The adventures of the Black Lips

With a fresh album out, the Black Lips are set to take on a supporting tour. Especially since the last one, across India, didn’t pan out as well as they would have hoped. But hey, how many bands can say they’ve been kicked out of a country?

“[India] is definitely not ready for rock and roll band outside U2 and Metalica,” says founder and bass guitar for the Black Lips, Jared Swilley. “I think to them we looked like four white guys with shitty guitars that couldn’t play very well. And we couldn’t drink and smoke either.”

Swilley spoke to me over the phone from the comfort of his bed, which he was vowing not to leave until the very last minute before departing for the upcoming tour. The band had only returned to their home in Atlanta, Ga., a week prior.

Notorious for outrageous on-stage antics such as vomiting and occasionally kissing, Swilley claimed that the band has calmed down a bit, attributing much of their former behavior to “left over stuff from when we were teenagers.” However tame the band may seem, they still act out just enough to get kicked out of India.

“Cole and Ian kissed each other on stage, I didn’t see it, but they called the state police on us and we had to leave the next morning,” Swilley says. “Cause homosexuality is illegal there, and public displays of affection.”

Swilley claims that band mate and guitarist Cole Alexander once confessed to being 5 percent gay, but aside from that the behavior was solely for kicks and crowd reaction. The reaction they got was far more extreme than expected.

“After that the sponsors of the tour called our tour manager and said they were pulling the money and canceling the rest of the dates, and they called the police on us,” Swilley says. “And then the promoters turned on us and wanted $10,000. They took our passports from the front desk, and we had to get those back by force.”

Released last February, their album 200 Million Thousand is their most ambitious effort to date. They were able to take greater control of the album than in previous attempts. In the end, the Black Lips have produced a piece of work that will take fans further than they expected, and in the right direction.

“I think we threw a lot of people a curveball, cause the past albums were clean and overproduced … this one is a little darker, using minimal microphones,” Swilley said. “This one we actually called all the shots. We had a friend of ours come in and engineer for us. We did it at our own pace. We did it in our own town and set our own schedules.”

The initiative proved to work well. Fans of previous Black Lips albums will find the energy and feel they have to come to love, but the band has added a whole new layer to their music with 200 Million Thousand.

Part of that new layer is the manner in which the album was recorded. The Black Lips opted to throw out the construct of modern technology and worked in the realm of good old magnetic tape. When they finished recording, they sent off their tapes to be transferred to lacquer, and eventually to an actual record.

From there it was put onto CD. It may have been a lengthy process, but what you hear on the album carries not only the Black Lips’ talent and style, but the feel of all those who came before them, those who you can hear within the inspiration of the band.

“As far as guitar work, we pretty much all learned guitar from Link Wray, and his style of picking. It’s kind of the foundation of what we do,” Swilley says. “I guess the Rolling Stones too, cause it’s kind of copying old black music and turning it into ours. We listen to the people they copied, but it’s more their interpretation of it, is what we do.”