Eclectic Band Tuatara Kicks Off Tour At Crocodile Cafe

Concert preview Tuatara, Minus 5, Mark Eitzel, 9:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday, Crocodile Cafe; $10, 206-448-2114.

The band Tuatara was named after a primitive reptile, but it has more in common with the mythical hydra: one body and a multitude of heads.

Make that local heads with familiar faces: Seattle's Barrett Martin of Screaming Trees was a founding member; Seattle resident Peter Buck, guitarist for the mega-band R.E.M., joined later, along with hometown horn man Skerik of Seattle's Critters Buggin'.

Tuatara offered an outlet where these rock and jazz musicians could explore ethnic and exotic musical idioms that their primary groups didn't allow. What started as a loose jam has resulted in a just-released recording, "Breaking the Ether" and a monthlong cross-country tour that kicks off Thursday at the Crocodile Cafe.

Tuatara began as a casual collaboration between Martin and Justin Harwood, bassist for New York's thoughtful alt band Luna. The two met when their bands toured together, and in 1994 they began playing and recording in the basement studio of Martin's Seattle home. Local musicians invited to sit in included Buck and Skerik, Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready and saxophonist Steve Berlin of Los Lobos.

McCready and Berlin contributed to the band's recording and moved on. Buck and Skerik, however, became full-fledged Tuatarians.

While working with the new band, Buck also produced and wrote songs with guitarist Scott McCaughey's side band, Minus 5, and with Mark Eitzel, lead singer and writer for San Francisco's now-defunct American Music Club. An inevitable cross-pollination took place between the three entities this year, and when Tuatara decided to tour, it was only natural to include Eitzel and McCaughey.

The road show is titled "The Magnificent Seven vs. the United States," although no one is particularly enamored with that tag.

"It's just something that came up during a meeting and stuck," Martin said. "Justin and I groaned but it won't go away. The concept is one band with seven guys (Martin, Harwood, Buck, Skerik, McCaughey, Eitzel and Devilhead drummer Mike Stone) playing on one another's songs.

"It's really incredibly fun," he continued, "way more than I ever thought it could be. In rock 'n' roll, you fall into these patterns, this method of doing business, which includes the process of making records and marketing them and playing the same set every night. Everybody expects the same thing, that you put on that `performance.' The performance here is people playing, moving around, changing the configuration and improvising. It isn't a typical rock show."

For Buck, who engineered the tour, it meant returning to the way he did things before R.E.M. - originally a college party band - became the enormous entity it is now.

"I hate to sound like I fought in the Civil War," he said from Hawaii, "but when we used to go out in '82 and '83, there weren't that many clubs. You'd go to a town and play the local country-Western bar or gay bar or pizza parlor or whatever you could find. There wasn't really a band scene in most places, but there were always 40 or 50 people around like us who would show up.

"When our first record came out, we were just happy to know we'd finally be getting hotel rooms and get to eat properly. . . . This is kind of like that, playing cool little clubs and theaters. Of course, we're not worried about the rooms and food now."

For Eitzel, Tuatara is the perfect backing band for his new solo effort, "West," which he wrote with Buck over three days. "West" will be released May 6.

"I can normally write fast," Eitzel explained, "but I don't trust it. The thing about writing with Peter was he'd say `Well, we're done now aren't we?' and I'd have to say `Uh, sure.' Usually I'd edit myself to death."

McCaughey said he saw the Tuatara mix-and-match road show as the impetus to finally finish the second Minus 5 record, "The Lonesome Death of Buck McCoy.".

"Peter gave me the music for most of these songs two years ago," he said, "so I guess I'm slower than Mark when it comes to writing lyrics. Most of it got finished in a last-minute panic. . . . But that's OK, I'm used to doing things that way."

What the Tuatara show will offer is enormous variety. Martin, who plays drums as well as vibes, marimba, cello, bass and a slew of modern and ancient percussion instruments, is the group's musicologist and touches on the music's spiritual side. Buck has a more meat-and-potatoes approach to his performing, moving with the prevailing mood of the music but never quite giving up his rock roots.

Vocalist Eitzel is a man of mood music, while McCaughey is about pop and psychedelia. Skerik is the jazz man of the band, a free-wheeling, free-form player.

Harwood, A New Zealanderby birth but New Yorker by nature, shares Martin's enthusiasm for the wonders of the outback - musical and otherwise. But Harwood has the most direct take on why Tuatara is Tuatara:

"It's just a cool-sounding name," he grinned. "Isn't it?"