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People are often at a loss to say exactly what genre The Invertebrates represent. Pop, blues, rai, r&b, surf, jazz, gospel, country, folk, funk, punk, you name it, they've tried it. Conceived as a multimedia performance group, during the summer of 1980, in the fevered imaginations of three disparate artist/intellectuals, The Invertebrates were born publically later that year in a San Francisco livingroom. Since then they've lived in basements, garages, warehouses, and spare rooms, and played in theaters, performance spaces, nightclubs, bars, gymnasiums, rent parties, street fairs, pagan rituals, a hotel ballroom, and even a college cafeteria (and they were paid for it, no less!). It's no surprise that The Invertebrates are now known as "one of the Bay Area's oldest continuously operating unknown bands". The initial shows of fall 1980 depended on numerous film, slide, and overhead projectors. Much of the music was improvised as background to the visuals, though a few loose songs were also a part of the act. But then the songs began to tighten and grow in number. Pretty soon the musical side came to dominate. An EP, "Eat 'em While They're Young", was released in 1981, followed in 1984 by an LP, "Let's Have Fun" (we still have a few hundred in the garage, so let us know if you'd like one). For a few years in the early 80's we also managed Club Foot, an art/punk hole-in-the-wall out at Third and 22nd Streets. From the beginning we've undergone innumerable personnel changes while generally consisting of a core of from three to ten men and women at any given time, along with an ever-varying group of occasional players dropping by . As of 2006, almost three dozen people have been involved.Throughout it all we've been more of a club than a band, and since 1989, though we've continued to perform live, we've mainly only done free shows or benefits. We've also continued to record since 1984, in a myriad of different formats and studios; in 1996 we released an hour-long CD called "Rubber Soul Train". A really good album usually has a unifying concept, an ordering principle, whether it be overt as in the case of an opera or a song cycle, or covert as expressed in its 'style', the instrumentation and arrangements, recording methods, genres. The concept behind "Rubber Soul Train" is the basic gnostic theme, chaos, alienation, and ultimately redemption. Now we have released a new CD "Garagezilla, a panidiomatic, album of psycholytic pop, gnostic gospel and post-modern urban folk. The Invertebrates have spent over two decades in basements, warehouse spaces, living rooms and garages; rehearsing, jamming, recording and making things up, while flying below the general cultural radar; bugs in the woodshed burrowing ever deeper into the underground seeking a niche in the fossil record.
