(Black Lips)
Black Lips could be viewed as garage-punk godfathers to FIDLAR, as they were the dirtbag kings of millennium male nudity, excess, and shock. Founding member Swilley recalls a gig SNL’s Stefon would have loved: an illegal, warehouse space featuring Georgio, the Human Carpet.
Written by Jared Swilley
It’s been about twenty years since Cole and I started playing shows as the Black Lips, and we had a long, slow climb to the middle, or whatever you wanna call it. Never quite made it to the top, but we made a life of it. In those twenty years it’s kind of hard to pick the craziest show. There were more bad ones than I can remember, but this one sticks out. It was sometime near the end of 2011. We were all renting a place in New York City while recording our sixth album, Arabia Mountain, with Mark Ronson. It was our first time in a real studio and our first time working with a producer, and that’s a hell of a first producer to have. Still can’t believe he agreed to do it.
We always say Black Lips can’t have nice things, and there’s some truth to that. One night after fucking killing it all day in the studio, we decided to go and celebrate at a Japanese joint that was near the studio. The last song we finished that day was called “Raw Meat,” an ode to our collective penchant for raw flesh. Mark had never tried raw liver, so as a show of celebratory solidarity, he partook in the feast. That didn’t go so well. The next day we all showed up to the studio, and the whole place reeked of death. We were all pretty sick, but Mark turned weird colors and couldn’t really move. Turns out he was pushing 104 on the thermometer and had to go straight to the emergency room until further notice.
He got hauled off to Cedars Sinai. That left us in an expensive city, on the clock with nothing to do. Well, if a band is not recording, they gotta play, so we did just that. No legit club would book us with two days’ notice, but we spent the better part of the first decade of our career playing basements, house parties, wherever and whoever would have us, so it wasn’t something we were too worried about.
Now, the reason we weren’t too worried about finding a place was due to the fact that when you spend a lot of time on the road, living like we did, you tend to run into some—and I mean this in the best possible way—shady characters that don’t really go by the book, if you know what I mean. See, we had this old friend named Lonnie (name changed for the story). He was a career con man and criminal that spent a lot of time in and out of prison, with his longest stretch being around seven years. We loved and grew up with him. Good guy if he’s on your side, but not someone you’d wanna go into business with or share your personal information. Still, a good guy in my book.
One of his sources of income was running an all-hours, illegal warehouse space in Brooklyn called The Shank. He had some tenants living there, a recording studio, drugs were sold, and they paid off-duty cops to tell their buddies to look the other way. I called up Lonnie and asked if we could do a last-minute show there with our friends Cerebral Ballzy, a hardcore band from east New York. He said sure, and it was on. What I didn’t know was that he had been kicked out of the Shank about a week before, and the city had condemned it. Being the guy that Lonnie is, he made it happen. I shoulda gotten suspicious when we got there and he took out bolt cutters to open the door because he said he lost the keys. Classic Lonnie.
We get in, start setting stuff up, and there’s no electricity. No problem. Lonnie gets two generators from the back of his truck, and we’re cooking. We hook that up, I go to take a piss, and the commode isn’t flushing. No plumbing in a warehouse that’s about to have 800 beer-swilling bozos with busting bladders. I thought all was lost, but Lonnie knows some union guys down the road, and they get two porta-potties there within the hour. This was a very large warehouse, and the PA that we had was tiny. There was never gonna be a chance of hearing anything. Not that it mattered. We announced the show that day via whatever the popular social media platform was back then, and by 8:00 p.m. it was packed. There was a line around the block. Chaos ensued. It was supposed to be a five-dollar show, which was a steal for us at that time, but there wasn’t really a door person.
Everyone kinda quit, and we weren’t even supposed to be there. The only semi-legit thing was the off-duty cop, but even that was pretty sketchy. Inside, it was about three hundred over capacity. There was no place to move. No ventilation and no exits, except for a tiny front door beyond a narrow hallway. I started feeling lightheaded from all the spray paint. A team of graffiti guys came in with ladders and were spraying everywhere. Everyone was smoking, and it was a hot August night with no ventilation. I noticed that everyone—girls and boys—were using the back wall, or pretty much any available space, to piss. There was a river of urine saturating the entire floor. This was about 9:00 p.m.
It was around that time that I saw a rolled up carpet on the piss-soaked floor, and people kept running across it, laughing hysterically. Turns out, there was a man inside the carpet who was a well-known figure in Brooklyn at the time, and he got his kicks by going to parties and rolling himself up in a carpet and having people walk on him. That was “Georgio, The Human Carpet.” It was finally time for Cerebral Ballzy to play, and that didn’t last too long. It sounded like barely audible, static-fuzz farts, and the PA collapsed because of the mosh pit. Right after that, the shoddily constructed staircase collapsed under the weight of one hundred people.
We were up next. I had two friends post up next to my mic and PA because I knew our stage wouldn’t last very long since it was two feet high, and it was dangerously overcrowded. The heat and fumes were almost unbearable. I’m not sure if we even played any cohesive songs. The mics had a life span of around three or four seconds, and it seemed like the crowd’s goal was to destroy the stage and everyone on it. If I said we played fifteen minutes, that’d be generous. Maybe four or five songs, if you could ever call them songs. It was basically a huge, smelly fight where nobody had any idea who they were fighting or what they were doing. We were the centerpiece of the madness. It’s a miracle that nobody got seriously hurt, at least as far as I know. I can honestly say that was our most dangerous and chaotic show. It was a total blast, but I wouldn’t do it again.
I went to help clean the next day, and I can still smell it to this day. I do a lot of things to my body that can cause cancer, but I think being at The Shank that night was probably worse than a few decades of smoking.