By J.H. Tompkins

THE NEWS THAT Clubbo Records was back in business was greeted, no doubt, by widespread disbelief – "I don't believe it" would be the appropriate response from anyone who was a longtime fan. Then again, Clubbo's history was twisted – all the way back to the tune that launched the label, the novelty hit based on a burp, Clipper Cowbridge's "Soda Pop Shop." The company had threatened to die so often (at least one of its leading artists did die) that coming alive again was almost an afterthought. But log in to Clubbo.com and you'll find it: old songs, old faces, stories and screwups, right down to the motto "Music you can believe in." When I saw the label had made like a god and risen from the dead, I laughed and thought I'd never believe in anything again.

Had you entered the name Devon Shire into the eBay auction machinery in 1999, that global yard sale might have coughed up a Polaroid of a young man sporting a strand of love beads and the kind of three-tab grin produced when dumb luck and talent are mixed with LSD. You could have scored the photo and possibly a copy of Shire's "Azure Lady Nightingale." The latter, for those old enough to remember, was the nearly transcendent 1971 single he recorded for long-gone Clubbo; it climbed the charts like a vine until it grew out of sight and disappeared.

The truth is that Shire has no need for eBay's services, because as Chris Parmagiano, a successful music-business lawyer, he has no need for a band or fans – the alienated suburban mobs that once embraced his blissed-out fantasy world and made him nearly famous are scarcely a memory to him today. But even if Parmagiano doesn't require old admirers, they need evidence of him – and if that's the case, well, what a difference a reissue makes. Until recently, the Clubbo catalog was the type of out-of-print treasure trove eBay sellers thrive on: music ruthlessly copyright-controlled and yet also forgotten about by the industry giant that owned it. It was stuck in a deep freeze – a label too small to even be remembered, which meant the public had no access to the recordings of Cowbridge and Shire, as well as others, like Rockfinger, Suthrn Cuzn, the Spooky Bunch, Lazarus Project, and local musicians Action Plus.

The bottom line

Does this name-dropping trigger a flood of memories – high school, the drive-in, juvenile hall, shoplifting, summer vacation, growing up too fast at Dad's house on weekends and Mom's apartment on school nights? Of course not, but don't worry; you aren't alone. Clubbo's artists were often contenders but rarely champions – self-sabotage was a lifestyle choice for the Clubbo roster. Who could, or can, blame them? They were cheated, underexposed, manipulated, and discouraged, and all anyone could or would say was "That's Clubbo." When promotional street teams tried to launch a movement to boost Clubbo's original motto, "The little label that could," confused fans tended to ask, "The little label that could what?"

That was then, and this is a new tomorrow – or something. And if you're a crate digger who's paid major bank for, say, a mint copy of Rockfinger's "Feel It," unload it ASAP. Clubbo is heating up the retail marketplace as it never has before, and Shoshana Sanchez, the label's new general manager, is busy playing savior, according to the label's Web site. Who knows why Sanchez calls herself a "bottom feeder," in the mold of founding partners Chett Clubb and Morris "Bo" Bogerman; bottom feeders normally exist a plane or two below journalists, junkies, and energy wholesalers.

Good or bad, the phrase certainly fits Clubbo's founding fathers, whose artistic vision was a function of the $1 bill – a sawbuck would've confused them utterly, and the label already had more confusion than it could handle. Clubb and Bogerman arrived in the pop marketplace via a string of stag records like "Here, Pussy, Pussy," and "Dawn's Crack"; it was just a sidestep to the aforementioned "Soda Pop Shop." The label became, briefly and sadly, the "Home of the Swiss Invasion"; it saw promising acts crash and burn and sometimes die; it cut corners, cut budgets – when it could – and always cut a piece of its artists' action without asking first. The years passed. Clubbo came and went.

But today, with a business plan that makes sense only in the unfixably broken English spoken by Indonesian Clubbo artist Tiger Love on her song "Feelingful Mood," the label is back once again – with music to believe in.

Reasons

In the Jefferson Starship's 1975 hit "Miracles," Marty Balin cut to the bone with the line "If only we believed in miracles baby." Search rock song titles for the word believe on the venerable All Music Guide and you'll find 599 occurrences. Digital summaries have weight in today's world, and these seem to say that belief is central to pop music. While it's fashionable (and simpler) to look at lyrics, the real answers – as far as I'm concerned – lie in the satisfying certainty of rock-steady 4/4 time and the immutable pattern that delivers "the truth" in the 12-bar blues. As one beat follows another, so does the human heart beat and the sun rise and set. To steal the kick drum 'n' bass is to undo a force that harnesses our hearts and binds us to one another – and if that isn't blasphemy, what is?

To use emotional and physical intensity as the measure of music is a ponderous weight to bear – although those qualities have traveled for centuries on the shoulders of gospel and spirituals, and more recently on those of jazz, soul, R&B, and funk. Their influence wasn't contained by racial or class boundaries; '70s rock superstar Bruce Springsteen, for instance, used music to find out "if love is wild ... if love is really real."

The Noe Valley home of San Francisco's Elise Malmberg and Joe Gore, founding members of Clubbo's Action Plus, is a long way from the nation's mythical music artery, Highway 61. Action Plus songs like "Lucky Pink" and "I Think He Went to Prague" aren't to be confused with Aretha Franklin's version of "A Change Is Gonna Come" or Esther Phillips's "Home Is Where the Hatred Is." Still, I've seen Gore play with Afropop bands, with singer-songwriter Steve Yerkey, with passionately brittle PJ Harvey, and with that student of surreal suffering, Tom Waits. Even as a sideman, Gore has been challenged to provide emotional coloration with his instrument that didn't depend on irony.

Years ago his status as a member of Nigerian musician O.J. Ekemode's often exhilarating band gave him bragging rights over American players who put Nigerian players – worthy or not – on a pedestal and described their own chops in much the same way as today's rappers "keep things real" by pointing to experiences with poverty and nonwhite communities. Gore, raised in the San Gabriel Valley and a veteran lute performer at California's Renaissance Faires, tells this story about his stint with Ekemode: "The moment of truth for me came when the fabulous Ghanaian drummer Ahumah Ababio skipped a gig because he had to go see his favorite band – Air Supply."

The story still gets a few laughs when it's rolled out, a couple of decades after the fact, because the question of racial, class, and/or colonial authenticity has polarized musicians since Al Jolson put on blackface and became a movie star. While it's anyone's guess what kind of cultural peculiarities his face paint triggered, the much-publicized case of Jewish jazz clarinetist Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow made big headlines a couple of decades later. Mezzrow decided not just to look black, think black, and play black; he decided to be black. He wrote the widely read Really the Blues – in which he said the blacker he got, the better he played – to tell the world about it.

Mezzrow's attempt to shed his skin notwithstanding, were he alive today, modern technology could have done wonders with his playing – once he got into the studio, anyway. Some years ago there was a widely viewed commercial for Memorex cassette tapes that featured jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald doing her thing so powerfully that at the spot's climax, a crystal wine glass shattered into thousands of pieces as a voice-over asked, "Is it live, or is it Memorex?" Few people use tape these days, but everyone's asking the same old questions. The answer or – better put – answers are more complicated than ever. Ask that Memorex question in the Malmberg-Gore living room, and both musicians suddenly jerk to attention, lean forward, and enter into a conversational duet as rich and bright as any musical riffs they play onstage.

Gore: Someday we'll need words to express 100 gradations of truth. That might be frustrating, but it's hard to argue with that.

Malmberg: What does it mean to say something is true and something else is false?

Gore: The notion has changed so much. Doesn't the disillusionment around Milli Vanilli seem quaint today?

Malmberg: We want to believe that truth comes pouring out of our mouths as if it was inspired by the gods.

Gore: The notion developed in the rock era that the singer was the voice of the truth.

Malmberg: Yeah, that these feelings had never been expressed like this before, and that the audience and artist – or in the case of albums, the living-room listener and the artist – were sharing a raw emotional awakening.

Gore: And that my voice is going to slice through all the bullshit in corporate America like this razor of honesty that can slice through the artifice that distorts daily life.

Malmberg: Which is bullshit.

Gore: Bullshit.

Malmberg: People just want to connect the dots. It's a really human thing.

Gore: People want to make a literal connection between lyrics and life – it's very human to want to connect the dots.

Malmberg: And very human to dislike it when that connection is broken.

Gore: It's a violation of trust, a social contract between performer and audience.

Malmberg: Which is what Clubbo is doing. We're tainting that trust. But we're making it fun.

Gore: If it's fun, you can manipulate them without that trust and knowledge.

Malmberg: It can't be just us having fun, because then you're mistreating the audience. But the truth is that people go to the Clubbo Web site, and they just love it. They see the old photos and band stories, and they hear all the hits, and they crack up.

Gore: That's what was wrong with the whole Milli Vanilli thing. Everyone took it so seriously.

Malmberg: Clubbo breaks the rules of entertainment, but it's fun.

Music to believe in

It's time to take a step back in order to confirm what anyone who hasn't figured it out no doubt suspects: Clubbo Records is a hoax. Or better put, the history as delivered at Clubbo.com is a hoax. The Web site exists, the Web site's music exists, you can buy Clubbo souvenirs on eBay and Clubbo songs on CD Baby; at this point, however, some of the hits have yet to be written and produced. Cowbridge and Shire? Well, they exist in the lives of anyone visiting Clubbo.com as much as any superstar or cult obscurity exists for the average fan. Action Plus exist, as do Malmberg and Gore, who formed it and who take responsibility for creating Clubbo's array of sounds. Malmberg has done most of the writing, and Gore has done the lion's share of the recording.

Clubbo.com is an intricate site that features razor-sharp design (by Malmberg and Rich Leeds of Big Wig Designs), MP3 downloads, album jackets, song titles, and some songs. The site is anything but haphazard; there's an official Clubbo bio and melodramatic multipage presentations for each artist. Take the story of Bleep's Martin Jarrow, the abundantly talented star who fought for artistic control and battled guilt in connection with the automobile crash that killed his bandmates, ultimately finding peace as a monk. Jarrow left the music world after the accident, and though the facts are murky, he eventually joined the Discalced Gaucherian Friars of the Strict Observance, a small Catholic order with headquarters at the Monastery of the Most Blessed Trinity in Lower Burrell, Pa. The order is given to silence, penitent meditation, and the renunciation of conventional footwear.

The professional quality of Clubbo.com helps quell doubts as to the legitimacy of the venture. The site also boasts something few nonliterary Web sites offer: the first 40 pages of a novel. The catch is, you have to know how to find the link that opens up Clubbo's true identity to the world. To do so, move the cursor left along the black bottom bar from the "contact" link. A link to a credits page will appear, and you'll enter a world closer to that in which you and I live. You'll find out which musicians contributed to the project, a list that includes Ralph Carney, Mark Eitzel, Gary Floyd, Amy Greacen, Dave Kostiner, Rich Leeds, Dawn Richardson, and James Rotondi. And you'll find The Clubbo Story, the first pages of a promising novel by Gore; buried within are the roots of Clubbo.com.

"I started out writing a novel to exorcise my music industry demons," Gore explains. "I was already into it when I became so captivated by the idea of forgery, of authenticity – it's a really good topic – that I started [over] again after 200 pages so I could get into a story where musical forgery distorted historical record.

"Then," he continues, hurrying because he sees Malmberg is anxious to interrupt, "with a friend named Jason Kramer, we started to talk about the idea."

"We wanted," Malmberg says, "to make the next album for some well-known artist – we would record it, post it on the Web, and then publicize it. It would be ridiculously easy. You could do it with CD Stamper and some letterhead. Send a press pack out to 150 media outlets, and it would fool at least some of the people. Because the thing is that people are ready to believe almost anything these days. It's fascinating, but it's also frightening and potentially sinister. It's an awesome power."

"And the payoff," Gore explains, grinning as widely his partner in crime, "would be to see the look on someone's face when they picked up Entertainment Weekly to find out that they had recorded a new album, and that it got a C-minus review and there's no record!"

"Eventually we decided to do what we called a music fiction project," Malmberg adds. "It's playing parts; it's closer to theater or fiction. It's telling stories."

"Something important happened to me in the meantime," Gore explains. "I was hired to make a DVD about how to make it in the music business that involved face-to-face interviews with 100 people, from the CEOs and huge stars to the mail room guy. I was in the belly of the beast, and it was nasty business, although I met wonderful people and awful people. It made me determined to go ahead with this project."

"And," Malmberg adds, "it made him angry."

Wonderful world

When word of Clubbo.com gets around – and it will get around; the project is not only funny but also as smart as hell – the writers who cover it will reach into their bag of clichés and pull out Spinal Tap. In fact, while This Is Spinal Tap is an older relative of Clubbo.com, the former doesn't reach much beyond parody. Clubbo.com goes deeper, despite the protestations of both principal creators, who, sensing an essay lurking beneath my questions, fight valiantly to head me off while we're all still laughing. Like it or not, their project implicitly questions the assumptions that serve as our culture's binding agents.

Closer to their heart is Lawrence Weschler's award-winning book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, about the writer's experience with a Los Angeles storefront that was home to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. The museum stretches the definition of what a museum is, plays fast and loose with the science underlying at least some of the pieces on display, and provides Wilson an opportunity to deliver straight-faced, off-the-cuff comedy – although the visitor is never sure when the performance is underway.

The real beauty lies in the uncertainty that hangs in the air. Why? Because humanity's need for certainty – allow me just a moment to share my worries – may one day be our undoing. Wilson is fond of his African stink ant with the protruding horn, and after reading about it, I too was seduced by its mysteries. But were I faced with the possibility of fending one off as it crawled beneath my bedsheets at night, its existence would matter.

Clubbo.com is, when all is said and done, merely a good-spirited prank, not a seditious underground movement. Nevertheless, pondering the mysteries of Shire has its beauty, and in its own small way, its radical purpose. As a species, humankind is curious and deeply conservative at the same time. We're called by the unknown, by the allure of what lies around the next bend, even as we want to make sure there's safety at the end of the trip. The problem is that even as we welcome those who disrupt our comfort, our pulses stir when the Blue Angels roar overhead, or when we hear the music of a marching band. Musically speaking, we don't want to live at the mercy of 4/4 time and the simple, solid backbeat. Let us celebrate, then, the pranksters and outlaws – musical and otherwise – who keep us off-balance and force us to think.

"We want to believe," Malmberg says sharply, "that truth comes pouring out of our mouths as if was inspired by the gods – "

"The notion developed in the rock era that the singer was the voice of the truth," Gore says, interrupting.

He stops short, and all three of us look down at my voice recorder and laugh.