Track Stars: OK Go

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NOT LONG AGO, OK Go was known primarily to power-poppers and public-radioheads. "This American Life" had made the energetic Chicago boys its house band.

Then they started homegrowing their videos.

More than 28 million views later, if you haven't seen the foursome bustin' a move on eight artfully arranged treadmills, you might want to get your grandkids to tell you about the YouTube.

To turn viral fame into meatspace success is no mean feat, requiring mammoth legwork. It was a tough, exhausting slog for OK Go, and frontman Damian Kulash's trip to New Orleans for a Future of Music Coalition retreat was a welcome respite. "I really fell in love with the city and had my faith in music revived," he says.

"I'd been on tour at that point for 31 months straight. Two-and-a-half years on the road is a really long time, and it tends to slowly transform music into an assembly-line product. Moving at that speed, you do just see the most homogeneous lowest common denominator of the country."

But the Big Easy stood out from the pack. "One thing that I am fairly certain of is that there are really no other places in America where music is the same as it is in New Orleans," Kulash says. "It's hard to discuss when you're not actually in New Orleans. This is sort of a given to people there, and people literally just don't believe it elsewhere. On any Sunday for most of the year, if you go out on the streets of New Orleans, people are parading around dancing. They actually grab pots and pans and bottles and trumpets and tubas and drums and go outside and parade around, dancing and playing songs.

"It's a completely transformative experience for a musician who has been in a tour bus performing the same song night in and night out across the country and across the world.

"It gives you faith that music doesn't have to just be your personal iPod bubble or the confines of your car stereo or your ringtone or whatever."

You can tap into that vibe Saturday, when OK Go teams up with loud 'n' proud NOLA hornblowers Bonerama for a special benefit concert at the 9:30 Club. They'll be performing tracks off "You're Not Alone," a five-song iTunes-exclusive EP that drops on Fat Tuesday. Like the D.C. show and an earlier concert at Tipitina's, the set benefits musician-relief organization Sweet Home New Orleans and Al "Carnival Time" Johnson, a Crescent City mainstay now stranded in Houston.

"It's not that tall an order to get him back," Kulash observes. "When you've got an elder statesman of the scene just a few thousand dollars away from living here again, well, that we can do."

» 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW; Sat., 8 p.m., $20 (general admission), $60 (VIP); 800-955-5566. (U St.-Cardozo)

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon

Photo by Dusan Reljin