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Nothin' could be fine

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LEGEND HAS IT that Caroliner are a cover band. All of their songs were originally performed in the 1800s by a singing bull named Caroliner who was slaughtered by his owner, a starving pioneer woman. She continued to carry his head around on a stick to entertain workers at mining camps – and the bull kept on singing.

Such fantastical resilience has served Caroliner well over the decades. Indeed, the slaughtered bull could be a metaphor for the music industry itself – that is, if Caroliner weren't such blatant anti-rock stars. The members perform in costume and use an ever changing array of incredibly fictitious names (currently the Mole Certificate, Slobberhouse Sock, the Three-Padded Brain, Gripplea, Cottypearile, and the Western Hand Builder). The band's 12 albums are independently released and are exclusively on vinyl, each individually packaged in recycled pizza boxes, vacuum cleaner bags, old clothes, adult-diapers bags, dry-cleaning stubs, etc., with original art and calligraphied lyric sheets, and often including random detritus (old photos, dirt, hair, burnt toast, fish heads). And the band have been chipping away at songs in a dark attic for four years without even looking for a show. All this isn't due to lack of interest – Alice Cooper, the Boredoms, Willie Winant (Oingo Boingo, Mr. Bungle, Sonic Youth), Wolf Eyes, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, and the Sun City Girls are all fans, as was Anton LaVey; they've had reviews in Spin, the New York Times, the Village Voice, and Alternative Press; and they've turned down label deals with Reprise and Matador. It's Caroliner's way of keeping the pioneer spirit alive.

Formed in 1983 as a three-piece in which the drummer played a bucket, Caroliner have gone through umpteen lineups over the years (my friend plays with them now but refuses to tell me what instrument), from trio to standard rock format to "chamber orchestra." While the early albums are raw, almost punk in nature, the group's sound has evolved into a newfangled old-music world that grabs elements of rock, bluegrass, musique concrète, noise, and Eastern music and spews them forth as an archetype of American folk songs for the future. They were a fixture on the San Francisco scene in the late '80s and early '90s, performing almost monthly, and toured the United States five times and Japan once before petering off into near folklore status themselves.

There's no denying that Caroliner isn't for everyone. Each show is an event involving a full-on assault of unexpected sounds and elaborate, hand-painted fluorescent costumes and scenery that reflect the band's operatic theme, depicting the hallucinatory visions of wayward and ergot-poisoned American pioneers underneath a blacklight sun. But both fans and unfans would have to agree on one thing: they've never experienced anything quite like it.

On the cusp of the first Caroliner show since 1999, head bull the Mole Certificate was kind enough to answer some questions about the band's previous releases and, in some cases, confuse us even more.

Rear End Hernia Puppet Show (1985)

Bay Guardian: Your first release opens with an almost comedic drumroll, then launches into driving bass lines and slide guitar riffs. But there's a lot more happening than in your standard rock trio. Listening to it today, it seems like a precursor to the current noise scene. How do you view the album in retrospect?

Mole Certificate: That particular LP is complete hodgepodge, as we were hesitant to continue with the tradition of Caroliner the singing bull and make a very personal record with individual psyches and tastes involved with a box that said "MANKIND: THIS BOX IS YOUR PRODUCT," meaning we included garbage and modern civilization within. That LP didn't stir the fertilizer like it should've, and we went for the purest Caroliner salted horn to suckle and birth from. We aren't as embarrassed by it as much as we are confused.

I'm Armed with Quarts of Blood (1986)

BG: You played this album's "Barrel Horse Wisdom Crackers" on your 1998 tour. Is it a favorite, or is there another kind of order to what songs you revive at shows?

MC: Well, each LP has a favorite song for each of us. That was one song that everyone was agreeing on from I'm Armed with Quarts of Blood. All the other LPs were knock-down-drag-out fights on what we would all agree to play. One particular member kept arms crossed and brow furrowed, as a personal statement, at the pretour practices, when we would try to practice "Sell, Heal, Holler" [from the LP of the same name], wanting to play "Horse Cannons" instead. By the time we hit Salt Lake City, though, the frumpy attitude turned into a grin as some folks were staring and waiting for the instrument to kick in. Embarrassment won over, and the song took off.

The Cooking Stove Beast (1988)

BG: How and why do you mine the songs of the 1800s and translate them for modern-day ears?

MC: History is important. If we are able to make a disconnection from some thoroughly modernized FM-radio flavor-of-the-year suicide and bring in some historical cabin-fever country and "westar" suicide, then it just makes us plum hammy. How we do it is imagining ourselves as ergot-flavored country deities with totem bow ties and adhering to what the Caroliner book describes each song as. Modern electricity has added the extra hum to the normally empty great plain of the brain.

Strike Them Hard, Drag Them to Church (1989)

BG: Your liner notes say, "This LP will keep you from ever being lonely." What do you think about the current state of cabin fever in America?

MC: We are in the city right now, but from what we understand, Alaska and Siberia are still suffering from the deficiency of good bread untainted by mold and inedibility. I suppose in 100 years we will have to hear from a know-it-all about how the communications of remote areas (yelling in the pasture) failed to save the life of someone hallucinating the ghost smokestack with an accompanied river of flowing death horror. We are prepared for this!

Banknotes, Dreams and Signatures (1992)

BG: Caroliner is known for using different, extended band names on each album, such as "Caroliner Rainbow Scrambled Egg Taken for a Wife." What's the significance behind these long monikers?

MC: We try to assimilate the audience into the verses or titles of the songs we are doing. "Scrambled egg taken for a wife" is a line from the song "Old Eggwipe," [about a character] who was half horse, half scrambled egg.

Rings on the Awkward Shadow (1993)

BG: This double album sounds like a radio broadcast of a Chinese opera company sitting in with a bluegrass band at a carnival during an electrical storm. Yet it's also very quiet and beautifully orchestrated. Can you tell me a bit about the shift in tone?

MC: We had some extralong pieces that wouldn't do well taking up most of a side of an LP. Thus it was doubled to redistribute the weight. We went out on a limb and put the whole thing on wire spool before cutting it to vinyl, as all our earlier LPs just had glimpses of this fabulous machine. This LP really has the sound of the 1800s in it more than any other. The low tones of the steal-the-stomach machine [an original invention] were lost in the technology of the wire spool quality, but it was a small sacrifice. You starve yourself for a week, eat some rotten food, you will throw your television out the window and breathe the 1800s with this double cannon.

Sell Heal Holler (1995)

BG: Sell Heal Holler is known for coming wrapped in a diaper disposal bag. Do you use what you have at hand for packaging?

MC: Yes, anything, preferably antiques. But we are stuck here in this century; we have to use these modern dump piles for cushioning the recordings.

Our American Heritage (1997)

BG: A lot of the songs on this live compilation are focused on food, the lack of food, and poisoned food. Was Caroliner a hungry bull?

MC: Caroliner was like unto an early tape recorder that used organic materials instead of machinery. What it sang was exactly what it was told. Food was a big problem back in the 1800s. It was a focus. If you didn't save that grain in the winter, your crops failed in the spring, you're deader than a rock in a water closet.

Toodoos (1998)

BG: It's been several years since you released your last album, Toodoos. I understand you have a new one coming out. What took so long?

MC: If you were in the financial bind of what Caroliner is doing each and every season of keeping the LPs in print (we have been doing a crummy job on that, sorry), then you would be walking around in shoeless shoelaces and a belt without pants. Dire, dire, monetary tom-sure poverty. Caroliner Rainbow One Line One Lung Capper play Thurs/8, 9 p.m., Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, S.F. $10. (415) 885-0750. Caroliner are distributed by Subterranean Records (www.subterranean.org).