By Michelle Valdez

A SHORT, chubby guy, balding, with blond hair and wearing lackluster spectacles, meets me in his home-studio-warehouse at 14th and Mission Streets. The first thing he says, as his bandmates loiter around the living room, is "Wanna see my cock? It's really cute!"

I recoil and then laugh as he pulls it out. It really is cute: a small, colorful leather coin purse shaped like a rooster. Meet Eric Bauer, creator of Fcute, a local band merchandise endeavor, and the brainiac behind numerous bands in the circuitous and noisy electronic music realm. If you're wearing a Coachwhips T-shirt or a scribbly Deerhoof button, chances are Bauer made it during a bleary-eyed bender while taking plentiful swigs of Rockstar and King Cobra. In all probability, he was also grumbling the whole time about how "this is not making me any money."

Bauer created his Fcute empire approximately three years ago. Bauer and his roommates hosted noise shows and served thick pancakes every Sunday at their Pubis Noir noise space, just two blocks away on Mission and 16th Streets, and elsewhere. He began booking shows a year before that at his old home, known as the Clit Stop, at Third and Howard Streets. As the nation fretted over the impending Y2K problem, the Clit Stop emerged as an incubator for experimental, cantankerous, and nonmarketable bands that were just starting out, like Total Shutdown and Earwicker.

During this seedling phase of Fcute, Bauer began recruiting other like-minded noisicians to collaborate on various sound/music projects. He currently plays in at least five bands, although you might not recognize him in his many performance disguises. His ubiquitous endeavors include Crack: We Are Rock, Big Techno Werewolves, Alpha-Buts, DJ Shitbird and the Ultimate Party Machine, Aerobics King, and a few others that are still in the "conceptual" stage. Not a bad résumé for a guy who says he can't play a lick of guitar and certainly couldn't read a note of music if you wrapped it around a microwaveable bean burrito.

Idea man

Who is Eric Bauer? Born amid the flatlands of Kansas City, Kan., the 29-year-old maladroit moved to the Bay Area about five years ago. Petey Dammit, Bauer's bandmate in Big Techno Werewolves, said he first met Bauer at shows and parties in Kansas City.

"We would at look at each other and go, 'Hey, you're that drunk, belligerent guy,' " Dammit says during a recent practice.

If you poke your head into Bauer's bedroom, you'd think a 12-year-old girl lived there, except for all the garbage and Japanese porno lying around. Bug-eyed Powerpuff Girl piñatas act as sentries to his microcosm of music and merchandise. Here, inside Fcute enterprises, Bauer cranks out T-shirts, buttons, posters, and just about anything else you can silk-screen for local bands like the now-defunct Pink and Brown, Tussle, and Negativland. Though he runs his own business, Bauer seems to pooh-pooh deadlines. Many bands have moaned about late-night pickups of their merchandise on the very night they've embarked on tours. Still, it doesn't seem to be affecting his shoestring undertaking. The unassuming silk screener supplements his income with a regular gig at the Academy of Art College in downtown San Francisco, where he listens to art kids whine about malfunctioning computers.

Ever the enterprising type, Bauer extends his entrepreneurial zeal to his musical projects: he often starts his bands with a simple, harebrained idea, following through in an attempt to take a joke too far. In the case of DJ Shitbird and the Ultimate Party Machine, he had talked about having a band with an eight-year-old lead singer and a robot party animal before the group existed. "So then I thought, well, I better find somebody to play with," Bauer says.

Noel Harmonson, the drummer for the Lowdown and Echoplex player for Comets on Fire, and Kristy Geschwandtner, the vocalist for Lil' Pocketknife, joined him in DJ Shitbird. The result resembles a slumber party where the participants have overdosed on curious confections and soda pop. There are candy-bloated dancing animals, silly lyrics, and totally obnoxious dance beats. The whole idea, Gerschwandtner explains at a recent Lil' Pocketknife show, is that you're really just supposed to party by yourself in your room with unicorns and imaginary friends.

"Yeah, I don't really like partying too much," she says. "That's what I sing about when I tell people to 'party.' They're supposed to go home and party by themselves, but I don't think they get it."

High energy

So, what does it take to run an entire empire that incorporates silk screens, bands, robots, and werewolves? Apparently, energy drinks in bulk, cheap beer in 40-ounce increments, crumpled packs of cigarettes, more beer, and assorted, microwaveable food from the gas station next door seem to be sufficient. Oh, and the persistence of a wayward locomotive.

Another Bauer band, Big Techno Werewolves, began playing three years ago. This trio of skulking, nocturnal skeleton-costumed figures embody all that is creepy when you mix Misfits motifs with some old-timey bluegrass twang and whippits. With the stage presence of a pouty trick-or-treater who just got home from a night of gluttony and other unmentionable acts, Bauer, a.k.a. King Riff, scratches out the steel arteries of a guitar with a pair of scissors. Dino plays keyboards, while Dammit beats up a bucket. Big Techno Werewolves dig up hillbilly riffs and grind them into pulpy, pulsating songs filled with dejected keyboard noodling and occasional caterwauling by Bauer. Dino says the band belong in the cubbyhole of "ironica."

Yet another infamous Bauer project, Crack: We are Rock blasted onto the scene just a couple of years ago. The lineup for the original or "classic" Crack is debatable. Until Le Kim and L'Erin joined, the band seemed like a clown car with various musicians continuously climbing out of the trunk, with Bauer holding down keyboards, mixing, editing, and recording duties. Many locals have passed through this electronic-crunch bric-a-brac band, including Bianca Sparta of Erase Errata. Crack have just finished their second album on TigerBeat6 Records and plan to tour the United States again soon.

I saw the first Crack show, two years ago, out at Toxic Beach near Third and Cesar Chavez Streets, where they played to about 10 people. The ladies flaunted fake tan lines around their knees, giving the illusion of nude knee-highs grandma might wear. They flitted around like nervous moths on the gravel in white high heels and hideously hot pink, obviously homemade wraparound rag dresses. Bauer and fellow Crack warrior, Jason Stamberger, a.k.a. Obscuratron, played in duct-taped cone-headed masks and a Mexican wrestling mask covered in thick, glistening, red-vinyl lipstick kisses.

At the end of the day, the Fcute creator seems worn out and grouchy. Between working on the new Crack recording, setting up shows for Big Techno Werewolves, and getting ready to go on tour across the Atlantic, he likes to give himself lots of breaks. Sitting in a weathered green lounge chair and chain-smoking, he does have the energy for a short jaunt down memory lane with one of his many concepts that haven't broken into reality just yet. "Chop Chop Powers is me and Fumicake. And we rap in German and Japanese with this awesome DJ, and he's scratching and making these wicked beats," he says. "Yeah, it's been like two years in the making. It's still conceptual, but you know, like all great ideas ... they take time, right?"

Crack: We Are Rock play a CD-release show Nov. 20, 9:30 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., S.F. $8. (415) 474-0365.

Crack: We Are Rock's Le Kim on Eric Bauer

• While on tour Eric never failed to wake from deep sleep in order to smoke – no matter what time it was.

• His farts are unbearable.

• Eric told Jason [Stamberger] to crawl into his sleeping bag, which a cat had pissed in and he still refused to get rid of.

• Eric says he only asked L'Erin and I to play in Crack because he thought we were hot.

• Every T-shirt he sold on tour, he wore.

• Eric's brilliant. I love him.