OK Go bassist Tim Nordwind tells us what could go wrong at the unique show at Royce Hall on Saturday, Nov. 4.
Ever since reaching viral fame when they hopped on treadmills to perform a complex dance routine in a video for the song “Here It Goes Again,” the Chicago-born band OK Go have embraced the idea of making quirky, wildly creative videos.
The band has floated in zero gravity for the song “Upside Down and Inside Out;” driven a car through a musical junkyard for the song “Needing/Getting;” and rode Honda Uni-Cubs (high tech unicycles), used umbrellas and thousands of dancers plus aerial views from a helicopter to capture the choreography in the song “I Won’t Let You Down.”
And while so many things could have gone wrong with just one missed step, they even bravely recreated the fast-paced treadmill dance live during the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards.
The band will be up to their creative shenanigans again when they come to UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance at Royce Hall Nov. 4 as part of a national tour where they perform songs live in sync with their iconic videos.
It’s part film screening, part live scoring, part concert and part theatrical show made up of about 20 videos from the band’s past 15 years of music.
“This has more in common with a theater-going experience or cinematic experience,” said Tim Nordwind, the band’s bassist and co-vocalist.
“We are sitting underneath the screen and we are playing in sync to those videos. We are playing to the videos that people have seen before but there are a couple of exceptions throughout the night which are sort of surprises where we do a little bit more,” he said.
It’ll be challenging enough just staying in sync to the recorded videos, since a live performance is more fluid than a set track.
“If we make a mistake, definitely the whole thing gets thrown off course,” Nordwind noted.
But the bigger challenge will come from the surprises, which include a few on stage recreations of some of their videos and letting the crowd play along to the live music via an app.
It’s a gutsy show with a lot of moving parts, so according to Nordwind, here’s what could go wrong with the most challenging parts of the show when the band attempts to recreate some videos on stage.
This was one of their first videos and featured a choreographed dance routine that the band will recreate live.
So what could go wrong?
“We could forget the moves, we could twist and ankle, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong with that one. At one point they have to pick me up and they could effectively drop me or not catch me. There’s a death-defying quality to us performing ‘A Million Ways,’ I suppose.”
In the video, the band hops in a car fitted with robotic arms and drives through an obstacle course in the desert hitting objects, pianos and percussion instruments to make music.
“We don’t completely recreate it live but we recreate the sounds live,” Nordwind said. “We’ve rebuilt a lot of these homemade instruments that we had in the desert and we have them on stage so we can re-create the music basically while you watch the video happen.”
So what could go wrong?
“The instruments are not normal instruments so they can easily go out of tune, they have to be tuned basically right before we play them. I think the biggest thing that could go wrong is that they break pretty easily.”
OK Go guitarist Andy Ross is a programmer and he created an app that the audience can download before the show.
It’s a “Guitar Hero”-type app that lets the audience follow a color chart to play this song as the band plays hand bells, yes hand bells.
So what could go wrong?
“That one’s tricky for the audience because they have to follow a ‘Guitar Hero’-like screen. And so their parts are all on the screen…so for that one the big challenge is for the audience to stay in time and for us to stay in time with the audience. So it’s very possible we could go off of one another, but if that happens I still think it’ll be fun and entertaining.”
The band can breathe easy on this one because while the video is included in the show, the members decided it would be a little too much to travel with eight treadmills.
“Maybe one of these days, we’ll bring it back out again,” Nordwind said.
When: 8 p.m. Nov. 4
Where: UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance at Royce Hall, 340 Royce Dr., Los Angeles.
Tickets: $29-$69.
Information: www.okgo.net
