The best band I ever heard totally stunk. However, they exhibited the spirit of rock and roll better than any other live performance I've ever seen.

In Vancouver, B.C., there's an interesting "bar" called the Pig & Whistle. The roof is literally caving in, the walls are uneven, and they have one beer tap. It is always packed to the gills, however, because of this band that doesn't even have a name.

The band consists one three middle-aged men. The bass player plays with his toes hanging off the stage, swaying and threatening to pitch forward onto his face. The singer's inspired rock star moves are like watching your dad try to square dance. The drummer looks like a gracelessly aging Slash.

They mostly do "cover songs," which are alarmingly indistinguishable. They honestly sound as though they picked up their instruments for the first time earlier that afternoon. They mangle the greatest hits of rock and roll, mauling their instruments at oppressively loud volumes. The best part is when the lyrics come in and reveal the song's identity, wowing the audience with how little the songs actually resemble the original. It's better than Name That Tune, and the singer raises the bar by knowing only one or two lyrics to any given song.

Between enthusiastic attempts to rock-star kick and sprightly demonstrate every single variation of the horrid "guitar dance," it periodically occurs to him to belt these lyrics into the microphone. Sometimes he just shouts out the song title. They actually have refused requests from the audience for "songs they don't know."

It probably wasn't their idea, but they're also a live karaoke band, and every few songs an incredibly drunken soul will jump on stage and grab the mic. The band's diva of a singer always appears agitated when this happens and will sometimes bully the microphone.

Their most fantastic quality is that they are drop dead serious, and the humor of their performance seems to entirely escape them. If you ate half a hit of acid, you might be persuaded to believe that they are conscious and creative geniuses. They bear some similarity to the earliest efforts of Half Japanese, before they attained a rudimentary understanding of their instruments. The difference is that the house band couldn't compose their way out of a paper bag, and they will never ever get any better.