Red Room Orchestra has become a bit of an SF Sketchfest staple. They first graced our presence with a tribute to the music from Twin Peaks, and have, in the years since, brought to life the songs and scores from Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Big Lebowski, and Boogie Nights. This year they are returning with Twin Peaks in homage to its late composer Angelo Badalamenti and late vocalist Julee Cruise, playing Great American Music Hall on Thursday, February 2nd. The next night they are doing the music from Repo Man, and those tickets can be purchased here.
We had the opportunity to talk to Red Room Orchestra’s founder and band leader Marc Capelle about his career, the inception of Red Room Orchestra, and a lot about how they function.
Spinning Platters: What was the musical experience that made you decide that this was your career?
Marc Capelle: Gosh. That’s the musical experience that led me on a vocational aspect towards music or just what made me want to play music.
I’ll let you decide which route you want to take with this.
Certainly. I grew up around music and started doing music from a very, very early age. I’m a San Francisco native. Grew up in the ’60s and was around a lot of music environmentally and certainly a lot more public music than probably had gone on in ages in San Francisco. My mother was musical. Her mother was musical. My father was not so much musical but very good at spending time around musicians, cultivating their friendships, and being a record collector and such. There was a sense of doing music from, like, 4 or 5 years old. He regards being introduced to the piano or being able to sing along to a record or do a little dance, or what have you.
What was the first instrument that you picked up? It feels like you can do a lot.
There was always a piano in the house, and there were always record players and tape recorders in our house growing up. My mother’s mother was a wife of a Presbyterian minister. My mother grew up in that culture; there was the aspect of that type of church music being around a lot.
It’s funny how many people I have on this podcast. Religious music is the thing that brought them to make non-religious music.
It should be buffered with the notion that my parents were very much Bohemians and very much not church people per se, unlike my grandmother, and that they were products of the post-war tide that brought people to the Bay Area. They were very much part of the demi-monde or the Bohemian, before Herb Caen made the word “Beatnik.” up, but they were part of the North Beach scene in a very big way in regards to who their friends and acquaintances were. There was the notion that I occasionally went to church to get baptized or hang out with my grandmother. There was just as much time spent going to people’s houses where there might be jam sessions. We’re going to Earthquake McGoon’s; we’re going to Pier 23, or walking down the hill into the Panhandle, or going to any number of free concert things that happened in the mid-60s to late 60s and onward.
It seems you grew up in the classic San Francisco music era. People talking about San Francisco music usually start in the mid to late 60s.
Yeah. I was born in 1962. I’m 60 years old. We lived on Page Street, just above the Panhandle. All that stuff I was exposed to, my mother took us to protests and to free concerts. Again, my parents had many friends who were musicians, and there’s certainly always a stereo system or, prior to a stereo system, some kind of record system in the house. There’s generally a piano and some instruments. No, I have this kind of ridiculous… It’s not like in my cousins, but my parents’ connections to a variety of musicians in San Francisco. From the jazz as well as the comedy and entertainment worlds, and then, the literary world is pretty significant.
When did you first encounter Mark Eitzel?
I ran into Mark Eitzel. I knew who he was. We’re essentially contemporaries by a year or two. I would see Mark. I’d only tell, “Look, there’s Mark Eitzel.” but we started working together around ’94 or ’95. I was playing with a group called, The Supernaturals, which later became, The Kinetics, that grew out of The Loved Ones at Bruno’s, on 20th and Mission, which was a great place that had kind of music round-the-clock in the evening. They had two separate music areas. At the same time, I was also playing with a group called The West Coast Spiritual Corinthians, which was a gospel group. A classic quartet-style gospel group that had started in 1967. I was playing a lot of music — live. I think Mark became aware of me from watching these groups.
When did he invite you to become part of American Music Club?
I am a member of American Music Club which is almost like, if you think you are, you are. I was in the second iteration of the reuniting of American Music Club after we got together in the early 2000s again, to work on Love Songs for Patriots with a group that was Tim Mooney, Vudi, Danny Pearson, Mark Eitzel, and myself, and a lot of fellow travelers at often appeared on a Music Club Records.
American Music Club was a loose collective, more than a proper band then?
Oh, no. They were a loose proper band, or they’re losing proper band. They were there. They were very much a group of guys there. I don’t know if we have enough time to talk about their varied history, but it’s pretty fascinating. There’s a variety of people that come in and out of the band, and a lot of people say there’s “this classic version” of American Music Club.
The one that I got in after was an exceptional group of people. Before the band broke up at that time, they’d done it. They’ve done a series of records that are just an astonishing development in the sound of their music and American music. It really started off, and stuff that people would say was Americana or like the birth of sad core or this/that or the other thing, and then, it got into this world of exceptional sonic landscapes from their own work, working with Mitch Froom and Joe Chiccarelli, with her own experimentalism. As a collective, I don’t know; the way I would describe is just one of the most experimental bands that ever existed, that wrote songs that people might consider pop. They’re just a complete… like, it’s a juggernaut that it’s an enormous challenge for me to try to get any descriptions around how deep the group is. There’s just an obvious thing about it is that they’re a bunch of really cool guys who do different things with their instruments and voices than you’d ever expect that have exceptionally poetic, lyrical, humorous, and surprising “Moon in June” lyrics. That was a very long sentence, but it’s me trying to convey a history, but also an appreciation for what the band is.
I love that you are a fan of the thing you were a part of.
They’re a band that we would be working our asses off so hard, and we would practice, and we’d practice, and we would just work so hard. We’d go over the same thing, and we do all this stuff. Occasionally, you’d show up for rehearsal, and there’d be a sign on the door like, “We’re at the museum. We decided to go on a field trip.” That’s a sweet description of some of the things that went on with American Music Club.
Going to the museum is the most rock and roll of taking a break you can imagine. Right?
Yeah. It’s always important to surprise people with what you’re doing. My experience with them was working very hard on Mark’s projects, and touring with Mark for a very long time, both in bands and as a duo, and with American Music Club. We did a silent film soundtrack for a movie called Street Angel for the San Francisco International Film Festival. That was a very, very significant part of what we all did together. Anytime somebody says, “Do you want to do something with American Music Club?” I certainly would say, “Yes.”
Where did Red Room Orchestra come from? What prompted you to put this together?
Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, Twin Peaks and David Lynch’s stuff from that period got our heads: His earlier works, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, etc. It was really what we built our lives around at that point. I worked in a store where we would tape Twin Peaks, watch, and discuss it, and it was a huge part of my late ’20s and the culture of the ’90s. Anyhow, because of that, it’s music I like to play. I would hum pieces from the show, and a friend would say, “What’s that?” I said, “Oh, it’s music from Twin Peaks.” I had a friend who played guitar and also played Bass VI. Bass VI is a baritone guitar that is a signature sound. On the Twin Peaks music, the first two notes of the theme are on that,
Anyhow, he played Bass VI, I played piano, we knew these songs, and we had a great relationship with The Chapel here in The Mission. Specifically, we had a great relationship with our good friend Fred Barnes who was the general manager, as well as, the booker. He heard us playing something, we were just sitting around the piano. He’s like, “Why don’t you fellows come back next week and play music from David Lynch?” We did that as a duo, and, I don’t know, nine people showed up. Then, we did it again. We brought a sax player. Over the course of 3 months, we went from sitting in a corner with 10, 20, 30 people, to actually, putting on a full-scale show with, effectively, a chamber orchestra of instruments that could reproduce the music from Twin Peaks and other things by David Lynch, like, Blue Velvet or Eraserhead or what have you. That went really swimmingly.
Then our good friends at SF Sketchfest caught wind of this, and they’re like, “Wow. That was pretty great. Here’s what we’re going to do”- They brought in most of the cast of Twin Peaks for a showing in a discussion at The Castro Theater. It worked out that then we got to perform a show with them. It was just astonishing. It was just like completely over-the-top, and clearly, a magical thing that we got to do, to be able to back up Ray Wise to work with Chrysta Bell, who’s from the third season, and it is also a tremendous honor to be able to play Audrey’s dance with Sherilyn Fenn dancing. It was all really great stuff. It was really fun, and we got along with everybody. We didn’t have a sense that we were doing anything but great justice to this thing we love. That was the beginning of things, and we continued to do some Twin Peaks stuff, but we also began looking at other movies that we thought, “Wow, we can really go to town on this.”
We did music from Wes Anderson’s films; we did Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. We did the music from Big Lebowski. We did the music from Boogie Nights. When I say music, it’s not just like, “Oh, we played that pop song.” We played everything, from the pop songs to the soundtrack cues to, in some cases, the full, and often have added bits of dialogue to sort of carry the show like a visual radio player or something. It grew from there, we had these little satellite things, and we were able to do a tribute to Oddball, the Oddball archives that our friend Stephen Parr ran here in San Francisco. That is a collection of amazing ephemera. We did that for the San Francisco International Film Festival. We did a variety of projects with Thomas Campbell around Surf Films. We did some stuff around sort of random selects from the Internet archives. We found that we had a really nice collective of people that could do this stuff, and we did it here in San Francisco. We did it down in Los Angeles, and we did it in New York City. It all pretty much started on a Wednesday night, with us sitting around the piano.
Going back to The Chapel and your relationship with Fred and all that, Red Room Orchestra was the first live music event in San Francisco since COVID hit. What was it like trying to make something happen for the first time in a year and a half or so? Was it weird? What did it take to make that Twin Peaks at The Chapel Outdoors happen?
It required to be as realistic as possible about not reaching too far around on it, and thank your lucky stars about whatever amount of performance and spaces, and whether you could use horns or how you were going to do this. Gosh. What did it feel like? It felt like a very little tender moonwalk, initially. In some ways, I got to say, it was easier than maybe, doing something… three or four weeks ago. It was an exceptionally careful event. It was absolutely delightful and soul-saving to be able to do it.
That was beautiful, actually. What kind of things did you have to do to be able even just to rehearse, to make sure that you could do it safely and fit with the rules of the time?
Just the same, the same dry cracker we’ve all been doing, which is we didn’t get to hang out. We would rehearse remotely, trying to manage the latent signal, trying to play with each other. We did our best to create a bubble amongst ourselves. I’m neighbors with Kelley and Allyson. Tom Ayres and I have played around the world as a duo, and we’re just very much in tune with each other’s health and are very careful around each other. The drummer only got to play with us when he showed up. Pete Straus is a very careful guy. The thing is, we took something that’s usually very maximal, and we brought it down to its sharpest point. It was great to be able to convey it. It was really trippy. There are a lot of people looking out the windows. You could hear it out on the street, and it was very strange. It was like playing in a sandstorm when there wasn’t sand. It was powerful, and I’m glad we can certainly open the door to that. I don’t think we fixed anything, but we at least went out with layers of masks and gave people, just a little candle for a minute.
You were the canary in a coal mine in a lot of ways. Like, you were the first people to go in and go, “Is it safe?” “All right. We didn’t pass out. You can come in.”
(Laughter)You’re not the first person ever to say that; that’s why I was laughing. Not specific to COVID. There you go.
Speaking of risk-taking, everything that you’ve listed off so far has been sonically cinematic, like, the Wes Anderson films, The Big Lebowski, the Twin Peaks, and this year; you’re doing what I like to consider to be the first great LA Hardcore compilation. You went from doing all these like big layered pieces to something. It’s very simple and guttural, and primal. What was the inspiration for picking Repo Man this year?
I just picked it this year. I’ve been picking up the movie ever since it came out. I love that movie. It’s an exceptionally important movie for me, as a… somebody was walking around. Like Otto in ’85 being underemployed. The soundtrack, a lot of stories in that movie is that the soundtrack did so, well, that it goose the movie into getting watched more, but I have absolutely adored that film and that soundtrack for ages, and have always stayed up to beat on the soundtrack. It is kind of guttural, but then, there’s a lot of depth particularly if you listen to the soundtrack. Beyond the soundtrack, what’s in the film? The depth of genres and variety is a little broader than just Huntington Beach strut stuff. We’ve been mentioning it for a while and wondering, do people really get this film? Do people really get this film? The more and more I talk to people, the more I realized how important the score music, which is by The Plugz, aka the Cruzados, which became Tito & Tarantulas, was to a lot of musicians I really care for.
The primary member we have talked about is Larry Mullins, who has played almost all the Red Room shows. He is a multi-instrumentalist, playing with Iggy Pop for decades. He works with Nick Cave, who now is a drummer, but he’s also been his keyboard player. He works with the Swans. He is just this exceptionally good orchestral musician, but he’s a savage behind the drums in regards to playing punk rock stuff. He’s working on stuff with Mike Watt now and all that. Just think of the people who are around and how much I really, really dug that film, and that just that the time was right for it. It really feels a lot more current when you watch this film, with helicopters and various medical surveillance going on. I absolutely loved it, and we were looking at things we could do that we thought could work. The real blessing we came across is that we could get in touch with Tito Larriva. Who, along with Steven Hofstetter, co-wrote all the cues for the film, which are astonishingly great. We were able to get Zander Schloss, who plays the part of Kevin, but also has worked with the Circle Jerks and wrote a lot of the music for a lot of films that happen after Repo Man, that are by Alex Cox, like Walker, like Highway Patrolman etcetera, etcetera.
Anyway, as they say in the film, “there’s this lattice of coincidence where suddenly everybody would talk to lead us to somebody else.” We realized that we could nail all in, like, we could do a “TV Party,” we could do “Institutionalized,” we could do Fear, we could just kill those songs, and do the Repo stuff with people that have actually worked with it. We also could look at the stuff that’s in there. The Plugz songs, there’s “Flor de Mal,” which is a beautiful kind of almost norteño ballad; there’s “El Clavo Y La Cruz,” there’s “Hombre Secreto,” which is a version of “Secret Agent Man.” There are Andrews Sisters’ songs in there. There’s a Louis Armstrong song in there. There are all these hidden little things in there that we’re really going to take advantage of. Excited because something we were in love with, and then further in love when we realized there were all these little things inside of it that we’d never really figured out before. Thanks to Tito, we’ve been lucky enough to work with the original score recordings. As Alex Cox was conducting them in the course of doing post-production and developing a suite of music. That’s from the score music by the Cruzados/The Plugz. We’re going to have a great time going after the punk songs. The West Coast stuff that you initially mentioned.
You’re not just doing the 30 minutes. You’re actually pulling all of the music from throughout the film, which is…
It’s a completist; it’s for better or for worse, it’s a completist in a venture that a lot of people will, they like, “Oh my God.” We’re doing “Feelin’ 7up,” which is sung in the supermarket. We’re doing “CC Rider,” which is in the party scene. There’s a moment where they play the “Ride of the Valkyries” in surf form. There are all these things that if you ask people like, “Hey, do you remember that?” they be like, “No.” There’s a brief moment where “Born to Be Wild” is quoted. We’re going to go through, from the beginning to the end of the film playing, all the significant sonic things that happened, down to the highway patrol officers’ boots being melted. Then, it also includes some dialogue. “Plate o’ shrimp.” will be in there, repo man code, and things like that.
