Conducting an interview with more than one subject is always a challenge, so pitching a feature on a whole clown car full of performers was a wild idea. Luckily, Jake Gold, Karl Tear, and Ricky Ostry are pros at collaboration of all sorts and proved to be excellent ambassadors for New Orleans’ #1 clown-themed LCD Soundsystem cover band, LSD Clownsystem. As well as holding down the rhythm section for Clownsystem, Gold, Tear, and Ostry form the core of BAAB and NOW! That’s What I Call A Karaoke Band!, two other immensely popular local cover bands. After months of rescheduling because of tours and performances, they joined me on a video call from their Bywater rehearsal space to talk about the complex social network of bands they’re in, the way playing for children can be absolute madness, and how the band they’re based on feels about this project bringing the circus aesthetic to their catalog. Honk if you bonk!
Long before there was a Clownsystem, there were eight disparate humans making art and music around New Orleans. How did each of you meet and discover that you should be making music together?
Karl Tear: In 2011 to 2012, me and Ricky moved to New Orleans, separately, not together. We were pedicabbers together though, with some other pedicabbers, including Kerem [Ozkan], who’s the guitarist in Clownsystem. We started a band called Milksteak and I think we were pretty good. Our friend Tim Beasley fronted it.
Ricky Ostry: It was a post-rock band, shoegazey. It went through a couple iterations and, later, Howe Pearson, one of the singers in Clownsystem, joined as well.
KT: So, that was the first time that Ricky and I played together.
Jake Gold: I knew Tim Beasley through other avenues and met Karl subbing in on some other Tim Beasley project. Might have been Milksteak for all I know! It was outside, is all I remember. A couple years later, Ricky and I met, playing in a Prince cover band called Princess that was intended for one of the [New Orleans] Community Printshop cover band shows. I don’t think anybody else from that band is still playing in New Orleans—
RO: Well, Dan [Cardillo], the guitarist from BAAB, was also in that band. That’s how Jake and Dan met.
OK, so that’s Milksteak, Princess, and BAAB. What other bands connect you all?
RO: Another central band to this universe is called TV Pole Shine. It’s a 12-piece, horn-driven funk band, new wave [and] Talking Heads influenced, that is fronted by our friend Bennett Kirschner, who writes all the music. Howe Pearson is the drummer. Jake and I are in it, as well as Toren [Hardee], who’s also a singer in the Clownsystem. Around the same time, I was also doing a lot of DJing with Kerem and Brooke [Trout Paulus] who are also in the Clownsystem. We throw this party called Solid Gold, which is a disco party. That’s a concentric circle.
JG: And Dan and I were doing a lot of Frenchmen gigs together.
RO: The three of us, along with Dan, are Now! Karaoke Band. We’re a live karaoke band with 300+ songs. That band tours every summer. And then the karaoke band plus two singers is BAAB, the Satanic ABBA band.
I actually met Dan before I met any of you and he told me about the karaoke band—I think it was a pretty new project at the time because COVID restrictions had just been lifted.
JG: The karaoke band started during [the] pandemic, on the back of a pickup truck. We wanted to get people outside so we drove around in the back of our friend Charlie’s pickup and posted up in parks around town and had people sing into N95 microphone covers. Clownsystem did some pandemic stuff too. We did Tasche [De La Rocha]’s garage, which was a drive-thru experience where people would pick a song from a menu, the garage door would open up, we would play a song or two, the garage door would close, and the next car would pull up.
I do love the inventiveness that restrictions necessitated. So, OK, now we’ve got: Milksteak, Princess, BAAB, TV Pole Shine, Solid Gold, and Now! Karaoke Band. Is that all of them? And what about PBJ Clownsystem?
RO: That’s pretty much everything. We also have our other projects and our friends’ projects linked on our website, and most of our past shows.
KT: PBJ is the same band! We just change the LSD to PBJ so it’s more kid-friendly. That show was really fun.
JG: The kids were wild!
RO: We added in two songs that the kids wrote and we did a Riot Grrrl version of a Shel Silverstein poem [“Sick”]. It was really sweet.
KT: The 30 minutes before we got on stage for that set were maybe the most chaotic moments of my life. There were a hundred children playing in the Music Box [Village], just screaming, running around, clanking everything possible. And I had this nightmare feeling: If we don’t start playing now these kids are gonna tear this place apart.
My band, WAR BUNNIES, wonders why we don’t get enough mosh pits and it’s clearly because we don’t play enough shows for kindergartners. You need those lower centers of gravity to really go at it.
RO: You do! And I think it should be PBJ Clownsystem and TICKLE BUNNIES.
We would be honored! Any time you want to do a fundraiser for anything you care about, we’re down. I absolutely love the fact that that’s a big part of your shows already. You’ve raised money for so many causes. How do you choose them?
RO: This band was founded at the Community Printshop benefit show, so our first gig was a fundraiser and, philosophically, the group is very much about inclusiveness. Our shows are about people showing up and dressing up and feeling like they’re invited to the party. And I think that, from day one, that’s been a big part of our ethos: letting everybody in on the fun. All of the shows that we’ve done that are benefits are things we all care about and it’s a no-brainer. We never have to convince anyone in the band to do it. New Orleans has a long tradition of mutual aid and caring for our neighbors. A lot of that has to do with the fact that the city has been neglected for so long by so many people. I personally feel a debt for all of the things that this city has given me. We’ve done benefits for prison reform, we’ve done anti-war benefits, benefits for youth empowerment. It all goes hand-in-hand with music.
JG: The karaoke band, in particular, was designed to break down the barrier of us just playing a show at people and, instead, being in a show with the audience and having one experience together.
You’ve already got so many singers in Clownsystem and you know the audience is fully singing along. And since you’re all dressed as clowns, it is hard to see where you end and they begin.
KT: That’s the beauty of it, what’s made people want to be a part of it: Just by dressing up, they’re in it.
JG: There was a gala that we did where we had 100 people on stage with us, behind the band, at the Civic Theatre.
RO: We had a fried chicken buffet and a champagne tower.
KT: It’s such a big, giant stage that we thought, if we bring our friends and audience on stage with us, it’ll feel like a house party.
JG: Like we’re back at Okay Bar.
Where you played your second show ever! I do appreciate that, because of the way it’s laid out, everyone going to the bathroom is also a part of the show at Okay Bar.
JG: Ha! We had a show there where people had to defend us from the mosh pit and defend all our gear from getting knocked over.
RO: Were you part of that wall?
The crowd at LSD Clownsystem’s “Big Top Ball” at the Civic Theatre, February 2024. (Photo by Leone Julitte)
I wish! But I saw you at French Quarter Fest and I couldn’t get over the fact that there were people dressed up as clowns all day. Who knew that clowns would be a unifier?
RO: It was a really good guess.
KT: At that original Okay Bar show, we were all getting ready at Ricky’s house, who lives near there, and we saw people driving past on their bikes, dressed as clowns. That was the moment where it clicked for us like, oh! That makes a lot of sense. People are gonna love it ‘cause they can be a part of it with their costume.
JG: BAAB is the same way. People dress up as demons and BDSM stuff.
How did that first show for the Community Printshop come together?
KT: A lot of us had seen LCD Soundsystem at the Orpheum earlier that year and were thinking, we’d had such a good time, as a group of friends… It’d be fun to do LCD Soundsystem songs for the Printshop show.
RO: And the clown thing literally came because we needed a name and Karl said, “What about Clownsystem?”
KT: It was Halloween so we needed a costume too, and that worked almost as a play on the word, and LSD made sense to make it even goofier. We don’t even do drugs or LSD, especially.
RO: But it doesn’t stop our fans.
JG: And we don’t discourage it.
KT: We probably had three rehearsals for it [and] played five songs. I remember watching grainy iPhone videos of our set and it was really profound, the way people were responding to it. And then we played another party that same week.
RO: The Interrobang ‽ party—that’s another concentric circle. A lot of us are in the Interrobang ‽ parading krewe that has rolled in Chewbacchus and in Bohème for many years.
KT: And then we got invited to play the Krewe de Lune’s Space Ball one year.
JG: We’ve played, like, five Space Balls, with different bands, all the different versions.
RO: And became very good friends with Jose Guadarrama, who was one of the producers of Space Ball for many years. He wanted us to start an ABBA cover band. It was really his idea. That was how BAAB originally formed, to play the Space Ball at The Howlin’ Wolf. As soon as we played it, we were like, “Oh no. We’ve done it again. We’ve picked a band everybody likes and we’ve played decent enough versions of their songs that people were able to sing along and everybody’s dressing in the costume theme.” Go figure. This equation works, again.
JG: And there are wild set pieces for that one—that first show, we had the disco ball connected to the butt plugs.
Excuse me?
RO: Our front lady was a burlesque performer and some of the people from BLOODRAVE have performed on stage with us a bunch of times so, yeah, there was a disco ball connected via chains to butt plugs to a bunch of dancers on stage.
KT: So as it lifted up, the chains pulled the people.
RO: We also played a show called “The Pit” where we set up in the middle of Saturn Bar and we lit everything from below in red, so everybody was standing around us and we were playing in the round and the last big BAAB show was “Exercise Your Demons,” which was an ‘80s workout theme where we had a demonic Richard Simmons lead the entirety of the Joy Theater.
KT: We had these great shadow boxes built where we had disco exercise dancers behind the shadow boxes so you could see their silhouettes. It was really, really cool.
When did you start building elaborate sets and props for your shows?
KT: The real moment where [LSD Clownsystem] went from just being a fun party band to building sets was when we did our first Clowntown show at Toulouse Theatre.
RO: We created a whole town with the clownies diner and a giant TV. There’s a newspaper called The Clowntown Tribune that Jake and I co-produce. It’s 12 pages with ads and personals and movie reviews and everything else. Jules [Merino] even made our own version of ANTIGRAVITY called PROLEVITY for one show.
That sounds like an entire musical production.
JG: For a while we went too far and were doing overly complicated plots to our shows. We did a time machine show where we came out of a time machine/clown car and we were like, “Oh no! We’re in the prehistoric era. Gotta get out of here!” and then we got back in the thing and went to the future and were too far in the future, and we got back into the clown car and came into the present. And we were talking to people after the show and they were like, “You did WHAT? We didn’t get any of that.”
RO: I wanted to add that that show opened with two monkeys coming out to the 2001: [A] Space Odyssey theme, worshiping a giant whippet canister coming from the ceiling. And later in that show, IGRAC, our friends, the aliens, sold the Joy Theater for 167 Vienna Sausages. Like Jake said, a lot of our friends were like, “Yeahhh, we didn’t catch any of that.”
JG: So we kinda honed in on our theme. Last weekend, it was “Diner.” Howe was out on the front of the stage making eggs and pieing himself, dropping food everywhere.
KT: We’re showing, not telling as much, is what we’ve learned.
How many bandmates have to vote “Yay” to push a concept through?
JG: It’s not really a voting process, it’s more of a conversation where we end up with some people in agreement while some people aren’t, and then we just have to start building shit… and then it’s pretty much Karl who says, “No. This is what’s happening.”
Top two flyers designed by Julianne Merino (Drools). Bottom flyer by Lindsay Tomlinson (a.k.a. Super Helpful)
Because building is your specialty, Karl? Can we do a breakdown of everybody’s roles in the band?
KT: A lot of groups like this try to do things democratically but one or two people have the best idea and it’s obvious. It’s not always me. Everyone has good ideas all the time and this band—all of our bands—it’s just that usually the person who’s most passionate about it is the one who pushes it through. But we do take votes and sit down and talk about what we want the thing to be, and usually the best idea wins. The building part of the band is usually done by me ‘cause that’s what I’m interested in, but everyone comes to help out.
RO: Whereas a lot of the aesthetic elements are directed by Jules, who’s more of a graphic designer and costumer.
KT: And she’s the one to often do the art that gets painted for the theme and she does all the flyers.
JG: It’s pretty collaborative. We all bring our strengths to each area. I’d say Ricky’s the cigar-chomping producer.
RO: The business clown.
KT: Ricky’s definitely the organized, managerial driver of the band. Ricky’s really good at following up on opportunities, making new opportunities for the band, and creating connections.
Ricky’s who put this together! I think the first time we officially met was at Noé Pierre’s backyard fundraiser after a bunch of his videography equipment had been stolen. We talked about how I play bass in one band and how Ricky plays in five (give or take), and the seed of this interview was born.
RO: It was! Jake’s usually the musical director, to a certain extent, especially in the karaoke band, and heads up the entire merch program. The three of us do a lot of the building stuff but mostly Karl heads that up. And everyone helps.
JG: A few people do the social media work. Kerem does a lot of spreadsheets.
RO: Howe leads a lot of the on-stage antics and often comes up with some degree of the narrative elements of the theme shows. Toren usually is the one who mixes and masters the records and is one of the more technical members of the group.
KT: Brooke is very much the pied piper/cheerleader.
RO: She gets the people to show up, and she writes the best lyrics.
KT: She’s a great frontperson. They all are, the four of them.
RO: Yeah, we have four band leader-frontpeople. It’s awesome.
LSD Clownsystem’s first show at the Allways Lounge for the New Orleans Community Print Shop Cover Band Show, Halloween 2018. Left to right: Snarl, Mister Softee, and Drools. (Photo courtesy LSD Clownsystem)
You mentioned that Brooke writes lyrics. Do the lyrics change for each show? Are there variations depending on the theme?
KT: There is an element of improv that the singers do onstage, but we’ve been writing our own music and we sprinkle that inside of our sets, so we’ll play four or five of our own songs amongst the LCD songs or other dance/punk songs that we play. In terms of changing the lyrics for the LCD songs, we do that for a couple but generally, not really. We kinda play those mostly to the record.
I remember you guys on stage being like, “And thank you, most of all, LCD Soundsystem, for not suing us.”
JG: We think they like us! They think we’re funny.
KT: Jake has met them.
JG: Yeah, I went to a show in New York one time and I texted our friend [and current LCD Soundsystem member] Korey Richey and he brought me and, like, seven of my friends backstage. We met them all, and James Murphy comes out reading our Clowntown newspaper and says, “This is pretty funny. Of the songs we played tonight, how many of my songs do you play?” And I told him, “Most of them?” He said, “OK, which ones don’t you play?” And I told him we don’t play “Losing My Edge” ‘cause it felt too personal and too much their story. He was like, “Change the lyrics. Make it about clowns. Make it about New Orleans.”
RO: We had a really fun time this past weekend. It was our first time playing at Prospect Park in New York City. We played at LeFrak Pavilion at Lakeside, which is a roller skating rink. Many of our family members were there. We had a lot of old friends show up. There were people on roller skates. It was rad. We had a really good turnout and got to collaborate with friends we met playing festivals. Our friend Adam, from House of Yes, brought in some drag queens to do a bit, the Fou Fou Ha collective. A really cool DJ called Amber Valentine opened for us.
Since you were on LCD’s home turf, do you think some of the people showing up were expecting the OG band?
RO: I hope not! One of the first people to show up was wearing an LCD Soundsystem shirt.
JG: We played a lot of different songs that we don’t usually play, including our originals. And even though we learned the [LCD] songs how they [play] them before we start genre-fucking them, we do mess with them enough so you can tell, even with your eyes closed, that it’s not the same band.
KT: And then you open your eyes and it’s absolute insanity on stage.
RO: Somebody talk about the Time Sandwich.
KT: A way that we’ve structured our set to be our own is we took three of their songs and put them together. We start with the song “Us V Them” and then, when there’s a dynamic shift, we go into “Time to Get Away.” Then we go back to “Us V Them.” Then when there’s another dynamic shift we go into “Beat Connection.” All three of those songs talk about time a lot, so it makes sense as a sandwich.
RO: Me and Jake especially grew up on jam bands and it’s something we stole from Phish and all those second-wave jam bands.
Let’s talk about your originals!
KT: We’ve almost Trojan-horsed our way into getting our originals in front of a lot of people, which is really funny. We have, like, six that we’ve played.
JG: One of them, when we started playing it, people were singing it in the crowd. It’s crazy. We had released it that day and they were up in front singing it.
RO: Oh yeah, that happens. I wonder if people are just trying to sing along sometimes.
KT: There’s been times when some of the originals almost get a bigger pop than some of the covers we play. I’m always so happy when that happens. They just want to hear good music and fun upbeat stuff which, as songwriters, is what we’re going for.
RO: It feels like that’s not how it’s supposed to go because “Shut Up and Play the Hits” is what you’d expect.
How do you write originals with so many band members?
JG: In the middle of a tour, two summers ago, we stopped at Howe’s house up in Connecticut. We shacked up there for a couple of days and he kinda led us through a songwriting retreat where everyone took turns running a song and everybody contributed, spitballing, no bad ideas. Lyricists would run off to the corner and write some lyrics and the rest of us would work on the groove. Me and the other synth player would figure out what kinds of sounds we were doing and try not to get in each other’s way. We spent two or three days just heavy BBQing and swimming and songwriting. A lot of the songs came out of that. Mostly the singers do the lyrical content ‘cause they’re the ones that have to sing it. Our lyrics tend to be more about partying in the Bywater and more New Orleans-centric stuff.
RO: Like, “Where were you for the Hubig’s Pie fire?” One of the originals, I wrote the lyrics and the melodies and brought it to the group but then it morphed from there. Whereas with others, a singer came with lyrics and we turned it into something.
Let’s talk about tour a little bit. How do you make it worthwhile or even feasible to hit the road with this many humans in a van?
JG: We go vertical. We stack all our shit up in the back of the van on wire racks and we wear top hats while we do it.
“Choose Yr Own Adventure” at Toulouse Theatre, May 2023. Photo by (Avery Leigh White)
So big top is the LSD thing but top hats are the karaoke band thing?
KT: Yeah, the karaoke band is the silliest, by far. We’re a silly bunch of dudes.
RO: I always say that it’s the cardio band. I feel that the work I’ve done in that band has made me a much better musician, especially when it comes to things like stamina and capacity to play really long shows.
JG: And learning a lot of music.
KT: And reacting, on stage, to when someone might miss something or you yourself miss a part. It’s really just time spent on stage playing with people, communicating with each other.
I didn’t even think of the fact that you basically have a new bandmate for every single song!
JG: New bandmate and no idea what the caliber of that bandmate is at all.
RO: And we often play a minimum of three hours, sometimes up to six hours.
How many songs have you had to learn for that project?
RO: There are about 250 songs on the main list plus 75 on the champagne list, which people pay us extra to play.
JG: It’s close to 400 and we have biannual drafts where we sit around and think of 50 new songs to add to the list every half year. I have my list ready.
RO: Me too. This summer, when we went on tour, the Clownsystem played at Bonnaroo with the karaoke band and BAAB, and then the karaoke band did a tour up to New York, over to Cleveland, to Electric Forest. And then the Clownsystem met us and we all came back down together, so we were like the mule band too.
How did you guys smell by the end of it?
KT: We smell OK!
RO: One of the benefits of being in giant bands is that we have friends everywhere.
KT: And we’re all in our 30s now, so we have friends who are a little more established. So we’re not sleeping on couches every night.
RO: We still do that, but not every night.
JG: And we do a lot of cooking for ourselves. We don’t eat badly on tour.
If your gear is stacked vertically, then most of the van is available for seating, and you just mentioned that all three bands kinda co-toured at some point, which adds up to about 11 members. This leads to the impeccable visual of you getting pulled over and out pours a literal clown car of bandmates.
JG: A dozen clowns, a satanic band, or four guys in top hats and tuxedo t-shirts. I’ve had that thought a lot, driving home from gigs, thinking, If I get pulled over right now, dressed like a demon, how do I even begin to explain?
For more info on LSD Clownsystem, including an organized catalog of past shows, photos, videos, and links to other bands and comrades, check out lsdclownsystem.com. For more information on BAAB, check out @baab.666 on Instagram. For more info on NOW! That’s What I Call A Karaoke Band! check out nowkaraokeband.com.
Top photo by Leone Julitte: Polaroids from the “20,000 Clowns Under The Sea” show at the Joy Theater, October 2023.
