Friendly Rich interview

Nov. 6, 2006: http://excal.on.ca/cms2//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2450&Itemid=2

Not many musicians would come to a fan's house for lunch with his mother and her boyfriend for an after meal interview. But as Friendly Rich put it, "I like to put myself into uncomfortable situations."
This situation highlights only the tip of the iceberg in regards to the composer and frontman of the Toronto-based cavalcade of sound, The Lollipop People.
"Yeah, I even went to a Conservative party dinner once and ate with a bunch of Conservatives and faked that I gave a damn about their platform just to practice the art of, ( . . . ) I don't know, being with strangers and mixing," he reminisced.
Discussing his music after a healthy serving of perogies, Friendly Rich's affable demeanor befits his name. Rich is the alter-ego of Richard Marsella. Composer by trade, Marsella incorporates influences as disparate as The Residents (avant-garde music and visual arts group), Italian pop and classical music, into a theatrical amalgamation that comes together in his latest CD with his band, the ten-piece Lollipop People, titled The Friendly Rich Show. The album is a soundtrack to Marsella's variety-vaudeville show of the same name, for which he composed all the music, along with puppet shows, crank calls, Eucharists, fish jumping through hoops and a general plethora of the absurd, the divine and the uncomfortable.
Marsella has been releasing music since 1994 on his label, the Pumpkin Pie Corp., but it's only recently that his sound has started to become more refined.
"The six - or seven, I can't remember - releases that I did before were just me naked in my parents' basement, on my own, so I would be playing all the instruments. So it was very un-listenable," Marsella said.
Since then, he has recently completed a master's degree in music at the University of Toronto, which culminated in the release of We Need a New F-Word this year, the first proper full-length album from The Lollipop People, produced by former Blue Rodeo member Bob Wiseman.
Despite the success of The Lollipop People, Marsella's website states his main areas of study as "musical construction and parade pedagogy." The latter refers to the Parade of Noises that Marsella has organized for the last four years in which several hundred elementary school students march in a parade while playing instruments they made themselves. Marsella believes that this helps to creatively engage children in music without the experience being limited to strict musical theory.
"The thing I do in the schools is not teaching kids the recorder; it's breaking your recorder in half or lighting it on fire - that's how we approach it. So it's rebellion; it's kind of teaching the benefits of anarchy to people."
On top of all this, Marsella curates the Brampton Indie Arts Festival, an event that he created in 2000 and has featured acts as diverse as The Most Serene Republic. The festival is the brainchild of former York University student Istvan Kantor and showcases experimental films and art exhibits.
"It's making a four-day composition, putting one interesting act behind another, behind another. We try to make it really different, like there will be an experimental film, followed by a weird dance piece, and we try to make it multidisciplinary," Marsella explained.
This works in tandem with his career as a musical educator, which makes his friendly alter ego seem a bit of a double life.
"It's been a challenge career-wise because I do a lot of work in the schools, and I don't necessarily want my work with The Lollipop People to be compromised. We want to be able to have naked 70-year-olds go on stage and inflate their balls. But at the same time, if a parent of a grade four (child) that I work with sees that, then you're in doo-doo." The naked old man mentioned is Naked Marvin, one of the many recurring acts that makes The Friendly Rich Show such a disturbingly fun time.
The Lollipop People just released their latest batch of musical misanthropy and had their celebratory show at the Music Gallery on Oct. 28. From there, they will be performing every Saturday at the Cameron House (408 Queen St. W.) as a preview for the next album, set to be recorded in December.
"The last recording I did, we had performed the material a bunch of times live, and I loved the outcome of what happened after you work with something in front of people and allow the musicians time to experiment with it."