Maximum raunch & roll

BROTHERS IN ARMS King Khan (right) and BBQ generally live on separate continents, but maintain a tight musical bond.

There is, alas, no etiquette book detailing the lowered social standards of the common rock musician, to say nothing of one operating along the fringes of garage rock. But it’s safe to assume that the singer and guitarist known as King Khan presents an affront to decorum severe enough to make Miss Manners’s head explode. Case in point: Within the first minutes of a phone interview, he has called this journalist by two different names (both wrong) and cussed. Asked his current whereabouts, Khan answers not with the city in which his band is playing (San Francisco), but rather his immediate surroundings (“the bathroom”). This seems especially gratuitous, as the musician is audibly urinating.

If an appropriate context for such behavior does exist, surely it’s within the framework of his duo, the King Khan & BBQ Show. The devoutly primitive group pairs the musician (born Arish Khan) with Mark “BBQ” Sultan. In concert, Khan sings, plays guitar and, at some point during the set, changes into a skimpy dress and a purple wig—a habit he claims to have adopted in order to “torture homophobic rockabilly fans.” Not to be outdone, Sultan sings while simultaneously playing drums and guitar. “I hit a bass-drum pedal with my left foot, another drum with my right foot and have a tambourine hitting my shin,” he explains. “It’s just a matter of coordination.”

The pair’s concerts can be savage: Khan, who is Indian-Canadian, has performed in whiteface and Sultan in blackface; a string of dates last year, with the Black Lips, regularly concluded with erupting firecrackers. “There’d be so much smoke that everybody would have to evacuate the club,” Khan says. “That was the end of the fucking show.” Musically, however, Khan & BBQ draw from doo-wop and early rock & roll as much as from punk and eighth-grade detention. Both last year’s self-titled debut and the pair’s new album, What’s for Dinner?, display raw shades of Sam Cooke and Bo Diddley, with melodically rich songs redolent of ’50s sock hops. “They’re steeped in the history of rhythm and blues,” says Jon Spencer, whose band Heavy Trash covers their song “Hold Me Tight.” “There’s a real sweetness and innocence to this music.”

Or, as Khan puts it, “We’ll play a heartbreaking ballad and then a song about eating shit, so people who are making out will have no choice but to tea-bag someone.”

Khan and Sultan are both 29. They first played together in the Spaceshits, a garage outfit that had the distinction of getting banned from every club in their native Montreal. When that group toured Europe in 1999, Khan—enticed by how nicely musicians were treated abroad, particularly by women—decided to remain in Berlin, where he now lives with his wife and their two daughters. The King Khan & BBQ Show came into being when Sultan, who resides “between Montreal, Europe and sometimes Brazil,” visited Germany and casually performed alongside his old bandmate. The shows went so well that the pair reconvened in a Nazi parachute factory–cum–practice space that Khan had rented for his psychedelic-soul group, King Khan and the Shrines.

The singer now credits the Nazi room’s “black magic” with inflaming Khan & BBQ’s sound. This is obviously nonsense: These two must have scared the poor Nazi ghosts witless. “You have to push the envelope in art,” Khan contends. “The times when we’ve gone too far, in some people’s eyes, are some of my best memories. Like the blow-job show.”Ah, yes. The blow-job show.

“It was our last night in Brazil, and we were in an emotional state,” a sentimental Khan recounts. “Our friend Clarah, who’s an underground writer there, was on tour with us. At the end of our set, Clarah grabbed her boyfriend, took him onstage, tore his pants down and started giving him a blow job. The funniest thing was that he couldn’t get an erection, ’cause he was so nervous. But the audience couldn’t tell—they went totally ballistic. They had no idea that rock & roll could be like this.”

The King Khan & BBQ Show plays Mercury Lounge November 14 and Southpaw November 15. What’s for Dinner? is out now on In the Red.