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Years ago, before our first record, we played at the launch party for a Dodge pickup truck in a Chicago hotel conference room. There was no question about taking the gig — we were broke, and it was far and away the most money we'd ever been offered to play. Dodge had recently been bought by the German company Daimler, and they were straining to be perceived as the tough, wild, American company they believed themselves to be, and not prissy, stuck-up, quality-obsessed Germans.
To this end, they thought they'd play a wild-and-zany practical joke on their audience of auto journalists. The dinner was set up to be especially stuffy: waiters with oversized, covered silver trays and undersized portions of some dainty fish, legions of forks at the table settings, pink linen everywhere, and a tuxedoed wedding band (us) in the corner. Then, when the ranking Dodge official began his extra-stuffy speech, he was — surprise! — interrupted by a brand-new red pickup bursting through the wall, at which point the wedding band was supposed to morph into a shreddin' American rock band, while the waiters, who'd changed out of their penguin suits into jeans and t-shirts, re-circulated with trays of hearty barbecued ribs. Can't you just feel the wild toughness coursing through the room of bored, middle-aged corporate men?
Needless to say, the shtick failed miserably. Before the truck emerged, a few weak thunderclaps played over the PA system and a little bank of red lights flashed timidly. A single table had been set in front of the wall where the truck was meant to charge through, and the actors seated there shrieked and ran. Then slowly, carefully, and with the aid of a few clearly visible men pushing from behind, the false wall fell into the carpeted room with a soft thud and the truck crept up from behind it, lumbering onto a corner of the felled drywall. Where there was supposed to be a reckless giant demolishing its way into the room, the truck rolled in like a squat old man waddling with his walker. At this point we were cued to explode into triumphant rock, and we did. We played about 20 seconds of one song before the event coordinator came running up, arms flailing, pleading that we bring the volume back down to the wedding-band level. The whole event basically announced, "We're not stuffy old Northern European men! Except that we are!"
The tuxedos they had rented for us were five sizes too big, due to a translation error between American and European sizes. They fit like a cross between muumuus and those suits the Talking Heads wore. But we survived it. Luckily there wasn't a soul in the room who knew who we were, and we managed to escape without telling anyone. The show paid our collective rents for a few months, and we lived to embarrass ourselves again.
Buy Oh No, by OK Go
–Damian Kulash, OK Go
Posted May 2007
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