By Will York

'PUNK ROCK CHANGED my life," the Minutemen's D. Boon once said.

In the same way, mid-'90s San Francisco obscurist concept rock changed mine. –So no matter what great things happened before or after, when I hear the words San Francisco and music scene together, I think about the same old stuff I never really shut up about: Amarillo Records, Mr. Bungle's Disco Volante (Warner Bros.), Flipper, Faith No More's Angel Dust (Slash), the Nuf Sed label, and the Pop-O-Pies.

Yeah, I realize that Flipper and the Pop-O-Pies were active in the '80s and that a platinum-selling band such as Faith No More isn't exactly obscurist. But it's all connected, at least in my diseased brain.

My indoctrination into this world came in 1998 when I heard "The Naked Hot Dog Vendor," from Neil Hamburger's America's Funnyman CD (Drag City). I was a college radio DJ in Chapel Hill, N.C., and a fellow DJ handed it to me and told me to segue out of some electro-acoustic sound collage I had on the air. The track consists of four minutes of scissor noises and awkward, intermittent laughter – the sound of an elaborate sight gag being documented on the wrong type of media. It's a subtle joke, but it sums up a lot of the Amarillo aesthetic: the sideways, audience-baiting humor, the sense of futility and failure, and the almost aggressive pointlessness. As one of my exasperated fellow DJs wrote on an album by another Amarillo act, the Three Doctors, "Is it funny because it isn't? Or is it?"

Amarillo specialized in records by baffling bands and down-and-out, screwball entertainers who spent excess time and energy on obscure, often impenetrable notions and occasionally just plain bad ideas. There was an intriguing sense of mystery and ambiguity in bands like Faxed Head and the Zip Code Rapists: it was hard to tell what was supposed to be funny and what wasn't, or what was real and what was fabricated.

The more I research and obsess over the music that's connected to this Amarillo axis, the more I hear this sort of ambiguity – this willingness to let people squirm in their seats and wonder what the hell is going on – as a common thread. It's evident in the scant discographies of Amarillo and Nuf Sed concept bands like Job's Daughters, the Easy Goings, Totem Pole of Losers, and the New Session People. But the aesthetic was also already in place in the early '80s, when the Pop-O-Pies played entire shows of nothing but the Grateful Dead's "Truckin'," driving unsuspecting punk listeners out of their minds, and when Flipper performed their prank song "Brainwashed," which repeats the same frustrating 30 seconds of music over and over, with a dozen false endings.

The same intangibles are also at work amid the prog-funk-pop-metal of Angel Dust, Faith No More's 1992 studio follow-up to their 1989 MTV-land hit, The Real Thing (Slash). It's there in the cheerleader-sung chorus to their gay-sex anthem "Be Aggressive." But I bet they know what I'm talking about here even if no one else does. FNM's core members are Pop-O-Pies alums, and the band invited Amarillo-Nuf Sed scourges the Easy Goings to open for them at the Warfield around the time of Angel Dust.

When I got to San Francisco in late '99, most of this stuff was over. Amarillo had closed up shop in early '99, the same year Mr. Bungle released their last album and a year after Faith No More broke up (and years after their last good album). Nuf Sed put out its last release in 1996, the Wandering Stars' self-titled CD. All of which means I'm hopelessly nostalgic and stuck in a weird, very specific part of the past.

Its echoes can still be heard, though, if you know where to listen. A month ago, in one week, I saw Cambodian-Thai cover-song specialists Neung Phak – who share a guitarist with Amarillo's Heavenly Ten Stems and Nuf Sed's Job's Daughters – as well as Amarillo artists and past/honorary San Franciscans Sun City Girls and Secret Chiefs 3. The latter were making their first Bay Area appearance in four years, this time as a nine-piece band playing somber, Middle Eastern-inspired music on a stage decorated with Persian rugs, one of which depicted a plane flying into a tall building and a violinist wearing a hashasheen mask – speaking of letting people squirm.

There's no single defining sound to any of this stuff, but there's a worldview that's at least partly shared by these acts – a realization that there's a fine line between comedy and tragedy and that the funniest things in life are often the most depressing (and vice versa). The scene may be a thing of the past, but if that basic idea isn't still relevant in today's sick world, I don't know what is.

Top 10

1. Secret Chiefs 3, Book of Horizons (Mimicry)

2. Pig Destroyer, Terrifyer (Relapse)

3. Danny Cohen, Dannyland (Anti)

4. Princess Nicotine, Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar (Burma) (Sublime Frequencies)

5. Isis, Panopticon (Ipecac)

6. Cambodian Cassette Archives, Khmer Folk and Pop Music Vol. 1 (Sublime Frequencies)

7. Meshuggah, I (Fractured Transmitter)

8. Sun City Girls, Carnival Folklore Resurrection Radio, Vol. 13: 98.6 Is Death (Abduction)

9. Flying Luttenbachers, The Void (Troubleman Unlimited)

10. Puffy Amiyumi, Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi (Sony)