Meeting the members of the apres-garde art rock troupe Derailleur in a south Minneapolis speakeasy, I was shocked by many things: the respect, bordering on fear, accorded to these youngsters by the gentlemen who ran the establishment; by singer/bassist Mark Kalar's insatiable appetite for burgundy with a squirt of lighter fluid; by singer/guitarist/keyboardist Grant Weeks' penchant for staring at a tiny, portable DVD player upon which he appeared to be viewing Thundercats without sound; by the size of the Bowie knife guitarist Jay Bauer-Clapp obsessively sharpened throughout the interview; ... (+) expand

Meeting the members of the apres-garde art rock troupe Derailleur in a south Minneapolis speakeasy, I was shocked by many things: the respect, bordering on fear, accorded to these youngsters by the gentlemen who ran the establishment; by singer/bassist Mark Kalar's insatiable appetite for burgundy with a squirt of lighter fluid; by singer/guitarist/keyboardist Grant Weeks' penchant for staring at a tiny, portable DVD player upon which he appeared to be viewing Thundercats without sound; by the size of the Bowie knife guitarist Jay Bauer-Clapp obsessively sharpened throughout the interview; and by the untroubled ease with which the quintet wore their kilts, despite the bitter Minnesota cold outside.

This lackadaisical kilt-wearing stood in stark contrast to the fiery Derailleur I'd seen on stage several times before. In my years in academia and the US House of Representatives, I have seen some truly fucked-up shit. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. Tom DeLay doing coke off of the ass of a dead hooker while Rick Santorum rubbed oil onto a hypnotized boa constrictor. But none of that, repeat, none of that compares to the fury of Derailleur live and in concert. Singer/drummer Bob Brown kicks his drums with such fury you'd think he'd grown a couple of extra legs (this is not true; his extra legs were surgically attached in the Netherlands). Singer/guitarist/keyboardist Keith Pille howls with the sort of fury usually only seen in a back-alley chain fight. The five of them make a godawful, glorious, sweeping, pulsing, rhythmic noise that makes you feel like the Almighty himself just hit you up with a straight-into-the-spinal-column shot of oxycontin and cialis.

"You know what really gets me jazzed?" Weeks has told me several times. "When I get to rocking really hard, I can stare down from the stage, pick out a woman in the crowd, lock eyes with her, and make 'er spontaneously combust. No lie, man. If my rock mojo's working hard enough, I can make chicks burst into flames."

You can see, then, why I was surprised to find the five of them sitting so calmly in man-skirts. What I discovered rather quickly, though, was that the calm was not as pharmaceutically-derived as I expected. It turns out that, in addition to taking rock music to strange new places that might cripple the human psyche, the band are advanced masters of Nin Jah, a little-known offshoot of Zen Buddhism. They were, in fact, experiencing a group moment of enlightenment while they spoke to me.

"Sorry if we seem sort of out of it," Kalar said. "We're actually wide awake, but it's mostly on the ethereal plane. We're having a hell of a conversation there—Bob's only got one more constant to work out before he can unite the electroweak force with quantum gravity. You should join us there."

"We're also sorta tired from saving those orphans last night," Pille added.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised. Back when I was in Washington, Derailleur would routinely dump large buckets of absurdity into my life. The band, then struggling under the name "Grumpy Alice" (they switched to Derailleur upon learning that "Grumpy Alice" is the nom de guerre of Toronto's leading madame) was barely eking out a living doing van tours of the southern US. At the time, they pursued a sort of jangly guitar-pop with a roots-rock feel, and the people of Dixie didn't really go for it, nor did they go for the jazz-inflected stylings of singer/guitarist/keyboardist Joe "Joeklahoma" Plummer. Down on their luck, Grumpy Alice developed a habit of crashing on the floor of my Washington office, often showing up bloody and vomit-encrusted right before I was scheduled to speak to a church group or some tourists from back home. They were not above paging me on the House floor and asking me to get the Senator Bill Frist to prescribe them some Vico-tussin to help with the persistent coughs they all suffered after picking up tuberculosis while imprisoned in Turkey.

Strange days, my friends, strange days.

Things picked up for Derailleur after the year 2000. Citing creative differences, Plummer left the band to become a killer for hire (I don't want to say more than I need to, but the word on the street is that Billy Crystal had better look under his car the next time he goes to start it). The band muddled on for a few months (which included a disastrous week in Toronto that led directly to the name switch) before hooking up with Weeks, an accomplished wizard. Bauer-Clapp was hired by a rival band to kill them; but after an epic battle, he was welcomed into the fold. Since then, it's been nothing but up, up, up for the five of them. As of this writing, they're finishing up studio work on an album that, Kalar claims, "would make Lenny Bruce blush. Really. This thing's filthier than Bob Saget's standup act."

When asked what comes next, the members of Derailleur demur even on the ethereal plane. "I don't know," Brown says finally. "We'd like to tour, but it's tough. People get so worked up when we take the stage that the National Guard has asked us to take it easy because they're sick of getting called out all the time. We'll work something out. There's always BET."

Indeed. There's always BET. Thank god for that.

-N Gingrich, R-GA (-) collapse