"Just for the Jell of It" by John Mendelssohn Queen lives! And so do the Beach Boys and Beatles of the _Pet Sounds/Sgt. Pepper_ era as well. Or at least, you recall them all upon getting an earful of Jellyfish's second album, _Spilt Milk_, surely the most ambitious (or, depending on your taste, overblown) release of the decade to date. They display exquisite choral singing, a corrosive racket, gorgeous melodies, and instrumentation more commonly associated with soundtrack albums than with rock 'n' roll. There's airy crooning, with angry snarling, a lullaby, a rabid denunciation of dead rock stars who sell well posthumously, cringe-inducing wordplay, shameless preciousness, and even an affectionate tribute to the dick of one of the principals. The roots of all this can be traced way back to the dawn of the '80s, when guitarist/keyboardist Roger Manning and lead singer Andy Sturmer, rock 'n' roll's first great standup drummer, met in high school in the hyper suburban community of Pleasanton, not too long a drive from Berkeley, but worlds away from that bohemian town. They quickly became what the big, shy Sturmer (who the admiring Manning knew to have played bars from early puberty with musicians in their twenties, and to have mastered more Neil Peart licks than any other teenage drummer in the bioregion] has called "little jazz snobs." "Usually musicians will listen to Black Sabbath and then, as they get better on their instruments, move on to jazz," says Sturmer. "We did the opposite. While everybody elsewas listening either to Styx or Devo, we were listening to Art Blakey, [John] Coltrane, the Jazz Messengers, Miles [Davis], anything drummer Elvin Jones had played on, and Bill Evans. And being into Coltrane wasn't exactly a recipe for getting laid in 1980!" My dad worked in a record store as a teenager," Sturmer giggles guiltily, "and had this immense record collection. when I was growing up. But I traded in so many of them to get other stuff that now he sits in his La-Z-Boy looking at his one remaining shelf of records and wondering what happened." Studying liner notes as they listened, the two friends realized that "everything was interrelated," Manning reembers. "You listen to a Missing Persons record and otice that everyone in the band played on other people's records, or with Frank Zappa. So then you'd get a Zappa aIbum, and see that everybody on it was a jazz-head. You'd keep connecting the players in his huge family tree, tracing the roots from progressive rock back to fusion back to jazz. There was craft in all of it. We tried to sift through the garbage to see who the great writers were, whether it was Cole Porter and Jerome Kern or the Brill Building bunch." By the late 80s, they were Atlantic recording artists, by virtue of their membership in Beatnik Beach--which eventually emerged as not the first act Atlantic's key executives had in mind as they arrived at work each morning. The two oId pals soon regrouped with guitarist Jason Faulkner, recorded some reportedly breathtaking demos, renamed themselves Jellyfish, and were pursued by lots of labels who swore that they'd do better by them than Atlantic. They went into the studio with producer whiz Alby Galuten, who, since making a trillion dollars on the Bee Gees' disco hits, had virtually turned his back on music production to rehabilitate South American torture victims, among other noble undertakings. Their sublime debut, _Bellybutton_ , vividly evoked the Beatles. The Black Crowes, of all people, invited the group to tour with them. Harmony singing and melody are widely viewed in the outback as the preoccupations of effete sissies, so you might imagine that the Crowes' more hormonally imbalanced fans might have felt morally compelled to overturn our heroes' tour bus and bloody their noses--especially on realizing that Manning's a wee slip of a lad. But no one laid a finger on them. "We started in Florida, figuring that, if anything was going to happen, it would be in the South," Manning relates proudly. But there wasn't a single show where we weren 't welI received. Luckily, we had a great relationship with the Crowes, who pumped us up every night." That isn't to suggest that the tour didn't have its harrowing side. "Before going outside and trolling the girls," Manning confides, "their roadies would ask if we wanted a blonde or a brunette for the evening. That's such a machismo thing, and so alien to my personality. I just don't have it in me to be a Viking, to think, 'these women are mine for the taking."' Remaining faithful to their sweethearts back in California, they devised more 90's ways of keeping themselves amused. For their first show in Canada, for instance, they worked up a medley of Gordon Lightfoot, Corey Hart, and Loverboy hits. Manning, who collects antique toys, late '60s restaurant promotional items, and dubious celebrity (William Shatner, TV game show hosts) albums, spends lots of time in junk stores. Sturmer watches the Arts & Entertainment Channel, which he zanily calls the Hitler Channel because it's forever showing documentaries about the Third Reich. And it turns out that they did have intercourse with the priapic hordes, albeit only verbal. "I'd go out and talk with girls and fuck with their heads," Manning cackles. "I carried on a heated conversation with one for an hour about whether Sebastian Bach or Chris Robinson was the ultimate rock stud." Such wholesome hi-jinx notwithstanding, Manning's bass-playing brother Chris discovered that he detested the road, and abandoned music to become a chef. Then, Faulkner was shown the door after presenting Sturmer and Manning with a catalog of nonnegotiable demands, such as that he be allowed to write and sing lead on a percentage of the group's repertoire. Having no intention of becoming "the Steely Dan of the '9Os," as Sturmer puts it, they conducted what turned into a transcontinental talent hunt for replacements. Their soundman was accosted at a party in Atlanta by one Tim Smith, a bass guitarist and singer who "knew" that Jellyfish's trademark live harmony vocals were far too good to be entirely real. Once having been convinced that they really don't use samples, he submitted tapes proving that he sang like an angel himself; he found himself working on Jellyfish's second album in L.A. a week later. They've since rounded out the live lineup with a young Alabaman guitarist who didn't admit at his audition to a proclivity for wearing his shirt unbuttoned to the waist on stage. Sartorially, Jellyfish's two principals have toned down enormously since their days as the Black Crowes' opening act. Nowadays, they seem not to have chosen their clothes for their ludicrousness and for how violently they clash. "When we did interviews," says Sturmer-- who posed for Bellybutton's gatefold in bellbottom trousers on which black and white checker-boards fought it out with orange and blue Union 76 logos, a red and white striped shirt, and a green, chartreuse, and purple hat straight out of Dr. Seuss--"we'd get to start talking about music only after 18 questions about where we got our wacky bellbottoms. 'I got'em in a fucking store. So what?' Well, we hadn't spend six months buying clothes. We'd spent six months making a record we were proud of." Grouses the even more flamboyant Manning, "One too many people told me that I was scaring fans away and that people who might want to give our music a chance weren't going to if I kept coming out in a skirt [actually a ladies' pantsuit with very wide bellboteoms]. Shocking people and being wacky is part of my personality, so part of me went, 'Hey, fuck you!" But the practical side of me said, 'Hey, I want as many people to hear us as possible.' Our goal has never been to be the kings of alternative. I want my parents' friends to be into this group. I want the kids in the fourth grade class my mom teaches to be into this group." "Being into" Jellyfish requires that listeners feel comfortable with the group often sounding exactly like one or the other of the bands that inspired it. Witness the exquisite middle of "The Ghost at Number One," the best impersonation of _Pet Sounds_ era Beach Boys that anyone will ever hear. Manning gets a little miffed at the suggestion that Spilt Milk may be perceived as nothing more than a collection of echoes of earlier great albums. "The Beach Boys would never have done it that way, with really hard verses surrounding it and a banjo at the end of the song," Manning elaborates. "We really take pride in exploring the arrangements. Our strength is in incorporating a lot of different things and twisting them in a way that they haven't been twisted before." In view of _Spilt Milk's_ dizzying ambitiousness--several songs seem at first to be trying to fight their way through dense orchestration and production--you might be surprised by how avidly our heroes believe that technique ought to be subordinate to expression. "The most important thing about us might be that were almost embarrassed by all our musical knowledge," Manning assures. "A lot of people have forgotten why they picked up their instruments in the first place. What's the point of Mariah Carey, for instance? I don't care that she has a five octave range, move me in just one of them!" "You don't listen to 'Eleanor Rigby and go, 'Who jacked off all over the string arrangement?' No, it completely complements McCartney's simple melody. When those strings start out in unison and go down in half-steps and the tension builds and releases, that's what fuckin' twists me. I go, 'Oh, my god, that is gorgeous! That's the correct way to employ knowledge. I think our success lies in the fact that we've made a very comfortable marriage of the completely soulful, nonthinking side and intricacy and wit. The best music excels on both levels, and I know that our stuff does too."