June 11, 2009 6:00 AM
Joe King doesn't think there's anything odd about it.
At 51, he's still traveling around the country as leader of the Queers, a punk-pop band that began its circuitous trip 27 years ago.
That's Queers as in outrageous. Not out."Everyone just jumps in, and we drive," said King, known as Joe Queer. "Oh, yeah. I used to work on my brother's fishing boat. After you do that, sitting in a van reading the paper and dozing off is pretty easy.
"You can stop any time and grab a cup of coffee. Traveling in a van isn't like breaking up rocks on Alcatraz with a hammer. It's not like that."
King's irreverent band, which plays its high-speed, upbeat Ramones-Beach Boys hybrid at Stockton's Plea for Peace Center on Tuesday, did crack tradition when it was founded in 1982 in Portsmouth, N.H.
"There were all these kind of snooty, artsy-fartsy stuck-up (people) in town," King said Monday after making the drive from Billings to Missoula, Mont. "So, we said, 'Let's call ourselves the Queers.' We kind of did it as a joke, and the name stuck."
Since then, the Queers - three instruments and mostly three chords - have had 32 members during a career that's produced 30 recordings, from studio albums to EPs and "split" releases such as the current self-titled vinyl one with Berkeley's Atom Age ("for all true punk rockers").
King, who writes songs, sings and plays guitar, has held it together despite a 1984-90 hiatus.
"It's still fun," he said. "I like touring anyway. It's going great. The Queers don't draw as many as we used to, but we still get a really good, strong following."
Even in Montana - not normally a punk-rock haven - where King's group never had played before Sunday's show in Billings.
"It was great," King said. "Not a lot of bands come up here. When bands do come up, they do OK. Missoula doesn't seem even as big as Billings. There's lot of skiing and mountain hippie types, though. I'm looking out at a river."
He'll get to gaze at the Stockton waterfront for the first time, too. "Where is Stockton?" asked King, whose band never has played in Stockton before.
It's where Middagh Goodwin, who's been staging rock shows for 20 years and operates the Plea for Peace Center, finally has fulfilled a goal with the Queers. He's finally completed his A-to-Z list of bands he's booked.
King's latest lineup includes Justin "Lurch Nobody" Shaver on drums and bassist "Dangerous" Dave Swain. Ryan "Kwon Doe" Perras - a member of Atom Age, which is opening Tuesday's show - shares the drumming with Swain.
What King called a "loose collective of friends who play together" will be getting some help from Jack "Wimpy Rutherford" Hayes, one of the Queers' original members.
"Yeah," King said of his old New Hampshire buddy. "He called up and wanted to come out and do some shows with us. We'll do the first half-hour, then he'll come out for about 20 minutes. He'll be a little closer to punkier.
"Really, like, that's our little niche," King said of the Queers' playful Ramones- and Beach Boys-influenced style.
The Queers even named a 1996 album after a defiant Beach Boys surf anthem from 1964 ("Don't Back Down"). "That's a killer song," King said. "Yeah, maybe we'll play that."
The Queers were punky pioneers in the early '80s, predating the pop-punk surge of the '90s (Green Day, Rancid, the Offspring and many others) but never achieving the same commercial success.
"It never really took off until we signed with (Berkeley's) Lookout! Records," King said. "It was a weird evolvement, where we had been together and - all of a sudden - we're on Lookout!, Green Day blows up and we get swept up in that."
As another tour unfolds, he's not sure what comes next.
"I'm kind of going year by year and tour by tour," King said. "We'll see. Then I'll step off this iceberg onto the next one and see what happens."
King said he's planning to move back to Atlanta after spending a year in Portsmouth, N.H., caring for his mother.
"That means I'll have to move my (studio) gear back down, too," he said wearily. "I want to get into producing smaller punk bands" (Toronto's The Roman Line and Unbelievers, Teenage Rehab from Kentucky and Wyoming's the Front). "I'm edging toward that, trying to stay home more, you know, being married (for three years) and stuff."
He'll also start working on a new Queers album in August.
While King enjoys touring, recent trips haven't been all fun and games. A 23-year-old man died from a drug overdose in Cincinnati, they couldn't get visas for Canada and Brazil, played their "swan song" at the overblown South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas (It's a "Mardi Gras-style drunken frat-boy party"), and their van got stuck in a Columbus, Ohio, carwash.
He's undaunted.
"Going on tour is like going back to the sixth grade when you'd camp in a tent behind your parents' house," he said. "Except there's no one who's shouting like your mom to make you shut up at 3 a.m."
Contact reporter Tony Sauro at (209) 546-8267 or tsauro@recordnet.com.