End of a (wild) era

Music Row
By Brian Rademaekers

Speaking in the fall of 2006, Sir Richard Bishop, one-third of the three-man institution known as the Sun City Girls, enlightened a crowd with these words:
“There’s a lot of that ‘freak folk’ stuff goin’ around. Some of these people might know something’ about folk, but they don’t know anything about freak, all right?”
He then sang a pretty ditty about chopping somebody to bits and spreading the corpse far and wide.
The guy knows what he’s talking about.
After some 27 years of touring with the insanely irreverent Sun City Girls and putting out a number of his own albums, Richard Bishop is qualified to speak on freakishness and folk. Or punk, and rock music, experimentalism, and dissent through art in general.
It is impossible to quickly wrap your head around the mountain of blithering music generated by Sun City Girls over the years. These guys fluently garbled every genre thrown their way, seamlessly blending whatever they felt like blending from song to song and album to album.
And there were lots of albums and singles released over the years, both officially and unofficially. We’re talking close to 30 albums on the official side of things.
Sir Richard himself can, for example, play a clean and rich blues-picking guitar number or a wandering raga at whim. But that doesn’t mean he won’t veer to a sweltering, mind-numbing psychedelic surf guitar freak-out, or turn tender with a gruff and gruesome sea shanty.
That wild repertoire will be on display — for the last time as the Sun City Girls — when Sir Richard comes to Fishtown on Saturday with brother Alan.
On a somber note, this final tour is a tribute to Sun City member Charles Gocher, who succumbed to cancer in February at age 54.
Called The Brothers Unconnected: A Tribute to the Sun City Girls and Charles Gocher, the tour is a sort of funeral for the band, as indicated by a press statement: “Sun City Girls will no longer exist as a recording or performing entity and this tour also serves as a tribute to the legacy of the group.”
It is, frankly, a little depressing. Still, there likely is no better time to celebrate the collaboration of three musicians who certainly deserve a lot of celebration.
The Sun City Girls came to be in 1982 when the Bishop brothers lured Gocher into their twisted musical world, cementing a trio that would spend the better part of three decades stretching and distorting every musical boundary they could find.
But the Sun City Girls also had an incredible knack for discovering fresh sounds in a way that was intriguing and hard to turn away from.
While much of their work was pleasantly incoherent on the ideological level, early works like the 1987 album HCP combined their wildly eclectic tastes with vitriolic political commentary. Numbers like CIA Man married a loopy garage-surf song with anti-imperialist lyrics, delivered via a jerky and coarse set of vocals that made for a pithy protest rant.
That same album gave us Nancy Reagan, a slow tribal poem chant and assault on the then-First Lady that was so obscene and vile that it might have made Hunter S. Thompson queasy, though his pal Allen Ginsberg may well have eaten up the depraved imagery.
Across the years, their work often included incredible and erratic guitar-playing, syncopated percussion, and a gruff style of singing that summoned Tom Waits at his creepiest and Captain Beefheart at his maddest.
On this final tour, the Bishop brothers pledge to offer a complete retrospective of the Sun City Girls repertoire, with much of the material culled from the demented mind of the late Gocher.
And while this tour does carry the gloomy air of a dirge, catching the guys who can out-freak any freak out there, simply through their creative genius, is an opportunity that’s hard to pass up. ••


Check it out . . .
Who: The Sun City Girls, minus the late Charles Gocher.
What: A final tour for a band that redefined experimental.
Where: Johnny Brenda’s, Frankford and Girard avenues, Fishtown.
When: Saturday, June 21, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $12.