Left Coast Live: Intro
Left Coast Live: Critic’s Picks
Left Coast Live headliners OK Go are more than just the ‘treadmill video band,’ or even the top viral music-video sensation of the YouTube era. With their energy, imagination and endless artistic curiosity, they’re bringing the experience back to the rock experience.
No good video goes unpunished. After popping onto the cultural radar in 2006 as “that band from the treadmill video”—their Grammy-winning exercise-machine ballet set to “Here It Goes Again” having taken its spot as the most “favorited” music video ever on YouTube—OK Go one-upped themselves this year with a video for “This Too Shall Pass.” Packed with everything from dominos to smashed TVs to shopping carts to cars, it made Rube Goldberg cool again by following one long sequence played out by the most lunatic machine ever set to alternative rock. So as the SoCal band headline Left Coast Live this week, they’ve done a fine job of raising expectations that go far beyond their music. The question has become: How will they out-do themselves? It’s the kind of situation that might make a band wish they hadn’t tried something creative in the first place.
But not OK Go. They live for this. Want to challenge them to do something stranger, bigger, more artistically outlandish? Bring it on. And no, they don’t care if you call them a “video band.”
“The videos and the album cover and the press photos and that kind of stuff, those are things that excite us,” says guitarist-vocalist Damian Kulash. “I think we have a pretty specific sense of what it is we like, and what fits us. But it’s very hard to articulate. It’s a particular type of crazy. There’s a very specific aesthetic to it. It’s less that we have this specific endpoint, like we want people to see x, y or z. It’s more just that all of the creative things that go along with being in a band we see as fun opportunities as opposed to necessary marketing chores.”
Kulash’s video-ready frontman looks are a bit deceptive. Graduating from Brown University with a degree in art semiotics in 1998, the same year OK Go formed, his artistic curiosity ranges across disciplines and media formats. As he sits at a long meeting table at Expression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville just before performing a webcast for San Jose’s Channel 92.3 FM, he sips down four shots of espresso over ice and paints a picture of his band as sort of artistic partners in crime, though he admits he does a lot of the “wrangling” for specific projects.
“None of us are virtuoso musicians, or people who were born into the world only to think of beats, chords and lyrics. For us, the band is in general an opportunity to chase our craziest creative ideas. That does generally start with songwriting, but that’s not a rule.”
It might instead be something like their performance at San Mateo’s Maker Faire this year, another example of their artistic self-one-upmanship. “We found a guy who makes strange water suits, kind of the inverse of a scuba suit—your head is in water, but the rest of you is all dry. It’s like a bubble of water on your head with a snorkel coming out of it,” he explains. “The thing I was in was sort of a big man-shaped bag filled with water hanging from a steel frame. You can get in and you’re entirely submerged, but it’s clear, so you sort of get rolled around. You can’t walk, there’s 60 gallons of water around you and you have a scuba mask. So I sang from within that, and the other guys put on their water helmets and played.”
Their Year
In 2004, I heard OK Go’s cover of the Zombies’ song “This Will Be Our Year” on the Future Soundtrack for America compilation put together—like a lot of records that year—in the hope of aiding the ultimately unsuccessful effort to unseat George W. Bush. I was doing an all-covers radio show at the time on the Santa Cruz public radio station KUSP, and I soon found myself putting their song into heavy rotation.
There was something about how they had taken a good, fairly obscure song by a criminally underrated band and made it even crisper and catchier behind the warmth of Kulash’s vocals. OK Go themselves seemed like a 21st-century version of the Zombies, poppy but quirky, or perhaps the Zombies crossed with Kulash’s hero band the Pixies, as they walk a fine like between personal songwriting and alt anthems. (“There’s no band in the last 20 years that didn’t want to be the Pixies,” said Kulash later during the webcast, before launching into a cover of “Wave of Mutilation” that featured band co-founder Tim Nordwind playing a xylophone.) With one album under their belt and another one on the way, I thought for sure OK Go, at that time based in Chicago, would be a breakout success.
And then, nothing. I barely noticed when their second album, Oh No, came out in 2005, and hardly anyone else did, either.
Then suddenly came the runaway success of what is referred to even by band members not as “the ‘Here It Goes Again’ video,” but as “the treadmill video.” For OK Go, it was like starting over as a brand new band. “It was sort of like our album had finally been released,” Kulash remembers. “We had put out a record a year before that, and been touring on it for 18 months at that point. The label didn’t have very much success promoting it. The videos we had made by ourselves without the label’s knowledge or permission were doing pretty well. Then the treadmill video exploded. We had been number one on the Heatseekers chart the first week our record came out, and then we were again the 53rd week of our record. We had to do the whole game again. We had to do another U.S. tour, another international tour, another tour opening for a giant band. That record cycle became 31 months of touring, then recovery afterwards.”
Viral 2.0
A similar thing happened with the Rube Goldberg machine and the video for “This Too Shall Pass,” though the timing was better, since their third album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, had come out just a month before they released the video. All over viral-video land, jaws dropped and links were forwarded. Immediately, Internet geeks began theorizing as to why the machine couldn’t really have worked.
“There are two edits in it,” Kulash says. “We got to the end of the machine three times, and only in one of them did the cameraman actually see the water section of the video. So it’s edited at the top and bottom of that, because the rest of that take wasn’t all that great.”
But other than that, it’s all, improbably, real, and he has the post-traumatic stress disorder to prove it.
“It took us 89 takes to get it,” he says. “The first few times I watched the video I still had that crazy feeling like ‘Oh my God, it’s not gonna go! It’s not gonna go!’ In fact, I had a lot of anxiety dreams for weeks after that that something completely unrelated was going to stop the machine. Like, if I didn’t answer my mom’s phone call in time, the machine would stop. Or I’d be on an airplane in my dream, and the stewardesses were walking by, and if I couldn’t get their attention, the machine would stop. Completely ridiculous things, but we were so immersed in it that the global terror in my life for a while was that the machine would stop.”
It’s a visual tour-de-force, and having required the four band members plus 60 other engineers, it wouldn’t have been possible if OK Go hadn’t already established themselves as “the band from the treadmill video.”
“We couldn’t have done the Rube Goldberg machine if it hadn’t been for the success of the treadmills,” Kulash admits. “What, are you going to walk into a roomful of engineers and be like ‘Guys, we’ve got the greatest idea! Work with us for six months for almost no money! We’ll make a great video!'”
There’s a long tradition of rock musicians being heavily influenced by the full spectrum of artistic disciplines, and vice versa. Andy Warhol used the music of the Velvet Underground for his Exploding Plastic Inevitable happenings, Patti Smith hung with William Burroughs and Robert Mapplethorpe, the Clash’s early outfits were inspired by Jackson Pollack, the Dead Kennedys were busted for obscenity for having included an H.R. Giger illustration in the sleeve of their Frankenchrist album. Tellingly, an early supporter of OK Go was John Flansburg of They Might Be Giants, who offered to manage them (instead, they now share a manager with TMBG).
“Early on, I remember people asking us, ‘Do you guys want to be like They Might Be Giants?'” Kulash says. “Musically, we share very little, but what I love about them as humans and their career is how broadly creative and excited they are, and how what they’re doing in their career changes every year or two and is always interesting. They’re people who’ve been on tour for 30 years basically, but it’s never the same old, same old.”
They also share a flare for the artistically weird, a rock experience that is far beyond the beginning and end of the songs.
“Rock & roll and pop music have always been way more than just beats and quirky lyrics. There’s always been a visual element, and there’s always been a cultural element of what a band means,” Kulash says. “All of the elements that go into that that are not just purely melody or harmony or tambor or lyrics, they’re just as fun to play with, in a lot of ways.”
