Black Lips: The Dropout Session

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"PEOPLE USED TO SAY, 'COLE you gotta go to college, get an education, have a backup plan." But I always wanted to have nothing to fall back on: Make it or fall in the garbage dump. That's how I have the motivation to give it my all."

So declares Cole Alexander, whose merry band of misfits, the Black Lips, bring their focused freakouts to Washington on Saturday. "My girlfriend is cracking up" he adds over the phone. "She says I'm living off of her. It's really just fun making music."

But rock 'n' roll takes its toll. "I think when my voice is just completely shot, that's when I'd call it quits," says Alexander, whose shouting habit resulted in vocal cord nodules.

"Lots of white people don't have that soul you like in R&B records, so they have to be raspy to make up for it. But I'd be willing to lose my voice forever if I could capture that beauty on record." Which is a funny thing to hear from a guy whose band enjoys fire, bodily fluids and violence onstage.

Or maybe not. "I like every kind of music — rock, jazz, classical — but I'm always looking for what's punk in that genre," says Alexander. "Like Bartok was really weird and dark."

The band admits their drivetime listening consists of only NPR's "All Things Considered." No music; not even books on tape. "We keep copies of the Economist in the van," says Alexander. "It's refreshing for us because we're always in such trashy contexts." Where, admittedly, the Hotlanta natives seem right at home.

The Black Lips' fifth album, "Good Bad, Not Evil," follows a pristinely captured live album recorded by ex-Hot Snake John Reis in Tijuana, where the band battled tequila-sodden fans and watched a woman get down and dirty onstage.

But then, says Alexander, "We went to Jerusalem. We bathed where Jesus was baptized." They even braved checkpoints to play the West Bank — for kids on the street, since there are no rock clubs. "Some started chanting a Hamas chant over 'Johnny B. Goode.'"

Which, naturally, the band accepted as a sign of approval.

Written by Express contributor Bob Massey
Photo by Daniel Arnold