self-titled - no. 1 - (Page 55)

C C ole Alexander stands atop a pile of construction rubble with a megaphone pressed to his mouth. “Let’s start a fucking riot in the streets!” shouts the Black Lips singer and guitarist, decked out in ridiculously tight, shiny golden pants and a leather cowboy jacket. Just one evening earlier, the -year-old Alexander was worried that Brooklyn police would intervene when his band’s Bad Kids Parade, numbering about a hundred fans plus two dozen hired circus performers, marched a mile from the Sound Fix record store to the Music Hall of Williamsburg. As Alexander beckons the circus band to crescendo and pounds on the window of an unoccupied parked police car, it’s clear his reservations are long gone. “We only ever get in trouble with bouncers, not cops,” says guitarist Ian St. Pe. Still, the pm stroll through Williamsburg is testing the band’s luck, especially after a super-fan generated some unlawful buzz around the Lips. The previous day an over-zealous -year-old man wearing rollerblades scaled the giant metal globe outside Trump International Hotel & Tower and tossed out Black Lips concert fliers before spending the evening incarcerated. The man insists he committed the stunt alone, without the band or any publicists egging him on. “We’ve never had a fan do something like that,” says Alexander. “We figured we should put him on the guest list.” And sure enough, the Lips’ most egregious fan is singing alongside the group at its pre-parade gig at Sound Fix. Although the band hasn’t achieved the kind of Beatlemania status that incites these kinds of stunts regularly, there’s been an ever-growing buzz surrounding the Atlanta four-piece after its fourth and latest LP, Good Bad Not Evil, dropped on Vice Records in early September. Raucous behavior goes hand-in-hand with the Lips’ grimy rehashing of ’0s doo-wop, blues and rock, perhaps best demonstrated by the band’s de facto anthem, the Good Bad Not Evil track “Bad Kids.” “Bad kids, ain’t no college grad kids / Livin’ out on the skids / Kids like you and me,” chime all four members on the song’s half-sung, half-chanted chorus, juxtaposing an innocent Motown melody with the drunken defensiveness of a criminal caught on an episode of Cops. The band members’ reputation onstage confirms these irreverent lyrics, with rumors running rampant about penis-strummed instruments, urine drinking and guy-on-guy kissing—rumors the band proudly confirms. As for the Black Lips’ sound—a hissy, raucous mish-mash of dusty s and Ed Sullivan re-runs—all four members claim an affinity for rock’s early days. “We didn’t have a lot of garage records when we were younger, like the Nuggets comps or whatever, but we knew we liked that stuff from the few we had,” says Alexander. “There were a lot of punk bands forming when we were growing up,” adds St. Pe. “But I always thought the Kinks and Rolling Stones were more ‘punk’ than actual punk was.” Alexander, drummer Joe Bradley and bassist Jared Swilley were high school classmates in Dunwoody, Georgia, a suburb about miles outside of Atlanta.. They spent their teen years playing in house bands with former Black Lips guitarist Jack Hines, who quit the group so he could settle down with his wife. Maintaining a strong connection with the band, Hines is the primary contributor to the band’s blog, theblacklips.blogspot.com. “ We got to swim in the Dead Sea and go to a little place where Peter and a little guy named Jesus started Christianity. We saw where he walked on water.” Twenty-nine-year-old St. Pe grew up in New Orleans but moved to Atlanta after graduating high school. “I loved the South, and since Atlanta’s the biggest city in the South, I figured I’d give it a try,” says St. Pe. He met sophomore Alexander and freshman Swilley, and the three formed a band in called the Renegades—a sloppier, faster take on the Lips’ trademark sound—after the older St. Pe spent months buying booze for the underage band members. “They’d give me this huge list, and I’d pick up the booze for them,” recalls St. Pe. “Everyone was always like, ‘Why are you playing with a bunch of sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds?’ I was like, ‘Man, ’cause these kids have more fun than my thirty-year-old friends!” Bradley, despite being the youngest of the group, was always close to the band in junior high and high school, and just a few months later, he enrolled as its drummer. After about a year, St. Pe left the Renegades to pursue a music degree from the University of Memphis while Alexander, Swilley and Bradley formed the Black Lips with guitarist Ben Eberbaugh, who died in a car crash in 00. Hines briefly filled in for Eberbaugh, and the new lineup played in what Bradley describes as “the worst touring conditions possible. “ Hines left after a year to get married, and the band, in need of a guitarist, gave St. Pe a ring. “They called me up in Memphis and said two things: ‘Do you want to join?’ and ‘It starts tomorrow,’” says St. Pe, who had not performed with his old bandmates in four years. “They picked me up in Memphis and taught me songs while riding up in the van to Cleveland. I was majoring in music anyway, so I figured I’d drop out and join another band.” For all four members, playing in bands has always been the only viable vocation. “We had career day in my school when I was a sophomore,” says St. Pe, “They said I had to pick something and if I didn’t pick anything, I’d have to sit in the office. So I said, ‘Fine, I just wanna be an arena rocker.’” For Alexander, science was an alluring but brief aspiration. “I wanted to be a geneticist as a kid,” he recalls. “But I had this teacher in elementary school who hated me because I was bad in class. One day she said, ‘You know what, Cole? You’re never gonna be a geneticist!’ And that was that.” http://theblacklips.blogspot.com

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self-titled - no. 1 Contents Spiritualized No Age Les Savy Fav The Teenagers Booka Shade Michael Gira Ellen Allien Magik Markers Jens Lekman Yeasayer Daptone Records Tipping Point Boris Fiery Furnaces Black Dice Black Mountain The Black Lips

self-titled - no. 1

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