by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

In case you hadn’t heard, Mr. Dressup and Lawrence Welk are dead, a point brought up on the Bob Wiseman-produced We Need a New F-Word, the new album from Brampton, Ontario’s Friendly Rich and his “oddball orchestra” the Lollipop People. The ghosts of the tickle-trunk titan and the variety-show VIP, however, are no doubt hovering over the goings-on of Rich and company, giving each other looks of approval and apprehension, disgust and delight.

Fronted by the gravelly growl of Friendly Rich (aka Richard Marsella, TV-tune composer, populist musical agitator and festival founder), the classically-trained Lollipop People crank out creaky, crepuscular, revisionist orch-folk that pokes around the darker corners of our collective unconscious.

Titles like “Miscarriage Waltz” and “The Ayatollah” might suggest adults-only fare. But the Lollipop People, and even more so their monthly Friendly Rich Show events in Toronto (Webcast at www.friendlyrich.com), owe a debt to classic lo-fi variety and kiddie programs. Their gig at Lederhosen Lucil’s A Night Aquatic event will be strictly a musical set, which means we’ll have to wait for a Friendly Rich Show tour to catch the puppets, the crank calls, the cartoons and the antics of Soot, a large, sinister, egg-obsessed mime (see photo above, and shudder).

For all their grim and gruesome elements, though—or perhaps because of them?—the band and show might be right up the average rugrat’s alley. They certainly push the right trauma/nostalgia buttons in open-minded grown-ups. “I want to be able to entertain somebody at the age of four or 80,” says Rich.

“We live in an age when kids have access to so much wonderful, satirical, dark stuff. The literature they read is very dark. They’re on with us. I mean, We Need a New F-Word is not necessarily written as a children’s entertainment CD. But the dark elements that are in there are with us here on the planet, and I’m choosing to write about some of those.

“I think if my work accidentally got into the hands of a nine-year-old, they might go, ‘Wow,’ instead of, ‘Oh my God!’ Letting your kids near a television with Britney Spears on it is far more dangerous than what I’m presenting.”

One could go further than that. Scratch the surface and you recognize some very admirable ideas at play in Rich’s oeuvre, ones children really should be exposed to—creative recycling of both trashed materials and dusty ideas, acceptance and even celebration of society’s misfits, and active community involvement, particularly in places regarded as cultural backwaters or artistic wastelands.

When he isn’t busy with band or show, Rich instructs children in the making of musical instruments from recycled crap, oversees the Brampton Indie Arts Festival, and has recently been negotiating a musical playground with his town’s councillors.

“Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver—they’re not short of identity. But what’s happening in Dildo, Newfoundland is equally important. Guelph, Brampton—we can’t just write off these communities as suburban losers doing nothing with their time. It’s completely not the case, if you dig a little deeper. Yes, you have your serial rapists in each city, and you have your creative weirdos in each city. It’s the people doing positive things with their madness that are putting their cities on the map and giving them identity.”

With Famulous, Lucille and Dandi Wind
at Lambi on Friday, March 31, 9 p.m., $12

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