching drinking age has become a Maginot Line for the music scene. It's a barrier that's pushed some to isolated undergrounds and others to the floors of roped-off theaters that have to leave room for the bar. For the next breakthrough talent like Esperanza Spalding or Typhoon, it may be a wall too daunting to climb.

"Youth culture and adult culture, they're very separated and are almost enemies to each other," Hannah Ginsberg said recently, discussing Portland's concert scene. A 17-year-old junior at St. Mary's Academy, she's been to her share of club shows and basement gigs. "A lot of high schoolers don't feel like that's necessarily their place."

Ginsberg wants to build a new place: one accessible to everyone. That's what she and her peers hope to do with Friends of Noise.

The new Portland nonprofit, a collaboration that brings together adult professionals, a youth steering committee and students and volunteers, will make its debut with an all-ages funk and hip-hop concert at St. Johns' Los Prados Event Hall on May 22. It's the first of many concerts the group plans to promote in the coming year as it earns the trust and attention of the city's youngest audiences and performers with a mix of music and education--and steers toward a venue of its own.

"We want to create a safe space," Andre Middleton said. "Think about it: most kids are not encouraged to be part of a music scene until they're old enough to drink."

On a blazing blue afternoon at Southeast Portland's Conquistador, Middleton and the rest of the group's grown-up board of directors laid out its goals. The quintet also includes Gina Altamura, Becky Miller, Aaron Hall and Korey Schultz. It was largely born of a 2015 all-ages workshop put on by the Regional Arts and Culture Council, which supports the arts scene in the Portland area.

Ultimately, Friends of Noise's aim is to even the playing field.

"It's youth voice, it's about empowerment, it's about having a place to be after 8 p.m.," Miller said, laughing. "Even if it's with your parents."

Quasi at Mississippi Studios

Parents and children gather to watch Quasi at Mississippi Studios, an unusual sight at the music venue. (David Greenwald/The Oregonian)

And sometimes not even after 8 p.m. On a miserable Friday afternoon in February, Northeast Portland's Mississippi Studios opened a few hours early for an unusual audience: under the music venue's LED lights, two children with squeaky voices and striped track pants pressed themselves against their mom. Another little girl walked by hand-in-hand with her mother, enveloped in protective headphones nearly as big as her head. They were waiting for Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss of the indie duo Quasi to take the stage.

"So cute," Weiss said to the headphones girl. Tony Lash, Coomes' old bandmate from Heatmiser, stands in the audience with his son.

It's the first of two shows the band played at Mississippi that night, a negotiation the group made to offer an all-ages show. Even at the early show, the venue remained a bar: the balcony and downstairs bar are cordoned off for legal drinkers as beer-free parents and children cheer on the band's noisy pop.

Quasi at Mississippi Studios

Quasi, with Sam Coomes, left, and Janet Weiss, play a rare all-ages show at Mississippi Studios. (David Greenwald/The Oregonian)

"I think to do a tour of all-ages venues, you have to make that your M.O.," Weiss, perhaps best known as a member of Sleater-Kinney, said backstage between sets. "It's not the first thing your booking agent's going to present to you because you won't make as much money."

From Mississippi Studios to the Moda Center, the live music business is also an alcohol sales business--one of several struggles for dedicated all-ages music spaces in Portland, which have faced rising rents, strict city policies, and the difficulties of business management. In the last few years, one after another has dropped off: Backspace, Slabtown, and Laughing Horse Books have all shuttered. The annual Portland concert institution MusicfestNW, a sea of youthful faces during its past two years at Waterfront Park, will be 21-and-over this summer as it partners with the Pabst Brewing Co. to present Project Pabst. That's right: An all-ages festival has been swallowed up by a beer company's marketing budget.

It wasn't always like this. Portland's creative culture was once synonymous with all-ages music, fostering artists, and audiences for them, from Elliott Smith to the Thermals.

"We just went and saw live music like every night," Weiss remembered of the 1990s Portland she grew up in, where shows at the all-ages La Luna ran as cheap as a dollar. "We went to Satyricon, La Luna, or X-Ray (Cafe). And when we weren't doing that, we were singing karaoke... It just made a scene, so that you would go to the venue even if you weren't sure what was happening."

Without that support, the next Quasi--and a generation of musicians and listeners--could find themselves silenced.

Turning up the volume

Some opportunities for underage fans do exist: the Hawthorne Theatre's punk, metal and hip-hop shows are all-ages, and larger rooms such as the Crystal and Wonder Ballrooms occasionally split themselves in half to make room for younger attendees. The free, all-ages PDX Pop Now! festival remains a summer staple, and newer spaces including North Portland's Anarres Infoshop and Southeast's Mother Foucault's Bookshop also have tried to step in for the scene's missing do-it-yourself venues, though the Infoshop had to reduce its hours after a noise complaint.

"Right now, all-ages shows are mostly underground, and when the cops find out about them, they get shut down," Schultz said.

Friends of Noise would like to fix that, and make sure young people aren't just watching concerts, but putting them on. The Los Prados show on Sunday will serve as test case: two adult acts, the Doo Doo Funk All Stars and Neo G Yo, will join young rappers Drex Porter and GEM Dynasty, with roles for youth both on stage and behind the scenes. As a hip-hop show in St. Johns, it's also a display of the group's priorities: to do what Hall calls "safe, fun" concerts of all kinds, in neighborhoods that need them.

Over a half-hour talk, Friends of Noise's board floated enough ideas to fill a bathtub: Perhaps they'll rent practice spaces to bands, or lobby the city for resources. They'll foster student education from performance to sound mixing to stage lighting to show production. They'll use their nonprofit status to turn to grants, memberships or crowd-funded capital campaigns such as Kickstarter, evading tickets-and-concessions (read: alcohol) revenue issues. Oh, and they'll open a sustainable venue along the way, where students can tap into their resources to put on the shows themselves.

It's ambitious. But the group's resumes range from venue management (Hall owns the Southeast Portland bar Dig a Pony) to youth organization (Altamura, who books bands to play at the Southeast club Holocene, is also managing director of Music in the Schools). They're doing their homework, too. In October, the group took a field trip to Seattle, where they toured successful spaces the Vera Project and the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center.

"Basically, we'd like to meld those two models," Middleton said. "We want to create a youth-run educational music venue that also can create kind of an incubator space for nonprofits that are specifically geared toward youth and arts."

Doing it themselves

Friends of Noise are intent on doing things by the book. But all-ages music in Portland also includes the scenes that aren't asking for permission.

On a drizzling afternoon at Portland State University, Jordan Rasmussen led the way down a series of staircases to the KPSU headquarters. The student-run radio station is smaller than a Burnside condo, but it's colorful, papered with concert posters. Rasmussen, KPSU's promotions director and a booker of on-campus concerts, said the all-ages scene kept him in Portland. A Utah native who wasn't sure the West Coast was the right fit, he connected here with upstart music label Good Cheer Records and the Semi-OK Collective, an indie zine and music community that includes such groups as Sioux Falls, Snow Roller, and Good Cheer artist/co-founder Mo Troper.

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Semi-OK's is a scene that lives in the basements of band houses and is promoted the old-fashioned way, with word of mouth keeping the gigs off of neighbors', and authorities', radar. There's also no security guard checking IDs, which leaves such shows open to partying and the safety and police issues that come with it. But the no-budget secrecy is a way to keep the music going without the red tape and expenses of city permitting or the pressure of ticket sales.

"There's something about being in a basement with kids that you know are all your age and they're all as into this as you are," Rasmussen said. "There's nothing like that kind of community."

Inclusivity is foundational for Semi-OK--Rasmussen said he doesn't want to put on PSU shows limited to straight, white, male performers--but it's mostly a rock 'n' roll scene, drawing on the sounds of punk, emo and lo-fi pop that often go hand-in-hand with "DIY." While word of mouth keeps the shows protected, it also limits who gets to join in. Semi-OK, for one, seems disconnected from other house-show hubs: its artists have yet to play at Banana Stand, the Southeast Portland basement that's hosted and recorded dozens of Portland musicians. Solidarity and smallness are the nature of independent music scenes; that means they can't offer the accessibility Friends of Noise, and teenagers like Ginsberg, are working toward.

Tomorrow's stars are often today's underage artists, though, and without venues willing or able to take a chance on them, scenes like Semi-OK and its basements are often the only way to perform and start building a fanbase. All those house shows add up, which brings its own Portland problems: growing press coverage and followings for acts such as Troper and Sioux Falls have gotten them in the door at traditional rooms such as Mississippi Studios and the Know, venues where the age limit suddenly stands in the way of a number of the fans who got them there.

"I don't know what's going to happen now that it's starting to get bigger," Rasmussen said, both excited and nervous. "Hopefully people continue to stick to their ethos."

A more unified scene

Portland bands have a history of giving back, at least for student music. Metal heavyweights Red Fang are among the groups who've recorded an original song with My Voice Music students at the nonprofit's Southeast Portland studio. Major label act Portugal. The Man spent a morning last September playing an auditorium show for Ron Russell Middle School as part of a $35,000 instrument donation to the school's music programs. And local groups are regulars at concerts for Portland's branch of the after-school program School of Rock: On May 27, indie act Genders will headline Holocene with students opening the show.

American Music Program

American Music Program students play at the Waterfront Blues Festival in 2015 (David Greenwald/The Oregonian)

Portland is full of these youth music offerings, which also include Ethos Music Center and the award-winning American Music Program. What's been missing is a star at the center of all these orbits, something to bring basement scenes, educational resources and community opportunities all into the light. That's where Friends of Noise comes in.

"We know that scenes and shows are already happening and they're going to sprout up on their own anyway," Miller said. "So we want to be part of it. We want to be part of the conversation."

Beyond outreach efforts to other nonprofits, that means pairing their expertise with student energy. Ginsberg, also a volunteer with Music in the Schools, said her peers have been just as involved in Friends of Noise's road map as the grown-ups.

"It's been a really smooth process," she said. "It's a testament to how important it is to have the youth voice involved in things like this. A lot of times, it's adults making things without their perspective."

It's too early to say if Friends of Noise has all the answers. But creating the space to ask the right questions is a promising start.

"We are asking youth, what kind of event do you want to put on?" Schultz said. "We'll bring the PA, we'll find the lights, we'll get the security, we'll make sure everything is covered, and we'll show you those steps--but what do you want?"

Friends of Noise launch party with the Doo Doo Funk All Stars, Neo G Yo, Drex Porter and GEM Dynasty, Los Prados Event Hall, 5:30 p.m. doors, 6:30 p.m. show. Tickets: $5 for youth or two for $8, $10 for adults, eventbrite.com.

-- David Greenwald

dgreenwald@oregonian.com

503-294-7625; @davidegreenwald

Instagram: Oregonianmusic