Spoken like a true road warrior. Musicians who traverse the States like crazy downhill skiers usually have good (or more accurately, bad) Spinal-Tapish road stories. And Sean has plenty of them. He ought to. The band has had close to fifty different members wander through the hallowed halls of Wise Monkey High; he's also been touring for the past eight years.

Sean, Andy Geib (the horn player), Reed Stewart (manager, brother to bass player, Chad, brother-in-law to singer, Alley) and some friends are sitting at the Little Chef in Ocean Beach, chowing down the morning after WMOs 10th anniversary party. They finish one another's sentences and trade memories like old baseball cards.

They recall a gig in Buffalo, when it was thirty degrees below zero. The place had big windows, which were wide open. When the bouncer was asked about, hmmm, maybe turning on the heat and closing the windows, he replied casually: "Oh, we don't use heat, we just wait for the place to fill up. Then it gets warmer."

"It was so cold," remembers Andy, "my horns were sticking to my lips!"
"It was so cold," adds Sean, "that my keyboards wouldn't turn on. It took thirty minutes to get warm enough to load the soundcards. Marty was playing with gloves."
"But it turned out to be a great show," says Reed. "It filled up and warmed up, just like the guy said."

"What about the worst load-ins?" asks Sean. "The Pollinator in Pittsburgh."
"We could draw a diagram, " says Reed, laughing. "We literally had to go upstairs to the roof of one building"
"Across a catwalk to the other building" says Sean.
"Through a window" adds Reed.
"Then down around in the catacombs of the venue to the front" Nothing but Net.

Hmm. Catacombs? High membership rate? Definitely Spinal Tap. Did any of them die mysterious deaths?

"When I started the band ten years ago, I had a couple other people with me, but they've been shot and killed since then in a public square as an example," deadpans Sean.

Back then Sean still lived in Tempe, Arizona. In one of the earliest incarnations of WMO, they used to throw warehouse parties (until they got busted for operating a "club" without a liquor license.) That group dissolved and Sean set out to find more people to play with. He ran into Chad Stewart, a friend since the two were in third grade, at a Grateful Dead show. Chad was living in San Diego at the time, but the band he was in had broken up. The two joined forces and roped in some other current players.

"Alley joined three months after Chad," says Sean. "There's a lore behind every player, and Alley definitely has a past! She was a gun-toting, whiskey drinking lunatic when I met her." But that all changed when she got pregnant. "Now she's the mother of two, and the mom of the band."

Andy, a horn player in the Tucson Symphony, had played only a couple of shows with the Monkeys before Sean broke the news. They were moving to San Diego. "I had only known Andy about two weeks," recalls Sean. "But he said, sure. So he left the symphony and moved to San Diego with a bunch of acid heads."

Reed decided to quit his "real job" and become the Monkeys' manager. "It's funny," says Sean. "Chad and I used to play ditch-em with Reed when we were younger, and now he's our boss!"

Sean, Chad, Andy and Alley have been the core of WMO for seven years. The current line-up has two fairly recent additions. A couple of months before the group was going on an intensive tour, the drummer and guitarist left to start their own band. Sean was forced once again to rely on old friends. He has known Bruce Stodola since the seventh grade. Bruce was in L.A. playing jazz gigs with a guitar player named Marty Schwartz. When Bruce realized that WMO and his good buddy Sean were looking for a drummer, he gladly made the move. Bruce recommended Marty, and that is how it remains today.

"We've had some awesome guitar players, but Marty is the best thing to happen to us," says Sean. "And he's only been playing the guitar for about five years."

The Wise Monkey sound, described as "song-oriented funk and soul with horns," attracts a diverse crowd, from "ladies in short black skirts to dreadlocked hippies, and everyone in between."

"I don't know how we ever got labeled as a 'jamband.' It's just that the group of people who are into that music has taken to us for some reason," says Sean.

"The spontaneity of the music is what intrigues most of the people," Reed chimes in.

"I guess what jamband means is that at any moment something new might happen that wasn't necessarily expected or planned," Sean offers. "But we're more song oriented than a lot of those bands."

"The live CD is more jamming rather than the studio CDs which are more four minute songs," says Reed.

The live disc that he is referring to is They Live, which was released last December on Lauan Records. It's a great way to get introduced to the band's funky groove. And we won't tell if you listen to it and end up dancing around your room. They often have guests jam with them. Sax great Dave Ellis of RatDog, the Other Ones, and the Charlie Hunter Trio fame, is featured on several tracks.

Wise Monkey begins another cross country trek in Los Angeles on February 22 at the Troubadour, continuing eastward until the early summer.

"We want the audiences to have a good time," says Sean. "We aren't trying to preach anything or blow them away musically. We just want them to dance."

They'll probably have another slew of hellacious road stories to add to the pile - but these musicians always play their hearts out and can always laugh about their tribulations later.