The Bobs

It all started when Western Onion went bust, leaving all singing telegram deliverers broke and unemployed. Thus began the Great San Francisco Singing Telegram Depression of 1981. Gunnar Madsen and Matthew Stull, two of the newly unemployed, placed a free 25-words-or-less ad in the classifieds for a bass singer. They got one call--from bass singer, songwriter and recording engineer Richard Greene.

After six months of rehearsal, the trio debuted at an open mike in a Cuban restaurant, shuffled ahead of the line of waiting flamenco guitarists by a manager aware of his patrons’ acute flamenco ennui. They sang "Psycho Killer,” "A White Sportcoat" and a few others. The audience loved them. The Bobs were born.

At first, The Bobs’ material consisted of uniquely arranged cover tunes. As they began writing their own songs, the need for another voice became apparent. Auditions found Janie 'Bob' Scott. Appearances helped the stage show gel. A contract with local record company Kaleidoscope Records produced a first album, THE BOBS. A Grammy® nomination for their arrangement of The Beatles’ "Helter Skelter" and a national concert tour resulted in radio airplay and television appearances, followed by concerts and festivals in Europe. Their special blend of music, theatre, comedy and performance art moved the Los Angeles Daily News to comment, “The Bobs prove that the best instrument in creating music is the human brain. They are nothing less than sensational.”

Over 25 years later, The Bobs, “a band without instruments,” are still bob-bob-bobbin’ along with surprisingly few personnel changes. In 1990, Gunnar retired, replaced by Joe Bob Finetti, whose vocal percussion and sound effects added a new layer of vocal pyrotechnics to the sound. In 2004, Dan Bob Schumacher took over the role of resident groove-master and oral instrumentalist, as funky as he is tall. Since 1998, Amy Bob Engelhardt has commandeered the femme-Bob slot (held by Janie Scott for 15 years and, briefly, Lori Rivera), packing a pistol wit, years of musical, comedy and theatrical experience, and numerous haircolors. Witnessing these four amazing personalities and their combined musical wizardry, audiences tend to “spontaneously combust” (to quote a Bobs song) with alarming regularity. The Bergen Record/Home News Tribune calls The Bobs “One of the most entertaining acts on the live circuit today.”


Highlights of the group’s career include performing with Jason Alexander on the Emmy® Awards telecast, and providing musical commentary for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. Citations have included Contemporary A cappella Recording Awards (CARA) too numerous to mention since the Awards were established in 1992. Composer/lyricists Richard Bob Greene and Amy Bob Engelhardt have repeatedly garnered ASCAP Songwriting Awards for their Bobs compositions.

A particularly notable avenue of statement for The Bobs has been collaboration with artists in other disciplines. Their first commission was a series of songs, "The Laundry Cycle," for the Oberlin Dance Collective in 1987. Later that year, they met the dance troupe Momix, (later known as ISO). Improvising with them yielded a show that toured fine arts venues worldwide for a period of years, resulting in a commission from Lincoln Center and a one-hour “Lonesome Pine Special” for PBS. The program is now part of the media archives at the Smithsonian Institute's Museum of American History. The Bobs were also featured in a tribute special on comedian Andy Kaufman for NBC, on PBS’ Great Performances in “The Beatles Songbook” and in a special with Harry Shearer for HBO. The group returned to Lincoln Center in 2001 to headline the prestigious American Songbook Series and recently collaborated with The Flying Karamazov Brothers in “A Comedy of Eras” - a musical/historical/fictional theater piece workshopped at Seattle’s A Contemporary Theater. “RHAPSODY IN BOB” premiered at The Barns of Wolf Trap in Spring 2005; the centerpiece of this show is their breathtaking arrangement of Gershwin’s masterwork, “Rhapsody in Blue” for piano (guest artist Bob Malone) and The Bobs (as the vocal orchestra). A recording of this piece was released shortly afterwards.

In 2007, Coldfoot Films released SIGN MY SNARLING MOVIE: 25 YEARS OF THE BOBS, a documentary about the group’s history and evolution, and The Bobs’ 14th album arrived shortly thereafter. GET YOUR MONKEY OFF MY DOG is a collection of all-new, original instant Bobs classics.

The Bobs, described by the Seattle Times as “a musical equivalent of a Gary Larsen drawing,” continue to add to their musical palette of possibilities as no other group, honing a catalogue of fourteen albums of witty original material and outrageous covers of classic songs. The Bobs are the prevailing trailblazers in the flourishing world of contemporary a cappella music, clear-cutting their own musical freeway. They are among the elite handful of totally original creators, who use just their voices and body percussion to fill a room with an orchestra of harmonious sound. They have left an indelible mark on vocal music, expertly skewering standards and establishing their own hilarious norms. Once dubbed the only New Wave a cappella group in history, “The Bobs,” commented The Washington Post, “prove that the human voice remains the most powerful instrument of all.”