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 twenty-seven years before Alan got it at a Folklife Festival auction. A red devil mask leers from above.
I am barely over the threshold of this strange place when I catch the title of a burned CD-R sitting on Alan’s desk: Broken Hearted Dragonf lies . The man immediately starts telling me about these fat Burmese insects whose chests routinely explode. Alan’s wife, who is Burmese and “from another planet,” says they are called broken-hearted dragonflies, and Alan has written the phrase onto a friend’s recording of Thai insect squalls whose intense electronic tones, I soon learn, vibrate with an almost nauseating menace. “Maybe I’ll put it out,” Alan says, as he finally turns the volume down. “But I probably couldn’t move more than 500 copies.”
Alan wears a backwards baseball cap tugged tightly over a close-cropped skull that accentuates his thin elfish ears. He is hefty and slightly wall-eyed, and has the somewhat disconcerting habit of not
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 twenty-seven years before Alan got it at a Folklife Festival auction. A red devil mask leers from above.
I am barely over the threshold of this strange place when I catch the title of a burned CD-R sitting on Alan’s desk: Broken Hearted Dragonf lies . The man immediately starts telling me about these fat Burmese insects whose chests routinely explode. Alan’s wife, who is Burmese and “from another planet,” says they are called broken-hearted dragonflies, and Alan has written the phrase onto a friend’s recording of Thai insect squalls whose intense electronic tones, I soon learn, vibrate with an almost nauseating menace. “Maybe I’ll put it out,” Alan says, as he finally turns the volume down. “But I probably couldn’t move more than 500 copies.”
Alan wears a backwards baseball cap tugged tightly over a close-cropped skull that accentuates his thin elfish ears. He is hefty and slightly wall-eyed, and has the somewhat disconcerting habit of not
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