Combine the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray,” Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl,” the freakiest free-nose experiments of New York no-wave era, and a shortwave radio soaked in hallucinogenic toad venom, and… well, you’re still not even close, but you’ve got an idea.

One of the most eclectic, confrontational, and genuinely psychedelic bands in rock history was formed in Phoenix in 1979. Named for a nearby planned community for retirees, Sun City Girls were brothers and guitarists Richard and Alan Bishop and percussionist Charles Gocher. Over nearly three decades, they blazed one of the most bizarre, confounding, and fascinating legacies in underground rock, scattered over dozens of releases on numerous ephemeral labels, mixing countless genres, and defying easy summation.

In the early days, the only shows SCG could book were in the punk scene, and even there, the Girls were weird. They mixed their ragged, desert-baked guitar riffs and ramshackle, counterintuitive arrangements with surrealistic theater, improv comedy, and antagonistic performance art, often resulting in mutual aggression between the performers and the audience. They eventually gained a small, loyal following through constant touring and freeform radio, including college stations and New Jersey’s legendary WFMU. The Bishop brothers were relentless world travelers, picking up instruments and influences from music scenes around the globe and often shifting their style radically within just a few years.

The band’s anarchic sensibility makes their body of work impossible to categorize and difficult to fully describe. Touchstones include:

• The darker, heavier end of ‘60s acid rock 
• Angry folk protest songs
• Free-jazz skronk 
• Hypnotic drones
• Proto-punk garage-band rejects such as the Monks, the Godz, the Shaggs, and the Fugs 
• The madcap shock humor of Zap! Comix and the ‘80s and ‘90s zine scene 
• Hyper-referential stream-of-consciousness rants 
• A whole lot of shameless cultural appropriation 

They are loved, hated, and still mostly unknown, but the streaming age has made it a lot easier to get into Sun City Girls than it was in the era of three-figure resale prices for limited-edition LPs on eBay.

By the band’s official reckoning, they have over 50 full-length reissues, not including film soundtracks, solo projects, collaborations, and cassette-only rarities. Some of this stuff is nearly unlistenable, consisting of abrasive noise, interminable jazzbo jam sessions, or, in one case, a recording of a previous album played in full, in reverse. Side-projects such as the Sublime Frequencies label, issuing music, field recordings, and radio broadcasts captured during the Bishops’ travels, complicate matters even further. If you want to get your feet wet, here are a few to start with.

Sun City Girls essentials

• “Torch of the Mystics”: Widely agreed to be the band’s most identifiable “rock” record, this one collects some of their most scorching riffs, coherent strong structures, and successful experiments

• “Funeral Mariachi”: An elegant, somber, sincere, and painfully haunting swan song released after Gocher’s passing and the band’s immediate dissolution, this is a death record that only Sun City Girls could create.

• “330,003 Cross Dressers From Beyond the Rig Veda”: the most extensive and well-realized exploration of SCG’s unique, irreverent, and sometimes problematic takes on “world music.”

• “Dante’s Disneyland Inferno”: Showcasing Gocher’s spoken-word performances, this is a head-spinning deep dive into the band’s dark comedic sensibility.

• Napoleon and Josephine: A surprisingly coherent and consistent collection of singles from the era that encompassed “Torch of the Mystics” and “Dante’s Disneyland Inferno,” providing a decent one-stop introduction to the band’s many facets.

• Abduction Digital Sampler: A good primer from the band’s house record label, with a few representative tracks from Bishop’s solo work as Alvarius B (named for the Sonoran Desert toad, the venom of which can make you trip like a rocket fired into the sun).

If you can get a foothold with Sun City Girls, it’s worth it. Such a challenging, freewheeling, fun-loving, inspired, and resolutely incorrect blend of avant-garde rock music is unlikely to happen again.