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The Senate and the People of Rome
Rock band that heads to the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt to participate in the massive Walpurgisnacht rock festival in the 1975 novel Leviathan, the third book in Robert Anton Wilson’s insane Illuminatus! trilogy.
They have a "bizarre vehicle."
Their name is a reference to the Latin motto of the Roman Empire, abbreviated SPQR.
For over a week the musicians had been boarding planes and heading for Ingolstadt. As early as April 23, while Simon and Mary Lou listened to Clark Kent and His Supermen and George Dorn wrote about the sound of one eye opening, the Fillet of Soul, finding bookings sparse in London, drove into Ingolstadt in a Volvo painted seventeen Day-Glo colors and flaunting Ken Kesey's old slogan, "Furthur!" On April 24 a real trickle began, and while Harry Coin looked into Hagbard Celine's eyes and saw no mercy there (Buckminster Fuller, just then, was explaining "omnidirectional halo" to his seatmate on a TWA Whisperjet in mid-Pacific), the Wrathful Visions, the Cockroaches, and the Senate and the People of Rome all drove down Rathausplatz in bizarre vehicles, while the Ultra-Violet Hippopotamus and the Thing on the Doorstep both navigated Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse in even more amazing buses.
A few pages later, they get into a tussle with band Attila and His Huns:
"Mick Jagger hasn't even played 'Sympathy for the Devil' yet and already the trouble has started," an English voice drawled . . . Attila and His Huns were trying to do acute bodily damage to the Senate and the People of Rome . . . Both groups were speeding, and they had gotten into a very intellectual discussion of the meaning of one of Dylan's lyrics ... A Hun bopped a Roman with a beer stein as
another voice mumbled something about Tyl Eulenspiegel's merry pranks.
