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The Rice Thresher
6100 Main Street (MS-524)
Houston, TX 77005-1892

It was the sort of confluence I probably never would have gotten to experience if I'd gone to school in another city.

I had been waiting around outside the beer can house (a one-story rambler 10 minutes drive from campus) for the band Sonic Joyride to show up. That Houston art-car buff Tom Kennedy chose to drive by in Max the Daredevil Finmobile was pure chance.

The Finmobile drove off just as Joyride's converted yellow school bus pulled up. The three members of Joyride and their tech crew took a moment to emerge onto the deserted street. They straggled out one by one, rubbed their eyes and looked around, dazzled by the bright sunlight. Drummer Ken Tondre's leather pants and leader Chris Hobler's purple-stretch flairs couldn't have been more of an anomaly in the quiet residential neighborhood. Before I spoke up, the only sound was that of the beer can house's aluminum decorations ringing in the breeze like so many wind chimes.

The band was on the first day of its second tour traveling the country playing concerts on top of its bus. The boys looked like they'd just driven straight through to Houston from their New Hampshire home, although they'd actually already played a set at a Blockbuster Music earlier in the day. Last year's tour featured stops at the world's largest bug, Swedish coffee pot and ball of twine, so I wasn't surprised when Hobler, indicating the beer can house, said, "We run into a lot of weird things traveling around the country, some of which are more unusual than we are, like this."

That was an understatement. Because what makes Sonic Joyride so remarkable is that it's not some kind of comedy or sideshow act -- it's a seriously talented progressive rock band, complete with tight pants and on-stage swagger, that also happened upon a unique, if more than a little off-the-wall, marketing idea.

Hobler described the group's music as "velcro" because everything sticks to it or something like that. Joyride played only a two-song set, because it had another, pre-arranged gig somewhere else in town. The first song confirmed Joyride's media kit rap as pyschedelic-leaning prog rockers. The second, "Upside Down," put chiming guitars in place of funk riffs. Hobler added straightforward rock 'n' roll hooks.

Sonic Joyride's album, Bazaar , cuts across progressive, metal and alternative genres in a pleasingly pop-friendly way. The band fills the album with 11 very different tracks without straining its range of talent at all.

As Joyride brought its set to a close, the sancity of the moment was somewhat upset by the lawnmower-like drone of the generator that powers the band's equipment. Besides Mary Milkovisch, whose husband decorated the beer can house with "whatever was on sale," one of Tondre's friends and a couple of young women were the brief concert's only audience. A few neighbors came out too late to catch the band in action.

Milkovisch, herself a member of Houston's Swinging Strings, took us on a tour of her yard before Joyride's set. Afterward, the band let me look over the inside of the bus. With a 10,000-watt sound system and digital recording studio on board, touring the country in a school bus has become serious business.

Sonic Joyride knows that it has turned itself into a giant gimmick in search of media exposure, but the bandmates are content with what they're doing. In a year or two, Hobler said that he'd like the band to be "still doing it ourselves, only much bigger."

This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the April 3, 1998 issue.