Paying homage to the lost world of the Sun City Girls

Richard (left) and Alan Bishop are paying tribute to the late Charles Gocher, who was the third member of the Sun City Girls. (Mark Sullo)

A typical trio of bass, guitar, and drums they were not.

Even tagging them "telepathic multi-instrumentalist storytellers" only scratches the allsorts skin of the Sun City Girls - half-Lebanese brothers Alan and Richard Bishop and their "adopted" older brother, Charles Gocher.

Over 27 years, the Sun City Girls mounted a massive catalog of more than 80 music recordings, with entries worthy of legend even if they only earned the group cult nobility status. As musicians who both challenged listeners with avant-garde blowings and rewarded them with gorgeous explorations of global music, the Sun City Girls trio had few equals.

And then there were two. Drummer Gocher succumbed to a bout with cancer last year at the age of 54, closing the book on the Sun City Girls. In tribute to both Gocher and SCG, the Bishop brothers are mounting the Brothers Unconnected tour, which comes to the Brattle Theatre Thursday. The show features "The Handsome Stranger," a 40-minute film of Gocher's video experiments, followed by two sets of the Bishops playing SCG songs as an acoustic duo.

For Brothers Unconnected, the Bishops recorded a tour-only CD with 11 samples of the Sun City Girls repertoire that tied their psych-rock explosions to Morocco, the Middle East, and Ennio Morricone. Cowboy songs, bohemian blues, radio, Cuban son, fantasy improvs, and the briniest of chanteys are adapted for voice and two active acoustic guitars.

"I'll rob you of your dignity to make sure that I have more," brays "Aristocrats of Impertinence." That's a mild sentiment compared to the dark-humored "Six Kids of Mine." A ditty by Alan Bishop sung by Gocher on 1997's double album, "Dante's Disneyland Inferno," the song is a jaunty DIY guide to crib death. "We've chosen some of Charles's most venomous pieces for this tour," says Richard Bishop.

Bassist Alan and guitarist Richard met Gocher in Phoenix in 1981 at one of the open-mike punk nights they hosted back then. "Charlie was standing on a chair, balancing on one foot and scat singing along to a prepared tape, waving drum sticks in the air as if they were magic wands, tracing sigils in the air over the audience," Richard remembers. "We knew right then that he [was our] missing link."

"He was so much more than a drummer," Alan says of Gocher, whose drumming gyrations were inspired by Houdini's great escapes and had once advocated "clear hair" as a response to punks's spiked rainbows. "Some called Gocher the last great beatnik, others a mad genius. Several still believe he was a serial killer who was never caught. Charles Gocher created for the few - a very few souls out there who could actually appreciate [him]."

Gocher had lost his parents early in life, and the Bishops became his family. Together the brothers three camped out on the fringes of the music world for a quarter century, recording albums at an amazing clip, staging wild performances (several are on YouTube), and creating indie film soundtracks. "We had a huge vocabulary of ideas," Alan says, "and nothing was off-limits."

In the late '80s, the Sun City Girls began traveling extensively overseas, leading to explorations of the global possibilities of their music. In 1994, SCG migrated to Seattle, where they purchased a full orchestra's worth of gamelan instruments. Gocher's last recordings with the group were for their soundtrack for Harmony Korine's new film, "Mister Lonely."

Gocher's fractured fairy tales could be relied on for both literary and shock value. "There are stacks of his journals with some of the most [whacked stuff] in existence," Richard says. "Songs of murder, rape, incest, you name it." But his drumming was both the band's musical glue and its get-out-of-jail free card. "He had a penchant for pulling the rug out from underneath us just to see what would happen. It helped us to develop our style of improvisation by providing no safety nets."

"There has never been anything like [SGC]," Alan continues. "Almost everything of passion is taboo to someone these days. We were always challenging ourselves and other people, and that's what we're doing with this tour. There aren't any 20-year-olds out there doing what we do. If there are, tell me, I want to go see them."

The Brothers Unconnected tour comes to the Brattle Theater (40

Brattle St., Cambridge, 617-876-6837) Thursday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 at brattlefilm.org.