How To Mix Family, Business & Pleasure With Success

In their early days, Atlanta’s self-professed “flower punks” Black Lips were nothing if not a volatile mob. In the first few years of the millennium they were renowned for their legendarily chaotic live shows and penchant for provocative antics like making out with each other, setting fires, smashing beer bottles and even ‘bubbling’ onstage (way before it was de rigueur, natch). Later, they took the mayhem abroad, being literally chased out of India in 2009 when guitarist Cole Alexander nuded up, dove into the crowd, then clambered back onstage and pashed his bandmates. Maybe they just didn’t get it.

But even back when Black Lips could be followed by the trail of venue bans that they were prone to leaving in their wake, it was their primal music that was always their true ace in the hole. Even at its most primitive, their stomping garage was always rife with hooks and innate melody, and saddled with a cool worldview and a deft way with words. As years passed and they all became more experienced as both musicians and songwriters and their albums got progressively better (without straying too far from their basic garage-punk template), the theatrics and crazy antics slowly but surely dropped away. They didn’t become angels overnight or undertake any strange conversion, but they no longer seemed so hell-bent on chasing that ever-elusive self-destructo bust.

In more recent times, they’ve even seemed to have developed a strong moral compass (in their own idiosyncratic way). A few years back, bassist Jared Swilley apologised to a gay blogger for a homophobic comment he’d inadvertently dropped about a rival act which had been publicised (then kissed him), while more recently prodigal guitarist Jack Hines interrupted a Huffington Post webcast with Gene Simmons to accuse the older rock statesman of misogyny (as well as calling for “the complete and utter surrender of the Kiss Army").

They’re getting older and perhaps even growing up, a fact reflected in the relative maturity and accessibility of their seventh album, Underneath The Rainbow, which came out earlier this year. The inherent catchiness of their early material is still super prevalent, but the edges have been buffed a bit smoother (without diminishing that trademark boisterous zeal). It’s still clearly the same band, just that they’ve been playing together for 15 years now and have grown together into their craft.

When The Music catches up with Swilley, he’s having a bit of a shocker. The Atlanta abode that he owns has decided to pack it in slap-bang in the middle of a cold winter, with the heat, power and internet all deciding to go awol simultaneously. He’s decamped to a hotel up the road to await the imminent arrival of tradesmen in the morning – luckily he’s more accustomed to living out of a suitcase than most, and overall he seems remarkably nonplussed by the calamity.

“It sucks, man,” he admits. “Owning a house is lovely – it’s great – but you forget that you used to just call someone and say, ‘Hey, this thing doesn’t work, can you come and fix it for me now?’, but now it’s, like, ‘Oh!’ There’s no one to call, you have to do it yourself. Luckily, with the electrical stuff, my Dad was an electrician in his younger days, so he can do that. So I’m not worried about that, which is great, because at least if I have a problem with my house most of my time I can fix it up myself because I bought a ‘fixer-upper’ so you learn along the way, but you could come into my house and bullshit me about electricians’ stuff for hours and I would have no idea. That and plumbing — I would have no idea and just go, ‘Yeah, you must be right’.”

"Black Lips is always family, that’s just the way we do it."

It’s cool that Swilley can rely on his relatives for help when he’s taking time away from his other family, the band. Even though they had a slight line-up change recently, with old guitarist Hines (who’d previously been in Black Lips between 2002-2004) returning to the role he’d handed over to Ian St. Pe a decade earlier, Swilley attests that all has been fine in the ranks (the line-up is completed by drummer Joe Bradley) in the months since Underneath The Rainbow dropped.

“It’s been great,” he enthuses. “I mean we had a bit of a personnel change, but not really because we just got back the guy that we had before Ian, when it was the four of us. I mean Black Lips is always family, that’s just the way we do it. We’re Southern guys – and when I say Southern, I mean Southern North American – and we always keep it in the family, that’s always the way we do it down here. I guess for y’all it would be up here; compared to you we’re northerners.”

As it transpires the concept of ‘family’ crops up again in relation to the line-up change, having been a major catalyst for St. Pe deciding to part ways with his bandmates.

“We’re still good friends. He got married and didn’t want to travel as much I guess, he just wanted to stop. We knew about a year before he left – you know how usually you put in two weeks’ notice for a job out of courtesy? He gave us about a year’s notice,” Swilley laughs. “But it was all good, people’s lives evolve and they do what they will. And Jack – who is now back in the band – when he left, we had to get Ian real fast, because Jack’s wife’s Mum was sick and he was going through some stuff. Then we got Ian, but now Ian just wants to do something else. I think with some people you hit a point in your life where you don’t want to do it anymore. I mean, he’s still playing music – he’s a musician by trade – but we have a rigorous schedule. But Jack’s married and has a kid too. For us it’s like a step forward because it’s back to the original group, and we all grew up pretty much on the same street so now it’s all the guys who grew up together again.”

Swilley’s further excited by how the newer material from Underneath The Rainbow has slotted into Black Lips’ live set.

"I think saxophone is a real rock’n’roll instrument – I mean Bill Clinton basically got elected President because he wore Raybans and played the saxophone."

“Yeah, I love it,” he admits. “We’ve kind of been having a fifth member now – this girl Zumi [Rosow] plays saxophone with us a lot, because we have a lot more sax. I think saxophone is a real rock’n’roll instrument – I mean Bill Clinton basically got elected President because he wore Raybans and played the saxophone, it all looks really cool. It’s Cole’s girlfriend Zumi, and it’s cool having a girl in the band sometimes, especially when she looks like a kind of Jewish biker.”

Will Zumi be coming to Australia for these impending Falls Festival and headline shows?

“I don’t think so, I never really know,” Swilley drawls. “I don’t think she’s going to be there, but she might be. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was there. I never know anything. I mean I talk to Cole’s Mum when I’m at home a lot more than I talk to Cole.”

Even though the touring has been unrelenting since the album dropped, they’ve already found the time to begin working on the next batch of tunes.

“We’ve already started writing,” Swilley reveals, before embarking on a slight tangent. “I was just at Jack’s house in South Carolina – me and him built a deck on the back of his house, via [following instructions on] YouTube. I can’t believe that we did it, but I went down and stayed with him and it’s like grown-up Legos, it’s easy to figure out. Or grown-up Ikea, Ikea for winners. But we’ve already written a whole bunch of the new record.”

It’s always hard to articulate the vibe of new music, especially in nascent form, but is it much different stylistically from their recent wares?

“Nah, my record collection hasn’t changed at all since we started – it’s just all the same influences, mainly early Americana,” Swilley continues. “Our favourite bands are still The Everly Brothers and Little Richard, and just like punk rock and British – and Australian – punk rock. Its based on the same building blocks, but with Jack in the band he writes a lot more because him and his wife were in a bunch of bands since he split with us, so he’s going to be writing a lot more. So it might change,” he chuckles. “I never know until we get into the studio, but then it never really changes that much. It’s not like we sit around and talk about, ‘Oh, the kids are into electronic music now, let’s try and make an electronic record!’ We just do what we know.”

But while there’s never been a seismic shift between particular albums, if you hold up Underneath The Rainbow against, say 2005’s Let It Bloom, both the music and its vibe has clearly changed quite substantially over the journey.

“Yeah, I guess so, but it’s on a similar trajectory,” Swilley muses. “It’s never been a big upheaval. I guess it just became a career because we chose it to be one, we never really made a conscious effort to change or do anything – it was just always what we did. I mean I’ve been in this band since I was 13 years old, so it was just always what happened. And the personnel’s always been pretty much the same, and we just did what we wanted to do. We have a very hard work ethic, and I guess luck comes into it at some point. But along those lines I read a nice piece – I wish I could quote it right now – but I was reading some letters that Hunter Thompson wrote yesterday, and it was someone asking him for career advice and he was saying how egotistical it would be for him to give someone else career advice, [and he said something like] ‘it’s never about the goal’, about the fact you are not what the goal is.

“Say when I’m a kid I want to be a fireman – I don’t want to be a fireman now, because my ideas have changed – but what you do on that path is what you are on the way to be… I’m not really being very eloquent about this, but basically it’s saying, ‘don’t have a goal, you are your goal’, and you are the person who makes that, and if it happens it happens and that’s great. It’s better to swim with direction… he had this point about swimming and floating, like if you’re 30 years old and you’ve already got some direction and you want to swim somewhere, people don’t swim towards that, they just float towards whatever society has built into you to do. But if you’re before that, if you’re fortunate enough to have that [direction], then swim towards whatever it is that is. I wish I could quote that properly, he’s a wise man.”

Has what he wants from Black Lips changed over the years? Is there a different mindset now compared to when they were starting out and it was more loose and theatrical?

“No, we always set very small goals for ourselves,” Swilley offers. “Like in the beginning it was, ‘Well, let’s pool some money and save up and get a house’, and we did that and got a house together. Then the next goal was, ‘Let’s play out of state’, and we did that. Then the next step was, ‘Let’s play in Europe’, and we got to play in Europe. Then the next step was, ‘Let’s make a living out of this, so this is our job’, and that happened. Next along the line was, ‘Well, can we buy houses from doing this?’, and we did, and then the rest is from there.

"I always looked up to a band like the Ramones, because they kept going in small steps at a time. But they all hated each other, and we actually like each other."

“It was always just about setting small short-term goals which always pushed us to go further. And since we were always in it together – we’re a gang and we’re a family – it was always the next step that kept us going. And I kind of feel that that’s a lost art. Along with being a lost art it’s a lost entrepreneurship. Today a band can blow up overnight over the internet, which is great for them – I’m friends with many bands who have done that, who have never been on a tour and put out one song and then Pitchfork has it on the next day and they’re huge – but I’ve also seen bands implode really fast because of that, so I think that’s what really gives us lasting power. I always looked up to a band like the Ramones, because they kept going in small steps at a time. But they all hated each other, and we actually like each other. They were almost there, but Johnny and Joey just couldn’t get along. We actually talk to each other. And we don’t steal each other’s girlfriends.”

And while it’s their living these days, the band doesn’t seem like a job to the current members of Black Lips, not something that’s become mundane or tiresome.

“No, I love jobs,” Swilley smiles. “Maybe it’s an American thing – or maybe it’s an Australian thing too – but it’s just this individualist attitude of being an American and working for something. Like I enjoy work. When I built that porch with Jack the other day I enjoyed every minute of it. A job for me is something that’s not rewarding – I love building things, and I love doing this as my job.”