words Jason Thayer
photos Daniel Arnold
If you ever get your hands on a flux capacitor-equipped Dolorean, forget the 50s. Set your sights on Atlanta, 2003 and find a Black Lips show. The sound will be kind of shitty – duct tape will do that to a PA – and the Lips’ songs will still be miles away from the dark country and doo-wop infused “flower punk” that landed their latest release, Good Bad Not Evil on just about every top 10 list for 2007. No worries though, you’re not there for the sound. You’re there for the spew—the cocktail of spit and piss that might make its way out of guitarist Cole Alexander’s pursed lips. You’re there for a shower, a little mist of history because it was, after all, these stage antics that earned the Black Lips nationwide notoriety and a spot on the blacklist of damn near every club in the South.
Recently, the Lips have traded in flying fluids and faulty equipment for trans-Atlantic tours and a whole slew of praise from the hippos at Pitchfork. Even without the piss, Rolling Stone anointed them one of the best live acts in the country.
While The Voice won’t compete with The Stone in terms of tits-per-issue, we still scored an interview with Lips’ drummer and co-vocalist, Joe Bradley. Ask him about anything we missed when the Black Lips bring their brand of refined sleaze to the WOW hall on February 6th. OV: Every thing I read about the Black Lips at least brushes on some of your crazier shows of yesteryear. You guys have tamed down the more lewd aspects of your live show. Why?
JB: In the past one of the reasons our shows were so crazy was because we weren’t the greatest musicians around. Sometimes our equipment was a little questionable being held together with duct tape. Back in 2004 and 2005 we didn’t even have cases for our guitars and they would just ride on tope of all the equipment in the back in a big ol’ pile. Most the time we wouldn’t even have money for replacement strings or anything. So to sum it all up, the music wasn’t that great at our live shows so in order to entertain people for the performance aspect of it, like, if the music doesn’t sound that great, it should at least be entertaining to watch, to be a part of. So things would get kind of crazy and we’d get a lot of crowd interaction and a lot of spewing of bodily fluids. But times have changed. We’ve gotten better at playing our instruments. We’re performers as well as musicians but we’re musicians first.
OV: I was really hoping to see you guys spit some piss at the Conan crowd.
JB: They we’re pretty strict and they were already taking a chance having a band like us on there because we weren’t that well known. I mean, we’re still not that well known. They normally have more established acts. Someone put their neck out on the line for us and luckily with as much chance as there is for things to go wrong in a situation like that, everything went great. Even the sound was really cool. It sounded really raw when they broadcast it, which is awesome.
OV: What was Conan like?
JB: Ah, he’s a bad ass. He’s really huge and he even took time to hold this thing called a post-mortem meeting which is just a meeting that happens after each one of his shows. But he took time off of that to come down and take pictures with us and hang out for like tem minutes before he had to go off and take care of business. But he was really nice, and I guess, he’s never out of character. When he came to meet us, it still seemed like he was being a talk show host. He’s just really cool. I heard he was a collector of old rockabilly seven inches.
OV: So you guys were right up his alley, then.
JB: Yeah.
OV: On the new album especially, I get a real country feel. Especially on “How do you tell a child someone has died.”
JB: Oh yeah, that’s like straight up country. That’s more influenced by this whole darker area of country that most people don’t know about. Hank Williams Sr. had an alter ego for all his darker country called Luke the Drifter. There’s a whole compilation of these really dark songs on Crypt records called God Less America instead of God bless America. That’s the type of song that influenced “How do you tell a child someone has died.”
OV: I feel like you guys have a knack for writing about dark, really tragic events without making them come off as melodramatic at all.
JB: It’s good to have that kind of juxtaposition. You listen to Emo music and it’s so sad and heart breaking but the chances are these people haven’t had anything bad happen to them their entire life. Most of the time you’ll find that the most happy go-lucky people are those that have experienced the most misfortune. They’re normally a lot more optimistic about life than everyday people because they’ve been to the depths of despair and they only way to go is up. They’re a little bit more positive about it but there are still very dark undertones to their lives.
OV: Well you guys have certainly been through some shit. What effect did Ben’s death have on you as a band?
JB: It helped us keep on going. We had a tour planned but then he got killed. We only canceled the first date in Chattanooga so we could have his funeral. And since a bunch of our friends from different parts of the country had flown in for the funeral we crowded them all in our van and in our friends, the Carbonas’ van and we all went out on tour together. We are all really close knit and it helped us get through it all. We just did the tour as a three piece and we asked one of our friends, Jack Hines, to move back to Atlanta and play guitar with us. He was on our second album and he was with us through the shittiest times. The times when we were eating out of trash cans and going to homeless shelters for meals, making more money on the street than we would for playing the show the night before. Things have gotten a lot better, a lot more organized, a lot easier.
OV: Did I read somewhere that you guys used to sleep at homeless shelters on tour?
JB: No, we’d normally just kick it in the van and wake up covered in sweat or freezing cold. We’d just go park in a hotel parking lot and sleep there because we couldn’t afford the hotel room. It used to be we’d play some shit town in the middle of nowhere and try our hardest to make friends. We had this thing called vulture mode where you seek out any thing that your body needs like food or shelter. You got no cigarettes? Get an empty pack and bum one from everyone in the room, then you have a full pack of cigarettes. If some dude’s walking out of the restaurant with his girlfriend, you ask him, “Sir, I’m hungry can I please have those leftovers” and he doesn’t want to seem like a chump in front of his date so he’ll give you the leftovers. Basically, you learn how to make friends real quick so you can stay at their place, maybe take a shower. One particular instance in Bowling Green, OH, I met this guy and he was like, “You can stay at my house but I don’t anything good to eat.” We’re like, “That’s fine.” And the next morning he brought us donuts and a two-liter of Coca-Cola for breakfast.
OV: Well you guys have come along way from scrounging leftovers. You’ve got features in Rolling Stone, Spin, Pitchfork, and I think even the New York Time called you the hardest working band at South By Southwest.
JB: That’s right. They did a video segment about us, it’s up on the internet somewhere. We’ve got a good work ethic and he know no one else is going to do the hard work for us. Plus it’s fun. It’s our job, as well as our life. Nothing’s better than working for yourself.
OV: Can you pinpoint a moment when you were like, “Wow, we’re kind of a big deal?”
JB: The turning point was October of like 2005. There was a point where we had been in Europe for four months—we did a two week tour then traveled for 6 weeks and then we did a full two month tour. After we got back to the states we noticed a real difference. Things have been rolling ever since.
OV: No joke. You guys are even going to be in a couple movies. Tell me about “Let it Be.”
JB: We’re supposed to be the stars in that movie. It’s your run of the mill movie about a do-it-yourself band roughly based off this band called the Altar Boys that existed in the early 1980s based out of New York. The guys who wrote the script we’re actually in that band so they wrote it based on their own experience. It’s basically the ups and downs of being in a band. The band sees a little bit of success and it all plays out from there. They want us to write some songs for the movie too. It should be an interesting experience. We’re supposed to start shooting on June 1st. Most of it’s going to be shot in Buford, SC and Savannah ’cause it’s a lot cheaper to shoot there. And all of the outside shots that are supposed to be New York are going to be shot in New York. It’ll be a nice break from touring. Before that we’ve still got to do a full U.S. tour and a full European tour and a full U.K. tour so we got our work cut out for us.
OV: Any nervousness about having to act?
JB: Nah. I mean people know we’re not actors so the expectations are low. We don’t have to do that great of a job. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to try. It just means we don’t have to feel terribly depressed if our acting is really bad. Look at the Ramones who did “Rock and Roll High School.” They were terrible, especially Dee Dee and he only had one line. Supposedly they made him do it 70 times.
OV: You guys are also going to be featured in a documentary on the Atlanta music scene.
JB: Yeah, it’s called “We Fun.”
OV: Atlanta’s just chock full of good bands right now.
JB: There’s a good punk scene there right now. The Carbonas are excellent, the 4th Ward Daggers, the Frantic, the Coat hangers—bands that are determined to get out there and tour no matter how detrimental it might be to their finances. That’s what we need to see. That’s what we’d do in the beginning. We’d save up for six weeks to go on tour for 12 days, lose all our money then come back and work again. Record labels, especially nowadays, are reluctant to put money into any band that hasn’t done something for themselves.
OV: It’s pretty collaborative down there, right? You and Jared and Cole are in a band with some of the guys from Deerhunter called the Spooks.
JB: Yeah, there’s also a couple of other dudes from different bands—it’s a whole collective and it’s a changing cast of characters. It’s a fun project we do when we’re all in town together. We’re almost done recording an album that should have been out four years ago.
OV: I hate the question “What does it sound like?” but, what does it sound like?
JB: It’s kind of spooky. We’ve got two Theremin players a keyboard player and it’s just real spooky rock. I think there’s some dark metal influence and some psychedelic and some noise. It’s a real hodgepodge, mish-mash group of people coming together and making music.
OV: When can I hear it?
JB: Hopefully it will be out sometime in the next few months. It just depends on how much money Die Slaughterhaus (Records) has.
OV: You guys recorded your live album in Tijuana. Is there a particular reason you chose that venue?
JB: You see live albums all the time: “Live from Atlanta” or “Live from Minneappolis” and that just seems really boring. We wanted it to be kind of an event so we worked with Vice and got some corporate sponsorship to help pay for the expenses. They got a shitload of Tecate and Tequila and it was all free. We just tried to make it the most debaucherous experience possible it being in Tijuana and everything.
OV: What was the club and the crowd like?
JB: The club was this old dance hall, just a big open room and the stage was like six inches off the ground in the center of the room so while we were playing we were surrounded by people who were constantly intruding onto the stage and at some point we had to fight them off to get them off stage so we could actually play.
OV: You guys are going to be tour through March. Do you hang out when you’re not touring?
JB: With each other?
OV: Yeah.
JB: No, we usually don’t see each other. I mean, we’re with each other 24 hours a day, nine months out of the year. We all like each other but it’s good to have time apart. It’s good to get a little breathing room.
OV: You guys have toured everywhere. Is there any place that really sticks out?
JB: It all kind of blurs together. Going to Israel and the West Bank was awesome. Playing on the street for all those Palestinians that was pretty fun. We really didn’t know what to expect, like if we were going to endanger ourselves by doing that. We rented some acoustic guitars and went over to the West Bank and found a decent looking square to set up in and just started playing. One of the shopkeepers saw we were setting up and he took me up to his shop and he was going to give me this little finger drum but then he told me he hadn’t had a sale in two days so I just ended up buying it from him. But it all went really well and after we played this other shopkeeper invited us in and served us this really good mint tea. The Palestinians were really welcoming. We weren’t there on a political journey or anything. We were just there to play music.
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