Rowdy “flower-punkers” Black Lips aren’t your run-of-the-mill band. Guitarist Cole Alexander gives us the skinny on why their live shows have earned a reputation as “heathenistic” debauchery-fests, and why tonight’s set at the Firebird is one even Beetle Bob can’t miss.
You’ve been playing together since you were fairly young. How does that experience play into your live shows?
Cole Alexander:
You could say we’re pretty comfortable together. We’ve been playing for ten years now so we’re pretty tight now – we’re sloppy still, but we feel comfortable.
Does that comfort level explain the sexual antics during your live shows, such as getting nude and making out with each other, even though none of you are gay?
CA:
You have to be pretty comfortable to do that together.
I can only imagine the reaction you got after including homoerotic displays in your shows, considering you all grew up in the south. Did that begin as an intentional effort to make a statement, or was there something else behind it?
CA:
I think it’s good to get in touch with other sides of yourself. A second guitarist in our band, Jack, he was older than us, and I remember I used to look up to him because he played guitar and I played guitar. I remember people said that he was going to prom with another boy, and I remember that freaked everybody out. It’s just fun to be young and experiment and stuff.
In addition to sexual antics, I think people have this image in their head of drunken destruction and peeing off stage when they think of you…
CA:
Like, heathenistic?
Something like that. Is that an image you feel you rightfully created for yourselves?
CA:
Yeah, you could say that. Sometimes the crowd will create things that will happen and we have to live by those things that they’ve created. Like a Frankenstein kind of thing – in a sense you create little monsters and they do weird things, and you get to interact with them at the show. We’re kind of tongue in cheek. We interact with the crowd based on the feelings that we create with our music.
I saw a little bit of We Fun, the documentary about Atlanta’s music scene starring your band. How accurately did that film represent you and the Atlanta scene?
CA:
I didn’t like that movie. I don’t think it represents Atlanta by any means. It’s a weird magnified vision of something that is a miniscule part of Atlanta. I think what’s going on in Atlanta is actually going on in a lot of other places, so I don’t think there’s anything really special about it. I don’t think it’s even worthy of a movie. We’re a big part of that movie but they don’t even show most of the classic moments, which are archived on YouTube or through other people’s home movies. They didn’t use any of that. They only used their own footage, and they were only there shooting three of our shows. To me, they didn’t really capture what it is that’s good. To me, any good documentary uses archival footage and they didn’t do that. They just used the couple shows that they shot, which are not even the cream of the crop. And they left out a lot of important additions in Atlanta just from lack of knowledge. They lived in Nashville – I think that might have been part of the problem. Maybe if they had lived in Atlanta they would have understood it better.
We like to give artists the chance to plug their own shows. Tell Eleven’s readers why they should come to your show:
CA:
I’d tell the people of St. Louis to come to our show, first off, because there’s going to be a guy named Beetle Bob there, and he’s going to dance his fucking ass off like something nobody’s seen before… unless they’ve seen Beetle Bob before. A few people have. Beetle Bob’s gonna make it. He’s gonna cut right to the top. And can you get me Chuck Berry? Invite Chuck Berry and Beetle Bob to come.
