Alumni Band Puts a Modern Spin on a Classic Horror Film

There's no one word or phrase that perfectly captures the distinctive musical style of the Philadelphia band Golden Ball, though many have tried:“freak folk,”“psychedelic,”“rhythmically oriented psych-pop,” and sometimes just plain“offbeat and weird.”

Keyboardist Sarah Jacoby '06 particularly bristles at that last descriptor.“We have distinctive voices, we all sing together, and we play instruments that aren't typical,” she says, referencing her two synthesizers, one an old analog Juno 60 and a new digital version, a Yamaha ds55.

Her husband, sometime Golden Ball drummer Timothy Tebordo '03, adds,“The band is known for interlocked rhythms and stream-of-consciousness lyrics.”

However you describe the band's sound, there's no question that it was exactly what the staff of the Philadelphia Film Festival was looking for last spring when they asked Golden Ball to write an original score for the classic 1920 silent movie Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring John Barrymore. The group performed its score live during a screening of the film at the Prince Music Theater on April 14, 2008.

When the request came from the Film Festival, the band was on a brief hiatus while members concentrated on individual projects. The group quickly reassembled, reinstating Jacoby, who'd been part of Golden Ball since 2006, on keyboards and adding newcomer Tebordo as drummer. (“It's a fluid line-up; they pick up and drop members at will,” explains Tebordo.“Whenever they need a live drummer, I'm their guy.”)

The band had only six weeks to memorize the film and write as detailed a score as possible.“It was to the point of, ‘When he opens the door and bends his finger, then we change the key,”' says Jacoby. She found the experience occasionally daunting but ultimately exhilarating:“Doing so much in so little time, applying ourselves so intensely, was invigorating.”

The morning of the performance, the band members arrived at the Prince Music Theater to set up and have a sound check, and, to their shock, discovered that the reel cut of the film scheduled to be shown that evening was not the same as the DVD cut they'd been working with for the past six weeks, even though the Film Festival had assured them that the two films were the same.“We started watching [the reel cut],” recalls Jacoby,“and within the first two scenes we saw things happen that we hadn't been anticipating.” The musicians barely had time to digest this turn of events when the theater informed them that they'd have to leave, to make room for the first film screening of the day.

With some members near tears, the band met for brunch to discuss its next move:“We weren't sure it was even worth it [to perform],” says Jacoby. The musicians devoted the next four hours to learning everything they could about the differences between the two Jekyll and Hyde cuts. Jacoby found a site called Video Watchdog that had written an essay on this very subject; as luck would have it, the group's subsequent question-filled e-mail to the site was answered immediately by one of the few employees working on a Sunday. She sent the band a PDF of the original essay, and the musicians were relieved to find that the differences in the two versions were not significant.

“Fortunately, our parts had been written to be repeated as necessary,” says Tebordo.“The parts were short themes that could be repeated to fill a scene. The music was to match the feeling of the scene without having to necessarily match the timing.”

“We just riffed on the parts we'd already created,” adds Jacoby.“It wasn't as bad as we thought it would be.”

She considers the evening's screening and performance a success, though audience reaction was mixed. Some appreciated the score, while others didn't understand its purpose. Perhaps one elderly woman whom Jacoby overheard summed it up best:“It was really loud, but I liked it!”

(“It didn't seem loud to us,” Jacoby says.)

For Tebordo, it was something of a shock to go from six weeks of rehearsing in an enclosed space to a live performance in a cavernous auditorium.“It's a different experience to no longer hear the band in a vacuum,” he says.

Today, Golden Ball continues to perform at various venues throughout the Philadelphia area with Jacoby on keyboard and Tebordo sporadically on drums, but the couple is also focusing on its new band, Tinmouthy, which Tebordo describes as a“ramshackle pop band.” Jacoby plays keyboard and sings harmony; Tebordo plays guitar and writes songs. In the meantime, Tebordo works as a records management contractor for the EPA and Jacoby is a freelance graphic designer and writer for such publications as Philadelphia Weekly and Spur (founded by her '06 classmates Asher Spiller and Scott Sheppard).

To see clips of Jekyll and Hyde as scored by Golden Ball and to hear samples of the band's music, visit www.myspace.com/goldenball.

-Brenna McBride