Nomad Codes

grass-skirted motherfuckers it would all sound like Merzbow.”
    Sun City Girls also became some of the most original performers in American rock. Simultaneously wanting to shock, amaze, and irritate, the Girls used the stage as a platform for snotty tricks and bravura experiments that tested both themselves and their audiences. One night they played nothing but an extended version of a single soul tune; another night they executed a perfect cover of Jodorowsky’s El Topo soundtrack; and sometimes they just ditched their instruments altogether. Once, opening for fellow travelers Thinking Fellers Union Local 242 at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall, the trio donned cheap Radio Shack wireless mics, plopped down on the stage, and improv’d a group of hobos waiting for a train while a prerecorded fifty-minute tape of crickets ground toward the inevitable whistle moan. Their longtime sound engineer Scott Colburn came on and danced a tramp jig, while Gocher sprayed peach air freshener in the air and threw marshmallows around, ruining the carpet.
    “That’s classic Sun City Girls,” says Colburn. “You get what you get.”
    With their monster touring days behind them, a Sun City Girls gig is a rare affair that draws the converted. In November of 2003, I was lucky enough to catch an unadvertised all-acoustic show at the Rendezvous, a jewel box theater in Seattle’s Belltown that looks like a padded cell for mad Napoleons. Their first gig in over a year, the Rendezvous show celebrated their twenty-first anniversary as a trio. It also served as a warm-up for an upcoming performance at the Java Jive, a tiki dive in Tacoma, Washington, that’s shaped like a coffee cup and known for whore karaoke and the occasional strip show with live monkeys.
    As the bird-like Gocher slipped behind his modest kit, a bearded and shade-wearing Rick began a snarly song about “the audience who’s come here to dream.” Alan passed through the crowd of hirsute and scruffy musos like an androgynous Uncle Fester, pouring from a bottle of Old Crow straight into people’s mouths—a ritual I later learn he lifted from Burmese spirit mediums. Between covers of “Midnight at the Oasis” and “Heart Full of Soul,” the trio played some of the misanthropic folk tunes Alan has recorded for his Alvarius B solo project, and which make him as proud as anything he’s done. Perhaps for my benefit, they play a game-show spin-off of The Wire ’s “Invisible Jukebox,” with Rick plunking out songs on a ukulele-toned kid’s guitar, as Alan handed out mint-condition LPs—23 Skidoo, Duke Ellington, The 50 Guitars of Tommy Garrett —to whoever could name the tune.
    Inevitably, perhaps, the mysterious Sun City Girls “X Factor” struck. During one of Gocher’s cubist drum rambles, a thick and tipsy nouveau jock walked into the theater, clad in a sweatshirt, Yankees cap, and numetal facial scruff. Booker, as we subsequently learned this apparition was called, had no idea what was going on, but he nonetheless clambered onstage and demanded that Gocher kick up some funkier beats. In response, the drummer brought his brushes down to a whisper. Booker kept at it and Charlie grew cranky: “I do what I want to do. Not what I’m told.” Charlie then stood up and told Booker to take over on drums, but the fellow turned to the audience instead and started beat-boxing. Charlie and some audience members led the suburban B-boy offstage as Alan started pulling spastic jujitsu moves around this ghost of their punk-rock past. As Alan said later, “ We must have conjured him up.”

    The Sun City Girls’ inner sanctum takes up one half of a former theater on a low-rent commercial strip in Seattle’s Ballard district. Their entrance room is filled with slacker shrines and towering shelves of LPs carefully filed away in crisp plastic sleeves. Alan’s office is off to the side, and further on is the huge blue room that serves as the main rehearsal/hangout space. Here American Spirits are endlessly smoked. From the walls hang a collection of curious stringed instruments: banjos, mandolins, a Burmese harp, a Russian balalaika, a thrift store score called an Orie Tone. A Kali poster is slapped onto the side of an upright piano that belongs in a saloon, with Holst’s score for “Dance of the Demon” displayed on a nearby music stand. On the floor lies the crumbling gamelan orchestra that a Javanese puppet troop dragged around Indonesia for