A Little Bit Country, a Lot Weird

This is the story of Gerald and the Naked Trucker. They met one night on the open road. The Naked Trucker was hauling 16 tons of horse meat back across the Arizona-Mexico border to a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints picnic. Gerald was standing by the side of the road, holding a bottle of sweet wine and sniffing from a gas rag, hallucinating a conversation with Joseph Campbell. Seen from the rig, Gerald looked “lonelier than a special-ed kid trying to find a cafeteria table,” thought the Naked Trucker. He slammed on his brakes, and Gerald climbed in--but he rode in back with the meat patties.

This, then, is their story. It is a tale embedded deep in this land we call America.

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“The Naked Trucker Show” is a musical journey, a tale told in approximately 90 minutes and a dozen songs--a postmodern mush of borrowed country and pop hooks mixed with original arrangements. David Koechner is Gerald, and Dave (Gruber) Allen is the Naked Trucker. (Having one’s nickname in parentheses as opposed to quotes is less cheesy, Allen feels.) For every name in comedy you know, there are at least two like Koechner and Allen, bubbling beneath the surface of celebrity and lionized talent. Many of them, to be sure, are in Los Angeles. Koechner is a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, and Allen was in a long-running comedy group called the Higgins Boys & Gruber, a sketch troupe that landed on cable television in the early days of niche programming but never broke big. He is 6-feet-5 and humble to a fault; to know him is to wonder what part of his personality kicks in when he’s standing onstage nude, three feet in front of strangers.

“The Naked Trucker Show,” which is Allen’s invention, may have begun as a goof, and it may continue as a more serious goof, but the show, which has been playing around Los Angeles for a few years now, has generated something of a hard-core following among the comedy writer-producer community through regular appearances at Largo, the hipster alternative comedy hangout in the Fairfax District where this month, there are two “Naked Trucker” shows, Tuesday and Dec. 19.

Like Tenacious D, the rock comedy duo featuring breakout star Jack Black and Kyle Gass, “Trucker” shows have become a word-of-mouth gauge of one’s comedic sophistication. And yet, there is nothing calculated or cynical about the show’s motives, and except for the friends-of-friends celebrities who have checked out the act (David Schwimmer, Bobby Farrelly, Tom Petty keyboardist Benmont Tench), Koechner and Allen swear they don’t know what kind of following they actually have. They are, however, proud of the fact that Tench walked out--presumably because the Florida native found the characters too horribly real to be endured.

It’s hard to get at the show in a blurb. Allen calls it “messed-up ‘Hee Haw,’ ” while Koechner is partial to “hillbilly art house.” In addition to Gerald on vocals and the Naked Trucker on vocals and guitar, professional musicians back them up--Tommy Chan (by day a sound designer on animated shows) on guitar and J.P. Fitting (by day a set dresser on the NBC drama “Providence”) on bass. Gerald takes the stage holding an American flag in front of the Naked Trucker’s body; by the time the flag is removed, the trucker’s guitar is strategically placed. He does remain in his shoes and socks.

The show’s musical references include everything from the old blues song “You Gotta Move” to the Tom T. Hall country tune “I Love.” In “My American Dream,” the band’s unofficial anthem and a country song originally written for an as-yet-unrealized comedy album from Norm Macdonald, “The Naked Trucker Show” signals its flag-waving homage: Theirs is the America of Iowa corn and a Georgia peach, not to mention various other unmentionable things Hank Williams Jr. would never sing about.

Beyond the music, there is the chemistry between the show’s two misfit stars. In the dream world of the piece, Gerald and the Naked Trucker have stopped to perform their show in some far-flung roadhouse. Koechner, playing Gerald in a comb-over wig and a Yukon Jack T-shirt, drinks liberally from a whiskey bottle and handles a snake in an ode to his fundamentalist hill-people roots. The Trucker (as it turns out, the naked guy is the reliable narrator) patiently brings him down from his religious reverie with a few bars of the 1980s German crossover hit “99 Luftballoons.”

The straight-man-to-comic-foil dynamic between the two is at least as old as vaudeville, but it’s the accumulation of story and detail that elevates their relationship. It is not hard to believe that they would have found each other by some happy coincidence. Their adventures call to mind “On the Road,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and maybe even “Of Mice and Men.” They visit the Jack Daniels distillery in Lynchburg, Tenn., and then stop by Travis Tritt’s house in Tennessee to sell Tritt a country song (naturally, things don’t go as planned). On the open road, with nothing but time and blacktop before them, Gerald and the Trucker discuss the sodium content of Lunchables, the Wal-Marting of America, the difference between bathos and pathos, and the Scopes Monkey Trial (“Turns out Trucker’s a creationist and I’m an evolutionist,” Gerald says, in his sloppy hillbilly drawl).

You could argue that the pleasure of “The Naked Trucker Show” comes in hearing two archetypes of stupidity mix it up like grad students. But the show’s cultural fluency comes from such a deeply realized place it’s hard to see the characters as dumb, or even as stereotypes.

“To me, the first lesson of being subversive is, don’t tell people you’re being subversive,” says Eddie Gorodetsky, a writer on the ABC sitcom “Dharma & Greg.” Because Koechner and Allen have deep roots in stand-up, improv and sitcoms, lots of established comedy writers and performers know about the show.

“It’s so rich with detail you can’t believe someone made it up,” Gorodetsky says. “You feel that you’re seeing a program spawned by an actual world.”

“Against my better judgment, I actually find it moving--the interaction between these two morons,” says Tim Long, a writer for “The Simpsons.” “After a long day of trying to fine-tune little jokes for our little TV show, there’s something full-throttle about it.”

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Allen and Koechner met briefly in 1995, backstage at “Saturday Night Live.” Koechner was a first-year cast member, part of an incoming class that included Cheri Oteri, Will Farrell and Darrell Hammond. Allen had been hired for a two-week writing stint by Steve Higgins, his former partner in the Higgins Boys & Gruber and now a writer-producer on “SNL.”

For his “SNL” audition, Koechner had done a character called Gerald “T-Bones” Tibbons, a drifter from the Quad Cities (on the Iowa-Illinois state line) with a working knowledge of Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” and a can of Hamm’s at the ready. Koechner had been honing Gerald, whom he describes as “basically a con man, anywhere between 29 and 45, depending on which girl he wants to date,” since his Chicago improv days. Although the character is invented, Koechner, who is from Tipton, Mo., says he based Gerald in part on a roofer-drifter in Tipton nicknamed “Four-Way George,” so called because he hung out at a stop sign at a four-way intersection. “There didn’t used to be a stoplight in Tipton. There is now. Progress,” Koechner, 38, says, over breakfast one morning in Hollywood.

But it wasn’t until years later, when Koechner was living in Chicago and performing in an improv group called Jazz Freddy, that Gerald began to take shape. As the character evolved, Koechner says, Gerald had a French accent, but his physicality was mostly Four-Way George. “There’s a little bit of his hangdog lanky curvatures--the way he walked, his boldness and audacity,” Koechner says. “And then a little bit of some French guy. . . . There’s none of that left, except Gerald thinks Tibbons is French.”

The character followed Koechner as he became a member of Chicago’s famed Second City improv troupe and then a cast member on “SNL.” Like all cast members, Koechner was signed to a five-year contract and, like all cast members, he had to give “SNL” ownership of any characters he featured on the show. This included Gerald, who appeared in three sketches during Koechner’s debut season--one in which he was an ordinary citizen picked to execute a condemned man, who was played by guest host Christopher Walken. The producers wanted to test Gerald’s breakout potential by making him the host of his own talk show, a stock “SNL” premise that has not only launched popular sketches, but has become a vehicle by which the show launches feature films (most notably “Wayne’s World”) But Koechner balked at developing Gerald as a talk show host.

“My mistake was not really seeing the target,” he says. “They probably told me three times, ‘How about a Gerald talk show?’ I didn’t realize that wasn’t a request, it meant, ‘Write one.’ ”

At the end of his first season Koechner was let go. But Koechner did get “SNL” executive producer Lorne Michaels’ blessing to pursue outside projects for Gerald. About a year after he left the show, Koechner was cast in “Dill Scallion,” a mock documentary about an aspiring country singer. It was during the shoot that Koechner got to know Allen, who had also been cast and was using his “Dill Scallion” travels to take highway footage for a show he had going back home, one involving a naked trucker.

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In the screenplay Allen and Koechner are now developing, Gerald and the Naked Trucker go looking for Gerald’s long-lost father, whom he believes to be astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon.

There have also been meetings with celebrated record producer Rick Rubin about doing a road show or album. In Gerald and the Naked Trucker, Rubin sees something with the pop culture wallop of Cheech and Chong or the Blues Brothers. But Rubin, who has worked with the Beastie Boys and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, also wonders whether the show’s “art house” qualities would be lost on a broader, younger audience.

“It is undeniably great, and greatness wins out,” he says, before adding, “It’s kind of a precarious thing. It has to be handled delicately and really smartly. It’s still not clear to me what way is going to work for it to break through.”

Koechner and Allen, meanwhile, have rented a $325-a-month office in Burbank Village, a small room with a desk and a bulletin board but no phone. They are working with Marc Hyman, a screenwriter whose credits include “Osmosis Jones,” an upcoming animated feature starring Chris Rock and David Hyde Pierce and co-directed by the Farrelly brothers. Lately, they’ve been working around Koechner’s schedule; he has become busy with film parts, including a bulky role as a Gerald-like character in “Run, Ronnie, Run,” an upcoming feature from Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, whose sketch series “Mr. Show” was a cult success for the pay cable network HBO from 1995 to 1999.

Allen, too, works. He recently spent a week playing a night-school auto repair teacher on an episode of “Frasier.” Although his nickname lacks an interesting back story, Allen is called Grube or Gruber by his friends, many of whom will tell you that his talent is as bountiful as his ego is nonexistent. Gruber, they say, would be richer or more famous (but not necessarily happier) if he had what most in the entertainment business have--a self-aggrandizing drive to be known.

“Here’s the thing,” Allen says of himself. “Other people are just so much more into it and really get out there, and I’m just kind of lazy.”

Says Allen’s former partner Dave Higgins, putting it another way: “Sometimes his drive is misguided. He’ll get all gung-ho about a project, but [the project] will be clearing out his desk.”

In an industry that runs on credit inflation and general PR demagoguery, Allen, 42, lopes along, pleased to have work but never one to take credit for it. At the advice of a casting executive, he has kept his beard and wears his hair long off a balding head. In this way, he has landed work as a stoned lawyer on an episode of “The Drew Carey Show,” a bookstore lackey on “NewsRadio” and Keith the Pizza Guy on “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.” Allen not only understands he’s being typecast, he gleefully welcomes it, because being typecast perpetuates more typecasting work in the future. Recently, Allen, who also played the guidance counselor on the short-lived NBC critical hit “Freaks and Geeks,” auditioned for an Olsen twins movie, for a role as headmaster in a private school. When Allen showed up, he was told the part had been changed to football coach, though he could still audition because the dialogue was the same.

“I walked in and it’s six dudes with super short hair,” Allen says. “One guy’s wearing a football jersey and I go, ‘What happened?’ ” He pauses. The rest of the story is implied, and Allen waits a few beats. It is a fine fall morning in Burbank Village, near Allen and Koechner’s office. Allen is sitting outside at a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, drinking a cup of house coffee and smoking a cigarette--for him a special kind of pleasure. “So I blew my chance to work with the Olsen twins,” he says.

To Steve Higgins, it is not surprising that Allen has invented a show like “The Naked Trucker,” for Allen, Higgins says, has always worked in what is personally pleasing to him. Higgins recalls a sketch Allen used to do with the Higgins Boys & Gruber, called “Dave’s Beginnings,” in which Allen posed as a guitarist who could only play the beginnings of popular songs. In the bit, recordings of “Dave’s Beginnings” could be purchased by sending a check to Mel Bay, Calif., a reference to Mel Bay, pioneer of guitar instruction. Says Higgins: “Only the guys who took guitar know Mel Bay was this guy who gave early guitar lessons. . . . So if you were one of the guys in the audience who took guitar, you’d say that’s genius.”

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The Higgins brothers met Allen in 1979, in their native Des Moines. Allen had moved to Iowa to live with his parents after graduating from Augustana College in Illinois. The three formed a sketch troupe called Don’t Quit Your Day Job, then changed it to the Higgins Boys & Gruber. Throughout the 1980s, the Higgins Boys & Gruber performed at colleges, coffee houses and comedy clubs, and by the end of the decade they were on television, with specials on HBO and then a sketch series, “The Higgins Boys & Gruber,” for the then-fledgling Comedy Channel. (They were brought to the cable network’s attention by Joel Hodgson, creator of the Comedy Channel’s earliest cult hit, “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”) In 1990, when the Comedy Channel merged with Ha! to form Comedy Central, the Higgins Boys & Gruber kicked around, moved back to Los Angeles and eventually split up. But it was during this time that the Naked Trucker came to be.

Says Allen: “Originally it was thought up by Andrew Steele, an ‘SNL’ writer, and Steve Higgins. They came up with the idea for the Naked Trucker. Because I like doing music, you know? So one time we were trying to do a sketch for one of our failed sketch show pilots. . . . It was like, how do you do a funny song? Well, you do a funny song as a character. OK, what kind of character? I don’t know, how about a trucker? OK, how about he’s not wearing any clothes? OK, sounds good, let’s do that. You know what I mean? I may be wrong, I may be Stalinist in my revision, but I think it was that.”

“Do me a favor and don’t listen to him,” says Steve Higgins, reached in his office at “Saturday Night Live.” He offers his own version of how the Naked Trucker came to be. “It was all about our love of CB lingo and cross-country trucking. And Grube goes, ‘OK, I could do it nude.’ ”

After the Higgins Boys & Gruber broke up, Allen segued into the job-to-job life of the comedy performer-writer. But he also kept the Naked Trucker alive, performing the show in various incarnations in small theaters around Los Angeles. Comedian friends of Allen’s would sit in or take recurring parts, and sometimes the show lasted 15 minutes. But people who have seen the show then and now say there is something more focused--indeed, even magical--about “The Naked Trucker Show” with Gerald.

“After you’ve been in corporate comedy, you forget why you’re doing this in the first place,” says Steve Higgins. “I saw that and thought, ‘Oh yeah, that’s why I do this.’ It really renewed my faith in humor.”

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“The Naked Trucker Show,” Largo, 432 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. Tuesday and Dec. 19, 9 p.m. $5. (323) 852-1073.