MUSIC .

Missed Connections

The Sun City Girls pay tribute to their lost brother.


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Published: Jun 18, 2008

ALL FOR ONE: Alan and Rick Bishop retired the Sun City Girls name after Charles Gocher died in 2007.

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"When one of the three leaves or dies, the group was history. As simple as that."

That's Alan Bishop's terse, direct explanation of the decision that he and brother Rick made to retire the Sun City Girls name after the death of drummer and "third brother" Charles Gocher in February 2007, following a lengthy battle with cancer. The Bishops are now paying tribute to Gocher's memory and providing something of a coda to the Sun City Girls with an acoustic performance of material culled from the group's impossibly voluminous catalog, under the name "The Brothers Unconnected," to be preceded by a 40-minute compilation of Gocher's video work.

But as Bishop says, what choice was there? SCG was never a band that played songs that could be performed by other artists. They were a blend of personalities, whose interests and obsessions and senses of humor sparked alchemical noise, creating a curious sonic space that simultaneously barred and enticed outsiders like a secret society.

That Gocher didn't share the Bishops' blood or name didn't make him any less a part of the family that the trio forged over 25 years together. The three communicated in something akin to an invented twins language, a hodgepodge of avant-garde jazz, in-jokes, folk songs, world music, poetry, aimless jams and, hell, anything that could be committed to tape. The moments between the pressing of "record" and "stop" were the frame that created a Sun City Girls "song," as long as Bishop, Bishop and Gocher were doing something or nothing in the recorder's vicinity.

Or on stage, of course. Asked via email to recall specific moments from SCG concerts that particularly typified Gocher's personality, Alan Bishop offered a few suggestions. "Lighting things on fire onstage? Maybe running a lawn mower over a dancefloor covered in confetti? Dancing on 3 huge bags of marshmallows?"

Their shows could be called performance art, but that's entirely too formal a term for it. Over their nearly three decades together, the Sun City Girls were continuously generating material, with a discography staggering in its volume and shows that combined spectacle with songcraft. Their music seemed always to be in a state of becoming, their prolific spontaneity resulting in countless unpolished gems, moments of great beauty shrouded in Dadaist dialogues and tape hiss. An SCG experience was something like a gallery show of half-finished clay sculptures, with intricate, hypnotic carvings occupying the same block of raw material as rough markings and unmolded lumps still dripping onto the floor.

They spoke to one another in assumed accents, whether playing characters in dialogue exchanges or by the absorption of musics from around the world. For all its seeming anarchy, the culture they created is necessarily silenced by the loss of one of its citizens.

"He contributed so many things," Alan Bishop says. "It's impossible to get specific. We always operated in the non-specific anyway. His songwriting, percussion, presence, everything really. We'll not have the same communication with another again. It's impossible."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

The Brothers Unconnected: A Tribute to Sun City Girls and Charles Gocher plays Sat., June 21, 8 p.m., $12, Johnny Brenda's, 1201 N. Frankford Ave., 215-739-9684, johnnybrendas.com.