Live musicians: Friendly Fire

As Real Life slams into Second Life at a great rate of knots, ask yourself this -- are you adequately prepared to rock and/or roll? Actually, the answer to that question is moot, because if you're not, Friendly Fire has enough rock and roll to cover everyone!

Friendly Fire -- the dynamic duo of Case Munro (guitar and vox), MacKenzie Rasmusen (bass and vox) and "Soft Ware" (drum machine) -- rocked the stage and the crowd to their foundations at The Beach Bum on the Monday eve that we caught their act; They truly brought the place down with glamtastic tunes, proud, prominent bass and amazing breath control, and then built it back up with their beautifully political and catchy lyrics. Highly charged punk power-pop all around.

Since August 2007, Friendly Fire have been rocking the Second Life grid with favorites such as "I like to watch", "Cardiac City" and the all-new "23-skidoo", featuring lyrics like "23-skidoo and I don't know what to do – it's all so confusing, need some more self-abusing in the night." And who could forget "You're a dick", specially dedicated to all the people 'who pissed us off today,' testing both 'the maturity of the sim and the immaturity of the band' with a welter of enjoyably foul-mouthed lyrical concoctions.

The list of the band's favorite influences caused our editors to balk a little -- we think when the list passed into the hundreds they went into shock and wandered off, dazed. So let's just say that it's as eclectic and nifty a list as you might hope to see, ranging as widely as The Beatles and Aerosmith to Bugs Bunny, Terry Pratchett and Marilyn Manson. It's a wonder they've got a musical style at all!

MV: How did you get started in music and what was your first instrument?

FF: 'We were both very into music from a young age. At 14 I got my first electric guitar and learned how to play. I started my first band shortly after, and have been playing in bands ever since. Mack had fooled around with the guitar a bit and had taken piano lessons as a kid, but hadn't had any real musical experience until 2000, when we pressed her into service with a band called The Informers.

The idea had been to use computer programmed bass parts with me playing guitar and my long time drummer playing, er, the drums. It didn't work very well. We had asked Mack to help out by starting and stopping the computer tracks, and doing some backup vocals etc. When it was clear that it wasn't going to work with the computer, we got the idea to have Mack play the bass parts on a keyboard. That did work, and we quickly got a gig at a local watering hole, and spent the next 18 months playing every weekend there.

In 2004 when we formed Friendly Fire, Mack decided she was tired of the keyboard, so she got a bass guitar and figured it out as we went.'

MV: What hinders you in your art and in your life? How do you get around this?

FF: 'If I had to say one thing, it's lack of time. We gig a ton in Second Life, this week alone between Tuesday and Sunday we will do 11 shows. Keeping up listings in Second Life events and MySpace, updating pics, writing new material and programming drums, correspondence and bookings, there's always something that needs doing. We each put a good 40-50 hours a week into the band, and that's on top of mundane day jobs to keep the rent paid lol. We also have other Second Life projects, we are co-owners of The Glamshack nightclub, and Mack owns a gesture shop, called appropriately enough Gestures by Mack.

We work around this by subsisting on 5 hours sleep a night.' [Funny, we do much the same here at Massively, when we can find enough time to actually sleep]

MV: Is this your primary job? If not, what keeps you off the streets?

FF: 'We do have boring day jobs, although we are hoping to change that in the near future.'

MV: What other art do you create?

FF: 'I write silly web comics that my brother draws, and we post them on some blogs and our own website. Mack creates gestures, and she's got quite the knack for it. Her store has been very successful, which cracks us up as we never expected it.'

MV: Are you partial to a musical genre that your voice or other instrument is not suited to?

FF: 'I like jazz fusion guitar stuff a la Jeff Beck, but I am not nearly proficient enough of a player to pull it off. On some level though, all that stuff kind of ends up in the stew, even if no one else can hear it.'

MV: What path did you take to get to where you are in Second Life music today?

FF: 'Although we didn't know it at the time, our path to Second Life began when I got into a post gig scuffle with our old drummer and tore up a tendon in my knee, Memorial Day weekend 2006. It was a dumb thing, he had been unhappy for a while, and we let tensions get out of control. He left the band, and we limped along (figuratively and literally) for another year with a different drummer. Great guy, but the chemistry wasn't the same.'

FF: 'By the spring of 2007 we were seriously considering calling it quits. I started playing around with a drum machine program, and we did a couple of demos like that and were pretty happy with how they sounded. I began to get the idea that we could gig in Second Life. I had been lurking on the fringes of the Second Life music scene for about a year at this point. I would log in and go to live shows and just stand there, taking it in. Mack couldn't figure out what I was doing ("You're just standing there? OMG that's even more boring than Everquest!") but I had the sense that something big was going on.

From there it all just kind of fell together. I first rezzed Case Munro in April 2007, we did our last official Real Life gig in early June, Mack rezzed in late June. It took us a couple of months to work up a set and get comfortable playing with the canned drums, it was difficult at first to find the energy. We did our first Second Life show in August 2007, and we've been playing regularly ever since.

Playing in Second Life has been so cool on so many levels. We slugged it out with our original music playing around town, and it's an uphill battle. Sitting in an empty bar until 2:00 AM on a Tuesday night, playing to the chairs and lucky to cover gas money and a bar tab,

it's rough sometimes. In Second Life however, we play to a worldwide audience every night, and when the show is over, we're already home! We're very happy about it, and don't understand why more bands haven't figured it out yet. Performing online, whether in Second Life or whatever comes next, is totally the future. We've had more than a few RL peers get angry with us for going virtual, but as far as we're concerned, Second Life saved our band.'

MV: Thanks for your time!

So if you're not completely overwhelmed with information, head into Second Life to catch up with Case and Mack – try them at The Glamshack, or check out one of the live music groups for listings. On the web, try Friendly Fire's homepage or their obligatory MySpace page. And wherever you may find them – glam them a beer!