The Black Lips: Pissing off dickheads since 1999. By Patrick Rapa
“Which one should I get?” Jared Swilley’s at a liquor store, looking at beer. It’s 2:30 in the afternoon, Los Angeles time, his first day off in two and a half months. “I’m gonna get an Asahi because I’m going to Japan on Thursday.”
The sound of clinking bottles. A loud, lung-clearing cough. “And can I have a pack of Parliament Lights?”
The rest of Swilley’s band, Black Lips, are back home in Atlanta, but he’s out west scouting a place to live. His girlfriend, Katy Goodman of Vivian Girls, just moved out here from Brooklyn. Their bands have toured together a bunch in 2011, including that upcoming Japanese swing.
“All the other guys in the band own houses in Atlanta. I wasn’t really ready to settle down,” he says. Swilley still loves his hometown, and misses soul food, but calls L.A. the best music scene in the country. “I like it out here. I can still have a front porch and a yard for roughly the same rent, so I can have a semblance of still being in the South.”
Swilley’s come a long way, and not just geographically. “I was homeless for about four and a half years,” he says, recalling the early, dirty punk days of Black Lips. “And that’s a first-world problem. If I didn’t wanna be homeless, I could’ve just quit the band and gotten a job somewhere. I’m not complaining about it; it’s just the situation we put ourselves in.”
They’re the kind of band critics like to call “scuzzy.” Their melodies are pure garage-pop enthusiasm, but everything’s got a vintage, lo-fi sheen to it. The choruses often call for messy, three-man sing-shouting. And their vibe could probably be summed up by their unofficial anthem, 2007’s “Bad Kids”:
Toilet paper on the yard
Six F’s on my report card
Smoke cigs in the bathroom stall
Spray paint a penis on the wall
It’s true, Black Lips are probably what your parents meant by “the wrong crowd.” Bassist Swilley and guitarist Cole Alexander were both kicked out of high school (which is where the band started, by the way). Everywhere they go, they’re preceded by their raucous rep, and usually leave behind a wake of dubious anecdotes. All that shit about vomiting, nudity and urination at Black Lips shows—that’s just apocryphal folklore, right?
“Yes and no,” Swilley says. “There was only about six or seven people a night coming out to see us, so those things would happen just ’cause we were drunk teenagers and didn’t know how to play. That got written about and it just kind of became this thing.”
So, what, GG Allin had some good ideas?
“I respect him a lot as an artist, but I don’t agree with a lot of the things he did. A lot of it was pretty gross and a lot of his music wasn’t that great,” Swilley says, before paraphrasing the old line about Allin’s excrement being a holy sacrifice at his bodily temple of rock ‘n’ roll. “As a weird performance artist, I think GG Allin’s amazing. We’re like GG Allin kindergarten.
“And that’s what rock ‘n’ roll’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to be dangerous. It’s supposed to make dickheads mad.”
“Mad Dog,” off their stellar new Arabia Mountain, pays tribute to the power bold music can hold over stupid people, making tongue-in-cheek references to backwards-messages and heavy metal inspiring murder. The song even features some backmasked Ke$ha lyrics.
“I think it’s beautiful that Americans in the ’60s burned Beatles records en masse. I think it’s amazing that Tipper Gore brought all these people into the Supreme Court to talk about saying things backward on records.”
This whole air of danger—it’s the real deal. Just ask Mark Ronson, who produced hit albums and songs for Amy Winehouse, Timbaland and Lily Allen before working on Arabia Mountain (the first outsider Black Lips have ever let produce their stuff). One night, after nailing the track “Raw Meat,” the band took him to Manhattan for some raw liver sashimi. The next day, everybody was sick, but Ronson was really sick, as in call-his-mom, drive-him-to-Cedars-Sinai, 105-temperature sick.
Ronson should’ve realized who he was partying with. The guys in this band are not built like most people. “We have a cockroach mentality. We’ve been exposed to all the germs in the world and we don’t take medicine. I think we’re immune to a lot of things,” says Swilley. “A lot of times when we find out people are sick or have the flu, we all try to drink from their cup, so you build up the antibodies. At least, that’s our theory.”
That should illustrate just how incompatible Black Lips sometimes feel with the rest of the human race. They often find themselves pissing people off without trying.
“It’s a politically correct world,” laments Swilley. “Especially in this world when you’re making music for generally upper middle class, college-educated white kids. They usually have PhDs in getting offended. That’s like the number one sport for white people is getting offended. National pastime.”
It’s a learning process. After getting into a fight with perennial rivals Wavves and their hangers-on, he gave a drunken interview where he called singer Nathan Williams a “faggot.” A bunch of times. Since then Swilley’s apologized, saying he didn’t intend it as a slur, and swore off the “f-bomb” as a favor to his father, a recently out-of-the-closet preacher of a large liberal Southern church.
“I’m the only male in my family who’s not a pastor,” says Swilley. All his life he’s been a non-believer, but he still felt a calling, of sorts. “I always knew I’d be onstage somewhere.”
“This is my purpose in life. This is all of our purposes. We’ve been doing it since we were 13 years old. Everyone dies one day, and you want to leave your mark.”
Recessional hymn?
“Tell everybody that’s reading this to please buy the album, because my kids are fucking starving.”
You don’t have kids.
“No I don’t.”
