SAN FRANCISCO (TNA) – “I couldn’t play with people anymore. Too much bullshit – drugs, egos, people showing up late, all sorts of problems.”

So says JBOT, a former jazz and ska musician who is now the semi-human slave for a sadistic gang of machines.

Members of Captured By Robots! torture lead singer, human, JBOT

They have partially disemboweled him and inserted a chip into his brain. They force him to tour the country as the singer for their rock band.

Fucking robots.

Or, rather, this is the creation myth of San Francisco’s Captured by Robots!

“Ain’t no myth,” barks JBOT, also known as Jason Vance, the former bassist for third-wave ska outfit Skankin’ Pickle.

Best to take his word for it. A man who chooses to build automated cohorts – utilizing creepy dolls and ape costumes to give them personality – is not the sort of person one should argue with.

To cut this Spielbergian narrative with a small dose of reality, however, we’ll unveil what is known. Captured by Robots! was constructed in 1996, a time when Vance was a musician at a crossroads that looked an awful lot like a dead end.

Skankin’ Pickle had followed the ska revival back into pop culture’s shallow grave, with Vance falling into a cliché musician’s job as a coffee clerk. He was also playing as a professional jazz musician, which he’d done before Skankin’ Pickle, but it wasn’t fulfilling his jones for rock ‘n’ roll.

“I wanted to play heavy stuff,” he says. “I was going to either quit music or do something without people.”

Then Vance came upon a trio named Steel Pole Bath Tub. During parts of their songs that required more guitars, more bass – just more ”heavy,” as Vance calls it – they would flip an electrical switch that did just that. This was before the era of samplers – playback machines that now help single folk musicians sound like the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“I had an epiphany,” he recalls.

He started tinkering in his apartment. He had no clue how to build a robot, but he was lonely and determined.

“I had a lot of time on my hands and no friends. I just started drilling stuff. Things sucked in the beginning. When I’d blow something up, I’d just say, ‘Oops, that didn’t work,’ and move on,” Vance says. “The thing is, I didn’t go over my head. I started off really simple – drums with steel cable attached to bicycle brake lines.”

It was an idea with little precedent. Sure, there was the creepy, waxen President Lincoln that recited the Gettysburg Address to desperate tourists at Disneyland. Chuck E. Cheese had his band, which boasted a quite adroit mechanical keyboardist in “the Purple Pizza Eater,” Mr. Munch. But an entire touring band that seemed like the evil, bastard offspring of El DeBarge’s hardwired cohort in “Short Circuit”? Vance’s friends must have considered an intervention.

“People thought I was crazy,” he says. “No one had seen me for about a year, so friends started calling me JBOT. They thought it wouldn’t work. But I knew it would work. If you work hard enough at something, you can do it. If it sucked, I could always quit.”

After innumerable trips to the hardware store, a significant financial investment and undoubtedly numerous violations of his rental agreement, he had his band.

An introduction, with character sketches by Vance:

DRMBOT 0110: “Basically, she plays kick, snare, high hat and ride. She was one of the masterminds of the takeover – pretty evil, pretty mean to me all the time. She likes to make jokes at my expense, very crude jokes. I’m always looking really stupid.”

GTRBOT666: “He plays guitar and bass, is brutally evil and does anything he can to torture me. He heckles the crowd. He’s the most evil robot.”

AUTOMATOM: “He plays three toms. He’s an accessory to the other robots. The most robotic robot I have. He just wants to get things done. He’s pretty evil as well.”

HEADLESS HORNSMEN: “There are three of them – a full horn section, headless of course. They just play really loud soul music.”

THE APE WHICH HATH NO NAME: “He plays the tambourine and halo. He’s very kind, loving.”

THE SON OF APE WHICH HATH NO NAME: “He’s also very kind and loving.”

To recap: Wanting to rid himself of the vulgarities of flesh and blood musicians, Vance created a band of robots who verbally assault him, on stage, on a nightly basis. It’s a transference of psychological baggage, a theatrical lampoon of the age-old rock maxim, “creative differences.”
Freud would have a field day. Especially if he knew that Vance acts as the ventriloquist for his automated friends.

“That’s why I built the original Ape – I couldn’t deal with all the hate all the time,” he says. “I love myself. I’m awesome. I’m the best. I think they’ve seen all the dedication I’ve put in and they’ve mellowed a little bit over the last years.”

It’s not the recorded output that takes so much dedication. Captured by Robots! has released three albums and one live CD/DVD combo over its 12-year career. But this isn’t a band you listen to on CD. The music is basic, crude rock ’n’ roll. Though sporting a Flying V dual-neck, guitar-bass hybrid, GTRBOT666 is no Jimmy Page.

The bulk of Vance’s diligence comes with his tours, all of which are mini rock operas united by the principle of spectacle.

There was the “Ten Commandments Tour,” in which the band dressed as Biblical celebrities and desecrated the Good Book. The “Get Fit Tour” then married Jane Fonda’s steely ab routine with the hyperactive masochism of the gimp from “Pulp Fiction.” But it was his most recent procession that really touched hearts – thanks to Vance’s ordainment as a minister of the Universal Life Church.

“I wanted something that was a little easier and fun and stupid. I wanted an excuse to do a cover band,” Vance said. “So I figured, ‘Well, we could be a wedding band. Why don’t we just marry people?’

“I got everybody dressed up in tuxes. I put in the rider that we’d have cake at every show. There were between three and 10 couples at every show who pushed their way up to the front. I wasn’t pushing anyone to do it. We married over 150 couples.”

As for the future, it is now. Vance is prepping his and his abusive robots’ next jaunt around the country, for which they will honor the seven-year reign of America’s president.

“We’re going to be members of the GOP and cover everything from 9/11 to the Iraq War,” Vance says. “I’ve been wanting to give it to this prick and, well, that’s what we’re gonna do.”

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