The night before the Black Lips took off on a summer-long tour — which kicked off in earnest in New York where they opened two shows for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs — the band played to a packed house at Lenny’s Bar in Atlanta and gave a performance typical of the kind that’s earned them the reputation as one of the wildest bands around.

A show-ending pubic hair fire might be punk-inspired hilarity at a soon-to-be-razed dive back home, but burning pubes in front of a crowd of thousands as well as the handlers and management of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs the next night at the Roseland Ballroom was enough to get them bounced from the stage.

“They were the biggest shows that we’d ever played in our piss-stained lives,” said guitarist and vocalist Cole Alexander of the two New York sets, “like thousands and thousands of people and we were physically removed from one [show]. We left their management flabbergasted and the band excited enough to ask us to play one more show with them in Germany.”

And so it goes in the life of the Black Lips: Alexander, guitarist Ian Brown, bassist and vocalist Jared Swilley and drummer Joe Bradley.

But it’s not just Karen-O who has become smitten with the band’s raw and bluesy Southern-fried punk and feral live show. Dave Kaplan from The Agency Ltd., the booking agent for the White Stripes, is now working with the band. The late Greg Shaw, founder of the legendary Bomp! Records, signed them to a deal back in 2002 when they were still teenagers playing their woefully out of tune instruments with their ding dongs — which they did enough times to get banned from several venues around Atlanta.

The band also caught the attention of a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and musician named Monty Buckles a few years back during a performance at the Horizontal Action Blackout in Chicago.

Says Buckles: “I caught them walking around the club beforehand. They had a cloud of stink around them, like Pigpen in the Charlie Brown cartoons. When they took the stage, people crowded up front, and palpable excitement pervaded the room. Cole hunched over and yelled the first line of ‘I’ve Got A Knife,’ and it was off to the races. Everyone went berserk. Black Lips were running around the stage, people were dancing, throwing things at the band and screaming. Cole puked all over everything, and then he pulled off his pants and played guitar with his dick while his sampler blared. Jared leapt up, body parallel with the stage, and kicked Jack with both legs at once and sent him sailing. Joe kept shrieking at the top of his lungs the entire show, which, mixed with the feedback from shitty equipment, made for an undercurrent of a high-pitched howl throughout the entire show. People went nuts. The next band had to play on a stage floor covered with cold vomit.

“Talking to them after the show I determined these facts: the Black Lips were an amazing band; and as people, they were all genuinely kind, interesting, and intelligent without a mean bone in their collective, tiny and skinny bodies. I’d been meaning to direct a video for a while. And I wanted to do it for band I liked, for people I liked, and not for a bunch of pretentious ingrates with an unearned sense of entitlement. The Black Lips were completely without pretension. They ate on two dollars a day. None of their equipment functioned adequately. They were also hilarious. I told them I wanted to do a music video for them, free of charge. Show up on my doorstep and I’d do it. They agreed.”

In reality, the Black Lips work extremely hard as a band. They’re prolific in the studio, tour relentlessly, and last year played the obligatory showcase set at South by Southwest. They’ve even started their own record label, Die Slaughterhaus — which Alexander said they are in the process of getting a distribution deal for.

“We’re not going to let Rob’s House Records (an on-going 7-inch series based in Atlanta) blow us out of the water like we’re Thomas Jefferson minus all the impurities.”

Wait, Cole, what the hell does that mean?

“We’re trying to step up from just doing 7–inches.”

Oh.

In support of their Nov. 2005 release “Let it Bloom” their first on In The Red Records, the band played 21 shows with their labelmates, the Mick Collins-led Dirtbombs, earlier this year. In April, Kaplan sent the band on a summer-long tour of Europe, where their pals King Kahn and the BBQ Show and the Dirtbombs — fellow purveyors of a gritty, 50’s era throwback sound — each enjoy huge followings.

“Touring with the Dirtbombs was probably the coolest tour we ever embarked on,” Alexander said. “It was something like conquistadors raiding a dog pound.”

Uh, like what?

“Lots of people, lots of respect — something we haven’t become accustomed to yet.”

I see.

But despite what may come off to the uninitiated listener as detuned, psychedelic, garage noise-rock, the band has actually been crafting a sound and a collective existence (they call themselves Flower Punks) since their days as the Renegades.

“In the Renegades, we were 14- to 16-years-old suburbanites being little shits. We thought we were the best thing since microwave hamburger helper Chef Boyardee.”

Since what?

“We were nothing more than a local sensation, actually.”

Got it.

Buckles, the guitarist for The Lamps, who are also on In The Red, said that he’s been hooked on their sound since he spun their first recording.

“I remember really liking the first Black Lips song I heard, ‘Ain’t Coming Back,’” he said. “I kept switching the speed on my turntable because Cole’s warbly voice — he sounds like he wasn’t even within a stone’s throw of his teens on the recording. I couldn’t figure out if it was supposed to be played at 33 or 45 rpm. It sounded like a lost 60’s garage obscuro number that’s later venerated as a classic by record connoisseurs — save for the incongruity of the fireworks being lit off during the guitar solo. But organic and genuine. They didn’t sound like the same batch of unimaginative idiots trying to emulate the past through rose-tinted shades. They sounded like the result of the same creative process that created great band’s way back when, just a bunch of like-minded buddies fucking around in the garage for fun.

“I perused message boards for information and bought their next and equally great single. I read about the band being obscenely young, lighting off fireworks on stage, puking on stage, playing guitars with their dicks, smelling like a sauna for bums, and traveling with an entourage of equally nefarious young people. I heard about their guitarist being killed by a drunk driver. I heard the band resuming their scheduled record release tour anyway, because that’s what the deceased would have insisted on.”

In 2002, shortly after the band cut their self-titled record on Bomp!, the band’s original guitarist Ben Eberbaugh was killed in a car accident in Atlanta when a driver going the wrong way crashed into his car — just days before they left for a tour of the East Coast and Midwest.

“He was killed by a doped-out driver, but he left a damn good looking corpse,” Alexander said. “And he is immortalized in music.”

The Black Lips opted to tour anyway, and did so in Eberbaugh’s honor.

“I snapped up that first record the day it was released after hearing friends of mine rave about it,” Buckles said. “I loved the record. I bought copies for my friends. I saw they were touring out West, and didn’t have a show lined up. I made some phone calls and managed to book them a show at the Silverlake Lounge.”

The show, Buckles says, was classic Black Lips.

“Cole puked all over the stage. They did ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ Joe trashed his drum set. People applauded. People cheered. Some people left disgusted — these kids in an LA club putting on all that unprofessional-sounding racket. A publicist brought some members of the Warlocks and the Brian Jonestown Massacre to the show. They were all horrified. The Black Lips looked like aliens in the ‘hipper then thou’ LA crowd. A friend asked me after the show, ‘How many Black Lips are there?’ I told him there were four. ‘Really?’ he asked, wide-eyed with amazement at the show he had just seen, ‘I thought there were at least five or six of them.’

“The promoter got angry and kicked over one of their amps. The net value of their entire gear, drum set, three amps, two guitars and a bass must have been — not exaggerating — under $400. My band gave them the money we were paid when it became apparent the booker was going to stiff them.”

Since then, Buckles figures he’s seen the band play at six different venues in Los Angeles.

“And they are not allowed in three of the six venues they have played here,” he said.

And so it goes in the life of the Black Lips.

When asked about the future of the band, Alexander is less mischievous with the wordplay, but no less cryptic.

“No one really knows what the future holds for the Black Lips, but I’m sure it’ll be good,” he says. “Honestly, from my perspective, after six years I’m ready to kind of take a risk and do something wild and different.”

Wild and different?

“Yea, wait and see.”

William Inman is editor of Dry Ink. Write to him at william@dryinkmag.com