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Lillian Berlin can't recall precisely what he said onstage during Living Things' gig at the Gypsy Tea Room in Dallas in 2004: "Just things about the Republican Party, how conservative it was," he says.
It was enough to nearly get him killed. After the show, Berlin -- Living Things' politically blunt singer-songwriter-guitarist and the eldest of the band's three brothers -- was outside, behind the club, when he was jumped by three men. One pulled out a revolver, hitting Berlin in the stomach with the handle. Then the gun went off -- twice.
"One bullet went so close to my ear it popped my eardrum," says Berlin, who went into shock and was helped back into the club by a homeless man who saw the attack. Berlin, now twenty-six, is still shaken. "OK, you're gonna beat me up," he says, sitting with his brothers, bassist Eve, 23, and drummer Bosh, 21, in a New York coffee bar. "But a gun?"
In fact, Lillian has done much worse onstage: burning pictures of President Bush with a lighter shaped like a flintlock pistol; throwing lit newspapers into the crowd. At one New York show, he mock-flogged women dressed as dominatrixes and wearing Bush and Donald Rumsfeld masks. But even after that bullet, Lillian won't shut up. "It's easy to get onstage and say, 'Fuck Bush, let's piss on him,' " he says with rapid-fire intensity. "It's harder to say, 'Fuck Bush. Now here's a solution.' Our songs" -- the defiantly topical torpedoes on Living Things' debut album, Ahead of the Lions -- "are about solutions. But what is it going to take for kids to pay attention -- a draft?" That is not just a rhetorical question. The brother-in-law of the band's second guitarist, Cory Becker, is a National Guardsman now serving in Iraq.
Released last fall by Jive Records, Ahead of the Lions is a nonstop assault on military-industrial imperialism, religious intolerance and blind obedience that roars and soars like the Clash's Sandinista!, Nirvana's Nevermind and AC/DC's Back in Black all at once. Ahead of the Lions has also been a battlefield itself since Bush's first term. Living Things started making the album when Bosh was in high school, turning in an early version to Dreamworks Records in late 2003. When the label collapsed, the band was assigned to Geffen. War soon broke out between the labels over the album and Living Things' loose-cannon stage act. "We were the perfect band to be caught in the system," Lillian says, laughing. "We were writing about it -- and got totally jacked by it."
"They're fairly incorrigible," admits Michael Tedesco, VP of A&R at the Zomba Label Group, who signed the band to Jive. "But so what if they pissed off the record business? It's not the end of the line. The people ultimately have to judge what they're about."
For Eve, "it's never been about record deals," he insists. "It's about blood." His long-term goal is "to keep playing with my brothers."
Raised in a conservative suburb of St. Louis, the Berlins were a band before they knew how to rock. (Lillian, Eve and Bosh are custom names. It's really Lawrence, Yves and Josh. Lillian: "My grandmother, who died a month before I was conceived, was Lillian. I loved that name.") Their father, Jeffrey Rothman, a devout Jew and a carpet salesman, took the boys on road trips. They helped install carpets; he got them singles-dance jobs at local synagogues. "We barely knew how to play," confesses Lillian. "We've never been able to learn someone else's song. It's always been an original song or an original rip-off of something else. We had the 'Bombs Below' riff forever."
The Berlins attribute their combined knack for raising hell and sticking together to their mother, Joan Berlin. A Catholic who took her boys to Mass, she also instilled in them the free spirit and moral commitment of her late-Sixties youth in Chicago, where she associated with activist groups and had an affair with a Black Panther. From the beginning, Lillian says, "I was aware -- I had this mother who gave speeches." In school, all three boys were diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder; Joan soon mounted a local campaign protesting the use of drugs to treat ADD.
As the oldest son, Lillian -- now married to photographer and video director Floria Sigismondi -- recalls getting "the most shit" from his mom. "But she and I had the biggest connection." At one point, she gave him a diary she kept during her relationship with the Panther: "He would write essays in her diary. They were so articulate, about how America, no matter how much we think we are a united country, will always be divided by race and religion." Lillian now has those essays on his computer and still reads them.
But this is not 1968, and Lillian is unafraid to take what once were sellout measures to incite debate. Example: Ahead of the Lions' first single, "Bom Bom Bom," is in an iTunes/Cingular television ad. "An anti-war song in a commercial? Fuck, yeah," Lillian crows. "It's a message to be spread, to be heard by many." This is also a guy who, even on an offstage day, looks like Oscar Wilde auditioning for the MC5: all in cream-white (pants, vest, ruffled shirt) except for an electric-shock nest of black hair. "Most people come to a rock show to escape reality. When I read a novel, I'm escaping. I'm also coming back with something I didn't know before.
"That's what we're doing," Lillian contends. "We'll do the theatrics and wear the clothes. But please, leave with an opinion. Then find a solution and spread it."