Grand Opening and Closing

It should hardly be surprising that a band with the name Sleepytime Gorilla Museum would form in 1999, with the implied calm before the storm, the moment of drowsy reflection before the wave of history (which is still crashing upon us a quarter century later) arrived with its simple millennial message: Sleep is wrong. With 2000 looming, the band formed around a collective commitment to personal celebrations of the apocalypse, to be shared in the most inviting way with the broadest possible listenership. Their prior experience together, of moving through and/or baiting audiences in Idiot Flesh and Charming Hostess in the 90’s, shaped their approach to the stage as a living theater, with a rehearsed precision of apparent chaos giving way to moments of actual chaos brought in on the shoes of the nightly audience. Carla had first met Nils and Dan backstage in San Francisco (Idiot Flesh with Mudwimin), bonding over a shared recognition of the future-rock promised by the Bartok string-quartets of the early 20th century (a legacy of the most globally apocalyptic era since the Black Plague). Their collaboration was cemented by drummer/composer David Shamrock, who by then had overcome the trauma of his very first show with (pre-Idiot Flesh) Acid Rain at a backyard party in East Oakland which erupted into an all-out brawl from fence to fence. The lineup was completed after witnessing Moe! Staiano single-handedly force a sort of music out of a stageful of hit-able things and the walls themselves before destroying a tube-television and attempting to wear it. “This is just what we need,” they thought, and their West Oakland studio - ‘The Nursery’ - was soon pulsing with 5 over 3 and other polyrhythmic toe-tappers. In addition to Moe!’s metal-on-metal percussion and Carla’s intricately shimmering and crushing command of the 5-string electric violin, the pursuit of new sounds was furthered by Dan’s musical inventions: the Percussion Guitar (played by Carla), the Sledge-Hammer Dulcimer (with 6-foot-long bass-piano strings), and a shifting arsenal of others. This opened the door to a wide pallet of unlikely musical bedfellows, with the debut album raging from careening hard rock of “1997 (Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s…)” to the ghostly “Ablutions” and the quietly shining meditation of “Sunflower” (so unobtrusive that at their first SF show in ’99, the expectant audience talked through most of it as a barely-perceptible opening number until a helpful citizen shouted out, “This is it, man. This is what you paid your money for.” Their most enduring audience sing-along also appears as the album’s 2nd track, with the single shout of a single word - “Ambugaton” (David’s mispronunciation of Hank Williams’ mispronunciation of ‘Armageddon’)!! Another staple of the set-list to this day, “Powerless,” appears on this expanded vinyl edition in both the original and a later live evolution (with later drummers Matthias Bossi and Michael Mellender, who also play on a bonus pair of contrasting Carla gems- “More Time” and “Flinch.”) By the time this opening album was completed in 2001, David had moved (temporarily) to Missouri and been amicably replaced by Frank Grau, whose varied ambitions included co-releasing the album on his Chaosophy label and booking 9-week tours that brought the band to (almost) every city in the U.S., while cooking with hot oils on the moving bus! This first domestic vinyl release (at last!), on Avant Night and Joyful Noise Recordings, has been completely remastered by the Museum’s bassist and producer, Dan Rathbun, and is accompanied by the release of the 2nd and 3rd of their classic albums. The new live line-up, which broke ground on the European tour of 2025 and tours the U.S. this spring/summer, completes the historical family circle with the drum throne being filled by Wes Anderson, who played with both Idiot Flesh and Charming Hostess. The reformed band is thrilled to find that the wrongness which pushed them to the very precipice of the 20th century is even wronger and feels more right today! Ambugaton!