Something Trippy This Way Comes

The crowd is up, and Justin Palicki is surfing it. Pimped out in shades, a silky button-down shirt and leisure slacks, the chunky lead singer for Honey Bucket looks like an Elvis action figure as he navigates the mosh pit at Hollywood Alley.

What began as a CD-release party has turned into a full-tilt bacchanal as the four members of the Tempe band Honey Bucket--Palicki, Bryan Stratman (keyboards/guitar), Matt Vosburgh (bass) and Jason Marlowe (drums), all in their early 20s--burn through a set of nihilistic, experimental, acid-laced funk off their virgin album, Blue Lite Specialists.

Etched with an odd array of effects, from turntable scratches to the psychedelic whirl of a digital keyboard rigged through a vintage wah-wah pedal, Blue Lite plays like a heavier Mellow Gold with an offbeat quirkiness that also conjures Primus and Mr. Bungle--or, as Palicki says, "anything but boring-ass desert rock."

Given Honey Bucket's taste for avant-rock, it's no shocker that Palicki counts Beck among his musical idols. Step into the singer's Tempe pad and you'll come face to face with an oversize black-and-white poster inscribed with Beck's famous mantra of slacker sarcasm, "I'm a loser . . ."

The day after the CD-release party, the weary front man is curled in a chair, staring a hole through the skateboard in his lap. Stratman, Vosburgh and Marlowe are sprawled on the carpet, also looking spent, while the stereo spins Blue Lite's hidden track, a loosely improvised, old-school blues tune structured around Stratman's colorful keyboard licks. Like most of the songs on the album, "Bucket Blues" was recorded while the band was in the grip of LSD.

Stratman estimates the band composed 90 percent of Blue Lite on various Schedule I chemicals, which accounts for the disc's drug-obsessed lyrics. "Spinners" reads like a handbook on addiction. "It's about being really fucked up on crystal meth and creating all kinds of stories and excuses for your habit," explains Vosburgh, who penned the first verse after a lost year as a meth-head, during which his weight plummeted from 150 to 115 pounds. "I was tweakin' every day," he says. "That was two years ago. Now I can't even stand the smell of it." All four band members say they're off drugs now, except for light beer.

For Palicki, the reality of drug addiction hit hard about three years ago when he discovered his sister was shooting heroin. "Everyone in my family had their own little way of dealing with it," he says. "My way of dealing with it was to write lyrics, so one day I was sitting in class and these words just came to me: 'so fuckin' low.'"

The darkest song on the album, "Low" begins with an eerie keyboard riff and the sound of distant laughter, then roars into a breakneck fusion jam that sounds like a steam engine derailing into a ravine.

When Palicki wrote "Low," Honey Bucket was little more than a concept in the minds of the four high school buds. Here's Vosburgh on how they met: "Our first day at Dobson High, we all sat next to each other. We had to get up in front of the class and tell a little bit about ourselves. As soon as we found out we all played different instruments, we started jamming together."

The next step was finding a name. Palicki remembers tooling down a Washington state freeway while on vacation with his brother and spotting a Port-a-Potty by the side of the road. The words "Honey Bucket" printed on the side of the lavatory stuck in his head. He wrote the Seattle-based company a letter saying he wanted to use its name for his rock band. He got back a package with stickers, tee shirts and a thank-you note.

Before graduating, the foursome played its first gig on the high school lawn in front of 300 students, teachers and administrators. "I was shakin' nervous," recalls Palicki. "I had my sunglasses on and I was hiding behind a podium." Things improved when the students formed a savage mosh pit. "Teachers were yelling at me to stop using profanities," he says, "and the vice principal jumped in to break up the pit. He got nailed."

Palicki says Honey Bucket's sizable local following is made up primarily of ". . . chicks and skaters. They know we're not all stuffy like egotistical L.A. metal-rockers, or like Bush and Oasis, who can't stand Americans."

"Yeah," chimes in Marlowe, teetering on a skateboard in the doorway, "Oasis is the death of rock."

One thing Honey Bucket has over Oasis is extensive musical training. Marlowe and Stratman have played blues and jazz since the seventh grade, and both joined the Phoenix City Jazz Band this year. Stratman is an accomplished keyboardist who doubles on guitar. Vosburgh, the only member of the band with a Slayer disc in his CD collection, started playing the string bass in fourth grade.

As for Palicki, Vosburgh says, "We're his musical background." Though neither a particularly skilled singer nor a gifted poet, Palicki exudes a rare sexual charisma, evidenced by the persistent group of female fans that shadows the band.