Singing bulls and Day-Glo tapestry: The spectacle of Caroliner Rainbow

For an hour and a half, the musicians knocked into each other like rabid beasts, stirring up jagged waves of feedback. The drummer stumbled around. The singer began a routine he continued throughout the night, which included going limp and then, without warning, collapsing backward into the front row, forcing the crowd to shove him up onto the stage. The actual singing, a marvel Caroliner refers to as "channeling" the bull, alternated between the high-pitched whine of Tiny Tim and the growling bark of death metal, all of it blurred by wet effects. In rare moments, precision and sensitive musicality emerged through the cloud of noise, but within a few seconds, the chaos always returned.

It was a mad scene driven by pure disorientation, not just because of the yowling music, but because a bar had been converted into an outsider–folk art installation, and a story of a singing farm animal was somehow controlling the entire evening. Offstage, band members refused to identify each other, referring to themselves as roadies, and whispering, "We're an anonymous band ... we don't discuss anything that doesn't relate to the 1800s." The farce was in full effect, and no audience members could wrap their heads around it. Even Scott Colburn, the illustrious Seattle producer and longtime Caroliner enthusiast (or scholar, as it were) has said he can't think of a stranger band, which is just to say that the group is doing its job. Cottypearile and company have spent a quarter of a century devoted to strangeness and disorientation, not to be recognized as bunch of freaked-out artists, but to turn themselves into a living, snarling folk tale.