Hiding in Plain Sight

"The Sun City Girls are America's premier underground band. No qualifiers such as "arguably" or "possibly" are necessary."

—Derek Monypeny, Popwatch, 1998

Throw a videotape titled It's Not Over 'Till the Skinny Arab Lights the Fuse into your VCR, and you will see, after some nifty Bollywood film collages, bizarre beatnik poetry, and footage of a spastic avant-rock trio playing live, a puppet that looks like a Mexican matinee idol swathed in Mardi Gras beads propped up inside a piano. When the puppet speaks, it has that condescendingly nasal style PBS hosts have, nearly every word punctuated by a dramatic pause. Classic jazz plays in the background. "Good evening, and welcome, to another edition of, Jazz Classics; I'm your host, Cantinflas," the puppet says slowly.

"Tonight will be an evening of what is commonly referred to as experimental jazz, jazz from the outside so to speak, from way outside . . . so if it's getting too abstract for you, don't leave—take a deep breath and try to see the scope of what these fantastic musicians are trying to express with their art. Sit back, make the most of it. . . . You'll be mesmerized by pure genius."

Then a scarier puppet appears, resembling nothing so much as a middle-aged Balinese hobo Frankenstein. The dummy bangs haphazardly on a stringed instrument (or maybe the inside of the piano—it's hard to tell). He turns then to the camera, groans loudly, and shouts in a drunken slur, "You know how long I've been in this business? Yeah, you! I've been making music for a loooooong time, waiting for you to appreciate it!" And then comes the self-parodying kicker: "Why come to the audience!? I want the audience to come to me!"

That credo could stand as the working philosophy of the band that released the tape this past March: the Sun City Girls.

It's Not Over 'Till the Skinny Arab Lights the Fuse is one of a mind-numbing number of releases by the impossible-to-pin-down, travel-addicted, mystically inclined, cantankerous, and often- brilliant musical trio of professional margin walkers. For 22 years now, brothers Rick and Alan Bishop—bass and guitar, respectively—and drummer Charlie Gocher Jr. have delightedly pushed the boundaries of music, art, and good taste. Originally formed in Arizona and named after a retirement community just north of the Tempe/Phoenix area where they lived in the '70s and '80s, the Sun City Girls have called Seattle home for the past 10 years.

Unless you're a devoted fan, you probably have no idea they live here—assuming you've heard of them at all. The Sun City Girls have toured Japan and performed with some of the world's best-known out-there musicians, including San Francisco violinist Eyvind Kang, members of Japanese avant-rock gods the Boredoms, and experimental guitarist-banjoist Eugene Chadbourne. They have scored soundtracks to films by Larry Clark and Harmony Korine. They are widely credited as godfathers of multiple schools of indie rock, from the tribal hippie ethno-prog school of bands like Sunburned Hand of the Man and No Neck Blues Band to Asian garage bands like Neung Phak and Dengue Fever. And on the rare occasions when they've played out, fans travel across the country to see them play.

The Sun City catalog is so vast that not even the band members themselves know how many LPs, cassettes, and CDs they've released—many of them are doubles, and most are rare—but it's at least 75 titles. Add to that a dozen 7-inch singles, a half-dozen hour-long VHS tapes, and a 10-inch 78, with more constantly on the way, thanks to their "Carnival Folklore Resurrection" series of limited-edition releases, as well as numerous solo projects, and you've got a rabid collector's worst nightmare. And that's not even counting solo records or material by others released on their own labels, Abduction and Sublime Frequencies. The group is notoriously erratic—their music veers from haunted, brooding folk to free-jazz blowouts to tape experiments, and their records range from the sublime (Bright Surroundings, Dark Beginnings; Torch of the Mystics; their self-titled debut) to indulgent doggerel (Jack's Creek, Superculto, Midnight Cowboys From Ipanema).

Just two weeks ago, they played to a sold-out crowd of about 1,600 at All Tomorrow's Parties UK, a celebrated annual festival "curated" by the critically celebrated Chicago band Tortoise—the Girls' first show in Europe. ("Everyone was so nice to us," Alan Bishop reports via e-mail, surprised by the crowd's docility. "Maybe they were all under some sort of mass hypnosis—that's what it looked like!") And in the U.S., the Girls regularly sell out large hipster venues like the Knitting Factory in New York City and Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. (On April 13, they were slated to headline Manhattan's hip Coral Room club, a swank joint in midtown with women dressed as mermaids in huge underwater tanks.)

The Sun City Girls have called Seattle home for 10 of the band's 22 years. But unless you're a devoted fan, you probably have no idea they live here.

But here at home, the band hides in plain sight. The Girls nearly always perform in costume, helping keep a low visibility, and last year they played just one official show in the Puget Sound area, at Bob's Java Jive, a seedy and reportedly haunted karaoke bar shaped like a giant coffee pot, in Tacoma. But with a worldwide tour, literally dozens of new releases, a new Web site (www.suncitygirls.com) that sacrifices the band's hard-won mystique for something more easily approachable, and actual Seattle shows in the works (they play the Sunset Tavern on May 22, and there's talk of the group appearing at this year's Bumbershoot), there's a feeling that the Girls are taking stock of their career, trying to put it all in perspective. And that, in turn, has re-energized them. I've known the band 15 years, and they haven't been this enthusiastic and dedicated since 1991.