America’s Naughtiest Marching Band

OAKLAND, Calif. (TNA) – “It felt like everything was coming to a climax – and all of the sudden the floor below me was completely wet,” recalled Lily Greene. “My shoes were drenched, literally, up to my ankles. Everything was soaking wet! I had no idea what was going on.”

It was, after all, 29-year-old Greene’s first time seeing Extra Action Marching Band. But stories like Greene’s are a dime a dozen whenever this particular group is involved.

Wild times are in store when the Extra Action Marching Band comes to town.

The Oakland-based band’s obstreperous birth took place in the late ‘90s when group founder Simon Cheffins connected with a handful of drummers and began playing gigs around the Bay Area. In a matter of years the band had exploded in size, from five people when it started to well more than 40 members in 2002. That number has decreased only slightly since then.

The percussionists, a muscly crew of strikingly attractive and heavily tattooed guys and girls, were joined by the brass section, a riotous mixture of fedora-wearing, mutton chop laden men and seductive, 1950s pin-up-model-quality women.

Add to these a wildly salacious and scantily clad flag team, a sincere love of performance art and an overwhelming proclivity for hedonism, and the Extra Action recipe is complete.

As Extra Action percussionist Jon Schainker explains, one of the main goals in the formation of the band was to break the mold of the pedantic, straight-laced marching band stereotype held by many people.

“It was more the idea of getting a group of musicians together to create this vision of a marching band that didn’t necessarily adhere to any of the genre protocols of a traditional marching band,” the 35-year-old University of California-Berkeley educator said. “We’re utilizing that form of a large group of musicians and the volume of drums to rally sort of a social occasion and disorient audiences both in public spaces and in club settings.”

Greene, a registered nurse who lives in San Diego, experienced her Extra Action deflowering while attending another band’s performance at the Casbah, an intimate hipster dive bar-cum-concert venue, on a late summer night in 2005.

Shortly after what was supposed to be the headlining band played their last song, explained Greene, Extra Action Marching Band came storming into the 200-person-capacity club like an unruly mob, dressed in their best (worst?) “half-naked Vegas stripper/marching band attire,” while tumultuously playing their instruments.

“I was shocked, overwhelmed,” Greene said. “The dancing, the gyrating – everyone was hot. All of the band members were totally sexy.”

But halfway through the band’s two-hour guerilla-style performance that night, the environment inside the Casbah changed drastically.

“I was dancing around with the band and thinking, ‘Hmm, someone’s spilling a lot of beer,’” she recalled. “I started to realize that it was a little more than just beer and drinks on the floor.”

Greene said it took a matter of seconds before news of the intentionally flooded toilet in the men’s room made its way around the bar.

Extra Action members march to the beat of a different drummer.

“People were saying that this sort of thing had happened before at Extra Action shows, that it was part of their gig, part of the nasty, debaucherous, raw nature of the show,” she laughed. “And everyone just went with it! People were lying on the ground doing the caterpillar and the worm. They were like animals on the ground, all over, just grinding on each other and the poles and the ground and the toilet water.”

“Fluids are always a big part of our performances,” explains Schainker. “Whether generated by our own sweat, the sweat of the audience, wine being spewed out, beer on the floor – there’s a very slippery nature to what we do.”

However, Greene’s experience that particular evening wasn’t exclusively related to her waterlogged surroundings.

“You’d think, for how crazy and random the whole thing was, that the music would have just been OK, like it just would have been a lot of noise,” Greene said. “But they were actually really talented. The music was phenomenal.”

According to Schainker, the quality of the musical performance in Extra Action is just as important as the unruliness of the party.

“The level of musicianship that is required to pull off what we do at this point is high,” he said. “Most of the band has backgrounds in music education. Our lead composer right now has a master’s in music composition.”

For some in the band, though, the main focus of the performance is the connection that is made with the audience.

“The level of excitement we can bring to a large audience is breathtaking,” says tuba player Wiley Evans. “We work hard at being ‘fucking-out-of-control-amazing.’ We … create a performance that will bring the audience out of their shell and into [a] visceral experience.”

Professor Jay Rees, associate director of bands and director of athletic bands at the University of Arizona in Tucson, while admitting to having only experienced Extra Action through YouTube videos, says he enjoys the band’s avant-garde approach with the audience. But Rees concedes that he is not particularly impressed with the group’s overall performance.

“There’s no question that Extra Action is ‘wink-wink-nudge-nudging’ at their audience with the way they’re doing things,” Rees says. “But if you’re going to do that, in my opinion, you’d better be really good at what you’re doing or else I’m just watching your bad party. And I don’t really want to watch your party. I’ll have my own.”

Despite what some marching band purists might say, though, flag team member Ena – “just Ena” – sees a vital significance in the work she does with the band.

“I love to watch unsuspecting random people lose their shit,” she confides. “It is important for our society. There is a lot of shit that needs to be lost. Our band has an important job to do.”

Aside from the gravity of fulfilling such an essential societal role, many in the Extra Action crew admit that the celebration of music and life involved in the band’s live performance is more significant than anything else that comes along with the mayhem.

“The marching band is a very, very special thing,” explains Roky Roulette, one of the two male members of the Extra Action flag team.

“It’s kind of like a drug in a way,” Roulette continues. “You might be ready to give it up but you can’t. You keep coming back for more. No matter how fucking junk-sick you are, once you hear that first beat of the snare, that first horn note, the next thing you know, you’re fucking blissed out, baby.”