SleepyTime Guerilla Warfare Double Decker Birthday Bash

 

                             Here they are seen performing live three years earlier, during the year 2003

   The donkey headed adversary of humanity threw a rollicking party. It was more like little red riding wolf run amok inside the garden, everyone invited, we took the bait hook and sinker, and drove all the way from Salt Lake City to San Francisco's sister town of Oak village, where Sleepytime Gorilla Museum heralded the headlining of two evenings at the Metro Opera house, Friday and Saturday July 7th and 8th, 2006. Let me tell you people it was sick. All the random and unusual guilty parties showed up.

   On Friday the Stolen Babies opened first. Bass player six and a half feet tall, gaunt and skeletal with skin painted white, a blood streak running from his right temple, wearing a rather soiled wedding dress. Keyboardist tackled a 55 gallon drum barrel intermittently between plastic ivory soloes. Frontwoman a petite broken windup china doll w/harlequin face painted rose bud lips, bristling w/toxic energy as she attacked the mic while their guitarist wore an executioner's hood. I was amazed they were that good. A postpunk industrial garage goth attack. For a dollar you best believe I bought their patch.

   In between the sets there was the one man band act of Bryan Kenny Fresno, acid casualty with a seventeen string guitar. He sang soulfully about chicks with dicks and a triumphant dog that he rescued from the streets from a cruel and thoughtless owner. The dog was actually there, and was trotted out on stage where the cute thang balanced atop a beach ball to the urgings and applause of the crowd. Perhaps Bryan Kenny Fresno's most moving ballad was his homage to Yngwie phukking Malmsteen, that's who. \m/ (Those who dared not throw the devil sign walked away from that show marked, I'm afraid) After his schtick, my overt enthusiasm drew his fleecing-crew straight through the crowd at me like filings to a magnet. The duck taped bucket was proffered; I was cornered. I obliged w/some spare paper currency.

   Finally the Sleepytime Gorillas began assembling their stage. Nils wore a stylish red riding hood. His black leather bracers looked standard -issue anachronist. All of them had their teeth blacked out. They all wore the same uniform: a hand tailored pant suit w/suspenders and a big old flower on the chest.

   I can't even begin to put into words what this band managed to deliver over the next two hours. Leave it said it was unlike any other musical group I'd ever seen. My personal description of what they sound like is best summed up by imagining what it would be like if Tom Waits and Bjork had an illegitimate spawnling who grew up to form a band heavily influenced by King Crimson. This only manages to scrape the tip of the iceberg, however. With an odd assortment of home-made instruments (such as the "Slide-piano log", the "Percussion Guitar", the "Electric Pancreas", along with autoharps, glockenspiels, toy pianos, and viking rowboats), the audience was in for a unique amalgamation of organically influenced musicianship unlike any conventional band's efforts ever witnessed.

   Their Bjorkian influence can be perceived in some of the strident vocals emitting from Carla Kihlstedt's impressive throat. When not lending her lovely pipes to a song, she is busy playing the violin or any other assorted bizarre instruments. During one song she played a "bass harmonica", this unwieldy contraption I had never seen before. I fondly recall one moment during Friday's performance, wherein the lights deemed to select her for a solo. She obliged by consistently fiddling a B -note, whilst Nils explained with a sideshow host's flourish that "the b -note is known to be the most healing of notes", and after a minute or so of that soothing manipulation, Carla announced brightly she was going to move on to a C ! The excitement was palpable. After a few "classically" inspired maneuvers of her bow, she winked & tricked us all by turning on a dime and DEconstrukcting the classical progression of her playing into a bizarre, fractally -cascading solo which ground into an inhumanly evertightening full stop, eliciting cheers from the crowd and leaving her breathless for a moment, while she recovered from the effort.

   Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is certainly not for your ordinary music fan. But for those who enjoy a more extreme, or creative approach, it is a force to be reckoned with, and should be slated for viewing sometime in your future. They keep their thing entirely underground for now, eschewing commercialist tendencies in favor of a radical new approach which their website explains as being "Rock against Rock". Hailing from a bizarre family tree of related musical experiments such as the reknowned IDIOT FLESH (nonconformist musical freakshow from the Bay area for a decade prior to SGM, which Nils was a part of) and inkboat, to name a couple. Another branching of the Sleepytime Gorilla tree is Nils' side project faun fables, of which he is a supportive guitarist for Dawn "the faun" McCarthy. Faun fables is a wonderfully diverse and anachronistic endeavor whose name conjures precisely what they're all about: pastoral performance-based music with shades of a bygone era, instilled with Brechtian overtones and experimental techniques in presentation.

   Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's music is definitely uncategorizable, as it ranges everywhere from lilting flutes to hellbent thrashadelic prog tendencies, all resting on a framework of conceptual artistry resonant with archaic yet still relevant philosophies reflected in the lyrics. Their front and center man Nils Frykdahl comes across like a daemonic Pan-possessed younger sibling of Tom Waits, with a powerful vocal style given to an odd assortment of range and textures. Halfway during their 2nd set on Saturday, Dawn the faun and this other lady carried a tray of cup cakes w/burning candles in them up onto stage right, during a particularly intense portion of Sleepytime's show. When the song finally crashed to a close, she led the crowd on a "Happy Birthday" singalong for Nils, upon which he accepted a proffered cupcake and announced he had just turned 40, and it was "time for a cup cake break". I'll tell you what, I managed to snag the last of them cupcakes, and it was so yummy; the frosting was still warm.

   So did this motley crew of musicians manage to warm my heart. I even saw John Shirley in the crowd, just as he said he would be, and got to meet his son Julian there. There was a real sense of community that made us feel perfectly at home, despite the fact we had driven nearly a thousand miles from Salt Lake City for this event. Easily one of the most worthwhile long distance drives to a concert I've ever undertaken. Dawn told me faun fables should be performing a gig in Salt Lake around September, and that she was actually considering moving here! I did my best to encourage this idea by letting her know I'd recently come to see Salt Lake as a true "city of the future", since its expansive evolution from the advent of the Olympics four years ago.

   SGM's Saturday set was very different from the previous night's effort. This made it extra worthwhile for us to have caught both shows. I would expect nothing less from such an eclectic assortment of musicians. Long live the Sleepy Gorilla people. Don't hesitate to spread the word.