Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players

What would happen if you found a bunch of slides from a 1977 McDonald’s corporate-marketing meeting and, in a flash of inspiration, turned them into a goofy song? What if you performed the song on a 1981 Casio keyboard, with your 9-year-old daughter on drums and your spouse showing the slides with a projector in time to the music? What if you wore matching costumes? Then, of course, you’d be in the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. Dad Jason, mom Tina and daughter Rachel buy slides from estate sales and write rock-song narratives to go with them. “Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959,” “Eggs” and that previously mentioned obscurity from McDonald’s HQ, “OPNAD Contribution Study Committee Report, June 1977,” take on new life when the family Trachtenburg celebrates their banality (in fact, the McDonald’s ditty, Jason says, is now technically a “six-song rock opera”). Don’t forget their hit travelogue “Fondue Friends in Switzerland” (it’s cheesy).

Jason was a long-suffering singer-songwriter, warbling bon mots and non sequiturs at Seattle coffeehouses and, he says, waiting for his ship to come in. Integrating the slides and the rest of his family was a lark that magically turned into a cash cow. Last July Jason and Tina closed up their dog-walking business (the Dog Squad) and moved to New York City to make a living solely from their performances. They play two gigs a week (one in Manhattan, the other in the trendoid Williamsburg section of Brooklyn), they recently played Late Night With Conan O’Brien and Comedy Central has a TFSP shrine on its Web site, complete with animations and paper-doll downloads. During our phone interview with Jason, a call from a National Enquirer reporter came in on the other line.

Watching the TFSP do their thing, you feel you’ve been admitted into a cute little family that enacts some off-the-wall yet strangely touching rituals. They will bring a goofy grin to your face, and, says Jason, you won’t feel any of the guilt that comes with sellout rock: “With a lot of other acts, there’s often some sort of corrupt influence behind it, like some sort of money thing going on, or cocaine, right? But with us it’s genuine artistic integrity, because we’re not in the machine. ”