The Guckenheimer Sour Kraut Band was a humorous musical group of amateur and professional musicians living in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, area who played a repertoire of polkas and light classical music while adopting a persona of mild confusion and wearing self-created uniforms once described as rejects from the Franco-Prussian War.
The occasional native German-born listener would often remark on the Guckenheimers' similarity to actual village bands back in the old country.
The third album's cover was a photograph of the band, or at least eight members of it as (according to a note on the reverse side) "Johann Sebastian Schmidtz III was not present -- he overslept."
There was, however, a ninth character on the cover, as the band was arrayed before a casting of the famous "The Thinker" statue by Auguste Rodin on display at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.
On the second album, Gump—or rather, Herr Doktor Guckenheimer—wrote a short note addressed to "Dear Music-Lovers:" One evening as I wandered along the San Francisco Waterfront, dreaming of my youth and homeland, I heard the dulcet wail of a foghorn rebound off the cliffs that support Telegraph Hill.