Not your normal family vacation

Like a lot of American families, the Trachtenburgs of New York - Mom, Tina, Dad, Jason, and 9-year-old Rachel - are spending their summer driving around the country.

Tina pilots the minivan, since driving makes Jason sleepy. Rachel likes to color, nap, and eat.

Any semblance of normal family vacation stops there, though, because the Trachtenburgs are not your normal family.

In fact, the Trachtenburgs are just the sort who might challenge you to define "normal" while they're busy undefining it - a feat they manage morning, noon, and night, but especially at night.

When the sun goes down, their minivan spills the trio into one nightclub or another, where they become a superheroic pop-music-art sensation known as The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players.

The handle is long but accurate. Jason sings and plays the guitar and keyboards, while Rachel accom-panies him on drums and backup vocals.

Offstage, Tina deftly wields a slide projector, aiming it to a screen off to the left of Rachel's drum kit. All of Jason's lyrics are derived from slides of strangers, no matter how unrelated they might seem to be (which, in many cases, would be very).

The juxtaposition of nutty pop lyrics, a precocious percussionist, and photographic snippets of the lives of complete strangers is, to understate the fact, utterly irresistible.

What really makes it work is that these folks are totally sincere - Jason's thick glasses, '70s striped tube socks, and conviction that he's changing the art world as we know it aren't an attempt to affect cool. No wonder fans of fantastic freakishness have catapulted TFSP to a happy cult status via excited e-mails: "This band is coming to your town soon. DON'T miss them!" Their first CD, "Vintage Slide Collections from Seattle Volume I," debuts on Bar None records this September.

Sitting side-by-side at Evita's Botanitas before a recent Austin gig, Jason and Tina dig into tacos and enchiladas and explain how the switch from walking dogs to appearing on "The Conan O'Brien Show" happened. (Rachel stayed behind at the hotel to play video games with her grandfather.)

Jason and Tina met in New York's West Village in 1989 and, à la John and Yoko, have spent every moment possible together since. Both say they always knew - even before meeting - they were destined for something like this. Their success has been truly a combined effort. Tina, the driven, business-minded half pushes Jason, the quirky (in a good way) tangential one.

"Everything I've ever done I've thought, 'How can we make money doing this?' " Tina says.

They moved from New York to Austin briefly in the early '90s, hoping Jason could make a go in the self-appointed "Music Capital of the World." But when an audience failed to materialize for his then-band, Pancakes and Cheese, they moved to Seattle, another music hotbed.

"I have no skills," Jason says. "I dropped out of college. I don't know how to fix cars or do carpentry or anything. I can't do anything except for service-industry jobs and write songs."

Of course, somebody had to pay the rent while stardom took its sweet time locating the family.

"Tina was a dog walker in New York," Jason says. "When we moved to Seattle, we said, 'Let's start up a dog-walking business.'

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