Among Lady Bey and other red carpet slayers, fame-marked in Givenchy and hip slits and fleshy-weird indecentware this year at the Grammys, there will be three middle-aged men who sing about fish sticks and yetis.
This is Recess Monkey’s first nomination.
The Seattle home boys, up for “Best Children’s Album,” have not yet decided who or what they’ll be wearing, but they promise to keep it classy.
Sadly, Korum Bischoff will not resurrect his dancing bear costume — too sweaty. Neither will he don the lucky pajamas that clothed him when he awoke to a zillion texts and found out he’d be traveling to the Staples Center in February and (hopefully) locking eyes with Paul McCartney.
Nah, for the biggest day ever in the band’s 11-year history, they’ll probably stick with suits, Bischoff said. Although they could tuck white paper hats into their back pockets in honor of the ice-cream truck cover of their anointed album “Novelties.” But that’s just a wardrobe what-if. They only heard the big news last Tuesday and Bischoff’s still giggling involuntarily.
“It’s something you dream about — for me, since I was a little kid,” said the drummer, who is also the marketing director at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. “I’ve had friends that have been nominated, who have performed at the Grammys as part of the backing band for Macklemore or whatever, but I never really thought I would be going in my life, especially in this capacity.”
Recess Monkey was founded by a trio of schoolteachers — Drew Holloway, Jack Forman and Daron Henry — in 2005.
Bischoff came on in 2012, after some power networking brokered by his third-grader. (His son Calder introduced him to Johnny Bregar, who introduced him to the Recess Monkey gang, who Bischoff later corralled into a show at Teatro ZinZanni, where he ran the children’s programming.)
Then simple addition took over: When Henry bounced, Bischoff stepped in.
Like many kiddie rockers before him, Bischoff traded the weepy songs of his indie heart for happy, goofy unpretentiousness. Before becoming a dad, he performed with the jazz-ish rock band The Dead Science.
He said it was hard to be cool, so he relished the switch to children’s music.
“What I like about Recess Monkey is we just write songs about whatever we think is funny,” he said. Which, at the moment, is mustaches, donut machines and lovestruck unicorns.
Recess Monkey devotees, “monkeynauts” for the true buffs, will have to launch their web browsers to see if their jongleurs receive the coveted gramophone trophy.
As one of the lesser-known categories, “Best Children’s Album” does not get play with the Drakes and Biebers of the world at the Staples Center. Eighty-three rounds of diva is a lot to get through, so the fate of spoken word albums and jazz cats is announced from the Hollywood Theater in the afternoon and streamed live for interested plebes. That way, Kanye has time to rant and other people have time to perform epically or terribly.
The 59th Grammy Awards, presented by the Recording Academy, will air on Sunday, Feb. 12.
Visit www.cbs.com/shows/grammys for more details about the pre-show, majestically titled the “Premiere Ceremony.”
Recess Monkey’s Grammy-nominated album “Novelties” can be purchased or streamed at www.amazon.com/Novelties-Amazon-Original-Recess-Monkey/dp/B01FAB74PW.
