Create (!) has a master plan

PHOTO by ZACK PIANKO

Create (!) gets every opportunity once, says guitarist/device wrangler Chris Schlarb—Project Blowed, a Bixby Knolls Christmas party, a five-hour Long Beach Marathon set cut when it began to rain and equipment began to electrocute its players—and Create (!)’s collaborative roster lists like alums of a wishful creative academy—Shapeshifters’ Circus, {open} and smgsap’s shea m gauer, bassist Anthony Shadduck, keyboardist Ikey Owens—because coreless improv/jazz band Create (!) is really nobody’s band, and thus unsupervised it might go anywhere with anyone at anytime. It’s a rare interview for a band founded on total unpredictability and fly-or-flounder musicianship from some of the best technical fingerflexers available, but Schlarb and Create (!) co-founder Orlando Greenhill—once of Havalina and one of Long Beach’s most distinctive bassists, with or without makeup, wig or pantaloons—sit now for unrehearsed wordcram (plus enchiladas) to track how a band (appearing this weekend as Schlarb, Greenhill and drummers Vince Reyes and Andrew Pompey) that blew its bass amp at the very first show grew into a musical workshop for kids at Long Beach’s MacArthur Park with only one practice ever in 10 years.

What were the first free records you ever heard?
Orlando Greenhill: Coming up, it all came at the same time. I can’t say record-wise—my dad had stuff lying around. He played. He was a major influence on me, too—I saw him and his friends play in the park, and from that I took my cue. I was four years old and I wanted to do that! He played guitar, keyboards, percussion—actually, twenty years this month I’ve been playing bass. In seventh grade—the first song I ever played was the Animals—Eric Burdon—‘Monterey.’ BOOM BOOM BOOM—I remember a lot of stuff!
Chris Schlarb: I’m reading Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia—and he talks about people who have instant recall of sounds. And you’ve been like that for years! You can pull anything out.
OG: I remember a lot of stuff concerning music. My whole life revolved around it!
CS: I remember the first time I heard Ask The Ages by Sonny Sharrock. I didn’t get it at the time. I was 16 or 17 and I was answering ads in the Penny Saver to find people to try and play with, and the guy had that record and was like, ‘It’s horrible!’ So I said I’d buy it for $5. And I didn’t know Elvin Jones drums on that record. And a few years later, I remember I was at Tower Records back when it still existed—standing there with $50 in my hand and I’d come into the store like, ‘Well, I heard it all. There’s nothing else to buy.’ And I hadn’t even gotten into anything. And I think I ended up buying A Love Supreme. And there’s Elvin again.
OG: What I’m saying is even with the whole progressive thing, it was just the sounds that got me—getting into E.L.P. and my dad had stuff like Michael White and Pharoah Sanders laying around. You can see how it all influenced each other. And just over time, hearing those sounds—and then I got into hardcore and all that stuff, too.
CS: There’s a lot of similarity between my taste and Orlando’s taste, but that’s the big departure. I never got into punk, hardcore, metal—I grew up listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Police, Joni Mitchell, Devo, Led Zeppelin, all the guitar hero stuff. And from that into jazz fusion, and then into jazz—Mahavishnu to Miles Davis and all that. Our big divergence is the punk and hardcore thing. I grew up listening to the Breakin’ soundtrack, early RUN DMC—we had a weird early hip-hop connection, then prog rock and avant noise.
OG: And jazz and classical.
CS: We’re big Penderecki fans.
OG: I’m about to cry—you mentioned Penderecki! And Schoenberg!
CS: I listen to Aaron Copland and I trip out on how optimistic it is—it’s all like, ‘the land of opportunity!’ It’s the most totally American music. And we’re both into Zappa, George Duke—

Beefheart?
OG: Oh, we’re about to start a riot up here!
CS: We’ve never figured out what we’re going to be, and that’s played a part in why we don’t do interviews that often. It’s not like there’s a dude—no frontman, no figurehead! A lot of people might see that as Orlando…
OG: Wearing make-up, jumping around off the stage, acting a fool…
CS: Or be like, ‘Oh, Chris, you produce the stuff.’ But it’s nobody’s band.

What was the Project Blowed show like?
OG: That was awesome. Steve [Richardson] went into a thrash beat and we just went off!
CS: We used to get invited to Off The Top in L.A.—this place where all the up-and-coming MCs would perform. Darkleaf, Acid Reign, Subtitle—that was when Subtitle was just there to like open the door—and we played there like weekly. MCs would get up and rap with us. And we played a show in San Pedro with Circus of the Shape Shifters.
OG: And L.A. Symphony, too.
CS: Not to toot our own horns. All fifty of them—that’s a Rahsaan Roland Kirk reference right there!—but I can’t think of many people who’ve been in all these different communities. We were asked to play Project Blowed, asked to play the Leimert Jazz Festival, we played the Long Beach Marathon one year—we stood out there and played for five hours, and we got electrocuted because it was drizzling. And we played on the street in Bixby Knolls—they invited us to play their Christmas fest, but they didn’t invite us back! We’ve gotten every opportunity once.

Is that a learning experience?
CS: It’s kind of an ascetic band—you go back to this feeling of, ‘Ok, I don’t know anything—I can’t steer this in any direction!’ You don’t have a lot of control. And you do have to have other things—you need things you can control in life! Create (!) has compositions, but we’ve never rehearsed in ten years—from 1998 to 2008, this is our ten-year anniversary right now!

Let me be the first to congratulate you.
OG: It’s close to ten—the thing I was gonna add to that is that… it’s very ascetic to the point where you almost have to… you have your ideas and you have the way you wanna do things, but sometimes it doesn’t always end up—it’s like life exactly! I always relate the band to life—every lesson comes, and we all have ideas but sometimes it goes totally differently! Like that show at Koo’s—my goodness! That blew my mind!

And you don’t have hits to fall back on.
CS: It can be tough on your ego. I’m like, ‘Oh, I played for fifteen years and I’ve reached a certain level of quote-unquote professionalism,’ and I go up there and I feel like a total jackass! I only have those moments with Create (!) but in the long haul, I always feel like it’s a refinining of character.
OG: You almost have to let who you are go. I’ve had to do it! Put me in it, but let a lot of things I know go—use what I have but let what I know… go.

What everyday household appliance offers the most versatile sound?
CS: I love the cappuccino milk mixers from Ikea. It’s a little handheld thing with a little spiral at the bottom—I can fret a chord and rub it over the strings and it gives this arpeggioed sound!
OG: I’ve been attached to hair clippers—my mom was a barber—and you put those over the pickups or kind of swing it back and forth.
CS: It wreaks havoc with the magnets. Orlando’s gone through more amps than I anyone I know. I don’t know if it’s negligence or pure energy—but he’s gone through about an amp a year.
OG: And I can’t afford it!
CS: We should practice! Maybe one practice before the show?

Would that be the first practice in ten years?
OG: The second.
CS: Our drummer Andrew Pompey—we were invited to play a show in Berkeley with Why? from Anticon and Wobbly from Tigerbeat6 and our drummer Vince Reyes couldn’t play, so he said he knew another drummer Andrew. I called and was like, ‘Uh, I don’t know you, but Vince recommended you for this show in Northern California…?’ And he was like, ‘Ok, wanna practice?’ ‘Nope.’ We didn’t meet until the day we left for the show. I explained a couple of the compositions and he just absolutely destroyed.

Do you learn a lot from the kids at your workshops?
OG: We always do.
CS: We give them a bunch of instruments to play—try to help them recontextualize what instruments and music were. Like you don’t have to have a guitar, you don’t necessarily have to have drums. And we split them into four groups—one group screamed, one banged on the desks—the teacher was freaking out! She thought it was total chaos. Similar to Create (!). People think it’s abject insanity, but there’s an overarching concept.
OG: We’re not crazoids—we’re sane!

What kind of musical experience do kids have now?
OG: It’s a lot different from when we were coming up. Some don’t have any. We try and let them know music is not so far away. It’s not just MTV or the radio. You can make this. We tell them, ‘You are the first instrument because you can make sounds.’ We have exercises where we teach components like tempo and volume—raise a hand high and they go up and down. A girl came up to me the other day and she did one of my hand signals—I was like, ‘Oh, you’re one of my old students!’
CS: It’s hard to not grow older like, ‘Oh, these hoodlums!’ But I’m interfacing with these kids—going in and teaching and being earnest and straightforward and sharing my time. There’s that passivity that can overtake you with age—everything like, ‘It’s all happening to me and I can’t do anything about it!’ Part of my philosophy in the very beginning—I used to live at Broadway and Redondo and there was a huge alley behind my apartment with every once in a while this kind of shady group of people standing around. And I always thought, ‘What if those guys were playing music?’ I’d be so much more stoked to walk by them if they had instruments—people wanna congregate, so what if they congregated and were actually doing something? That was a spark for me. Shortly thereafter, we started doing these classes and giving instruments to kids. Maybe it’s a particularly idealistic thing…
OG: I was at work and this lady—I don’t know how we started talking—and she was like, ‘You’re a musician? It’s amazing what you guys do with sound! I can’t believe you’re one of them!’
CS: It sounds like that quote Agata from Melt Banana said about us—‘Create (!) sounds like something from your life!’

CREATE (!) WITH PINK SNOWFLAKES, KING CITY SPEED TRAP AND GREATER CALIFORNIA THE PROSPECTOR | 2400 E. 7TH ST. | LONG BEACH 90804 | SAT., 9 PM | $5 | 21+ | MYSPACE.COM/THEPROSPECTORLONGBEACH OR SOUNDSAREACTIVE.COM.

Tags: CHRIS SCHLARB, create (!), Long Beach, Music, orlando greenhill, prospector