Biography
INTRODUCING… THE NEW ORLEANS BINGO! SHOW
Somewhere in the French Quarter, in the darkened back room of a family-style café, a drum roll is sounding. Through air made thick with the competing aromas of fried chicken and cigarettes, a standing room only crowd of costumed regulars and disheveled miscreants is fumbling for their cards. A foul-mouthed clown in a ruffled tuxedo jacket is waving an air raid siren while a one-eyed drum major with a dead raven perched perilously at the peak of his chin-strapped hat is handing you what you hope is the luckiest board in the room. And seated at the pump organ, Clint Maedgen, the spiky-haired troubadour of Lower Decatur Street, has a question for the room:
“DOES ANYBODY WANNA BE… A WINNAH?”
Since 2002, The Bingo! Show has been gleefully entertaining audiences with its own unique brand of Mardi Gras-styled carnival revelry. Deftly juxtaposing the fiasco-based atmosphere of a geriatric board game gone horribly wrong, multi-media vaudvillean antics, and some of the most touching songs ever written about life in this anachronistic American city, this one of a kind musical experience may be the closest the world will ever come to truly knowing what it means to be from New Orleans.
LONG VERSION:
A (not so) BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BINGO! SHOW
It was sometime in the summer of 2001, while poking
around the scattered recesses of a local antique/junk
shop, that Clint Maedgen stumbled across a stack of
500 weathered bingo cards. A young veteran of the New
Orleans music scene via his megaphone driven art-house
rock band Liquidrone, Maedgen talked the proprietor of
the shop into parting with all 500 cards for 25
dollars. It was from these humble beginnings that a
quiet musical revolution would begin
At the time of the purchase, Maedgen had been looking
for a new musical challenge. His group Liquidrone had
garnered a substantial local following and favorable
reviews, but he had recently come into possession of a
pump organ and was searching for a quieter venue
through which he could showcase his remarkable vocal
talents and his love for the oddball troubadour.
Being that a great deal of the new songs he had
written stemmed directly from his experiences
delivering fried chicken to strippers on a bicycle, it
seemed only natural that his place of employ,
Fiorella's Cafe on Lower Decatur Street, should serve
as said venue.
And so, every Thursday night for the next two years,
the tables on the French Market side of Fiorella's
Caffe were stacked and stashed to make room for the
ongoing evolutions of a performance-art fiasco in the
making. In its earliest incarnations, the show's
primary spotlight was cast on the acoustic
arrangements of Maedgen's lovingly crafted musical
gems. Scattered throughout the musical presentation,
guest callers drew bingo numbers and distributed
prizes to winners while the band readied itself for
the next set. Thanks in part to Maedgen's ties to the
junkyard circus of the ninth ward's burgeoning art and
music scene, it wasn't long before the audience itself
began to help drive forward the mutation of the show.
Patrons would show up weekly in elaborate costumes
constructed from cast-off materials*. What began with
a hint of the absurd would slowly take on a trace of
the sublime.
Week by week and month by month, small touches and
flourishes were added to the show as a format slowly
emerged. The Bingo! Show became more of a collective
than a band as non-musical participants lent their
skills to the mix. It was around this time that
Fiorella's manager Ronald Rona began screening short
videos made specifically for the show. The early
films were primarily goofy in nature, featuring
everything from a scripted bout of Rock'em Sock'em
Robots to a true-to-script remake of the first fifteen
minutes of The Empire Strikes Back, turned entirely on
its ear. Meanwhile, light-up circus toys and
walky-talky megaphones were making their way into the
performance aspect of the show's musical segments, and
the group came into possession of a decommissioned
school bus.
It was this bus that would carry the collective to
Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood for a six week
engagement at the Combustive Arts Venue in October of
2002. Thanks in part to Combustive Motor Corporation
member Stephen Soltis, who had recently relocated from
Bushwick to an apartment on Lower Decatur Street
directly across from Fiorella's Caffe, the group had
been booked for two weeks at the Corporation's New
York venue. Determined to garner a decent crowd for
an unheard of out-of-state show, the
ever-entrepreneurial group developed a grass roots
following by offering free tastes of the nightly show
to unsuspecting bystanders during the day. Never
afraid of a spectacle, the collective took to parking
the Bingo! bus outside busy subway stops. As it
turned out, the roof of the vehicle made for an
excellent miniature performance space from which to
play music, clown, and barrage innocent passersby with
small toys and flyers advertising the pertinent
details of their show. What began as a two week
engagement stretched into six as The Bingo! Show honed
its craft to a fine absurdist sheen.
By the time the group made its triumphant return to
its hometown of New Orleans, the show had been
perfected and the structure was cemented. "Ronnie
Numbers", the occasionally foul-mouthed and ever
dapper clown alter-ego to Ronald Rona, emerged as
permanent bingo caller and Master of Ceremonies. Matt
Vaughn Black, who had taken to showing up at the
restaurant and distributing bingo cards in the guise
of his own clown-painted and costume-bedecked sideshow
star, introduced "The Turk" as a permanent staple of
these newly invigorated shows. With the final
addition of Jamie Gandy and her Las Vegas Showgirl cum
Big Top Stripper, "Calliope Calliope" ( pronounced:
Cah-LIE-o-pee CAL-ee-ope) as resident number-puller
and foil to the libidinous bufoonery of her clown
counterparts, a permanent cast of outlandish players
made possible new depths of sideshow skit to the
already intricately woven production.
And so, as audiences populated primarily by friends
and local French Quarter regulars gave way to standing
room only affairs, it wasn't long before the local
media began to take notice. The Bingo! Show became
darlings of the local press, opening the doors to such
high-profile gigs as a segment on the well-known
regional music showcase telecast of Louisiana Jukebox
and the coveted honor of being the very first
performance of the 2004 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage
Festival. By May of 2004, the group was forced to
abandon its grueling weekly showcase in pursuit of
more sporadic and premeditated performances. The back
room at the cafe, no longer physically capable of
housing the sheer volume of interested attendees, had
to be left behind in favor of larger venues more
capable of spotlighting the intricacies of the
audio-visual laden sideshow spectacular that the
production had grown to favor. Fortunately, this epic
local run did not draw to a close before winning the
heart of Preservation Hall's director of operations,
Benjamin Jaffe.
Founded in 1961 by Allan and Sandra Jaffe,
Preservation Hall has been leading the fight to
preserve the sounds of authentic New Orleans-style
jazz music for forty-five years. Since 1993,
Benjamin Jaffe (son of founders Allan and Sandra) has
taken the reins of the operation. Serving in multiple
capacities as upright bass player, director of daily
operations, and touring manager for the
internationally booked band of long-time New Orleans
based musicians, it is to the credit of The Bingo!
Show that this leading ambassador of New Orleans music
and culture has taken such an active interest in their
continued well-being and success. Not long after the
dissolution of the weekly Fiorella's gigs, it was
Jaffe who offered Maedgen the opportunity to further
hone his already venerable skills as a guest vocalist
to this globally recognized all-star band. Signing on
for a modest two to three songs per show, this
privilege has nonetheless allowed our own
spikey-haired troubadour of Lower Decatur Street the
chance to display his skills before such disparate
audiences as the President of The United States and
the King of Thailand, with loads of midwestern high
school auditoriums in between. Coming this summer, in
honor of the forty-fifth anniversary of this honored
New Orleans institution, Maedgen will once again be
taking to the road with Preservation Hall's New
Orleans Revue. In celebration of the past and with an
eye to the future, the Hall will once again be
thrilling devotees world-wide with its dedication to a
sound that must not be lost to posterity. And it is
with no small honor or lack of humility that Ronnie
Numbers and The Turk have agreed to come along for the
ride, to sprinkle some confetti and vaudeville on the
revelatory proceedings.
And through it all, through side-projects, setbacks,
and storms, The Bingo! Show lives on. While members
of the original acoustic line-up have been scattered
to the four winds by the force we call Katrina, that
which is old becomes new once again. Returning to his
roots in the wake of upheaval, Maedgen has enlisted
the primary players from his electric endeavor
Liquidrone to provide the new soundtrack to this
ever-evolving sideshow cabaret. Turning their eye now
to the national stage, and equipped with the lessons
they've learned from the hall, the group will be
touring this autumn, hell-bent on bringing a little
piece of unquenchable New Orleans culture to a theatre
near you.
Instrumentation
CLINT MAEDGEN - vocals, pump organ, keyboard, guitar, tenor saxophone, squeaky dolphin, okarina...
RONNIE NUMBERS(Ron Rona) - emcee, bingomaster, ukulele, upright bass, accordion, pots/pans, bullhorns, dementia
MR.THE TURK(Mattvaughan Black)- ridiculophone, bullhorns, intrigue
CALHOUN MACALUSO(Casey McAllister) - keys, theremin, guitar, backup vocals, percussion
CARAMEL(Marty LaStrapes) - bass, keys
CAKEWALK(Chris Davis) - drums
VEVE LAROUX - bingomistress, arbiter of discipline & haberdashery, keeper of the ding(DING!)
Discography
The New Orleans Bingo! Show Volume 1: Soft Emergencies (2005)
The New Orleans Bingo! Show Volume 2: For A Life Ever Bright
Links
| http://www.neworleansbingoshow.com |