BY THIS TIME much of the popcorn-gobbling public has already raised its collective goblet to School of Rock, Jack Black's celebratory cinematic grog of vintage hair-band high jinks. The flick has its moments, but once the initial euphoria fades, you really have to wonder, is it about anything more than the fact that rock and certain associated rote gestures are as played-out, overworked, and as gristly as "Für Elise"?

As for myself, I'd pay to see School of Rock doctored up by the guys in the Lowdown. The Lowdown's school would set out to defuse rock clichés by bringing the entire class down to the floor, spindling their already broken instruments, turning free-form playground games into performance, and then using schoolroom scuffles, storybooks, and lesson plans to make music that resembled kindergarten primal-scream therapy. Later, instead of playing along nicely with a climactic battle-of-the-bands scene, the Lowdown would run outside for recess, "borrow" the school bus, and never come back.

As it shakes out, keyboardist-guitarist Josh Alper, vocalist-guitarist Hugh Holden, and drummer-saxophonist Noel Harmonson are doing their part to drag rock out of class and plop it down, beer in hand, in a good nutso house party. Their second album, Y Is a Crooked Letter (Zum), puts it through the freak-scene blender of nerve-fraying punk, trash-can rattles, sheet-metal electronics, and primitive dance-noise. Their recent Bottom of the Hill show found the threesome, weary of the ever shifting rainbow of terror codes handed down from the Department of Homeland Security, donning "code yellow" haz-mat uniforms with faux bombs taped in strategic places. Then there was the time they climbed into gorilla suits and "re-created" the first meeting between human and animal. Or the show they played in San Rafael, when Holden threw his two-string guitar down, midsong, dove headfirst into a pool, and then finished the song, soaking. Or the time in Kansas City when Holden removed his guitar and sprinted across a park – and didn't return for 20 minutes.

"Traditional rock performance – it's kind of boring, yeah," says Harmonson, 25, relaxing with a few after-work Budweisers and Euro smokes on the back patio of Mission District bar Naps, as Arabian disco drifted over the fence from El Rio. There's been no rest for the wearily productive Harmonson, who lives in San Francisco. While the rest of the Lowdown continue to reside in Santa Cruz, Harmonson recently went back to school at San Francisco State University, toured this summer with Comets on Fire, in which he plays an Echoplex, and plans to record a split 7-inch for Narnack with his latest brainchild, DJ Shitbird and the Party Machine. "I don't mean to be so cynical. Anyone can play a song or stare at their feet or pull a rock move, but we decided we weren't going to be satisfied with that; we were going to do something dangerous or stupid."

School of Rock's tribute to synchronized headbanging, windmills, and playing the guitar with your teeth probably seems like just another sign of these bizarre times to the 29-year-old Alper, talking from his home in Santa Cruz. "I heard this term – used before, from this other band – 'I was manically impressed,' " he says with a brainy stutter that stops and starts throughout his conversation. "But I think right now I'm manically per-plexed. These things persist, and it's really fascinating. I mean, Arnold Schwarzenegger might get elected, and there's someone up there doing the Mick Jagger thing. But the Lowdown is more a selfish product of our own brains, doing it in reaction to some world events – we're not taking some arrogant stance towards other music."

Make all mistakes

Other musicians love them right back. Total Shutdown's Paul Costuros e-mails to say, "Something that comes to mind is the French word, 'deconade,' which means to do something bad or stupid but on purpose, or to make mistakes intentionally. By this I mean they sounded like a rock n roll band recorded onto a cassette tape that was left in your pocket and put through the wash by mistake then left outside in the sun during a 114-degree Fresno heat wave and then played on your stereo at a dance party!"

Aligning the group with dadaists like Marcel Duchamp and Fluxus figures such as George Maciunas, Old Time Relijun's Arrington De Dionyso testifies in an e-mail, "To me, the Lowdown is much more than a band – like Luddites for the Digital Age, their work is both resistance to and veneration of the entropic collapse of consumerist culture. They are also tricksters in the mythic sense, able to turn upside down any casual expectations of rock performance."

Holden and Alper started the Lowdown in 1997, while attending UC Santa Cruz, as the chaotic party band follow-up to their other "all-over-the-place" groups named – "Oh, you're going to love this," Alper says with a laugh – Make Fuck and Narcist Mutherfukers. It was just another excuse for the pair to play music together, make Casio beats, and write songs on Holden's karaoke machine. Ojai-via-Olympia, Wash., transplant Harmonson, who worked with Holden at Streetlight Records, joined a year later.

"I saw the Lowdown play at a party or two – they just blew me away. They were so not concerned with playing the role of a band. They were just so loose and so free," Harmonson says, stretching his arms as if he were hoping to find the words floating above his head. "They just seemed so artfully lackadaisical about it." Even now, when it comes to writing music, in many instances, "if it makes us laugh really hard, that's what we use," says Holden, 27, over the phone from Santa Cruz.

A self-proclaimed rock band with an affection for the absurd, the Lowdown were also united in their love of '60s psych pop. But, Harmonson says, "I don't think we consider ourselves a psychedelic band. You know, if your hallucinations sound like the Lowdown, that's cool, but that's not good," he says with a little chuckle. "That's kind of bad-trip sounding. If things move that quickly and are so jagged for you, then it's kind of heavy, and, like, you probably shouldn't be taking acid anymore."

Party central

For about seven months between '98 and '99, as Harmonson tells it, the band also became the center of a burgeoning below-the-radar rock scene, inspired by performances by Caroliner and Zeek Sheck, visits to the Clit Stop, where Eric Bauer of Crack: We Are Rock was booking, and friends such as Curtains' Andrew Maxwell and Deerhoof's Chris Cohen, who helped the Lowdown make their first recordings. Groups like Erase Errata, the Quails, and the Need passed through Harmonson's Broadway abode, and Friends Forever parked and played in the driveway. Still other pals would take over the Rio Theatre after closing time, screen the movie backwards, and hang out, drinking beer and smoking, Harmonson remembers.

But nothing's forever – except perhaps Friends Forever – and those days waned with noise complaints and encounters with the police. The Rio was sold. And after the band put out their first album, audaciously named Revolver II (Strange Attractors, 2000), Harmonson moved up to San Francisco. The trio continued to record the music on Harmonson's four-track for Y Is a Crooked Letter over the next few years, trying to pin down their spastic live sound.

The end product cuts up thrash, manic machine music, and that gutbucket bash of psych blues that Don Van Vliet so often dipped into, in a way that keeps me bouncing in my chair like a Romper Room reject. As with the Mummenschanz they've sometimes impersonated onstage, theirs isn't a fun-house mirror, Alper says. They're just trying to reflect the craziness around them. "Fuck Your Moves Dancehall Reprise" riffs off the competitive edge of the dance floor. "I'll Turn Your Blood into Ants" compares people to blood vessels in the organism of an office building. And "Total Shutup" is no Total Shutdown put-down – it's more like a pledge of allegiance.

"Fuck You Revolution" rages against the rage rock machine. "Revolution, in general, is just such an easily thrown around word, and then you look at a thing like rage rock," Alper explains. "I m not saying there's no reason to be angry, but I think we wanted to temper that with self-awareness, like, well, what good is a revolution if it's just done with vehement anger. What does anger lead to? There's a certain testosterone that's built into these yelling males."

But, I ask, isn't that what you guys are doing? They seem to yell a lot about yelling.

"But, you know, we're more like squealing," he says, coming back quickly. "There's a difference!