Meet The Film’s Supporters: Wonder Ballroom Owner Chris Monlux

Wonder Ballroom owner Chris Monlux has graciously donated the space for an Alien Boy benefit on September 17.

Monlux was a Portland cop himself for 3 years in the late ’70s.

“Things were a lot more liberal back then,” he says. “We had a liberal police chief, there were cops who smoked pot, and there were cops with long hair. I considered it as like social work.”

Ultimately, Monlux decided the police bureau was not for him, and quit to follow other interests. Or, more bluntly…

“I went from there to experimenting with drugs and getting into the music scene,” he says.

Monlux remembers Chasse from his days at the Pine Street Theater, where the Wipers would perform. He started his promotions company MonQui, which booked the Wipers, and later, Nirvana, and continues to bring in high profile performers today. I interviewed him outside the Wonder last thursday, July 17, before the Jesus and Mary Chain went onstage.

While sympathetic to Chasse’s story, Monlux feels Portland’s police are working in a far more difficult environment these days than they had to when he was a cop. Following Reagan’s de-institutionalization program in the early 1980s, he says, cops are expected to respond to a host of issues for which they are not necessarily either equipped or adequately trained.

“The cops deal with a lot of bullshit these days,” he says. “There’s more of an us versus them attitude. When I was a cop, I lived in the city, but these days a lot of the cops are coming into Portland from elsewhere to work, and they have the attitude that the city is a combat zone. So instead of walking around and communicating, they have this alienation. And that’s a big problem.”

Monlux is particularly interested in the intersection of mental health, drug addiction, music and performance—citing the deaths of River Phoenix, and of Kurt Cobain as tragic outcomes that affected his outlook, personally. He’s decided to support Alien Boy because he likes director Brian Lindstrom’s work on addiction in his previous documentary, Finding Normal.

“With musicians, there’s a certain looseness or openness to performance, and I guess being high, or a little fucked up, there’s an illusion of being a little bit looser on stage,” he says. “Although I think I’m tending to be a little bit more conservative these days when it comes to drugs. There are kids who are smoking ounces of pot in a day, and there’s a huge heroin problem in Portland.”

Ultimately, however, Monlux feels that an appreciation of the kind of world people like Jim Chasse inhabited as kids would help, more than anything.

“The police don’t have this understanding of the alternative,” he says. “Everything is either white or black.”

Thanks, Chris, for donating the Wonder Ballroom for our benefit in September.