VIDEO: Sun City Girls, "Apna Desh"
When you’re poking around YouTube for footage of the (in)famous performances of Sun City Girls, one of the first things to turn up is a section from their video The Halcyon Days of Symmetry (see above.) Dating from the late ’80s, it shows the band playing the Sun Club in Tempe, in their home state of Arizona. The song they’re performing, “Apna Desh,” is a cover of the title track from a 1972 Bollywood movie. In the original Bollywood version, a solidly built man with a Burt Reynolds moustache and white velour pants sings to a vampy blonde who wiggles all over the floor, shakes her breasts, and is visibly happy to behold the mustachio’d fellow.
Things are a little different in the Sun City Girls version. It’s almost as though the two (actual) brothers of the band, Alan and Richard Bishop, were attempting to play the characters: Alan as the winking hunk, slinking his hands over his bass and singing; Richard, donning a purple lab coat, writhing his upper body in circles as he plays guitar, happy to behold the audience. As the camera pans between the two, a drum set comes into focus with the largest ride cymbals I’ve ever seen. It’s so large, it almost obscures the drummer. Suddenly, the video jumps to the end of the song, where a bespectacled man with a moustache (looking like an evil scientist out of Dr. Who) is in the midst of a serious drum solo. His hands move furiously, his eyes widen from behind his lenses, he bares his teeth while his hands race faster and faster over the toms and cymbals. Then the video just cuts off.
That drummer is Charles Gocher, a member of Sun City Girls, the adopted brother of Alan and Richard, and, in February of 2007, at the age of 54, a victim of cancer (after a prolonged fight). As a tribute to the man and a goodbye to the band he was a part of for more than 20 years, the Bishop brothers, as Brothers Unconnected, are touring the country, showing clips of films Gocher made throughout his life, and playing an acoustic set of Sun City Girls songs. They come to the Brattle Theatre next Thursday.
Writing about Gocher for the on-line magazine Perfect Sound Forever, Alan Bishop says, “Some have called Gocher the last great beatnik. Others have called him a mad genius. Several still believe he was a serial killer who was never caught. Many people were afraid of him or had no idea what to make of him. Whatever he was, few of you deserve to know of him.”
The contrarian vitriol of that statement is key to understanding Sun City Girls. Founded in Phoenix in 1982, the band took their name from a retirement community (along with its grumpy denizens), and they’ve continued over the years with an inspired insouciance. Mixing the instrumentation of a rock trio with musical styles taken from Eastern music (like the aforementioned Bollywood cover and a reliance on the drones of sitar and oud music) and playing shows that were often more akin to performance pieces or happenings than the merch-moving pop-song model, the Girls have consistently been written off as too esoteric, even while enjoying their small rabid following.
By turns enticing and enraging these fans (and keeping the uninitiated at arm’s length) are the close to 100 releases the band have dropped over the years, many of which were low-run cassette releases of the sort that held the ’80s DIY scene together. All that material (most of it long out of print) makes it difficult to bring the band’s sound into focus — and indeed, that’s become sort of the point. Any given SCG album offers a grab bag of material — here a Waitsian spoken-word piece with hand drums and chanting, there soft jazz with a film noir narrator talking about “cutting Marilyn’s lips off,” somewhere else a three-man a cappella drone, and then easy-listening organ music. They scatted about Shakespeare, rang bells, covered Morricone, unleashed 30-minute psych jams, and issued a whole bunch of stuff that’s describable only as free jazz — and the catalogue stretches on.
Descriptions of live shows are similarly cornucopian. My favorite is from an Eric Davis article in the Wire from 2004: “At San Francisco’s 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 50-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.”
The brothers have never been given to offering easy answers, and the rest of Alan Bishop’s Perfect Sound Forever tribute to Gocher suggests how the trio wanted their band to be understood: “Gocher had no place to be put. There is no category for him. And I’m not sure I’ve met anyone qualified to judge him. This deems any type of ‘historical recognition’ abstract.”
