The Black Lips played a randy daytime show at Twist & Shout Records on Sunday. Photos by .
Skinny jeans: For teenagers, drug addicts, maybe punk rockers. No one else. The people wearing skinny jeans at the Twist & Shout in-store show looked alright in skinny jeans. You draw your own conclusions.
It smelled of ashtrays, stale beer and bubble gum. And we waited for a good half hour, listening to the superior stylings of the 1190 DJ set, Under the Mattress: ‘50s, ‘60s, rockabilly, surf stuff. Yardbirdsey at times. Psychedelic. We were anticipating the Black Lips, hoping they’d pee in each other’s mouths. Thatap what we had heard about their live shows, anyways.
Finally the boys in Black Lips rolled in around half hour late, with puffy red eyes and goofy grins. Rock and roll is not on time. Ian Saint Pé wore shades, with a mischievous smile that revealed a mouth full of gold teeth. He waved at the crowd, posed for the cameras, blew kisses, flipped his guitar around to reveal “THANK YOU” written on the back in electrical tape.
A real charmer, that one, but probably a bad seed. They all looked like teenagers behaving well before the parents go on vacation and the kegs arrive. And you gotta love them for it.
Each song started like a loose thread and then seamlessly banged itself into a real cohesive song. Cole Alexander counted off, gleaned trippy whooshing noises out of a little sound box, things that sounded like nothing really, but then all of a sudden you were caught listening to some decent montage of the ‘50s and ‘60s: surf, psychedelia, folk, country, Dylanesque vocals, rag-tag singalongs, with high-twanging Rolling Stones guitar a la 1965’s “Mother’s Little Helper,” black, wirey abrasive basslines, all wrapped up in a paranoid Twilight Zone-esque sheet of effects and sound bytes, recordings from the dark void.
Drummer Joe Bradley tapped out a phenomenal show with just a drum duct-taped to a crate duct-taped to a stool, banging on it with a drum stick and tambourine. He bounced jovially, looking so innocent, like some character off the beach in a Scooby Doo episode. He managed singing while taping and re-taping his freedom-seeking drum, wrestling with it to stay put. They all pretty much sang except Saint Pé, who seemed to mouth vocals occasionally while looking confused.
It became clearer at about the fourth song that these kids looked pretty stoned. Alexander postured at the echoing mic and raised his arms gloriously, reciting cackles and oceanic whooshing noises and alien spaceship sounds, making creative arm gestures as drummer Bradley became lost in a time-warp, eyes closed, feeling the air for support, feeling the music. After the song bassist Jared Swilley stopped, gazed up, and said, “Whoa. This place is big.”
Before you draw any conclusions, it must be mentioned that this isn’t just your typical hedonistic rock ‘n’ roll band. They’ve been called things such as “hard-working,” and they’ve been through their fair share of misery. In 2002, the Black Lips’ guitarist Ben Eberbaugh was killed by a drunk driver. And the Black Lips decided to continue, keeping up a blog with awe-inspiring entries like this, perhaps written by Saint Pé:
“So that winter I was baptized a Black Lip. The coming year was as a purifying fire that we would be forced to pass through. Precarious pinnacles were mounted, heart-breaking disasters shrugged off and laughed at, monies borrowed and never repaid, curfews broken, expensive equipment stolen and subsequently destroyed, freedoms wrenched from the jaws of defeat and bondage.” (http://theblacklips.blogspot.com/ is worth the read: please note November 17th’s entry, which states, “Cole welcomed our new fans with a golden shower. I think they dug it.”)
Twist & Shout in-stores reveal an intimate glance you’d never get elsewhere. In the quiet, the boys looked at each other and chatted about what they should play next. The audience caught on and within seconds, the Black Lips were pounded with a barrage of requests. I personally was shouting, “SLIME! SLIME AND OXYGEN!”
“Vini Vidi Vici!”
“No, no, those songs will sound like shit!” they said. “We’re kind of um, limited. We can’t play a lot of our songs.” Itap difficult to create that by-the-docks feel of ‘Vini’ with duct-taped instruments, perhaps.
“Feels Alright!” someone volunteered.
“We’ll play it, but itap not our fault if it sounds like shit,” they said. The charmer there in the middle, he said, “We just made a video for this that was awesome. We hired like four strippers for it.”
And promotion and disclaimers taken care of, they played the most amazing song of the set. It was one of those rock ‘n’ roll moments that you live for, one of those songs you must see live. The wirey bassline, beachy vibe, blues strutting vocals, banging beat, stoney mantra: “It feeeeels….alriiiiiiight.”
And then it was the end. “We’ll be signing shit,” one of them said. Another got on the mic: “Does anyone have a cig?” Non-peeing aside, it was a good show. And I’m sure Twist & Shout appreciated the dry set.
Erin Barnes edits the .
All photos by Reverb contributor .
We also found some video from the show. Here’s the Black Lips playing “Be A Man” at Twist & Shout:
Here’s them rocking “Workin'”/”Dirty Hands:”
And here’s “Ain’t Coming Back:”
And finally … “Buried Alive:”
