PHOTO: Rock quartet Ellis Street performs at The Cider Mill in Southwest Portland Saturday, May 10, at a benefit for the Ida B. Wells High School music program. (Rockne Roll/The Jewish Review)
A list of Jewish rock-and-rollers doesn’t end with Bob Dylan and Billy Joel.
Those two might be the most famous, but Randy Newman, Alanis Morissette, John Mayer and half the founding members of KISS (Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley) count themselves amongst Am Yisrael (the Jewish people).
There are many more than that, of course – four of whom, right here in Portland, were brought together by their common heritage and community.
Ellis Street consists of Andy Gilbert, Rick Menashe, Steve Resnikoff and Dave Bloom. Gilbert, Menashe and Resnikoff have known each other since their days in Congregation Neveh Shalom’s preschool program. Menashe recalls picking up drumming in seventh grade, forming a band in college called Homegrown along with Gilbert. Homegrown split when Menashe took a summer job at Camp Solomon Schechter. He sold his kit but taking the music out of the musician is much harder.
“I still kept playing with anything I could get my hands on; a table, the steering wheel on the car, the dashboard,” Menashe explained. “I still do that, and I drive my wife crazy.”
Gilbert and Menashe stayed connected, and Gilbert still played, but mostly acoustic and mainly solo. He went on to work in the music industry, becoming President of Pacific Talent in Portland. All three are members of Neveh Shalom and active with the synagogue and other Jewish organizations.
“We finished college and got on with our lives,” Gilbert explained. “We stayed in touch, but the band was kind of a thing of the past at that point you know in our lives.”
Gilbert paused and added, “Until now.”
In early 2020, Menashe decided that he had gone long enough without a drum set. He recalled that Gilbert had just purchased a new guitar, and that Resnikoff was picking up the instrument as well.
“It just kind of hit me, I remember, in January of 2020 that I wanted to get a new drum set,” Menashe said. “I hadn’t had one since the late 70s, and so I went out and bought one.”
The wheels were in motion. Soon Gilbert and Resnikoff were on board. They still needed a bass player.
“Coincidentally, Rick is a really is a really good racquetball player and he plays at the [Mittleman Jewish Community Center] all the time,” Gilbert said.
“My main racquetball partner was a fellow named David Bloom who goes to Neveh Shalom. He and his family have been up here about 10 years from California,” Menashe recalled. “I said, ‘We’re forming this band, and I know you’re a music major. Do you happen to know of any bass players by chance?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I play bass.’”
“I guess it was meant to be,” Menashe went on, following it with the Hebrew translation – bashert.
It turned out that Bloom can also sing lead, as can Resnikoff – Gilbert offers backing vocals. They practiced individually through the early days of the COVID pandemic but kept up over Zoom as a means of looking out for one another during isolation.
“When the shots happened, we would practice wearing masks,” Gilbert said of the band’s slow progression to in-person practice. “When the booster came, we decided to take the mask off and said, ‘OK, the six-feet thing is fine.’”
They decided on their name – which comes from the street just north of Southeast Woodstock Boulevard where Gilbert lived in the 70s when he, Menashe and Resnikoff were hanging out a lot- and started building their repertoire: The Beatles, Tom Petty, R.E.M, The Police, Neil Young and more. Menashe said that basically anything from the 60s through the 90s was fair game. The four blend well together musically and have a common interest in honoring those whose work they cover. They’ll practice a song again and again until they get it just right – only then does it potentially go on their set list, the pool for which is at 34 and counting.
“We’re not going to just fluff over something,” Gilbert said. “It’s important that we pay homage to the people who wrote a song and make sure it’s done right because people have heard this song many times before.”
When they “got out of the basement,” as Menashe put it, and played their first live show in 2023, they donated their services to the Neveh Shalom auction, supporting their synagogue by letting the highest bidder decide their first venue. Since then, they’ve played numerous private parties, typically for fellow CNS members, as well as the synagogue’s Shabbat on the Plaza (where they’ll appear again this summer) and the recent fundraiser for the CNS Sisterhood’s Torah Fund – on top of a recent gig at The Cider Mill on Southwest Capitol Highway, just up the hill from Neveh Shalom, as a fundraiser for the music program at Ida B. Wells High School, where Menashe’s wife works.
Their collective Jewish connection isn’t just what brought them together – it’s a huge part of their lives. Bloom’s three daughters have all celebrated bat mitzvahs at Neveh Shalom since Ellis Street formed – Bloom’s bandmates have been at each one. The four members are all active with Camp Solomon Schechter. Ellis Street maintains a standing Sunday practice session at Menashe’s home, and during breaks in the three-hour sessions, the topic of conversation often involves the band’s shared faith and heritage.
“It means a lot to us that we’re all Jewish,” Menashe said. “It’s kind of cool when we can play at the synagogue and people that have known us all these years say, ‘I didn’t know you guys were a band like this, that you could play like that.’”
“We wanted to be all Jewish,” Gilbert said. “It’s just a bond we all have.”
Catch Ellis Street live at Congregation Neveh Shalom’s “Rock n’ Roll Shabbat” Friday, July 12at 6:15 pm. For more information, visit nevehshalom.org/sotp.