Photos + Review + Setlist + Video: The Black Lips Destroy The Firebird, Wednesday, April 7

I'd heard some wild stories about Black Lips performances -- instances where the band pissed in their own mouths, cut themselves and bled all over the stage or hocked loogies into the air and caught them in their mouths. Basically, I was told: "Imagine something shocking with bodily fluids, and assume that they've probably done it on stage."

See 40 photos from last night's Black Lips show here.

None of those things happened last night at the Firebird. But it was still an epic show.

The crowd was rowdy, sweaty and ready to rock the shit out of a Wednesday night. Some people were overheard saying they traveled from as far away as Nashville and Memphis. The quartet from Atlanta obliged them with a balls-to-the-wall punk thrashing replete with broken beer bottles, guttural howls, broken guitar strings, fuzzed-out amplifiers and generous helping of y'alls -- as in "Y'all ain't fuckin' around out there."

Those were the words of guitarist Ian Saint Pé upon seeing a throbbing mass of a frantic (but mostly friendly) St. Louis mosh pit. The crowd was a mob of stage-diving, bubble-blowing, giant-inflatable-jukebox-batting, beer-spewing crowd-surfing mad men. And when the band played "Bad Kids," they swarmed onto the stage, pumped their fists and belted out the lyrics themselves.

The Lips were clearly impressed, joking about how the last time they were in town long ago they were at "a shitty bullpen" (The Creepy Crawl) and how it was time "to put St. Louis back on the map." They professed their love for Chuck Berry ("We're gonna go see him up at that Duck Hunt Room") and wailed on their guitars in a way that would've both horrified and delighted the Father of Rock & Roll.

They attacked their instruments. They stuck their tongues down each others throats. Saint Pé smashed a High Life bottle on the stage and played slide guitar with the jagged bottleneck. Bassist Jared Swilley dangled from the ceiling with one arm and strummed with the other, held aloft by the die hards at the front.

They screamed and spat and and lived up to every insane expectation and then some. And they didn't even piss in their own mouths to do it.

(Thank God. That's just gross.)

Fuzzy setlist:
Video and a slideshow coming soon...