Single bass drum and a banjo cradled between his knees, a mic set up on one of those accordion holders, the One Man Banjo man is a singular figure. In the middle of the song “Harlequin King” he switches speeds and becomes the smoothest crooner. Banjos are not just about frenzied strumming—this  is a blues man to the core. He’s a charmer too in eye shadow, a bowler hat, black blazer and striped with thick black and gray bands.

The One Man Banjo aka Sean Lee playing on Mardi Gras 2010.

I realize: it makes me sort of feel bad to be typing notes on the newest of Netbook circuitry while the One Man Banjo goes on singing about Algerian dances and Parisian waltzes.

All sorts of dancing going on now on this Tuesday evening at the Stork Club in downtown Oakland. Sean Lee aka One Man Banjo is breaking in the stage before The Hobo Gobbelins and the Blue Bone Express play. The acts on the bill have got the crowd swerving and moving. It’s the fuck-it kind of dancing. Real dancing, not the head bopping you see at rock concerts. A lot of arms are being thrown into the air. Knees are wobbling and hips are swaying. To an ex-Deadhead with a pentagram t-shirt and a top hat adorned with red garlands, One Man Banjo declares: “And the the prize goes to this guy right here for dancing his ass off!”

Up the street, way up Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley celebrated Mardi Gras today and the zanier crowdlings have showed up now. There’s a man with Fred Flinstonesque shredded yellow robes and a Bozo clown wig. And if it’s not that in terms of headgear, it’s honeybee antennas or long black crow’s feathers.

The One Man Banjo Band—who also goes by the sobriquet SL Gompers—performs his own songs before joining the Hobo Gobbelins on stage.

Between the two acts the audience is treated to plenty of storytelling or re-telling (OMB sings the tale of Humpty Dumpty, as an homage to Lewis Carrol’s recent birthday, he says). The in-between-song banter is presented in a snarl, an ignoble voice pressing the story themes forward. When the Hobo Gobbelins comes along, the show is really more like a set of Dungeons & Dragons episodes than a proper setlist. It’s not impossible that the whole thing, top to bottom, amounts to a sordid tale filled with gobbelins and lurking halflings.

The banjo player turns to Professor Plague, the guitar-playing alter ego of Dan Abbott, one of the band’s lead singers. He asks, “Professor Plague, will you please tell us what to watch out for the most on this journey?” Abbott answers with a coy smile,“Why, falling rocks of course. And then yourself, staring back in the mirror… and this is a song about the Hall of Mirrors.”

Skyler Fell, Melody and SL Gompers of the Hobo Gobblins playing at the Stork Club in Oakland.

[Chorus--a waltz]

When the wagons come through with their trickeries and treachery

Stay clear of the hall of mirrors

Heed my advice, don’t blink twice

The third look’s the charm, now you’ve been warned,

you’re an image embalmed in the hall of mirrors

Abbott, an old friend from journalism school, first told me about the HG in 2005. Excitedly, he called it “a sort of Satanic jug band populated by various creatures of the night: picture the Muppet Show if Jim Henson were raised from the grave by H.P. Lovecraft.” Basically, it appealed to his Dark Nerd side.

Gobbelins being vile creatures, their songs are dark, boastful and gross. “Your panic is our party,” they sing, “Uncork your throat and drink your wine, your skull will be a whiskey bowl.” In past shows, I’ve heard them swear that the word “audience” is goblinese for “food that screams..” It’s more theater and yarn-spinning lyricism than your average radio single. Another piece refers to a mythical city-state called “Kaltharas Bay,” which Abbott made up as part of an old Dungeons & Dragons game that lasted a couple of years, but, he explained, echoed the last scene from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Return of the King.

“I mean, we’re all incurable weirdos in our own way,” Abbott said, “but we’ve managed to scoop out chunks of space in our lives for the Gobbelins.”

When he’s not Professor Plague, Abbott also leans on the political—something he hopes will be reflected in new Gobbelins songs. The day after the start of the Iraq War in March 2003, Abbott headed a demonstration called “Puke for Peace” who made themselves vomit near the old Federal Building in San Francisco in a colorful display of the sick-making effects of war. It worked, closing down the edifice for the day.

Dan Abbott aka Professor Plague and Skyler Fell of the Hobo Gobbelins play at The Stork Club.

The Hobo Gobbelins feature three musicians that play with little more than found objects. This makeshift aspect is crucial to the band ethos. “Music doesn’t begin with a factory or a Guitar Center just because you don’t have money for a musical instrument,” Abbott said.

His bandmate Miasma plays the musical saw, an idiophonic instrument that takes far greater dexterity to play then its simplistic makeup implies. Two more members opted for instruments that had their heyday in African-American communities of the early 1900s, including a washboard player—who goes by the phantasmic moniker H.P. Gobblecroft—to provide percussion with black metal abandon.

Fittingly, Abbott used an African proverb to shed some light on how the Gobbelins crew got so big: “If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing,” he said. So one by one, the crew grew to seven.

No one exemplifies that better than the one known as Malady. As the accordionist’s lover, Melody Guzman began to spend so much time with the band that someone fashioned an instrument for her: the gutbucket. The sound it makes resonates out of an upside down metal washtub. (People once used washtubs like her’s with washboards like her bandmate’s—to do their laundry.) A single string made of animal gut is tied to the tub’s bottom and struck by the hand and taunt with alternating force by a wooden stick that sits on the ground. Not exactly Guitar Center ware but it’s a fascinating instrument to look at.

Whether gobbelins by name or by nature, it’s clearly a different breed of band we’re dealing with here. Still, their instruments may be unusual but they do pop up in the music stratosphere; the singing saw, for example, is used by the rock band The Eels and by Hans Zimmer for his score of the second Pirates of the Caribbeans movie.

There’s also Buba Tuba, the green-faced Tuba player in pirate bandanna, who is by daylight Stan Osborne, a simple computer engineer. Wielding perhaps the band’s most complex instrument is 27-year-old accordionist Skyler Fell. She founded and successfully runs Accordion Apocalyspe, San Francisco’s only shop dedicated to the squeezebox. (See Heather Mack’s article about the shop on MuseZu here) Masters of doing the best with what is at hand, the band has used Skyler’s shop to play shows and a converted school bus Fell lives in to haul the band during tours.

Melody Guzman concentrates on her gutbucket's bass line.

“The Hobo Gobbelins are amazing,” Fell told me by e-mail. “Being in the band feeds my belly flame. Time to play, make music magic, be around great inspiring musicians and friends, adventure in the goblin realm, and takeover the world. One cranium at a time.”

Most of the revelers came to the Stork Club show from the Berkeley Mardi Gras Parade (which, along with the How Berkeley Can You Be? Celebration , is among the weirder things you can attend in the East Bay) but where do Hobo Gobbelins come from? Not from the ground as you might expect but, according to one song, from green balloons made of the decaying skin of humans. Makes perfect sense.

We rule the skies in our flying machines

La, la, la, la, blah blah blah blah blah!

Your panic is our party time

Uncork your throat and drink the wine

Your skull will be a whiskey bowl

Your guts go in a bucket and we eat… your… soul

We’ll flay you pretty soon

And sew your skin into a new balloon

A little later, the band offered up a shout-along. Everyone seemed quite drunk by then, so happily they followed instructions. When the Hobbo Gobbelins mentioned “whiskey,” the dancers shouted “WHISKEY!” The word “beer” was reserved a similar adulation.

I am a fisherman, weathered and broken

 

It's hard to stay still when the Hobo Gobbelins play--of course the HB prefer their prey writhing.

The last of my kindred, my home was the sea

There’s one thing I crave

And that’s whiskey for drinkin’

For whiskey I’ll tell my tale to thee

In my youth I was brazen, hunted locathah

Sea demons! Man-eaters! Orcs of the sea!

And the more I looked around, the more I noticed the eclectic bunch that collected here.

Perfectly in sync with the spirit is a man in leather blazer and gold lame cape with a frilly white dress. Another dancer decided on a polka dotted dress and a man’s blazer made of brown long fur. The tambourine player from the Hobo Gobbelins is all in black lace with long black curls split by pointy silicon goblin ears attached with spirit glue. When not playing she’s dancing, twirling long fingerless gloves in the air. The droll outfit is made quirkier by a set of black and green striped stockings.

But then there’s the normal. There’s a dancing guy who’s pure yuppy, a silicon valley type in a wool sweater, designer jeans and black Asics. You don’t have to be weird to be here after all. He may be a square but he has the prerequisite jello legs to jig.

By my third Tall Boy (that’s a 24 ounce can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, for the untrained) and several swigs of my friend’s sneaked-in whiskey flask (don’t start; I took the metro) I couldn’t just sit there anymore and type on my diminutive laptop. I got up and tapped my foot, and then nodded my head to the beat. Two songs later, I was shamelessly jiggin’ with the rest of them—lapsing on my assignment, but happy to be one of the partygoers for a change.

Before the show, Abbott thanked me for coming. For some dumb reason, I asked him to “guarantee that you guys are going to rock.” (I know it was a pretty lame thing to say but my friends know I have a serious foot-in-mouth problem). Professor Plague looked thoughtful for a moment and then said: “It will definitely be some kind of rock. Maybe basalt or some volcanic rock.”

For good dancing, great live music and bouts of incurable nerdiness, don’t miss the next Hobo Gobbelins show. Visit their website or their MySpace page for updates on their whereabouts.

To listen to the One Man Banjo, visit his site or his MySpace page.

All photos were taken by Liz Drake of Oakland. Visit her photography site at www.lizdrake.com

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