As Disgusting As They Wanna Be

"You’ve gotta have rain to have rainbows/

You’ve gotta have dick to have a dick in your mouth."

—Moldy Peaches, "Who’s Got the Crack?"

About three seconds into their debased act, The Moldy Peaches have us floored. Maybe it’s hearing a teenager go "I traded my wife for a new three-holer," or the two-part harmony of "up, up, down, down, b, a, a, b, select, start." Whatever it is, these anti-hipsters are totally devoid of the vomit-inducing irony you’d expect from dorks that speculate about Lisa Loeb’s vagina. Finally.

Kimya Dawson and Adam Green are doing the Sonny and Cher side-by-side thing in an earnest Cowboy In Sweden way. Alternating folky ballads and rockstar riffs, their 80s sitcom obsessions are full of insecure sincerity. They seem like those ‘best friends since grade four’ kind of friends, but they’re not.

Returning from Olympia, Kimya teamed up with twelve year-old Adam after hearing his song about Calvin Johnson (K records guy). Seven years later, The Moldy Peaches just got signed by Rough Trade head Geoff Travis (guy who signed The Smiths) and, despite all the new hype, they don’t really care. They’re a "not care" band, down to the white tube socks.

Kimya swigs her own urine on stage the way granny sneaks gin from a plain coffee cup. "GG Allin would, like, have everybody know that he was drinking his own urine. I do it for myself." Adam also drinks his piss but he does it to gross people out. This disgustingness led to their germophobic bassist leaving the band, with a severence package consisting of Adam's pubic hair, fingernails, scabs and boogers.

To balance the band out again, The Moldy Peaches brought in Spin Doctors frontman Chris Barron (remember him?). Barron got kicked out of the Spin Doctors after an incredibly rare vocal paralysis left him totally unable to say "little Ms. can’t be wrong."

"It’s unknown why it happens," he says from his penthouse apartment in downtown Manhattan. "To have it happen to your voice is much rarer than having it happen to your face. It’s like one in millions and millions and then to have it happen to a singer is, like, one in zillions and zillions." And what are the odds he would go from forgotten flash-in-the-pan to obscure, folk-joke, weirdo superstar? "I don’t know. I’m not even sure how long these guys want me around, but to be honest I don’t really care."

BYRON VELVICK

They’re "running out of ethnic friends," so meet them by going to www.moldypeaches.com