Charles Gocher’s premature death in 2007 signaled the immediate demise of Sun City Girls, the end of the trio’s mercurial 20-odd year run through the world of Bollywood covers, graveyard improvisation, sex cults, and esoterica. After all, Gocher was a honorary Bishop -- an adopted brother of Alan and Sir Richard in all but law -- so the idea of continuing without him was unthinkable. He was more than a drummer and occasional vocalist; he was an irreplaceable part of the Sun City engine, a bespectacled, sharply-dressed man forcing the methodologies of poetry and visual art between the grooves of limited-edition vinyl records. The blood brothers have since continued their respective solo careers and toured in tribute to brother Gocher, stripping down the group’s core to acoustic normality and showing Gocher’s film work in the background -- again, it seems the man’s vision was always inaccessible and dedicated regardless of medium.
Pint Sized Spartacus is Gocher’s only solo outing. Released in 1997, a year after the Girls peaked with the double-double of 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond the Rig Veda and Dante’s Disneyland Inferno, this unfortunately scarce record happily rests as a more personal extension of the latter, an ode to odd sounds, feverish journal writing, and a fetish for telling stories from beyond. Gocher’s spoken tales are set out like an extended radio play, not unlike the anonymous vignettes scattered around the songs on Sublime Frequencies compilations, backed by a range of musicians clinically weaving together free-improv and the lightest of jazz. What resulted from the sessions is an album of wonderful, fractured indulgence -- this is a work at the deepest end of the Sun City Girls catalogue, a terrifying prospect for the well-meaning but flawed individuals who dare not dig deeper than Torch of the Mystics. Words are whispered and shrieked inches from the listener’s ear; sometimes we’re presented with singing, though only rarely. Shadowed by impressively reserved instrumentation -- flickers, creaks, plucks, beats, drones -- Gocher is in his element amidst all this chaos, weaving anecdotes of organized and unorganized crime, poetic dirges, God, unpleasantness, geography, legends, and slavery. Themes eclectic for no other reason than being a welcome option, such is the Sun City Girls philosophy.
Writing shortly after Charles’ long battle with cancer was lost, Alan Bishop stated that he’d never encountered anyone properly qualified to judge Gocher. While I’m certainly in no position to change his perspective, this record’s rich and consistently vivid literary nature makes it a pleasure to write about, though admittedly in a way that largely dodges objectivity. Pint Sized Spartacus is an album to soak in, then, not one to analyze. Its stories impact osmotically, long after you’ve stopped listening. It is a monument to the nightmares of psychiatrists and potential biographers of the vocalist, a red rag to those who threaten even a decent level of understanding. Or perhaps, when all else is ignored, it’s simply a man ranting manically over weird noises.
This is not a difficult album; it is an impossible album. Such an admission is necessary in feeling any sort of joy at all. And while those familiar with the more celebrated Sun City Girls releases will fall into this place more comfortably, the manipulation of sound and language on Pint Sized Spartacus could only be understood fully in the mind of its creator. It’s perhaps fair to assume that even those closest to Gocher at the time could never grasp it all. Twenty listens in and I find myself more lost than when I began, trapped in a concrete labyrinth crafted by a man somewhere between a shriveled beatnik and a history teacher, the light dimming around me and the walls slowly closing in. This is a record for the jaded folk around us who’re tired of being able to understand everything they’re presented with, who long for the days of childlike wonder. Occasionally clawing at nothing but thin air is more satisfying, my friend, so don’t feel frustrated. Expectations of closure are to be disregarded at the door.
1. Fanfare
2. Prologue
3. Wanting Things
4. Prodamare
5. The Debate of One Splintered Soul
6. His Evil Twin Brother Within
7. Parting the Sea of Tranquility
8. Speak Easy and Forever Hold Your Piece
9. A Constructive Illusion
10. Johnny "the Brain" Torrio: Attorney at Law
11. Dissappearing in a Sea of Unbridled Personification
12. Hymn for Kali Ma
13. Sea of Samsara
14. The Sound of One Cross Walking
15. Flying on Scissored Wings
16. Crucified at the Crossroads Between Shovel and Sky
17. Angelo & Bessie
