Two hours before his band’s first live show, Adam Schatz is focused on building a replica of a passenger airplane using a cardboard Toshiba TV box, an X-Acto knife, a glue stick and multiple sheets of blank white paper. Once complete, he intends to rig the plane to a pulley system so the show can start with it “flying” off the balcony and nose-diving onto the stage. Schatz isn’t engaged in some sort of art-school navel gazing. He’s co-founder of the “recap-rock” band Previously on Lost, and this plane is meant to represent Oceanic Flight 815. The idea is to re-enact the plane crash that began the TV show Lost, the fourth season of which will be recapped in song that evening.
Supporting band members make the inevitable comparisons to Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge” set, but Schatz, 20, is undeterred. “People coming to a show need to feel like they’re part of something, so the band needs to look like they tried,” he declares. “And this plane does say, if anything, we tried.”
In the end the pulley system is only a partial success. They can’t get the plane to start high enough or descend without coming apart. The four-month-old albatross makes its entrance carried by the band. Schatz and his artistic partner Jeff Curtin, enveloped in fog, tear it to pieces. The Previously on Lost live experience has begun.
Aside from Schatz, Curtin and Flight 815, the small stage is crowded with the six members of their backup band, along with an inflatable palm tree kiddie pool filled with packs of gum (which they plan to toss to the crowd), two bowling pins (occasionally used as quasi-percussion), a couple of cowbells and a cardboard cutout of a Hawaiian dancing girl. Not content to merely musically recap the fourth season of Lost, these guys have, for their first-ever live show, thrown together an entire duct-tape musical-comedy stage-show extravaganza.
“The quality of theater that pervades through the entire show is important to us,” Curtin, 25, explains. And they also don’t skimp on the in-jokes.
For Lost fans, the band’s lyrics are thick with insider info (from “Be My Constant,” the sweet ode to Desmond and Penny: “She’s constantly on my mind; I’m constantly blacking out”). Much like the TV show itself, the recap band is probably incomprehensible to the uninitiated. But Curtin and Schatz are planning to abandon the TV show after they’ve released their Season Four album and played a couple more live shows this summer. Tapping into the Lost fandom helped them grab attention online and draw a packed, enthusiastic crowd to their first show—but they don’t plan to be a TV fan’s novelty band forever.
“We’re hoping people catch on to what we’re doing and support us as a band that they can expect new things from every year,” Curtin says in an interview.
Given that last year these guys composed a sci-fi ballet for the Fringe Festival inspired by Carl Sagan and named after Jean-Francois Champollion, the Egyptologist who decoded the Rosetta Stone, “new things” is not an idle threat.
For all its cardboard-airplane goofiness, Previously on Lost comes from two guys who have some genuine musical chops. Schatz is a jazz sax major at NYU. Curtin is a drummer who rattles off Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Sondheim and a high school biology teacher who called himself Dr. Art, the Singing Scientist, as influences on this project. Between them they play in at least five other bands. Schatz organizes two different New York concert series, and Curtin produces an online TV show for Pitchfork.
On MySpace, the Season Four songs are bright and cotton-candy catchy, but they’re a little thin. In order to take in the twisty plot of each episode, they skip through musical styles in sometimes dizzying fashion.
Live, with six other musicians backing Schatz and Curtin, the songs come to three-dimensional life, smoothing transitions and becoming a performance more than the sum of its clever in-jokes. The finale—which they’d composed the previous night (and which one band member learned at sound check)—is a full-on gospel number, with a refrain to the tune of “Amazing Grace”: “I once was found, but now am lost, and all my friends are dead.” The most rip-roaringly joyous number of the show, it’s a New Orleans–style funeral service for the various major and minor characters who perished in the season finale. And for a mustachioed hipster, Schatz in particular does a surprisingly convincing imitation of a gospel preacher.
While at least one person at the Knitting Factory show was clearly proclaiming his TV loyalties with a “LOST NYC Meet Up” T-shirt, Curtin and Schatz hope that people who enjoy their Season 4 album will follow them as they move on to other projects. Their plan is to expand their recapping repertoire beyond the television medium.
“Educational recap, it’s something we may go into,” Curtin says. The two throw out a list of things they might musically summarize: books, historical events, world wars, the process of photosynthesis, museum exhibits, the week in politics.
“Things that will make other peoples’ lives better,” Schatz says.
So if you’re the kind of person who’d be tickled to hear “Australia” rhymed with “paraphernalia,” but you’re not a Lost fan, don’t despair—the recap rockers may yet cover a topic whose jokes you will get.
However, Curtin says they’ll keep the name Previously on Lost. “Just to remind people, and remind ourselves, really, of how we started.”
Supporting band members make the inevitable comparisons to Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge” set, but Schatz, 20, is undeterred. “People coming to a show need to feel like they’re part of something, so the band needs to look like they tried,” he declares. “And this plane does say, if anything, we tried.”
In the end the pulley system is only a partial success. They can’t get the plane to start high enough or descend without coming apart. The four-month-old albatross makes its entrance carried by the band. Schatz and his artistic partner Jeff Curtin, enveloped in fog, tear it to pieces. The Previously on Lost live experience has begun.
Aside from Schatz, Curtin and Flight 815, the small stage is crowded with the six members of their backup band, along with an inflatable palm tree kiddie pool filled with packs of gum (which they plan to toss to the crowd), two bowling pins (occasionally used as quasi-percussion), a couple of cowbells and a cardboard cutout of a Hawaiian dancing girl. Not content to merely musically recap the fourth season of Lost, these guys have, for their first-ever live show, thrown together an entire duct-tape musical-comedy stage-show extravaganza.
“The quality of theater that pervades through the entire show is important to us,” Curtin, 25, explains. And they also don’t skimp on the in-jokes.
For Lost fans, the band’s lyrics are thick with insider info (from “Be My Constant,” the sweet ode to Desmond and Penny: “She’s constantly on my mind; I’m constantly blacking out”). Much like the TV show itself, the recap band is probably incomprehensible to the uninitiated. But Curtin and Schatz are planning to abandon the TV show after they’ve released their Season Four album and played a couple more live shows this summer. Tapping into the Lost fandom helped them grab attention online and draw a packed, enthusiastic crowd to their first show—but they don’t plan to be a TV fan’s novelty band forever.
“We’re hoping people catch on to what we’re doing and support us as a band that they can expect new things from every year,” Curtin says in an interview.
Given that last year these guys composed a sci-fi ballet for the Fringe Festival inspired by Carl Sagan and named after Jean-Francois Champollion, the Egyptologist who decoded the Rosetta Stone, “new things” is not an idle threat.
For all its cardboard-airplane goofiness, Previously on Lost comes from two guys who have some genuine musical chops. Schatz is a jazz sax major at NYU. Curtin is a drummer who rattles off Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Sondheim and a high school biology teacher who called himself Dr. Art, the Singing Scientist, as influences on this project. Between them they play in at least five other bands. Schatz organizes two different New York concert series, and Curtin produces an online TV show for Pitchfork.
On MySpace, the Season Four songs are bright and cotton-candy catchy, but they’re a little thin. In order to take in the twisty plot of each episode, they skip through musical styles in sometimes dizzying fashion.
Live, with six other musicians backing Schatz and Curtin, the songs come to three-dimensional life, smoothing transitions and becoming a performance more than the sum of its clever in-jokes. The finale—which they’d composed the previous night (and which one band member learned at sound check)—is a full-on gospel number, with a refrain to the tune of “Amazing Grace”: “I once was found, but now am lost, and all my friends are dead.” The most rip-roaringly joyous number of the show, it’s a New Orleans–style funeral service for the various major and minor characters who perished in the season finale. And for a mustachioed hipster, Schatz in particular does a surprisingly convincing imitation of a gospel preacher.
While at least one person at the Knitting Factory show was clearly proclaiming his TV loyalties with a “LOST NYC Meet Up” T-shirt, Curtin and Schatz hope that people who enjoy their Season 4 album will follow them as they move on to other projects. Their plan is to expand their recapping repertoire beyond the television medium.
“Educational recap, it’s something we may go into,” Curtin says. The two throw out a list of things they might musically summarize: books, historical events, world wars, the process of photosynthesis, museum exhibits, the week in politics.
“Things that will make other peoples’ lives better,” Schatz says.
So if you’re the kind of person who’d be tickled to hear “Australia” rhymed with “paraphernalia,” but you’re not a Lost fan, don’t despair—the recap rockers may yet cover a topic whose jokes you will get.
However, Curtin says they’ll keep the name Previously on Lost. “Just to remind people, and remind ourselves, really, of how we started.”
