Oregon Music News

Mark Steering and Joan Freed in "Oil Change the Musical Comedy"- photo by Salem Victoria

Brent Rogers and his brother Klay Rogers hadn’t intended to write a musical when they first started making songs together. Klay’s wife Teresa had died of brain cancer, and he worked through his grief by composing music about her, with help from Brent. Eventually, they worked together so long that their songs took a different direction, a happier one. They had so many tunes on file that the thought of putting them together in a musical was born.

Brent, account executive and audio engineer at REX Studio in Portland, is a long-time song writer and musician, and Klay, who is a certified public accountant in Garland, Texas, had written several books and lectures before he embarked on this joint musical effort, so the sibling duo created a nice balance.

Brent Rogers - photo by Daniel James

After many revisions and various permutations, their musical Oil Change the Musical Comedy will be presented as a staged reading with live musical accompaniment and choreography for the public to view as part of Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival, a late-January event featuring new theater and dance works. The reading workshop will take place Jan. 20, 21 and 22 at Broadway Rose Theater in Tigard, and Jan. 27 and 28 at Portland Actors Conservatory, Firehouse Theatre. Tickets are $10, and reservations aren’t necessary. For details, visit www.boxofficetickets.com/OilChange.

What brought the musical into being? Its title intrigued us, so we talked to Brent about its creation, about his background and what viewers can expect if they come to see “Oil Change,” based on an idea Klay had running an oil-change franchise in Texas.

Brent, talk about yourself, your background.

I grew up in Dallas, got a degree in Economics at the University of Texas at Dallas, then pretty quickly went to work for the fire department there as a firefighter, a paramedic and later as a dispatcher, a 911 operator. I did all that in a total of 11 years. The fire department job gave me the time to work on my music, which was my true love. I was a rock ‘n roller, guitar player, pianist, vocalist. I always put together bands, and I’d go out and do gigs. That was interesting because at the fire department, you work 24-hour shifts, then you’re off. Later as a dispatcher, it was 24 hours on and 72 off. So I had a lot of time to work on my music. Also, I had a recording studio in Dallas, learned how to do recordings for musicians, mostly.

How did you get from Texas to Portland?

I came here on a whim. I had been thinking about quitting and doing music for quite a while, but Portland was chosen because I just liked the feel of the town. I had kids who were young at the time, and I really didn’t want to raise kids in L.A. I looked at Nashville, but it’s so humid and hot, like Texas. We visited the Pacific Northwest, came down from Seattle into Portland, and when I saw the Morrison Bridge with those colored lights on it, I said, “This might be my city.” I fell in love with the town in about two days.

Mark Steering and Catherine Olson - photo by Salem Victoria

I started a recording studio in my basement at 47th and Belmont, took out an ad. That led to volunteer work with the Portland Songwriter’s Association. We’re talking 12, 13 years ago. I spent about seven years running showcases for them. That helped me meet a lot of people. And one important person I met was Dan Decker, who owned Sound Impressions studios, and he offered me a place to work, and took me in.

So musical theater was a very distant idea at the time…

I’d done hundreds of songs, I’ve worked on movies. I’d done lots of shows as a performer, but I’ve never written a musical before.

What jump-started “Oil Change?”

Klay owned an oil-change facility called Kwik Kar for about six years. During that time, he amassed all these stories of what it was like to work with all these characters at a Jiffy Lube kind of place, and to deal with all the customers that came in. The characters kind of burned into his mind. He wrote a love song for his wife Teresa, who was dying of brain cancer, and he asked me to put it to music. The last thing she said to me was, “You need to keep him writing: It’s good for him.” After she died, he was sending lyrics that were really depressing, and I would cry with him when he would write these songs.

Three or four songs in, all of a sudden it flipped. It turned int comedy. Silly comedy, like road kill. Or what happens when you call the telephone number on the bathroom wall? Stuff like that. So after maybe 10 songs, he said, “I think we’ve got a musical going on here.”

We probably had a finished script for the first time in June 2010 or so. We went to New York and did an off-Broadway workshop with Momentum Repertory Company. Mindy Kay Smith was the director, and she ran us through a mad, crazy four-day workshop that was very helpful. Quite painful, but very helpful. They were a high quality acting troupe. We worked on the show for four days, and did a performance afterwards, mainly for other actors. We got their opinions. Then in September of that year, Klay hooked up with a director in Texas named Jeulet Noyes, who actually lives in McMinnville now. They had a 10-day rehearsal, followed by a workshop onstage with props. We had a questionnaire, and the 50 or so people who saw the show filled it out. We decided which songs were weakest and which were the strongest. It turned out that this one subplot and the weakest songs were all together, so we cut those.

So you got good feedback from audiences in New York and in Texas.

Gerrin Mitchell and Catherine Olson in "Oil Change the Musical Comedy" - photo by Salem Victoria

The people in Dallas confirmed what the folks had said in New York. There were a lot of touchy subjects. There was a serious part of the show, where it all started…One some level, the whole musical has been a grieving process for the loss of Teresa. And letting go of those characters that represented her and represented Klay was a big turning point.

One of the comments we got in Dallas from an actor in the audience was, “This musical needs to decide whether it wants to be “Les Miz” or “Gilligan’s Island.” It was pretty clear to us that we needed to go with “Gilligan.”

What have you learned from the process?

I’ve learned that it’s difficult to make a storyline fit into existing songs. There are half a dozen songs left over, that were outside the storyline. All the rest of them had been written specifically for the story line.

All the heaviness is scratched. We have just a ball of fun now. It’s about Roni (played by Catherine Olson), or grease-monkey girl, who’s been released from the number one champion racing team at Talladega Superspeedway. She’s back home in Hokes Bluff, Ala., after trouble she had with the crew. She’s working at the Oil Change, and she’s the only certified mechanic in the area. Johnny Ray Ratchet (Colin Wood), the local stock car driver, has been out of racing for a year or so, and he’s back in to race in the number 44 slot: That’s the last slot. He’s trying to get this motor to run right. He’s looking for a mechanic. When he and Roni hook up, she helps him win the race. It’s a Cinderella story.

Your sponsor?

REX, where I work, is sponsoring us. REX is basically a production company and recording studio. We work for most of the big production companies in town, doing sound recording, replacement dialogue, etc., work for television series like Leverage and Grimm. If there’s a scene and the microphone gets messed up…they’ll send their actor here, and we’ll fix it. We also work with local filmmakers needing full post-production services as well as commercial work, ranging from radio spots to corporate videos (www.rexpost.com)

What kind of music do you use in “Oil Change?”

It’s eclectic. It starts out with some rock tunes that get your feet thumping, then it has some country, then the next thing you know, you’re hearing this flat five dramatic motif in D minor, the saddest of all keys. Flat five? That’s the Devil’s chord. And then we’re back in the beginning of Act Two, and it’s almost rap. We’re really trying to keep it eclectic. It’s got some Latin sounds. The only thing we don’t use is polka music!