Nat and Alex Wolff, the brothers in the Naked Brothers Band, have been working together for five years, since the evening they got out of the bathtub and began singing and jumping around. Eventually, they got dressed, picked up instruments, and, along with a few friends, started playing neighborhood gigs. Nat, who is twelve and is known as “the girl magnet,” is the singer, songwriter, and piano man; Alex, nine, plays drums. Their big single, which Nat wrote when he was six, is called “Crazy Car.” As a nine-year-old female fan remarked the other day, “I like it because it’s about a love that leads you nowhere.”
Nat and Alex live with their parents, the jazz pianist Michael Wolff and the actress Polly Draper, on lower Fifth Avenue. Two and a half years ago, Draper decided that it would be funny to make a film about them. The result, a winsome, relatively ungoofy, half-made-up chronicle of the boys’ exploits—“Spinal Tap” meets Our Gang—was picked up by Nickelodeon, which then signed the boys on for a TV series. The movie airs Saturday; the show begins next week. It parodies fame, and probably dooms them to it. Here’s a prediction: Nat makes the cover of Tiger Beat, if not Rolling Stone, by year’s end.
The tricky thing with the Naked Brothers is figuring out what’s real and what’s not. On the show and in the movie, for example, their father, as played by their father, is a dorky accordionist who is desperate to join the band. In real life, he’s got his own thing going on. And on TV the boys are motherless; Draper, who writes and directs most of the episodes, thought the show would be better off without a mother imposing order on the kids’ rock-star idyll. Nat and Alex, though, seem to be pretty much what you see on TV: Nat, a lanky treble with a sunny stage manner and a Paul McCartney mullet, is the pop-hook prodigy, and Alex, with long curly hair and fake tattoos, is the imp—Ringo, by way of Alex Van Halen.
“A lot of the time when I get recognized, and I have been recognized like five times, people think I’m my character,” Nat said one night last week.
“Well, you are your character,” Draper said.
“I know, but they don’t make the distinction.”
“They never do,” Wolff said.
The four were sitting around their dining-room table, eating lasagna, salad, and green beans. Alex slouched in his seat, bare feet on the table; Nat was animated, playing air bass and humming falsetto melodies.
Alex: “The difference is that Nat’s cool in the show. Ha-ha-ha-ha.”
Draper: “He’s not that cool in the show.”
Nat: “Thanks, Mom.”
Wolff quietly urged Alex to remove his feet from the table.
Talk turned to the Beatles, Nat’s favorite band. “O.K., guys, I can do all four Beatles,” Nat said, adopting an accent that sounded more Tufnel than Scouser. “This is John: ‘This just the way it, you know, goes.’ He talks like this. And then Paul talks like this: ‘You know, um, we’re just, you know, a little band.’ ” The parents beamed.
Alex piped up, “I’m Ringo. ‘Ringo. Ringo.’ I can do it, Mommy. ‘Ring-go, Ring-go.’ ”
“But Ringo wouldn’t say his own name,” Nat said.
Alex writes songs, too. He’d recently recorded one called “Three Is Enough.” (“One is O.K., two is fine, three is enough.”)
“It’s about girls,” his mother said.
“No, it’s about math,” Nat said.
“It’s about doughnuts,” Alex said.
“It’s about girls,” his mother repeated.
“Shut up, it’s about doughnuts!”
Everyone laughed, and Alex, holding up a glass of milk, declared woozily, “Let’s drink to that.”
Alex sneaked off to watch some unsanctioned TV (a family friend once remarked of him, “Do you ever get the feeling that Alex is just an independent contractor working out of your home?”) while Nat donned boxing gloves and jabbed at a heavy bag that hung near the table. Then he began dunking a basketball into a six-foot hoop, nearby.
After a while, the parents coaxed the boys into putting on a little show. A drum kit and a grand piano occupied a corner of the living room. Nat sang a number called “I’ll Do Anything for You” as Alex bashed away, neighbors be damned. Wolff said, “He plays the drums like a man.”
More songs followed (Nat has written more than a hundred and fifty). “Everyone’s cried at least once.” Then: “Your love keeps me on the ground.” And finally: “You need a taxicab!”
“Guys, it’s time to brush your teeth,” Wolff said. Alex obeyed. Nat resisted. “I like to stay up,” he said. “That’s when I write all my best stuff.” He picked up an acoustic guitar and started playing the intro to “Day Tripper.”
“Nat, brush your teeth.”
Nat ignored his father and played a few bars of “Smoke on the Water.”
