It’s Halloween, and the streets are overrun with armies of zombies, vampires and Lady Gagas (or various combinations thereof). Richard Marsella has showed up for our interview at a Queen and Dufferin neighbourhood café wearing a hat that belongs to a ghost. It’s a dapper, broad-brimmed, black-felt number with a jaunty cloth rose in the ribbon, the sort of topper a shady businessman might’ve worn in the ’40s or ’50s. As Marsella explains, it’s less a costume than a character manifestation: it turns out the hat symbolizes a major turning point in his evolution from a mild-mannered salesman into the mad carnival barker and madcap composer known today as Friendly Rich.

Over a decade ago, Marsella was a music student at U of T. Fed up with the program, he dropped out, deciding he’d keep his creative pursuits on the down-low while pursuing a full-time career selling insurance.

“I was going to be like Charles Ives, a man with a fine beard,” he says with a grin, alluding to the legendary early-20th-century American composer who ran an insurance company by day. A short while into his tenure, Marsella’s wacky uncle — the man who owned the snazzy hat Marsella sports today — suffered a heart attack.

“I went to see him in the hospital,” he says, gesturing to the hat. “The guy in the bed behind him said, ‘You’re not an insurance man!’ He could tell right away that I was more of a creative soul — not that Charles Ives wasn’t — but this guy said, ‘You’ve got to believe in what you sell, and you don’t believe in life insurance.’ At the time, I was in my early 20s. I didn’t have a life-insurance policy, but here I was selling them!

“I’m a pretty good salesman,” he adds, “but I much prefer selling things that I’m passionate about.”

The kid quit the insurance game and went back to school to get his master’s degree in music education. (The hat was bequeathed to him in a will some time later.) But he parlayed his gift for the hard sell into convincing people to buy something much more out-there than life insurance: Friendly Rich and the Lollipop People, a vaudevillian nine-piece act with a penchant for confrontational spectacles and surreal orchestration.



Marsella’s vision tends toward ambitious projects that confound even his most devoted fans. This week, he’s unveiling what he refers to as a “marathon” multimedia show based on Pictures at an Exhibition, the 1874 suite composed by Russian wild card Modest Mussorgsky. He’s just released an album that features his own version of Pictures — “rearranged for the modern world,” it showcases the ample heaviosity of famed avant-garde bassist Trevor Dunn (whose work includes stints with Mr. Bungle and John Zorn), along with the unconventional instrumentation of the Lollipop People, many of whom are jazz- and classically trained virtuosi. Pictures is Rich’s fifth album with the Lollipops since their formation in 2004; they’ve tirelessly played dozens of shows, opened for bands including the Dresden Dolls and toured in Europe, steadily amassing a fan base despite their not fitting neatly into the worlds of classical, jazz or pop.

Marsella originally tested the waters with his Pictures during a late-2007 residency at the Cameron House, which he dubbed “Not-So-Classic Albums Live.” In addition to the Mussorgsky, the strange series included performances of obscure works by Rush, Renaldo and the Loaf, and Adriano Celentano, a.k.a. “the Italian Elvis.”

“The only recollection I have of my youth and music is my mom playing Adriano Celentano,” he sighs. “Beautiful, beautiful tunes, and kitschy as hell.… That was me kind of making fun of the Classic Albums Live thing,” referring to the ongoing series featuring local players covering classic rock LPs in their entirety. “That was fun. For the 14 people who got it, they really enjoyed it. I mean, Classic Albums Live does employ a lot of musicians, but come on! It’s ridiculous.”

Mussorgsky’s celebrated composition has been arranged and ripped off by dozens of artists, from Ravel to Michael Jackson (the final section, “The Great Gate of Kiev,” was an intro for his ’96 HIStory tour) to Method Man (who jacked the “Promenade” theme for ’94’s Tical). But few of those works rival Marsella’s singularly weird approach: his version of the 9th section, “Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua,” is a sporadically melodic cacophony of keening, grunting and clucking voices.

It’s certainly bizarre, but Marsella insists his project also comes from a place of deep reverence.
“Before I die, I want to do, like, a Russian Masters series,” he says excitedly. “This is the first part of that. I want to do Scheherazade, by Rimsky-Korsakov, for a weirdo ensemble. That’s what got me into music. It essentially changed my life and got me into wanting to grow a really long beard and be a composer.”



In his teens, Marsella was a frequent visitor to the Brampton Public Library, where he’d salivate over the classical music collection the way some pubescent boys pore over comic books. “I was also getting into Pee-wee’s Playhouse and stuff like that, learning how creative the art form could be,” he offers. “Masturbating a lot. Being socially awkward  — those were my teenage years!” At the time, he was also taking classical guitar lessons (a pursuit he carried into university), and he gravitated to the same recording of Scheherazade every week. “It totally inspired me,” he says.

Of course, it’s a long way from iconic Russian classical recordings to the strange Happenings that comprise a Friendly Rich show. His Pictures performance, for example, will boast a “nightmare machine” invented by a crew of Orangeville hippies, a staged “bear attack” and local performance artist Ulysses Castellanos setting fire to his penis.

Confrontation and discomfort are key elements of the Friendly Rich experience. (It’s no coincidence that he composed background music for MTV’s Tom Green Show for several years.) Marsella discovered how those factors could heighten the intensity of a performance while watching British outfit The Tiger Lilies’ (self-described as “the world’s foremost death oompah band”) production of the “junk opera” Shockheaded Peter a few years back.

“It was a weird thing, and it really inspired a lot of the Friendly Rich show. It starts with a character that comes out and just stares at the crowd for, like, 10 minutes, stone-faced. I was like, ‘Oh god, this is killing me,’ but I also realized [discomfort] was a really interesting emotion to work with. And I do it naturally. All through university, I’d be such a failure with women. Three sentences in, and it’s like, ‘Soooo… what hand do you wipe with?’”

But beyond a mere celebration of social awkwardness and guerilla tactics, Marsella’s idiosyncratic manoeuvres are founded on a very solid pedagogical platform. He’s a firm believer in the importance of using humour and anarchy as a tool to involve people in listening to and creating music, an approach he finessed during his studies at U of T. One of the advisors Marsella connected with while working on his master’s degree was R. Murray Schafer, a veteran music educator and arguably Canada’s most lauded living composer.

In Schafer, Marsella discovered a guy whose unconventional techniques and defiant attitude made him a kindred spirit.

“Schafer is serious about having a sense of humour. The thing is, kids are gonna laugh at the idea of a whoopee cushion organ, but it’s still an instrument,” he says. “He’s written me letters in which he’s said — it’s really far out, and I’ve got it in writing, from Schafer — ‘You’re doing some of the most creative stuff of any Canadian composer.’ I’m like, ‘What the fuck? That’s amazing!’ I’m totally gonna frame it someday, right?

Appropriately, Schafer has inspired one of Marsella’s most ambitious projects. In addition to some of his current preoccupations — that Russian Masters series is in the works, along with a puppet opera that may become a collaboration with Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer — Marsella’s particularly excited about his long-term scheme, a public installation that will serve as a de facto shrine to Schafer.

“I’m working on a proposal for a musical playground,” he eagerly offers, “with large-scale musical instruments. I’ve got [comic artist and Pee-wee’s Playhouse set designer] Gary Panter locked in as the designer for it. It’ll cost a couple of million dollars, this project, so it’s not gonna happen overnight.

“I’m currently still in negotiations with Brampton for it. I’m trying to get a feasibility study done. But that’s one of my long-term municipal projects, to get that off the ground. For me, it’d be like a centre for music education. Kids would come in by the busloads. Classes of kids would come in and play in this park. And I don’t know what it’s gonna be called, but it’ll be named after R. Murray Schafer. He’s totally supportive of it. When I mentioned it to him, he was like, ‘Oh yeah, I had that idea in the ’70s.’ It almost seems like what I’m doing is like Muppet Babies — Schafer Babies or something.

“He really sees [my music] as kind of Dadaist…. He’s read too much, that guy. He knows shit that I don’t even know about what I’m doing, and he applies it to what I’m doing.” Marsella laughs. “I think he especially appreciates the sense of constructive anarchy that I’m bringing to what I do. It’s been great to get his support. In a world where it’s kind of shaky — I don’t fit into indie pop, and I don’t fit into classical/new music — having Schafer to bounce ideas off of, it means a lot. And the fact that we connected is… I don’t believe in anything, right? But it’s kind of weird.”