The wild boys

Their career is booming, but there will be no delusions of grandeur for the Black Lips. The raucous Atlanta band discovered early that life on the road promised little but bumps. Take its first big tour, when the musicians hopped in a van bound for New York.

“We couldn’t find a gig so we played a country bar,” frontman Cole Alexander says. “Me and the guitarist got extra-strong Long Island iced teas. The bartender told us not to get two of them, because every time someone does a fight breaks out. Yeah, whatever. We took two of ’em and sure enough, me and the guitar player got into a big fight.” Alexander smiles, flexing his attempt at a Freddie Mercury mustache, which might serve him well in a post-rock career as a car salesman. “That,” he adds, “was before we were professional.”

Seven years and 13 labels later, the once utterly obscure Black Lips have firmly established themselves as memorably distinct from all the other bands with Black and Lips in their names. The act’s latest album, Good Bad Not Evil, captures its onstage insanity in a studio setting, striking a perfect imbalance between weirdo humor and a vintage-rock sensibility. As Alexander explains, a teenage enthusiasm for bands like the Stooges and the Kinks, and collecting hardcore garage anthologies like Pebbles and Back from the Grave should have turned the Lips into another fun, but creatively narrow, revival outfit.

“We were never really good enough to play garage,” he says, which is why they introduced other influences, from busted-amp psychedelia to the lachrymose jukebox ballads of Red Sovine, and just played louder and wilder than anyone else they knew.

The five musicians, now signed to the almost painfully hip Vice Records, are enjoying a breakthrough much like their friends in Deerhunter, another Atlanta-based act that has been burning up the blogosphere this year (and which is also in town playing Empty Bottle Saturday 29). Together, the groups are putting their hometown’s music scene on the map in a way that has nothing to do with hip-hop. They also have a hard-earned reputation for killer live shows, manic eruptions that might find Alexander swapping spit with one of his bandmates or parading a tad explicitly in red hot pants.

“When you go see the band in a smelly old punk-rock dive bar,” says Jeff Clark, editor of the Atlanta rock zine Stomp and Stammer, one of the Lips’ earliest boosters, “and the crowd’s going bonkers, it’s loud as hell, beer and other substances are flying all over the place, the distance between band and crowd is about two inches, the speaker cabinets are wobbling to and fro and look as though they may topple at any moment, and the club’s sound guy looks terrified—well, it seems sort of dangerous in a way that rock & roll usually isn’t anymore.”

Still in their twenties, the Lips are committed to an endless tour that would make them fierce contenders in a rock & roll version of the reality show The Amazing Race. They’ve rocked the Arctic Circle. They’ve rocked tiny villages on the southeastern coast of Sardinia, Italy. They’ve even rocked the West Bank, that flash point in the never-ending Middle Eastern conflict between Israel and Palestine. It’s a place where most American rock acts are too wussy to go. Not the Lips.

“I actually felt pretty safe over there,” says Joe Bradley, the group’s drummer, who began playing with Alexander when they attended high school in suburban Atlanta. “Israel is like a police state. Especially if you’re in Tel Aviv.” The musicians were particularly taken with the massive barrier erected to keep the Palestinians out of Israel. “It puts the Berlin Wall to shame. It’s unfucking real how tall the wall is. The gunposts! They’re not messing around.”

The group’s bid for international diplomacy may not garner a Nobel Peace Prize, but it did win some new fans. This, even as it challenged Islamic codes. “Girls were digging us in the West Bank, but they were forced to leave,” Bradley says. “It’s just the culture. We were playing and these little girls were coming up and their parents were ripping them away. They knew we were American. I think we were showing them [the] light.”

The Black Lips play Logan Square Auditorium Friday 28.