Salt Lake City native leads orchestra of misfits

A chamber-pop sextet with a tuba and a ukulele is coming to Salt Lake City, led by a performer as unique as the music his band plays.

Ukulele Loki's Gadabout Orchestra, led by Salt Lake City native Aaron "Loki" Johnson, describes its musical genre as "melancholy Brechtian carnival rock," inspired by a life spent in the Utah culture wars of the 1990s.

"People outside of Utah don't realize how liberal, freaky, gay and progressive Salt Lake City really is," said Johnson, who now lives in Colorado with the rest of his band. "I grew up reading The Salt Lake Tribune letters to the editor on a daily basis because it is regularly hilarious. ... In liberal Boulder, the editorial page is a snoozer. In SLC, hippies, homos,

freaks, liberals, intellectuals, goths and weirdos tend to team up with a common cause, and usually [with] a great sense of humor."

Johnson created his band -- featuring the ukulele, tuba, trombone, clarinet, glockenspiel, drums and synth -- several years after graduating from East High in 1996. Initially, he left Utah to tour the country as an emcee for burlesque shows, circuses and sideshows, and worked with sword swallowers, fire-breathing little people, and Dita Von Teese, the fetish model formerly married to Marilyn Manson.

"Given these circumstances and climate, growing up [as] a 'weirdo' was just very normal for me," Johnson said.

Johnson loved music and writing songs, but didn't play an instrument and calls

himself a "terrible singer." So he recruited his friends to create a boisterous stage show that combines 1920s vaudeville and circus music with a rock edge.

Johnson's grandmother, the late Alice Jensen -- who Johnson said was a great friend to the Utah gay community, and was frequently seen making her opinions heard at the state Capitol -- had a collection of sheet music from the 1920s. Johnson taught himself how to play the ukulele from the sheet music.

"Aaron and I are kindred souls," said the band's drummer, Davis Wimberly, a music therapist who is headed to Harvard this fall to study human development and psychology. "We both knew a lot of music from the 1920s that I had been using in my music therapy. We just clicked."

Johnson wrote songs about his life, including songs that hark to the experiences he had as a petition writer to the Salt Lake City school board during the Gay/Straight Alliance walkouts of 1996. Just as the title suggests, another of his favorite songs, "Bill and Nada's Cafe," is about the city's now-demolished late-night landmark.

"College students with chess tables, blue-collar workers, truck drivers, goth-dance clubbers, drag queens, everyone who wanted to be out late in SLC would assemble late at night to eat brains and eggs, orange pancakes, tapioca pudding and listen to tracks by Patsy Cline and Marty Robbins on the personal jukeboxes that sat on each table," Johnson said. "I owe some of my interest in music from past eras to my close relationship with my grandmother, but also to the environment of Bill and Nada's. The idea of mixing Tin Pan Alley music, early country, Depression-era music with goth, punk and post-punk might seem odd to some -- but it makes perfect sense to me."

Wimberly stuck with the band because of its off-kilter outlook on life and inherent fun of creating a rhythm section with a glockenspiel, played by his sister, who is also known to hula-hoop during shows. "[Our music] can be therapeutic," he said. "It can be a transcendent experience."