Semi-Controversial Life

Although Marilyn Manson is still pretty much Public Enemy No. 1 to conservatives, an unlikely competitor is nipping at his heels: Third Eye Blind. The San Francisco-based band has been stirring up the natives and bringing the wrath of local educators and police departments down upon them as they wind their way through the hinterlands on their MTV Campus Invasion tour.

Last week, lead singer Stephan Jenkins decided to attend to the sex education of the students of Siena College, a Catholic university in Loudonville, N.Y., by pitching nearly 1,000 condoms into the audience after the administration refused to allow LifeBeat, an organization that travels with the tour, to distribute free condoms -- for fear that the act would promote sex among the student body.

Before deluging the front rows with prophylactics, Jenkins, told them: "The powers-that-be of this university believe they know what's best for you, so they've made the decision that MTV can't distribute condoms. However, I can do whatever the fuck I want, baby." Afterwards, Jenkins walked out front after the show before the cleanup crew had a chance to sweep up and there wasn't a single condom on the floor. "Apparently, they've got a lot of horny Catholics out there," he says.

And Third Eye Blind does their best to titillate them, not only by hiring busty former-Guess model Anna Nicole Smith to make a cameo in their last video, "Jumper," but also by having a nude woman dancing behind a flimsy gold curtain every night to kick off their show -- something that agitated the sheriff's department in Harrisonburg, Va., on Tuesday night (Nov. 17).

"We didn't know it was illegal to have a nude dancer on stage in Virginia," says Bobby Schneider, tour manager for 3EB. "We don't usually ask in advance if it's okay, we just do it. But when we played at James Madison University, a cop tried to pull her off the stage. He wanted to arrest her, and give her a summons for public nudity."

This semi-lewd strife isn't a new thing. According to Jenkins, the band's female fans have been clamoring to get on stage and disrobe for the past year, so the band decided to make it part of the show. "The funny thing is girls love doing it. There's arguments over who gets to dance nude behind the screen every night. We don't have to recruit these girls, they want to do it. They're usually college girls who have an exhibitionist streak in them. We have people up on stage every night -- you know, contest winners and such -- and these girls start taking their clothes off right then and there."

Not only that, female fans who don't make it to center stage are disrobing in the aisles, and throwing red silk panties (because of the line in the band's hit, "Semi-Charmed Life," "Your little red panties, they pass the test") and exotic lingerie on stage nearly every night. "We have one roadie who has a panty fetish, and he collects them," says Jenkins. "He has an anvil case full of them."

But lingerie is not all that 3EB fans have been throwing. Some take the band's lyrics so literally that they regularly pummel Jenkins and Co. with objects alluded to in the songs: Ultra Lube, Blue Diamond Matches and ... little toy lobsters. "I once admitted on TV that the strangest summer job I ever had was as a scuba diver, who sexed lobsters for a study," says Jenkins. "Since then the fans picked it up, and began throwing lobsters. Luckily I've never been hit with a live one."

Perhaps when the band enters a San Francisco studio next January to begin recording their follow-up to their self-titled debut, Jenkins will play more scrupulous attention to the metaphoric household objects he chooses to further his themes. "This time I was worried over the condition of my soul," says Jenkins of his current subject matter. "I'm much more concerned with what it means to be a good person, and what it means to have a fulfilling life. Those are the things I'm thinking about, and writing about. But I still have the same hopes and fears that I had before, and still feel kind of vulnerable to life."

~JAAN UHELSZKI