>>PREVIEW
OK GO
Monday, April 9
MacEwan Hall
Infamous for tight rock ’n’ roll songs and sensationally creative videos to accompany them, Chicago’s OK Go has firmly connected with over 15 million people who have downloaded their videos off the Internet. In March, they won YouTube’s most creative video award for "Here it Goes Again" featuring the (now infamous) dance routine on treadmills. Since they dream up most of their video concepts while on tour, they should have a batch of new ideas ready to roll – incredulously, OK Go are in their 28th straight month on the road.
Despite having the flu and staving off the fatigue of basically being on a two year-long camping trip, front man Damian Kulash is articulate, polite and up for a good conversation. Last night, the band drove all night from New York to Boston, fuelled by a discussion they had with a pal who is working on his master’s thesis on Kazakhstan. Kulash explains how it was refreshing to have a conversation that didn’t begin with how the band’s gig went that night.
"Just to sit there and learn from someone who knew about politics and could explain what happened in the region after the Soviet Union fell apart and what American oil interests have done there – it’s absolutely riveting to me. I’m never going to spend my life trying to learn about (Central Asian) politics, but just learning from someone, it feels like you’re having a real discussion as opposed to when we’re rehashing the technical problems of tonight’s show."
There’s no doubt about it, Kulash has a voracious intellectual appetite. He recently finished reading David Foster Wallace’s The Infinite Jest and is now immersed in Steven Johnson‘s Emergence. The other night, he hung out with Ira Glass, the host of the Peabody award winning radio show, This American Life. Kulash counts Glass as an idol along with punk icon Ian MacKaye, from Fugazi.
"Ian MacKaye is a huge influence on my life. When I was in high school, he loaned me some money to start a record label out of my bedroom and single-handedly got me into music. It was just a handshake deal in which he gave me $3000. The way he made sure it came back was to say, ‘I have this three thousand bucks and I’ll loan to you. If you don’t pay it back to me, I can never loan it to anyone else again.’
"I had my own crappy rock band, but I wanted to put out some seven inches and stuff. I did a little of that and then wanted to put out a CD. It was a benefit for a school in Haiti, but it was going to cost way more money than I had. Ian loaned it to me and was like, ‘just make sure you pay it back.’ I did. I paid him back as quickly as I could."
When he isn’t lost in books or noodling around on his computer making music, Kulash and his band mates still find time to get into mischief on the road. OK Go is getting custody of the Stanley Cup in St. Louis for a day. They’re going to try and smuggle it to the top of the St. Louis arches and sneak in a couple of photos. Later on that night before they go onstage, they’ll be engaged in the evening sport that has both OK Go and Snow Patrol obsessed.
"On this tour, we’ve been playing ping pong a lot. Snow Patrol brought a ping pong table out with us – it’s a very relaxing way to spend a half hour before the show. Tim (Nordwind, bass) is really a fantastic ping pong player. Tim is definitely the best player, I’m next. We play games all the time. I might beat him one out of 10 games or something like that. When you get in enough practice for it to not feel like a random motion of the ball, when you actually get good enough to play pretty well, it gets really fun." |
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