As far as gimmicks go, few are as compelling as The Extraordinaires‘: The Philadelphia genrebenders release records that sound like musical scores in book format. The band returns to The Jefferson Theater on October 11 for the first second time since a June 2009 gig at iS Venue, which was a release for their most recent effort, Electric and Benevolent.
What’ve The Extraordinaires been up to? Crack intern Spencer Peterson investigates in a conversation with the band’s two longest-lasting members, frontman Jay Purdy and bassist Matt Gibson.
When you were writing Electric and Benevolent, what initially drew you to Nikola Tesla? What about his life struck you as good subject matter for an album?
Jay Purdy: Well, a friend of mine did a lecture, and for some reason at the end of this lecture he launched into this diatribe about Nikola Tesla. I had never heard of him before—this was probably like six or seven years ago—and so I started reading biography after biography after biography and it was sort of like reading science fiction novels.
He’s got all these big trials and these horrible defeats, this genius character who finds it really difficult to relate to normal people but he has to in order to further his work. Its just this really beautiful story that needed no embellishment at all. I’ve personally ended up going to writing narratives more, and so it was pretty easy to just sort of latch onto these moments in his life and kind of place myself there in any way possible, and that’s where the album came from.
When you were writing songs, would the narrative arc strike you first, or would it come after the music?
JP: Usually when a project like this comes about the music is created first, but you can hear just from listening to the piece of music what it’s about or what emotions it covers, and you know, the overall sense of the song, whether it’s an angry jealous song or a wispy happy song. Every song had emotional baggage that kind of lent itself to specific moments in his life, and that’s kind of how it would work. The songs would sort of write themselves.
Matt Gibson: We have a hit factory up in Philadelphia.
Word has it that your first album, Ribbons of War, is going to be turned into a full-scale musical. How did that come about?
JP: We had done a musical and toured with it back in 2008. We had staged it with props and costumes and lights and sound effects; everything you would expect from a theater show we kind of put together in this traveling musical. After we did that—it was just about a two week tour—we just said “awesome we finally did it” and then released a DVD and called it, but then a local high school in Philadelphia called Friend’s Central decided they wanted to do it for their musical.
Eventually we were in touch with a man named Chris Biddle, who is the director for the Piccolo theater in Evanston, Illinois, and he’s writing a treatment for a brand new version. He hasn’t seen our version, so hes working on another one on a much grander in scale, with bigger props and tons more cast members. So now there’s a budgeted theatrical piece in the works, which will begin rehearsals in the Spring of 2011 and will go up for eight weeks that Fall. So we’re probably about a year from another premier which we will also attend in suits.
The Extraordinaires in 2010. More below.
You guys are known for stage antics and really theatrical shows. Have there been any particularly dangerous moments?
JP: Well, I would say that there’s one antic that has maybe been perceived as a dangerous one, involving this old wild west gun that I got on the internet, modeled after a 1873 Colt Peacemaker. It’s heavy and looks like a real gun and it actually fires 9mm blanks. One of our big heros Spike Jones used to conduct his band the City Slickers with a revolver and then shoot it off as a percussive element. So just as a nod to that we procured ourself a gun and it does get shot off from time to time. It fits a little bit because when the show goes crazy, just even the smell of gunpowder in the air is enough to put a little excitement out there, which is worth it.
MG: I think were just now starting to feel pretty free and liberated on stage, and aren’t really worrying or caring about what’s happening, just kind of letting loose. The show is starting to get crazier and just more like whatever personality we’re trying to put into it. I guess we all share the idea of a child’s birthday party. That’s kind of what the stage is starting to look like, like you’ve walked into somebody’s kid’s birthday party.
JP: We’ve been slowly making a really nice collection of dollar store decorations for our stage setup, so hopefully most of that stuff will survive until the Charlottesville show.
MG: Thats the last show we’re going to have on the tour, so we’re kind of hoping that our momentum will just culminate and it will be the craziest and the most fun. If nothing else, we’ll bring enough stuff to make it the biggest mess.
-interview conducted by Spencer Peterson.