Tentang Saya

Gorillas on the Bus

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum promises some new songs during their Tucson stop

By GENE ARMSTRONG

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

Dan Rathbun squeezed in time to chat with a reporter the other night, despite the fact that he was feverishly working on the bus in which his band, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, rides on concert tours. And he needed a bath.

A retrofitted 1960s Greyhound-style bus that conveyed Sleepytime on three tours last year alone, the vehicle in question had just undergone some last-minute repairs to get it up to speed for the group's latest tour. That journey kicks off this week with a gig in San Diego and comes to Tucson Monday, Feb. 21, for a performance at Solar Culture Gallery, a venue that Sleepytime Gorilla Museum has played on several occasions.

"Now what it needs is a bicycle rack and a new heater," Rathbun said over the phone, amid some mysterious clanking in the background. Half the time, he sounded like a pragmatic mechanic; the other half, an eccentric inventor.

Rathbun, who plays bass guitar, among other instruments, is one of the founding members of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, the endlessly inventive Bay Area music collective that explodes all musical categories, including those it seemingly embraces during heavily theatrical performances: art-rock, thrash-metal, free jazz, punk-bred noise, '50s rock 'n' roll, nightmarish nursery rhymes, avant-garde opera, folk music from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia and whatever else pushes its way up from the band's collective subconscious.

Sleepytime is touring to promote its third CD, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum of Natural History, which was released last October on Web of Mimicry, the same label that gives the world such envelope-pushing art bands such as Secret Chiefs 3 and Estradasphere.