After a couple of quiet months, live music will start back up Saturday at Pakit Liquidators on Bend’s east side.

The show — featuring Portland-based roots-rock band Sassparilla — is the first of three Saturday concerts coming up at the evolving home-improvement resale yard at Ninth Street and Wilson Avenue. Portland bands The Autonomics and A Happy Death will play Pakit on April 12, and popular blues-punk band Hillstomp will perform April 19.

The short series is the latest step in the transformation of Pakit from charming junkyard to rising art space, which began last summer when owner Matt Korish and local musician Mark Ransom spent months cleaning up the property’s considerable clutter to get it ready to host the 2013 Bend Roots Revival, a three-day celebration of local music and art.

That event happened in September, despite terrible weather. And Pakit hosted a handful of concerts over the winter until late January, when Korish announced the space would go dormant while he continued cleaning up and working toward increasing the 49-person capacity inside the property’s central building.

Saturday’s Sassparilla show will happen outside, on the south side of that building. Pakit’s outdoor capacity for the Roots Revival was 375, Korish said, and he expects this weekend’s crowd won’t approach that number.

Meanwhile, he is continuing to work toward upping Pakit’s capacity for concerts and toward filling in his vision for the property, which he describes as “a marketplace pairing for-profit companies and nonprofit companies.” The El Sancho taco stand is already in place, and Korish said he’s working with The Environmental Center to establish a “nonprofit community shop.” Also in the works: An “urban homesteading store” and a produce stand, plus Pakit will exist and operate as it always has, he said.

As far as live music is concerned, he is still working with Jesse Roberts, head of the local humanitarian and arts-education organization Rise Up International.

The two envision Pakit not as a music venue but as a vibrant community space that happens to have room for concerts.

Together, they are looking into the pros and cons of running Pakit as a social club for Rise Up, a nonprofit, rather than a more business-oriented music venue.

Korish has said all along he has no interest in owning a bar or a concert hall. He wants Pakit to be a low-key place with the right mix of tenants and room for Roberts to run his summer art camps and other events.

Both Korish and Roberts say the goal is not to make money off the music, but to provide it as a service to the community.

“That’s how (Rise Up) started in Bend … trying to grow the music scene and not worrying about supporting a venue,” Roberts said, citing his longtime relationship with popular locals Larry and His Flask and once-locals The Autonomics. “All the door (money) goes to the band, and we’re just trying to make enough (in bar sales) to pay the sound guy and hopefully have some money left over to go back to the nonprofit for our educational programs.”

Korish said he considered converting Pakit into a full-time music venue (he estimates it would cost $250,000), but decided against it.

“I’m not a nightlife guy. That’s not me,” he said. “I just want Pakit to be a place where the community can come together and be comfortable and create and enjoy what we have here in Bend.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0377, bsalmon@bendbulletin.com