Sshh! The Posies are in the middle of a US fall tour, but they won’t say exactly where they’re playing.

Their website lists the cities they’ll play, but not the venue. The address of the shows, which could be at a variety of types of places from homes to offices to record stores, are given only to ticket holders not more than 24 hours in advance of the show. The unusual pop-up tour is part of a general drift of the beloved Western Pacific power pop band started by Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer to a more off-the-grid, D.I.Y. mode of music making.

Already, their recordings, the latest of which is Solid States, was made available through a kickstarter type site called My Music Empire, and they crowd-funded the cover art through a contest to fans (the winner got $500).

But as the band endures lots of change—from Auer and Stringfellow moving to France, to the addition of new drummer Frankie Siragusa after the unexpected death of Darius Minwalla last year—they’ve shifted their sound as well, from guitar to more electronic shadings. We talked to Stringfellow from France just before the tour began.

Tell me about the secret shows.

Basically it’s pretty cool. We charted out an alternative way to tour that’s extremely D.I.Y., that doesn’t require us to use the club circuit at all. That doesn’t mean that we only play house shows. We do play those, but we also play places that I think are more interesting. We build each show from scratch, we bring our own P.A. and set up and everything. They have a very homemade feel and they’ve been working out great for everybody—both the audience who love the novelty of it, and the fact that for once it’s not a gross smelling bar where the show starts at one in the morning or whatever. I think that paradigm has lost a lot of romance for a lot of people.

Our shows seem to be romantic for people, us included. They end up being secret shows, where we don’t tell people the venue until the last minute, sort of by necessity—some of these venues are a little sensitive. We’ve had multimillion-dollar homes that we’ve played in and things like that. We want to be careful and have a little bit of control about who actually shows up and make sure that only the people who are supposed to be there are there.

But the byproduct of doing the shows that way and keeping the venues secret is a little bit exciting. It’s a little like a treasure hunt. People don’t know what’s going to happen. And they love that, because so much of modern life is controllable and predictable and certain.

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“When I was born my mom and I lived with my aunt and my cousin. We didn’t have much, so our record player got a ton of play.”

“Some of my earliest memories are of the albums we listened to. I remember my cousin playing Neil Young for me, and us rocking out at the ripe ages of 1 and 3. I remember singing along to REO Speedwagon’s “Take It On The Run” over and over, running around the house. We sang along to the soundtrack of the animated film Pete’s Dragon and Peter Paul and Mary’s Peter Paul and Mommy. These memories are certainly some of my oldest and happiest. This is a huge part of my love for the record. And though I listened to them in my teens and 20s, it wasn’t till recently that I really fell in love with them again.

I bought a portable player about ten years ago and started collecting vinyl. My mother-in-law gave us a bunch of their old records, including some that my wife used to sing along to as a wee one. When we were home with our baby boy shortly after his birth, we started to play them for him. I remember one day in particular when he was a little under the weather and upset. I took him over to the record player and put on Ravel’s Bolero. After initially being a little scared, he stared at the player for the whole piece and at the end reached for the record and asked for more.

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Sure, he may well have been the most lethargic and shambolic superstar rock has ever known, but the late Jerry Garcia, he of the Grateful Dead, somehow made it work, at least more often than anyone would have expected. His work went from laid-back to comatose, but that suited the Deadheads just fine; they were all lost in their trips, and had no use for amphetamine rock’n’roll; no, they preferred Garcia’s songs because they could actually WATCH them as they rolled slowly by, like day-glo trains, through the freight yards of their minds. Only Garcia could take Chuck Berry’s immortal “Let It Rock” and play it at Quaalude tempo, as he did on his 1974 LP Compliments, and against all odds make it work.

Garcia, Jerry’s 1972 debut solo LP, was a two-person project, with the Dead’s Bill Kreutzmann handling the drums and Garcia doing everything else. And like Bob Weir’s Ace, which was released the same year, it was an auspicious debut, including as it did some half-dozen songs the Grateful Dead would add to their live repertoire. I’d give it an A if it weren’t for the 10-minute prog rock meets musique concrete of “Late for Supper/Spidergawd/Eep Hour,” which finally evolves into a listenable melody featuring some excellent piano and pedal steel guitar somewhere past the five-minute mark, but which is recommended solely to people who are (a) demented and actually like this sort of thing, or (b) just took six tabs of good Owsley acid, and are listening to it from the ceiling or another solar system.

But aside from that long piece of experimentation, the LP is a perfect example of Garcia doing what he does best. Opener “Deal” is a keeper, loping along as it does like Robert Crumb’s “Keep on Truckin’” guy, and is an example of laid-back funk every bit as likeable as a beagle puppy’s ears, thanks to a lovely melody and Garcia’s masterful guitar work. As for “Bird Song,” it opens with a groovy organ riff and a bluesy electric guitar, and so what if long-time Dead lyricist Robert Hunter’s words are so much hippie hoodoo voodoo? The song captivates, the chorus provides a flash of the loveliness that characterized 1970’s American Beauty, and Garcia’s guitar work is as pristine as a clear mountain stream.

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Jesus Funkin’ Christ, Grand Funk. Where does one even begin? Homer Simpson’s immortal description of the band’s members is as good a place as any: “You kids don’t know Grand Funk? The wild shirtless lyrics of Mark Farner? The bong-rattling bass of Mel Schacher? The competent drumwork of Don Brewer? Oh, man!”

Grand Funk was one of the biggest arena acts of the 1970s, but nowadays you’d be hard pressed to find anyone besides Homer Simpson who will admit to liking them. I’ve never heard a single rocker cite Grand Funk as an influence, and unlike their Michigan brethren the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges, Grand Funk scored a big zero when it came to hipness factor. Their talk of revolution was transparently empty jive, they didn’t have a proto-punk bone in their bodies, and in general all they did was fill arenas—something the far cooler MC5 and the anarchic Stooges never came close to doing—and make the people in those arenas (and their bongs) happy.

Of course filling arenas doesn’t prove much, except that it’s impossible to overestimate the ignorance of the American public, but still it’s intriguing—what did all those pothead on reds at all those Grand Funk shows hear that we simply can’t hear in 2014? Did people back then have an extra Grand Funk ear? That closed up around the time of 1976’s Born to Die, which marked the band’s downward slide following seven consecutive LPs in the Top Ten?

That’s right: seven consecutive LPs in the Top Ten. How they managed this feat, given their lackluster body of work, remains a mystery, like what became of Amelia Earhart or how Pittsburgh Pirates’ pitcher Dock Ellis managed to throw a no-hitter while tripping his balls off. It is possible people really did come to hear the shirtless lyrics of Mark Farner? Or were they truly that hard-up for entertainment in the Dark Ages of the early to mid-seventies, when rock had become empty entertainment, with the talk of music changing the world having become passé on one side and the soon-to-come (and equally unsuccessful punk revolution the other. Never having seen Grand Funk—they were well into their precipitous fall from superstardom when I started attending concerts, I can’t say.

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