There isn’t much on a typical Black Lips record I couldn’t play for my parents—the band’s brand of garage rock follows a blueprint that’d be perfectly familiar to Dick Biondi. But onstage they’re another story: the Lips are raunchy at their mildest, often descending to the kind of public excretory displays that made GG Allin such a hit at parties. The audiences at their shows are thus tilted somewhat toward people who think shit like that is funny, or who don’t mind staying well clear of the stage.
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The trial run was in early October. Scholl and his charges came to the Bottle to see dance-pop outfit Fujiya & Miyagi play a few songs between their sound check and their set, before the doors opened to the public. It went well—the kids gave the band a pair of white Reeboks they’d all signed, a nod to the F&M tune “Reeboks in Heaven”—and the venue decided to make a regular thing of it. A second Camelot trip, to see Busdriver in November, was aborted when somebody threw up in the van on the way. The Black Lips show at LSA, also booked by the Bottle, is the third.
For me the words “music therapy” bring to mind someone with a graduate degree and a soothing voice playing the Autoharp for a roomful of kids with tambourines and toy drums. Most of us don’t actually know what it’s supposed to accomplish or how it’s supposed to work, so we think of it as a palliative for people we’re not sure what else will help.
Alexander had a special affection for the kids in the crowd. Growing up he’d been placed in special-ed classes, where he got to be good friends with a boy named Andrew. “I was the only one who could talk to him,” he says. “I had to be his translator for the teacher. I was like the horse whisperer for the autistic kids.” The Lips were only expected to play two or three tunes, but they did six—an excellent selection of cuts from Let It Bloom and Good Bad Not Evil, plus an inexplicable cover of the Chuck Berry Christmas song “Run Rudolph Run.” After an encore—”Sea of Blasphemy,” for a kid in the audience who requested something “futuristic”—they jumped offstage to give high fives, and Alexander handed out copies of a cassette by like-minded Missouri band the Modern Primitives. Then it was the kids’ turn: they presented the Lips with a huge framed collage of band photos, decorated with handwritten messages from all two dozen of them.
sharp darts
