cineSOURCE magazine

Extra Action Band: The Revolution Continues
by Doniphan Blair

An Extra Action Marching Band Flag Girl in front of their diverse horn section at an atypical rural, daytime gig. photo: D. Blair

IT'S HARD TO COMPUTE THE EXTRA
Action Marching Band: their raucous, ribald performances, their two decades playing around the Bay, nation and world, their overall effect on the nervous system.

The confusion kicks in almost immediately when you spot their scrum of drums, tubas and up-to-35 members massing in the corner of a club, or around the corner from a parade. It doubles down as the drummers start pounding, the horn players begin blowing and the dancers enact epileptic seizures (or are those routines?).

It goes off the charts as they march right at you, smashing the protective “fourth wall,” a primeval, unamplified, audio-kenetic blitzkrieg.

“We’re off the stage, in the mix, constantly moving and playing and dancing,” attempted to explain Isaac Clemons, a 30-or-so year-old horn player. “The bass drum isn’t on stage—it’s in your face, thumping so hard your eyeballs vibrate.”

“I lugged my sousaphone from one tiny San Francisco apartment to another,” he recalled, about his own irrepressible musical dreams, until three years ago he finally met and joined the band (or is it tribe?). “Brass band meets burlesque act or Rocky Horror Picture Show,” was how Clemons would describe it to friends, although that barely scratches the surface.

Premier sonic explorers, Extra Action draws sounds or scores from Moroccan pan pipers to the heavy metal band Black Sabbath, see their site or Facebook page. Becoming well-known around 9/11, they embodied the freedom and fearlessness many felt had been lost and helped trigger the alt-marching band fever which swept the country and some of Europe during the mid-aughts.

“We started with just drummers,” recalled Simon Cheffins, Extra Action’s diminutive and oddly-bearded founder (or is it cult leader?), in our recent interview (see below), held incongruously on a beautiful Bay Area beach.

Scene from the Extra Action Marching Band's MTV "The Burning Wigs of Sedition", notice the main dish, a handsome dancer, circa 2010. photo: Stephan C. Vance

“Then we had dancers, then we added horns," he elaborated. "The whole thing wasn’t designed, it just accumulated.”

Modest, impish and originally English—he immigrated to LA with his parents around age ten, Cheffins is hardly Manson-esque, as claimed in comments on their YouTube page or rumors running around Burning Man, although the band borrowed Charlie's all-girl choir concept for one of their covers.

In point of fact, Cheffins now serves as a figurehead, mostly, while the band is a collective, with creative, booking and other chores managed by working groups—comparatively efficiently, according to Clemons and others.

What’s missing is a family historian, which makes it hard to compute the Extra Action story. Moreover, they have given few interviews over the years, due to being quoted inaccurately, and, for personal reasons, Cheffins doesn’t like to discuss his previous band, the San Diego-based Crash Worship.

“[N]otorious in the late ‘80s for a hedonistic show involving tribal drums and naked dancers smeared with pig’s blood,” according to Spin Magazine (2/2006), Crash Worship would often have their three drummers enter a venue through the front and set up in the audience. One was Cheffins, who came up drumming in San Diego's punk scene and then joined with percussionist Markus Wolff and others to start the band.

Crash Worship was an excellent exponent of the transgressive culture then overrunning the West Coast, although they rejected the loud, mechanical music that ruled much of the scene in favor of hand-made, aboriginal trance sounds, with Cheffins building a body brace to carry three drums while walking. Eventually Crash Worship, well, crashed—disbanding in 1999, after playing four dates with the pan pipers of Joujouka, Morocco—but the audio Odyssey did not burn away.

Indeed, Cheffins had already relocated to San Francisco and, in 1998, formed the Extra Action Marching Band. Their first project was reinterpreting Black Sabbath’s entire first album (see “War Pigs”), initially on their own but then fronted by eXtreme Elvis, a Bay Area phenom determined to eclipse even the bloody dancers of Crash Worship.

eXtreme Elvis, San Francisco bar, circa 2003. photo: courtesy 12 Ounce Prophet

Tall, fat and from Alameda, a suburban island near Oakland, eXtreme Elvis was known for nudity, scatology (flinging shit, drinking piss) and audience taunting, as well as occasional resonant crooning, as we can see in this rare EAMB/EE piece. Sadly, or all-to expectedly, eXtreme Elvis came under investigation by the authorities, faked his own death, or perhaps actually died, although the jury is still out and internet searches revealed little, not even his actual name.

EAMB now features the somewhat more civilized, single-named Mateo, who sing-shouts, sometimes odd abstractions, into a handheld PA, making him the only amplified player (see this tightly-edited tune). The others generally remain anonymous, a tradition learned by Cheffins while traveling in Indonesia, which facilitates their often-changing personel, even as Cheffins is obliged to play the band's spokesperson.

Post-eXtreme Elvis, Extra Action evolved from a "more transgressive than thou" aesthetic to translating their post-modern tribal worldview into a more comprehensible and Americana-friendly marching band format, albeit with none of the play list. Although they now do about half originals—Sun Ra meets drum circle, their covers remain a hoot: Led Zeppelin, marching band tunes from New Orleans or India, Serbian Roma music.

Indeed, that list came to include Talking Heads tunes after they crashed a David Byrne book signing and he hired them on the spot for a 2004 tour, doing the Hollywood Bowl and San Francisco Davies Hall, among other big venues (see their “Burning Down the House”, 2008). They also opened for Arcade Fire and Modest Mouse, among many others.

By that time, like-minded troubadours were forming bands up and down the West Coast, notably MarchFourth out of Portland, Seattle’s Infernal Noise and Vancouver’s Carnival Band, but also further East: Denver’s Itchy-O (formed by an ex-Extra Actioner), and Environmental Encroachment and Mucca Pazza in Chicago. Brooklyn’s Hungry March Band, on the other hand, was started by another Crash Worship alumni, Dreiky Caprice, at the same time as EAMB.

In fact, a regular, if largely African-American, marching band is at the center of the popular 2002 movie "Drum Line", which helped the genre hit prime time around 2004. Gwen Stefani, Pharrel and others brought marchers into the studio or onto the stage, while fashion designer Marc Jacobs used them in promos.

When Extra Action played Serbia’s Guca Music Festival in 2004, they even helped revive US-Serbian relations, which took a severe hit from Clinton’s one month of bombings, killing 3000, in 1999. That gig also provided an opportunity for cross-pollination with their musical motherland, which is what Cheffins considers the Balkans, and a visit to Istanbul, where they saw Ottoman-style marching bands.

Extra Action blows down in the middle of the crowd, a common occurance, San Francisco, circa 2008. photo: courtesy Extra Action

As it happens, EAMB specializes in odd gigs. “When something is happening new for the first time, there is an ability to transform, to change,” Cheffins explained. “And that's why the idea of context is so important to me—we are much more powerful when we surprise passengers on a bus or burst into someone's house.”

Sousaphonist Clemons especially enjoyed going “through a manhole into the Oakland storm drain system [to] perform in the ‘undercity,’” he said, by email from Canada, where he was traveling, and even more “playing a private Japanese rope bondage party on the eve of the Folsom Street Fair." Then there was the time they caused an orgy.

"It was pretty funny how it went down," according to Clemons. "We were just sitting around in the afternoon waiting for our actual showtime around midnight and got bored. So we started walking, and playing, and soon had a group of about a hundred people following us. [Then] we wrapped and wandered off to eat, but apparently a bunch of the folks following us were inspired to get busy—good story for the grand-kids."

“It is a weird mixture of little kid play and absolute perverted raunchy sex appeal and violence,“ explained EAMB flag team girl Kelek Stevenson, also in the 2006 Spin article, where Tara Fire Ball, of Brooklyn’s Hungry March band, added: ”There is a need for craziness in the streets. People are cordoned off to bars… cubicles, political parties, cars.”

If breaking out of the designated performance area is what you do, stepping on toes is part of the job description. Indeed, EAMB embraces its audience's, as well as its own, boozing, salaciousness and occasional fist fights (or are those riots?), even as it creates joyous, anarchic music and transportive dance.

Despite doing EXACTLY that for nineteen years, in impromptu performances or scheduled parades, clubs and stadiums, Extra Action remains indefinable, su generis, difficult to package, record and, of course, sell.

With no record company or visionary producer, they have struggled for years in the studio, creating a few adequate gig-sale CDs, one very good four-song 12” and an excellent music video, “The Burning Wigs of Sedition” (2010). A gorgeous and fully imagined, mini-movie (nine minutes), it includes galley slaves, crazed card games, various seductions, competitions and revolutions, even a cannibalism reference, and, of course, the band and dancers blowing and dancing their hearts out.

And so it goes that Extra Action appears to be slowly sinking, much like the Spanish galleon featured in “Burning Wigs” and in their enormous art car, a built-to-size ship welded on top of a school bus, which was burnt to the ground in 2006 by a disgruntled caretaker.

Extra Action gave marching bands an 'adult theme' and, after 9/11, the fans fell in love. photo: courtesy Extra Action

And that is not the only former constituency with which they have parted company: Burning Man (the administrators got jealous), San Francisco (all techies now), Oakland (they’re too white), and some of the institutions where they have shown up unannounced. In my ad hoc survey, however, I found many local fans, albeit some who have just heard about—if not actually heard—the Extra Action Marching Band.

On the other hand, alt-marching bands are doing well across the country.

MarchFourth, which started on March 4, 2003, after they saw Extra Action at Burning Man, tours prodigiously, including recent shows in San Francisco, I was informed by manager Nayana Jennings, who used to be their stilts walker. Drawing more on funk, rock and Ska, and using electric instruments, MarchFourth has a more circus look, eschews the movement’s raunchier aspects and is well-supported in their home town of Portland, Oregon. (To see MarchFourth or other marchers, check their sites or look for the Honk! Festival, which started in Massachusetts but was so enthusiastically received by musicians and observers it has spawned several spin off festivals all over the country.)

Perhaps Extra Action is simply “aging out,” having kids and taking on bigger day jobs, even as they deliver some of the tightest and tuniest performances of their careers. Indeed, their flag boys and girls, the latter now wearing Mexican wrestler masks, are as provocative as ever, as I witnessed recently at a rare daytime performance in a lovely, little marina on the San Francisco Bay, north of Richmond.

Indeed, the band plays on, and on, AND ON—I mean scorches the living shit out of all living beings within earshot, rehearsing every Tuesday to tighten the white on rice for that week’s invasion—I mean gig: every club, stadium, party, parade, product rollout or wake that invites them or, on occasion, uninvites them or tries to stop them.

Perhaps Extra Action is simply TOO MUCH, which would explain not only their inability to get a recording contract but a decent recording—they simply have to be experienced live.

And perhaps they don’t care, given they are blessed by being part of an all-terrain art vehicle, able to march, play, dance and strike aesthetic terror (or is it satisfaction?), anywhere, any time, regardless of money.

I met up with founder Simon Cheffins at a woodshop in the aforementioned marina, where he was refinishing a boat. We adjourned to a beautiful beach, where, as if in a French New Wave film, we contemplated the peaceful scenery while discussing one of the most raucous and radical bands around.

Extra Action founder Simon Cheffins sits down for a rare interview in the odd location of a beautiful Bay Area beach. photo: D. Blair

cineSOURCE: My first question has to be: ‘What do you call your music, is there a name, a genre?’

Not that I am aware of. I would be happy if there is no genre, if we were able to do something…

What is the main one you borrow from: circus music, Gypsy, Klezmer?

It is definitely not Klezmer.

Great, we ruled that one out. That is good place to start.

I don’t know if you heard of our Black Sabbath project?

We did the entire first Black Sabbath album and the singer was eXtreme Elvis who was, at the time, a 300-pound, naked Elvis. [He] was always sticking his mic up his ass and stuff like that. His take on things was, ‘Every generation gets the Elvis they deserve.’

We did some of the vocals in Manson girl-style and our flag team was doing rifle routines—so there you go: Black Sabbath, Vegas, Manson family.

You ever heard these old recording of the Manson family? He wrote some great songs and there are some great recording of the women singing.

High voices, faux innocence?

Yes. A strange trinity of inputs for that project.

The flag team of Extra Action are pretty fantastic dancers but also skilled at interacting with people on a personal level—a lot of people feel they are too personal.

I’ve seen them do that. They are great.

Another of big influences, or at least for me personally, is the Viennese ‘AKTIONIST,’ Hermann Nitsche. He used various body fluids and other natural but disturbing elements in his live 'aktions.'

Or Moroccan trance music.

Simon Cheffins (left) wails on his home-made, marching band drum set, circa 2003. photo: courtesy S. Cheffins

Wow, Joujouka!

Yeah. A few of us went there in 2001, five people from Extra Action. Three if us were part of a film crew—we were trying to do a film about them but we didn’t get the funding. We did get to spend some time there.

You played with them?

We did, a little, but it was difficult. It doesn’t sound difficult, when you listen to their music, but it was a challenge.

Are they Sufis?

Yes, of Persian origin.

Morocco is full of Sufis. They left the Middle East around 200 years ago—they could see what was coming—and hiked and hiked until they got to Morocco—the California of Islam.

Yeah. But I think they came there much longer ago, maybe four or five hundred years.

Ahh, OK. They take drugs?

They smoke kief [Moroccan hash].

By the ton?

Literally. Not all of them but some, certainly.

Is there a master?

Yes, the current leader [Bachir Attar] is the son of the leader before that. I don’t know if he was the son of the leader before that.

Probably, since that is the system most Sufis use. And he knew Brian Jones?

He did hang out with Brian Jones—he was a teenager—and he is still in contact with Mick Jagger, who called on the cell phone when we were there. We were trying to get Jagger to come to this party so we could kidnap him, to fund our movie.

Moroccan pan pipers, officially called the Master Musicians of Joujouka, circa 2005. photo: courtesy MMM

That was my first attempt at a film. I made a glorified short with Extra Action [‘The Burning Wigs of Sedition’ (2010)], which won a few film festival awards], nine minutes, I will give you a copy.

Out of curiosity, are the Master Musicians of Joujouka also connected with other celebrity musicians?

I saw them play with Donovan once, which was kind of embarrassing. My mom told me she dated Donovan once or twice and I was with my mom when I saw them perform together. After that she denied ever having met [Donovan]. I think he was having early onset Alzheimer’s.

Bachir, the current head of the Master Musicians, also lived in Brooklyn with Genesis P-Orridge. He is the leader of the Temple of Psychic Youth, Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle, a hugely radical thinker—culturally, sexually and on any level I can think of [‘an English singer-songwriter, musician, poet, performance artist, and occultist,’ according to Wikipedia].

He was thrown out of the UK for… I can’t remember.

Pederasty?

Something like that. Bachir is not the most devout Muslim but his thinking is definitely guided by his upbringing. They must have been a very odd pair of housemates. He is much younger, like my age. The rest of the guys are, like, in their 60s, at least.

It’s petering out?

Yes. That is what our film was about—possibly the last generation.

But when we were there, they got a new drummer, in his 30s. He wasn’t from Joujouka—a neighboring village—one of the first new ones who wasn’t from the family. I don’t know if of all those guys were from Joujouka, which is the size of this marina—really small [about 500 yards].

The Extra Action flag team conjures opera, Goths and more at a performance around 2007. photo: Jasmine Boloorian

That is pretty tight, if the neighboring village is excluded. So you look to that as your number one—

No, not number one influence. Long before that, I went to Indonesia and studied Gamelan, just for a few weeks. What was actually a really big influence was, strolling in a neighborhood, I found a Gamelan orchestra rehearsing in the backyard of a house.

They invited us in and we learned they were all neighbors. They didn’t consider themselves musicians. One of their neighbors had passed away and it was their civic duty to perform this funerary march.

The thing is: they sounded amazing. They had probably been playing this music off and on since they were kids. That struck me as something unusual and important—total anonymity. Even with professional [Indonesian] musicians, there is this sense of anonymity, this sense of—I don’t like the word—duty. Culturally, it is the thing you do for your community, you play music.

My take away is: Don’t wait for someone to die. It is something that needs to happen and it can be done without a sense of trying to be famous, a rock star or whatever. It is just what you do, if you are musician. You are driven and you play for your people, or people in general.

When did you start playing?

I started when I was 18.

I used to race dirt bikes as a teenager. I had quite a few accidents and I was in the hospital for 20 days at the time and I decided I needed a better hobby. I was listening to Led Zeppelin and I was really into John Bonham and I decided, ‘Fuck it!’ I am going to quite racing bikes and start playing drums—that was 33 years ago.

When did you switch to walking around with—what are they—your drums?

A tom-tom and two timbales on a built-out rig.

That emerged when I used to play in another band—that is a whole other story. That band had a marching element; we would put on marching drums and sometimes play in the audience. There were three drummers in that band, Crash Worship [out of San Diego], and sometimes we would unload all our gear into the crowd and play in the crowd.

It’s a great tradition. Did you look to New Orleans or Sun Ra or… ?

Extra Action plays a Burning Man street fair or 'decompression': (lft-rt) Wiley Evans, Andy Kuntz, Greg Jones and Joshua Sirotiak, circa 2010. photo: courtesy Extra Action

I don’t know where it came from. I wouldn’t say it was our invention. Crash Worship ended up moving to New Orleans after a while. We went there to seven Mardi Gras in a row.

One year, we were putting on our show and we neglected to ‘hire’ the cops for security. So they came around and said, ‘Who ever we don’t arrest will end up in the hospital.’ So we cancelled our show [but] ended up doing an impromptu parade, which began with us and 30 friends and ended up with probably five hundred people marching through the streets.

It went on for well over an hour and, by the time it was done, we ended up with an entire block full of people and a few cop cars at either end of the block—a bunch of people got arrested anyway.

I had to throw my drums down and run with everyone else. I had to do that a few times but the beautiful thing about New Orleans is my drums would always make it home, to my friend’s house, before I did.

I am still trying to identify where the music came from: circus music, Joujouka?

We started with just drummers. Then we had dancers, then we added horns. The whole thing wasn’t designed, it just accumulated.

You follow the Fela Theory: Music without dance is a crime against humanity?

I wouldn’t put it that way but it is definitely what drives me as drummer: people dancing. I play and they dance, a reciprocal thing that can fuel itself for a very long time. As long as people are dancing, I can play for hours.

All of a sudden the sound—whatever it is called—became very poplar, around 2005? There was MarchFourth [in Portland], people in Denver. Did you notice that happening?

Itchy-O, is that who you are referring to? The guy who started that was in Extra Action for a while before he moved to Denver.

MarchFourth told us they started after seeing us in Burning Man. There are couple bands out of Seattle who said we were an influence. What Cheer Brigade out of Providence started after seeing us and Hungry March Band.

So yeah, we have been doing this since ‘98, close to 20 years. We definitely inspired some people to make a new interpretation, to take it in a new direction.

Formed after seeing Extra Action at Burning Man, the more family-friendly MarchFourth has become one of the most successful alt-marching bands around, circa 2010. photo: courtesy MarchFourth

When Crash Worship split up most of us didn’t talk to each other for a while. We were living in New Orleans and everyone went to all different corners of country, one of the other drummers [Dreiky Caprice], she went to New York and I came to SF and we both started marching bands—without knowing about each other's projects!

She and I had the same idea at the same time [hers is the Hungry March Band].

Marching bands, brass bands, New Orleans-style brass bands have been going for years. We just gave it an adult theme.

Perhaps you should call it Sextra Action.

Yeah [laughs], I like to think of it as a kind of commando unit musical performance.

We don’t do it so much anymore but we used to play on the city bus, in the supermarket, in places people didn’t expect us—or want us!

That is where it is powerful. It is powerful at a party, where everyone comes and they know what is going to happen and they want to dance and have an experience and let loose. But it is really powerful when it is a surprise.

Do you play New Orleans tunes or… ?

We mostly do original. There are one or two things that sound like New Orleans brass bands. We do a Boban Markovic cover, which would be Serbian Roma music. We have done Black Sabbath; we have done one Led Zeppelin cover; but a lot of stuff is original.

I don’t know if sounds like much else. I hope that it doesn’t—I hope to come up with something unique. I think that is more powerful then playing something people are familiar with.

Yeah. I actually saw some band a few years ago at a party that sounded a lot like you. Talking to one of the members, I kept saying ‘What is the name of this music?’ Apparently, I remain obsessed.

Are you familiar with Brazilian Bahian marching bands?

The soft-spoken Cheffins likes to lay back until a complication obliges him to hurry to the helm of his band's rowdy ship, sometimes in the middle of a hurricane. photo: D. Blair

I have not been to Brazil but I played in a Samba band in New Orleans, so I have a bit of that influence, to be sure.

You seem to be maintaining an amateur thing. You have day job. Extra Action is not your whole life?

Extra Action is about 30 people.

Hard to derive an income?

We make pretty good money sometimes. We have driven it all back into touring and making that film that I mentioned. We have been to Europe a few times where we had to buy 30 plane tickets.

And that is the whole profit right there?

Well, we mostly don’t have to put people up in Airbnb—people help out. Touring is an expensive proposition with a band that size. That is where all of that money goes.

We have been talking about paying people so we can get a more consistent group, because people come and go a lot. It is partly because people aren’t getting paid.

That’s always annoying. But you were playing with David Byrne, didn’t record contracts start coming?

No.

Too esoteric?

Yeah, it is.

As a musician, I never really wanted to count on music as my livelihood. I think it is a choice I made when I was very young. I am not sure it is the right choice but it has definitely kept me free to do what I want.

As soon as you buy in, it is very hard to resist the producer saying, ‘Ah just a little more…’

Yeah. Back in the day I was in a punk rock band.

Full set drummer in a punk rock band in San Diego?

That’s right.

Pretty wild down there?

San Diego was a great music scene in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, a lot of great bands came out of there.

What do you think of the scene here today, with all the tech money?

Extra Action horn section in a scene from their EP MTV, 'The Burning Wigs of Sedition', 2010. photo: courtesy Extra Action

I don’t recognize San Francisco. I don’t really know anything about it anymore. I just got back from five years in New York.

Brooklyn?

A couple of years there and the next three I was half in upstate New York— Rosendale, 25 minutes drive from Woodstock—and half back here.

I was playing with band up there, Flying Teeth, and in one Brooklyn, and spending winters back here. It was pretty disruptive. I definitely fell out of touch with what is happening here.

I interviewed the woman who runs The Bottom of the Hill [club in San Francisco]. She is concerned about the future of that scene. What is the point of making trillions of dollars if you don’t have a club scene to go out to?

Yeah, yeah.

How many albums have you done?

We did a couple of CDs, you know, small pressings of things, but we never had any distribution, just things we sold at our shows.

Really? That is amazing.

We were not really successful at recording.

Capturing lightening in a bottle?

It’s fucking hard. We did a ten-inch and I like the way that one sounds—at lot! That was supposed to be the first release of this body of work we were doing. But the project just grew and grew.

There came a time when I just felt the band had gotten better in a lot of ways. [But] we stopped doing some of the music and the project was essentially shelved.

It is a live event!

[laughs] People disagree with me. I was working on the production part [of the album] for a long time and I felt like it could be saved.

Extra Action toured Europe a number of times in the aughts, circa 2005. photo: courtesy Extra Action

But it would need to be totally reimagined and I just have not been able to find the time to go [into the studio]. It is expensive, too, but there is the ten-inch on vinyl.

I would like to hear that.

I have a few boxes.

So it is an amateur aesthetic: live the dream, don’t profit.

It is its own reward, I guess. That is one way of looking at it. There was a period of time we were making good money, we were flown out to Europe and stuff like that. That was awesome.

Around 2005?

Yeah that was the golden era of the band—it has gone a bit down hill since then.

Have any of the other bands, like MarchForth, made it through some other system, a cousin in LA, or something?

MarchForth is the most financially successful in that way. They are professional band. They are always on the road, it sounds like, and that is how they do that.

[But] how old they are? A lot of Extra Action are a variety of ages; the youngest, she just turned 26. A lot of people in Extra Action have families and real jobs and they can’t go on the road.

I don’t know if MarchForth or Extra Action is aging out. It probably is, we don’t have a lot of very young people joining. I would love it if that was a possibility, if there were a stream of young people, who would come through and take over.

Are you the leader or is it a collective or anarchy?

It is strange combination of all three. I am certainly not nearly involved as I used to be. It used to be all consuming and I had to be involved in everything. These days it is much, much less, which is fine.

So, it is probably more of a collective. It was a bit chaotic over the years. [Although] we have developed ways of making choices, it is a big heavy machine. It essentially has an inertia and maintains a status quo and is difficult to change.

The funny thing is new people will come and go and the thing itself doesn’t change.

Is there are secretary?

The Extra Action flag team reprises a traditionally provocative performance, the can-can, circa 2004. photo: courtesy Extra Action

There are people who do the books, run the business end of it, do the bookings. There are people who are more like creative directors. I am more on the creative side of it but, like I said, I have been out of town so much I have relinquished that leadership.

I will come in and steer it at the last moment if things go badly wrong. That is mostly when I get up and do something [laughs].

When it is going right, you don’t need anyone. Any projects on horizon?

We are going to do a big wake for Greg Jones, who passed away last year—he is one of our long time members, in May, in Oregon.

Honestly, there is nothing really big on the horizon, but if we survive into 2018, I want to do a 20th anniversary thing—not just a few shows. We have been talking about collecting a recorded history of things, events, people’s favorite stories.

There are lot of fantastic photographs no one has ever seen. I was thinking of having a show and having an exhibition of some sort. There is a lot of unused stuff from the short film we did—that could be fun.

There is always the possible bounce—Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in America but I was just reading a story by him in the New Yorker—considering Extrta Action did produce the genre and all these offspring.

You play Burning Man every year?

Uh, we used to umm. I got a grant to build a Spanish galleon replica that was on a school bus and the band would cruise around in and play different places [around the Burning Man ‘playa’].

Yeah, there were some misunderstanding between us and Burning Man—that would have been 2003, which ended us going there.

Does that follow that old saying: No where but amongst the anarchists do you have more rules.

[laugh] Exactly, yeah.

The Extra Action flag team enjoys a well-deserved reputation for sheer inventiveness as well as sensuousness, circa 2008. photo: courtesy Extra Action

Sounds like a story. You want to tell me or do I have to wait for the book?

Your saying is apropos because there were a lot of rules I didn’t know about. My ignorance led them to think that, umm, you know, I had a bad attitude or the marching band had a bad attitude.

There was also an absurd amount of rumors and disinformation that were flying around.

What crime could you have committed?

Well, we were driving too fast and in places we shouldn’t have been. We did some things that, while not reckless, could be considered offensive. The worst thing I ever did was drive through the fence, honestly.

The perimeter fence. On purpose?

Ah, yeah.

Who bitched you out?

Michael Michael. He actually left some kind of arcane threat on a piece of paper. The thing is I didn’t hear from anyone personally until we were asked not to return.

Wow!

At that point, you have to realize that we put a lot of work into the galleon [ship built on a bus]. We felt like we were bringing a lot of value to the event so, suddenly, it didn’t seem like a good use of our energy.

I even offered to arrange for the Master Musicians of Joujouka and Crash Worship to play Burning Man a few years before but they wouldn’t even give us tickets.

As I said, we were uninvited and the next year we went to Europe and Serbia and we played this music festival there: the first America band to play this festival since Clinton bombed the hell out of them.

How did they receive you ?

Very well; they loved us; we played live on TV.

A flag boy in full regalia, circa 2011. photo: courtesy Extra Action

And elsewhere around Europe, they enjoyed your sound?

Yeah, yeah. I don’t know about now but there was certainly nothing like this American renegade marching band scene there. There were bands doing Gypsy-style music.

Apparently, it really started with the Ottoman military marching bands in Turkey. When that music made it up into the former Yugoslavia, the Roma there started working with these Ottoman instruments, which were similar to Western brass instruments but a little different, especially at the time.

The cymbals were invented in Turkey.

That region of the Ottoman Empire that turned into the former Yugoslavia; where there is a lot of Roma. That is the well-spring of what has become marching band music.

Did you play Turkey?

No, but I did see the Ottoman marching bands there.

Actually, [the sound] was fairly familiar. We do a lot of odd time signatures and they do as well. We do a few things in seven and one in nine and one in thirteen. I am not trained in music to know specifically what they are but I know there are thirteen beats in the measure.

The [East] Indians do these marching bands and they sound like free jazz because they are so off.

Yeah, we are actually trying to learn a song from southern India for three years—we just about have it.

I remember thinking it was about one notch off the Chicago Art Ensemble screeching and wailing, sometimes very disconcerting, sometimes very exciting.

The band is really divided about this song. A few people just hate it. The horn part really makes no sense. It is not funky and it doesn’t feel that good, in a lot of ways. But I like it because it is just so strange.

My job is to put a drum part to it that is driving and menacing and I think the combination will be pretty good .

Are there half tones or quarter tones in the score?

That is not my department.

Do you rehearse on a regular basis ?

Once a week, pretty much without fail, unless we are doing a run of things and we are really busy. Then we will take a week off. Every Tuesday. Sometimes we will get together as sections, the drummers will play without everyone else.

We rent hourly the same space every week at Soundwave Studios on Wood Street in West Oakland.

The Extra Action 'singer' Mateo points towards a distant objective while, in back, a flag girl awaits her cue to explode. photo: D Blair

A few blocks from my house, I know [the owner] Alan. Can I drop by?

We have always been guarded about people coming to rehearsal. Our rehearsal is usually almost no one is ever there who is not in the band. It is the place to be sloppy and let your hair down—the band can be pretty embarrassing sometimes.

But it is good, I really like that we have that opportunity to do that. I would be more inclined to put you on the guest list for when we are doing a show at the Starline [in West Oakland].

Now what is with this whole sex thing?

What do you mean?

Especially among the dancers, the band seems very sex positive? Natural or a planned thing?

That is a funny question. I haven’t thought about it in that way [although] we have talked about it. Sure, it is sex positive but that is not the motivation of the band.

I think it is was when we were playing Copenhagen: we got interviewed there and one of the first questions was: ‘So, you are a homosexual band?’

And, um, we are like, ‘No. There are gay and queer people in the band and we are from a sex positive area but that is not what the band is about.'

What the… ?

I know the flag team loves to play with notion of what’s hot and what’s sexy: sexy girls with mustaches or body suits with 17 extra tits. That is more interesting and fun because it is unsettling to people.

The Extra Action flag girls lead the charge at a rare rural, daytime parade. photo: D Blair

Something that is unsettling and provocative—maybe it is sexy, all at the same time. I think that is powerful: You are causing someone to think differently or feel differently and evaluate how they think and feel.

That is the power of the band, in my opinion.

Like I was saying about playing in different venues or contexts [like a public bus]. Anytime you can bring 30 people into a place they shouldn’t be and play music, or do something sexy in a strange new way, then you’re making people rethink who they are, what is meaningful and what is important.

My impression from seeing those girls is they are extremely aggressive, so that is sex right there. And they are looking into your eyes and they have this gimlet grin, it is very sexy. Performance is sex for some performers.

Un-hunh.

Burning Man and San Francisco have that reputation but it is a tough one to live up to.

Un-hunh.

I can’t remember where but I read that anomaly is the trigger of evolution. I think quote is: 'Transformation occurs only in moments of anomaly.' When something is happening new for the first time, there is an ability to transform, to change.

It is the job of Extra Action to provide these anomalies, to help turn the rigid structures of the mind into something fluid, and transformative.

And that's why the idea of context is so important to me—we are much more powerful when we surprise passengers on the bus or when we burst into someone's house.

When the marching band plays for a bunch people who had no idea we existed, or anything like that ever existed, especially when there are kids! That is a moment where something new and exciting can happen in the world for the first time.

Simon Cheffins in his element, surrounded by dancers, drummers and horn players. photo: D Blair

In the last few years, any sort of marches or parades?

We went and played when Occupy was happening in Oakland [2011]. A variety of us went and played the day after the [Trump] inauguration. We have done all kinds of parades and demos, but it has been a while.

That is a great venue. If you do a next one, it should be filmed, the step of the feet, captured properly with nice, low angle tracking shots.

We did a Fourth of July parade a few years ago. That was when we discovered we could do pretty much anything we wanted.

They put us near the front of this parade [but] at some point we made a U-turn. We started marching backwards, through the parade, dividing it in half. It was on Treasure Island [in the SF Bay].

Then we were at the very back of the parade and turned around again and followed the parade. [Then] we saw this lady in her house, screaming and dancing in her kitchen window. I noticed her front door was open—

I think I can guess—

I made a turn and the entire band turned out of the parade and went STRAIGHT INTO her house. There we were, all of us, in her living room, with her two friends.

So that would become a thing we would do in parades: march in to someone’s house—if they were into it.

That’s cool, man!

Or try to all jam into the ladies bathroom, or something like that.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on Apr 29, 2017 - 09:49 PM