Good vibrations
All hail Oakland's Hale Zukas.

By George Chen

IF YOU HAPPENED upon an Oakland warehouse party last month with revelers waving candles over a chanting congregation disguised as a rock band, you probably left as confused and elated as I. This was the homecoming show for Hale Zukas after a national tour with Angeleno posi-punks Wives. There was something ritualistic in the three-part vocal unity, the freakish spectacle of flames, and the bearded rhythm section. It imparted an ecstatic Jonestown vibe that is hard to shake, but the Burning Man posse twirling around in rapturous approval that made me pass on the Kool-Aid.

Still, candles seemed tame as far as low-budget rock pyrotechnics go – that is, until Hale Zukas guitarist-keyboardist-vocalist Rob Enbom casually tells me, as we walk around the Piedmont Cemetery, he got kicked out of high school for setting his school gym on fire.

"The candles were supposed to bring in the ghosts who would eat the flame," not-at-all-defensive bassist-vocalist John Benson adds.

"Ritual is an interesting word. I think it's kind of dangerous," Benson clarifies when I press the point. "But ... it's important to have the show go somewhere and have the audience be part of that, so a ritual would be a nice thing to be compared to."

Wandering through a burial site with the Oakland three-piece isn't nearly as creepy as one would hope. Benson doesn't want any headstones in the background of the photo shoot, hinting that the sight of his bearded visage among the graves might make for a played-out image. It's a dreaded sunny day, so we frolic with the photographer's dog and climb a tree instead of getting all gothed out. A few facts are learned on this excursion: there's a stash of hallucinogens somewhere on the premises hoarded by the band Orcs, a coke-dealing Buddhist believes Benson possesses "the ass of life," and there are merits to having your band named by seven-year-old girls.

Magnum force

Enbom and drummer-vocalist Mark Small began playing together as teenagers in the Walnut Creek-Danville axis, most notably in the band Magnum. "It was fun, live. It was crazy," Enbom deadpans. "Suburban kids liked it." He even started a tape label, Dial-A-Pirate, that only released music from "our side of Walnut Creek, 'the Eastside.' "

Post-Magnum, Enbom had a Neil Diamond cover band called Nick and the Diamonds ("We formed to win talent-show money at co-ops"), whose leader met Benson and pulled him into a new project. Having held down the low end as the bassist in math rock heavies A Minor Forest, Benson was game for a new band. A neck injury messed him up for a while, though, in the first in a series of what Enbom calls "false starts": "Creepy Crawly Claw was the third or fourth [attempt]." The other attempts included the band Evil Eye of Duck, Tiger, Bear, Shark, and Whale, named by the aforementioned preadolescent girls. "It was very frustrating – we were trying to start a band, but we just could not do it."

Allegedly influenced by Deep Purple and '70s-era Beach Boys, Creepy Crawly Claw (also named by those creative girls) played Flipper covers, released a few singles, and toured the West Coast with the aforementioned Orcs before losing their trombone player and falling apart last year. The core members regrouped with the new name, Hale Zukas, a revision that Small describes as "melodically different but conceptually the same."

After the breakup of CCC, Small joined heavy-hate band Burmese as a second drummer, to much acclaim in local rock circles, while Enbom joined blues-improv spazz ensemble Vholtz. The last thing one would have expected was for Hale Zukas to emerge, conceptually strengthened, from the wreckage, but that's just what they did in April.

Assisted living

Hale Zukas share their name with Benson's boss, who is "in his late 50s and looks like a wizard in a wheelchair." A Google search brings up both the band's Web site and Easy Does It Disability Assistance, Zukas's Berkeley nonprofit emergency wheelchair service. So far they've released one untitled EP, a 3-inch CD-R packaged in a red envelope from Chinatown, that includes songs like "Sparky," which sounds like a bunch of monks gone circus-y (no surprise then that the band recorded with Experimental Dental School drummer Ryan Chittick). Another track, "Beating Dream," made it onto my summer mix tape. Its loping vocal anchors a genuinely catchy prog oddity.

"Breaking it down musically, singing in a band for me is a really positive thing. I'd never done that before, and it's a big challenge," says Benson, who actually got a turn at the microphone near the end of A Minor Forest. "We're all singing in this band, and that's something I learned in Creepy Crawly Claw – just what a great feeling it is to sing."

Indeed, there's something uplifting about Hale Zukas, though all indicators point toward their dark side. They might sing, "Nuh, nuh, nuh," while organ and drums are propelled along, in a weird mix of math rock and maybe the Animal Collective and their forest-y menace. Throw in scrap percussion – random cymbals, gongs, and a conventional drum kit – and a synchronized light show for a psychedelic experience.

The group members see it all as a balance of positive and negative energy, much like a half-moon cookie. "It's good to have a little variety in your daily life," Small explains, describing his once bizarre routine of first going to work at a photo lab, where he dealt with professional photographers on "a high-class level," then after work, attending gymnastics classes, where gay cheerleading troupe S.F. Cheer would practice, and finally continuing on to practice with the high-negativity Burmese.

Mass appeal

A band in flux, Hale Zukas have already changed many of the songs on their CD-R and have plans for their next recording to capture an acoustic mass. "The whole idea of ritual would be part of it, something that flows all the way through," Benson says. "The outline of the Catholic mass musically is something I'm kind of familiar with just from studying music. It's got a lot of good ideas and kind of a nice shape to it.... The original idea was to do something loosely based on that, but also Latin has a lot of good sounds and syllables. We're going to try and mix that up and do something that's not so 'I am a lamb in the eyes of God' and more what feels better."

It would be a small stretch to lump the group with other outsider weirdo rock bands, since Enbom has hosted the freak fests of Friends Forever, Japanther, and Lightning Bolt at his rabbit hole, otherwise known as grandma's house. Yet the pleasures of Hale Zukas are more subtle than those of their contemporaries, and as is customary for this scene, they returned from tour deep in debt and fired from their jobs. All the trio had to offset their gas-guzzling customized van were sales of their CD-R and some T-shirts. But though they are broke, they remain unbroken. Hale Zukas are on some next-level shit, by which I mean so next level that they seem to be going backward. Theirs looks like a spiritual revisionism for dark days to come.

Hale Zukas play with Experimental Dental School Sat/20, 10 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, S.F. $6. (415) 923-0923.