A couple of Thursdays ago I rather unsuspectingly wandered into the Eagle Tavern to catch yet another installment of Live Music Thursdays. This night was featuring a larger than usual line-up of acts as a part of the The Mission Creek Music Festival, a local celebration of musicians enjoying its sixth year with a week of live shows scattered across the city at various smaller venues. By the time I had arrived the one band that I really wanted to see, The Quails, had just finished but there were a couple more featured acts to go and the crowd gathered was a very interesting mix of familiar and unfamiliar faces so I was content to mill around and socialize. While doing so I noticed a group of people slowly start to congregate on the stage area of the patio, the only thing setting them apart from the rest of the crowd was an occasional brass instrument and maybe a flashy sort of marching band uniform. That’s when I remembered that one of the nights featured acts was called The Extra Action Marching Band, which is all I really knew about them. I liked the name but didn’t really think they would be an actual marching band. I talked to some people in the crowd who were there specifically to see the act and they filled me in a little more about the EAMB, or at least that they were recently featured as an opening act that actually closed the show for David Byrne at his recent appearances at The Fillmore. By then the group of people on the stage area began to slowly march in formation from outside to the main bar area playing a sort of new Orleans style funeral march, the notes hanging and lingering lazily accentuated by a guy with a megaphone speaking in French while certain percussive motions brought to mind something far more primal than say Dixieland. I suddenly knew the place was in for a real treat, these 35 or so musicians and dancers were already showing a decidedly bent and bizarre nature with the stylistic hodgepodge of influences in just the music alone. Before long they had circled the bar and as many as could fit took the stage while others including some really powerhouse dancing girls jumped up on the bar or danced at stage front. Once in place, so to speak, the band exploded in sound and motion and the room just sprang to life with an edgy exalted joy. The invasion of a familiar place by a large group of strange people can be very off-putting and uncomfortable, but if that group just happens to be a marching band, well then it’s quite another story. To witness your standard uniformed marching band playing simply a Sousa march is a very exciting thing, or it was for me when I was about seven and standing right at street level, having never seen one before. I knew something was approaching, sounding like a herd of cattle but with rhythm, buffered by the swelling cheers of the crowd. Then I caught first sight of them, rigid and marching and decked out in uniforms with shiny ropes on the shoulders and big feathers on tall hats. As if that weren’t enough already, the band burst into song and proceeded marching in time led by the member with the fanciest uniform, heading right at us. It was the loudest thing I had ever heard, the big bass drums and snare drums sending waves of sound so thick you could feel the vibrations inside of you, then the tuba’s and the trombones and trumpets and French horns kick in like a tornado, so strong you fear being swept up in the air, floating away from the crowd and your mom by the sheer power of sound, then the flutes and clarinets and glockenspiels provide a more delicate dreamy soundtrack for the center of the swirling cacophonous fantasy you drift through. Only with the metallic clash of the cymbals ringing in your ears do you float back to earth, and then all you really want to do is run after the band and join them forever and never go home, not that home is something horrible or bad mind you, but what could be better than marching around with a group of people creating this magnificent sound, this magical powerful thing that swept me off my feet and into a dream? If you could, who wouldn’t want to do that forever? I knew I could probably master that triangle instrument in no time. Seeing The Extra Action Marching Band at the Eagle made me feel just like that again.
The show was a bit different than what I saw so many years ago at the Pear Blossom Parade in my hometown. I saw a high school marching band doing nothing more than traditional American songs and marching in simple stiff formation. The people in EAMB looked like people who might be arrested for hanging out anywhere near a high school and there was nothing rigid about their formation—it was totally chaotic, dancers on the bar, patrons bending back to avoid getting smacked upside the head by a tuba, trombones stabbing down towards the ground or up towards your chin or erratically back and forth when players were dancing not playing, and dancing girls yanking you into the chaos for some extra action dirty dancing. But the music was the thing—an interesting hybrid of multi-cultural influences with boundaries far reaching as hip-hop and punk to the famous Moroccan ensemble Master Musicians of Joujouka. They sound like a marching band but actually more primal and more polyrhythmic and jam-like, even at times a touch improvisational. The percussionists were the standout musicians, aggressive precise and sometimes seeming to move about four directions at once. Their overall sound differed from traditional marching band fare in that it was definitely prompting lots of movement in the crowd. It was an instant party, with an almost otherworldly spell taking control like Haitian voodoo drummers inducing trance-like states in unsuspecting vacationers. It was fucking wild, way too much fun, and as far as I could see, nobody got hurt. Seek out the EAMB’s next scheduled appearance and other useful information on the band at their website, http://www.extra-action.com/,
which is chocked full of great stuff including short movie and sound files.
I thought it was an odd coincidence that the next show I attended featured a band that boasted a total of eight members with lots of horns and percussion who had chosen a definite funk and groove oriented style not usually embraced by musicians emerging from the indie/punk scene of Sacramento, the birthplace of !!! (pronounced chik chik chik) Yeah, the name is sort of annoying to try to explain when searching for their eponymous CD release at the record store but if you can find it by all means buy it. Already a couple years old, that CD is one of the most enduringly satisfying and engaged sort of punk/funk/groove affairs that I have ever heard and it has literally become like a staple food to my DJ sets. The songs are long and kinetic bass and drum driven constructions that build up to frenzied horn and guitar crescendos and chant-like vocal assaults then deconstruct to the spareness of that fantastic ever present spine of a bassline, often several times during one song. The lyrics are self-revelatory sort of statements or philosophies regarding a lot of life’s issues, like drug use and things learned from it, spotting insincerity in other people who want to be friends, the importance of not holding oneself back with limitations in taste or style, and basically awakening yourself to the importance and fun of experiencing and dancing a good groove.
!!! bring to mind a variety of influences from the past, like Gang of 4 and their melding of punk’s sharpness with a more funky groove, and The Talking Heads as they forged into a deeper exploration of African rhythms and cerebral art-school rock, and a score of other bands from the early 80’s New York scene like Liquid Liquid, ESG, Konk, Indoor Life, Bush Tetras and even Pylon, an Athens GA band that is often lost or hidden in the shadows of R.E.M. and the B52’s. At any rate, this time period was rich with great music that I find myself listening to all over again in part because !!! brought them to mind.
In early 2001 six members of !!! relocated to New York and started making a splash on the east coast, the two remaining members in Sacramento visiting every three weeks or so to rehearse or play live at loft parties and small venues. The band was starting to get some good press in major magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin and recently they signed a deal with Touch and Go records. They plan to release their sophomore effort in early 2003 and their first record will definitely be redistributed and hopefully much easier to find. I was completely thrilled to learn they were playing in town recently opening for Trans Am so I went to catch this act, very curious about what they looked like and if they could achieve live the magic of their CD.
I missed about half their set waiting in the will call line for my ticket. Unfortunately I heard two of my favorite songs by them while standing outside but I finally got inside and enjoyed the rest of their set which all seemed to be new material. Live the band could definitely hold up to the promise of their recorded stuff, maintaining a very fine-tuned sense of timing and high energy level. The entire band was also in constant motion, when not playing or switching from horns to percussion they were dancing or clapping hands. The band looked like a fairly unassuming bunch of guys, kind of like members of your high school marching bands off-shoot jazz-lab. The vocalist was pretty taut and intense like a wire, occasionally jumping on the crowd verbally for not dancing enough, then apologizing for doing so. In all I was very impressed with what I saw and I believe the world at large will likely be enjoying this band a great deal as well in the very near future. Buy their record, and if you can’t find it just ask for it, go ahead. You should see what it does to spell-check on my computer.