Family tales that star strangers

“Is there some way to lift the screen?” Tina Pina Trachtenburg asks during a late-afternoon sound check at the Silverlake Lounge. “People in the back won’t be able to see.”

This is important. The screen is to the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players what the sail was to Odysseus. It’s what gets them where they’re going. Without the screen and their projector, they’d be just another oddball pop act. With them, the New York trio is making its California debut as one of indie-rock’s most buzzed-about bands.

Their one-man road crew finds a dairy crate, but the screen’s tripod base is too wide. A chair works better, but the roadie still has to duct tape two of the screen’s legs to the railing around the low stage.

“It’s always an adventure, every show,” says Tina’s husband, Jason Trachtenburg, peering at the procedure through Coke-bottle-thick glasses. That’s probably the shortest sentence the singer and songwriter will utter all Wednesday evening, either in conversation or to the audience during the show.

Jason and Tina’s 9-year-old daughter, Rachel, has already set up her drums, and she drifts around the funky neighborhood bar as her mom tests the projector. She seems preternaturally composed and says she loves touring and performing.

The images that Tina aims at the screen are a stranger’s vacation photos. They’re the first slides -- from a Seattle estate sale -- the couple ever picked up, just something to use to see if their secondhand projector worked.

Then one night Jason, an enthusiastic and confident but perpetually struggling musician, decided to try a songwriting exercise and composed a song narrating the set of slides. He played “Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959” for his wife the next morning, and their life would never be the same.

“I loved it. I thought it was just incredible,” Tina says during a pre-concert dinner at a nearby Mexican restaurant. “I was completely floored. It was funny and political, and it was kind of sad and scary and kind of creepy in a way. It had all these elements. OK, let’s find a place to go, let’s perform this, I’ll do the slides.... Come on, this is like genius.”

A lot of people have come to agree. After scouring Seattle sales for more slide collections and writing songs about them, and after adding Rachel to the act and donning the unusual costumes Tina designed, they quickly rose to the top of Seattle’s music scene.

Nonetheless, they found they still had to support themselves with their pet-care business, the Dog Squad. But another rock music capital, New York, beckoned. They gave away 5,000 excess slides at their last Seattle show and headed east in their pink and blue van. A press kit and homemade CD quickly earned them residency at the Fez nightclub.

“Our first show was on a Saturday night,” says Tina, 39, a warm, friendly woman with Dr. Seuss-style tufts sprouting from her red-tinted hair. “On Sunday morning we got a call at home from a writer for the New Yorker wanting to interview us.”

Other publications followed, from the dailies to the rock rags, along with National Public Radio and “The Conan O’Brien Show,” where they performed “Look at Me,” a tune tracing the recreational lives of two nurses through their parties, barbecues and visits to the bathroom.

When they do the song at the Silverlake Lounge, it’s the full version, with some naughty shots network TV wouldn’t show. Jason’s songs -- bouncy, hook-driven, quirky pop in the vein of They Might Be Giants -- have a way of creating a poignancy as they describe these lives, but there’s also something undeniably voyeuristic about it, and some critics have called the Trachtenburgs’ approach an unpleasant invasion of privacy.

“We hear a lot of that all the time, that it’s exploitation of the subjects,” says the motor-mouthed Jason, 33. “But I really think we treat them with respect. And I really think that most of the subjects in our songs would be proud that their lives culminated in such a way. We treat them with respect, we really do. And humor.”

Humor is high on the agenda at the Silverlake Lounge show, the first of an extended series at various Southland venues. But there’s a serious subtext, say the Trachtenburgs, that emerges most in their mocking treatments of internal corporate presentations.

The centerpiece is what Jason calls a “six-song rock opera” based on one of the family’s favorite treasures, the slides from a 1977 McDonald’s convention. (The piece is on a CD the Trachtenburgs sell at their shows but will be widely available in September when indie label Bar/None releases the album, enhanced with a visual component on a couple of tracks.)

“Ever since I was young,” Jason says during dinner, “I thought it was really important to have what me and my friend Randy used to call MWM -- music with meaning. We were like 13, 14 years old, before I even wrote songs, we wanted music with meaning -- lyrics that have some sort of significance and aren’t just about mundane fictitious relationships or about your inner feelings. I don’t care about some songwriter’s inner feelings. I really want to know about the state of the world and the state of art or the state of song....

“Obviously there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world, and I feel that this is the best way we can address it and handle it. This is our contribution to it, just being able to say, ‘Well this is the state of what corporations have done to us, and now we’re all in a way slaves to their interests.’ I feel that that’s one of our underlying messages.”

“It’s done through irony, you know,” adds Tina, likening the Trachtenburgs’ art to “The Simpsons’ ” multilevel subversiveness. “Like some people can see it and just not see it -- ‘That’s cute, you guys are cute.’ Where others are, ‘Oh my God, whoa, that’s intense.’ ”

*

The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players

Where: Silverlake Lounge, 2906 Sunset Blvd., Silver Lake

When: Wednesday, 8 p.m.

Price: $10

Contact: (323) 666-2407

Also

Where: Viper Room, 8852 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood

When: July 8, 10 p.m.

Price: $10.

Contact: (310) 358-1880

Also

Where: Tangier on July 9 and the Derby on July 16.