My face is almost singed by the flames blowing off Ryan Davidson's torch at an eXBeSTFRIeNDS show. It's an old rock and roll gimmick, and one I've seen Davidson do before. But I'm completely buying it. When the fire appears, a few people shriek audibly, but everyone quickly regains that seen-it-all composure that is the primary signifier of a Seattle audience. As the band finishes "God Chang," a blistering liquefaction of punk, metal, and grunge, the crowd still seems reluctant to let itself be blown away by anything.

But I'm blown away. Which might have something to do with the this post-adolescent head space I've been in lately. My thoughts have been splintering like Hüsker Dü lyrics, and I've got a head full of mailbox baseball, drugs, lust, and rebellion--all wrapped up in rock and roll, that gigantic, vainglorious mode of expression that's equal parts destructive prank and celebratory transgression. There are moments these days when I would give my right arm just to be a 15-year-old punk kid again.

Or better yet, I want to go way back, to a time like 1969: a seductive, iconic moment when rock and roll could still shock and genuinely move people. Somewhere back there, Iggy Pop is onstage with the Stooges, a hot, flailing live wire. Someone throws a bottle at him and it breaks when it hits the stage, and he dives on the broken glass, literally bleeding for his audience--and in that very moment he becomes the living embodiment of rock and roll rebellion. I want to go back to Bowie, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, the Clash, and everything that's missing right now in rock and roll. Why are the bands I like to go see so afraid of big gestures? Why don't they want to be rock stars? And why do audiences rarely scream at rock and roll shows anymore?

I can't remember the last time I woke up the morning after a rock and roll show hoarse from screaming. Bands nowadays are often so passive that seeing them live feels more like going to see a friend's recital, or to the movies, than the visceral experience it's supposed to be. Perhaps that's why we as audience members politely refrain from doing anything as theatrical as bumping into one another, or, Lord help us, screaming ecstatically after a great guitar riff.

Hungry for a rebellion that goes beyond occasionally calling in sick, I find myself attending eXBeSTFRIeNDS shows again and again. Ryan Davidson and his band vicariously provide me with the rebellion I crave, a rebellion that's hard to find in this complacent seaport town, and a rebellion that I rarely seem to find within myself anymore.

When he's not busy layering post-punk riffage onstage, Davidson makes a living ladling tomato sauce on the pizza at Hot Mama's at the corner of Pine and Boylston. He's polite in a stoned-out surfer way, offering a "What's up, dude?" to every customer. Davidson is never quite as animated at the pizza place as he is onstage, though one night when I was in for a slice he seemed cagey and reckless. I was feeling somewhat envious of Davidson's burned-out voice--which he rubs raw during his high-flying live shows--when he began kicking the discarded plates and Coca-Cola cups deeper into the garbage can to make more room for people's refuse. Davidson was laughing, and he was reckless, shrugging off the boredom and isolation that routine labor instills in people. Unlike the thousands of other pizza-joint workers nationwide engaged in the very same act at that same moment, he was happily outside of himself, both in control of what he was doing and a million miles away. He was reveling in his effort, kicking garbage like a rock star. And that trash was flat by the time he was done with it.

If rock and roll has felt dead for quite some time, it's not because there are no more revolutions at hand or because no more poetry needs to be written. Rock and roll feels dead because no one is willing to take the risks. No one is stepping up to live and breathe its essence. And it was on this particular night at Hot Mama's that I realized Ryan Davidson is among the very few people in Seattle who is capable of taking those risks. It wasn't a glorious revelation like the audience must have had at a Stooges show back in '69, but it was something truly primal and libidinal that I was picking up on. And, yes, it was about more than kicking garbage around a pizza place. Davidson has an animal energy, a scattered aggression, which was unmistakable even as he stomped garbage down at his day job.

I doubt Davidson realizes he's a rock star, but I'm thinking it's only a matter of time before half of the world picks up on that fact. So I meet him at Hot Mama's one night to interview him, hoping he'll lay it all out for my tape recorder. I want his band to be huge because I don't believe that electronic music is the new punk rock, I barely believe in rock and roll anymore, and I don't want Nirvana to be the last great band that every jaded music critic name-checks when they talk about energy.

Davidson plays the polite host as I wait for him to finish up. He tells me a couple of times that he'll be done in a minute, checking in to make sure I'm not bored. I already have a Coke, but he brings me a beer. When he gets off work, we go to the Cha Cha Lounge to drop off leftover slices with his friends there. Thomas Wright, his drummer, is working the door and takes a slice. Davidson offers the bartender some. We get drinks and go to the back room, where it's too noisy to talk because it's a Friday and the room is full of drunken frat kids.

We head to the Sorrento Hotel, my choice, where it should be quiet enough to record our conversation. It occurs to me in the lobby of the hotel that we probably won't be welcome. My suspicions are confirmed when we approach the bartender, who eyes us and asks for IDs. Davidson's is bent up in the corners, but he's 29. "I can't take these, guys," says the chubby bartender. I look to my left at the slurring, wasted, well-dressed white-trash customers he's already serving. Then I look at Davidson, who has shoulder-length, greasy, bleached-out hair with dark roots; an angular face that at times looks eerily like Kurt Cobain's (or Elizabeth Peyton's painting of Cobain); a white T-shirt with stains on it from cooking pizzas; and a kind, effortless smile on his face. He's not bummed out about being refused service. He blames it on his ID. I blame the bartender.

We decide to go to QFC and just get a six-pack and head to my office, where we will be undisturbed.

Davidson's story is the traditionally untraditional West-Coast American upbringing, replete with nomadic moves, fresh starts, and strange second acts. After his parents divorced when he was six, Davidson and his mother moved from Costa Mesa, California, to Maui, where she dated "this drug-dealer guy who was a skateboarder and a surfer. We had like two acres of weed in our backyard. That was my way of life. I knew about all that shit. But he was a total asshole. He beat my mom up in front of me and shit. And then we moved back from Maui to L.A., and my mom and him finally got apart and my mom married a fuckin' cop." He laughs. "She went from one extreme to another." Did he hate the cop? "No," he says emphatically. "He was totally fucking cool. He was my stepdad for 18 years. They just got divorced last year. He knew the whole time I was in high school that I was smoking weed. And I did a lot of acid."

From Los Angeles, the family moved to Redding, California, "which is just the most boring, shithole, hillbilly, redneck fuckin' town." To alleviate some of the boredom, Davidson and his friends hosted rock and roll shows. Bands like Operation Ivy, the Mr. T Experience, and Crimpshrine played at them. Davidson got his first acoustic guitar in the fourth grade. "I bought it off my buddy. We used to play Beatles songs. He sold it to me for $2.50. He taught me E, A, D, and C. There were times when I would only have one string on it... I'd just be up and down the fret-board like mad on one string." Davidson taught himself to play "The Star-Spangled Banner" on one string, started bands, and drew logos. "But we never played out. We probably had over a hundred bands that never played out."

The first eXBeSTFRIeNDS show I saw was the band's first, slightly awkward performance. It happened at the Sit & Spin. I remember being impressed by them, but I don't remember thinking that this band was going to be huge. I do remember thinking that Davidson's voice sounded emotionally genuine, and, while strained, whole and natural. It's not easy to scream; screaming kills a singer's voice, with few exceptions. Not everyone can be Frank Black, or Kurt Cobain, or even Bob Mould. I remember that Wright's drumming was full and fantastic. My overall impression was that this promising band reminded me a lot of Pavement and Fugazi, which are both excellent bands that most of us have heard before....

Despite having music in Redding, Davidson was bored, and boredom bred discontent. "There was nothing to do except get in trouble. Most of my friends ended up in jail. Luckily I didn't." I ask him what landed his friends in jail. "Oh fuck, you name it," he replies. "The kids I hung out with did burglary and acid... you name it." Davidson confesses to having participated in one of the robberies. "I felt really bad about it. But those people weren't so honest themselves. They were these huge coke dealers, and they had ripped a lot of my friends off. We just went in and got shit that they had made money off of our friends with."

Davidson speaks of his adolescent misadventures without apology, but he doesn't glorify them either. "We would make bombs and blow shit up," he says, matter-of-factly. "TVs, cars, whatever there was to blow up. One guy we knew would pay us to get him bait for fishing. We'd go out to this dock by Shasta Dam and let pipe bombs off into the water, and all these tiny fish would float up. Little minnows. And we'd give them to him for bait. He'd pay us so we could buy sacks of weed, or sometimes he'd just give us sacks of weed."

When he was 18, Davidson moved to Seattle with the drummer from Snot Labeled, a Redding punk band he had joined two years earlier, which eventually broke up. "When I got to Seattle I started playing music with other people. Me and the guys from Swarming Hordes, and A. J. from Stagger Lee, used to have a band. The only name that we ever really called it was Mothra. Like from Godzilla." Davidson's friend ended up moving back to Redding. "I did, too," he says. "For a little bit. But I knew that Seattle was the place I dug." Back in Redding for nine months, his aimless larking took a sinister turn. "I did all this stupid shit down there, and I figured I had to get back out before I got killed. Friends of mine were getting killed. Speed is huge down there, and your mind is crazy when you do speed. One of my friends shot another one of my friends in the back of the head because he thought the guy was having sex with his girlfriend."

Returning to Seattle, Davidson and a friend lived in a '64 Malibu for about eight months, in the U-District outside of the Espresso Roma coffee shop. "I'd go in there and sleep in the mornings. I had just left my parents' house, and I had never experienced any kind of hardship. I felt pretty spoiled, so I figured I had to see what it was like to live without anything." After he moved out of his Malibu and into an apartment, Davidson began establishing himself musically. Eventually his friend Sam Jayne asked him to play bass on tour for Love as Laughter. He met Wright at a Love as Laughter show and they began playing together. Ben Kersten, eXBeSTFRIeNDS' guitarist, began working at Hot Mama's with Davidson and brought in a CD he had made with some friends.

"It was all these electronic samples, and it was crazy and really cool," Davidson says. "I figured if he was that in touch with the way music goes, I wanted to jam out with him." But Wright was on tour doing sound for Zeke at the time, so the two had to wait for his return to get started. "None of us even had our own equipment," he tells me. "We were playing through other people's amps, and we got together for the first time and realized we needed to do this." Davidson also met bassist James Glunt at a Love as Laughter show. "He was totally psyched about playing. So now I had James as well, and he rules."

The second eXBeSTFRIeNDS show I saw took place at Graceland. It was much more crowded than the first show at Sit & Spin. I had no idea the band had evolved so much. The guitars were locked into great, mathematical trajectories that caught and held my attention. I couldn't help but watch Kersten's fingers for a great deal of the night. Wright beat hell into his kit. Glunt's bass-playing was decisive and spirited. Davidson spat Nerds at us, and blew fire. He moved around the stage as he played. The audience was engaged. I left the club when the show ended and ran into some friends at another bar. "Have you heard eXBeSTFRIeNDS?" I asked. They hadn't, so I told them about the band, at length. My friends just stared as I rattled on like a deranged, obsessive fan.

Like most intuitive rock and roll musicians, Davidson never took lessons aside from the initial four-chord introduction. "I just do it by feel," he tells me. "When me and Ben play, I'll just hear what he's playing and do shit to that. I'd rather not see where their fingers are. They're like my brothers. I've never been in a band like this." And it shows. The guitar work in eXBeSTFRIeNDS is adventurous. When Davidson is not singing, his guitar work interweaves with Kersten's artfully meandering riffs to create a sound that is both primitive and masterful, ear-splitting and elegant. The result is sublime and seemingly effortless. Atop Wright's penchant for thundering floor toms and Glunt's confident, integrated bass lines, Davidson's screams are simultaneously animalistic and brainy. His catchy vocal hooks are the only thing that is pop about this band.

The band is about to put out a 7-inch, the recording of which was funded by local booker and promoter Dave Meinert, who is at work starting his own 7-inch imprint. The record will include the songs "Downtown" and "Solo." Davidson is excited about it. "It sounds totally organic. You can count on mistakes. I was thinking about calling it that--Count the Mistakes."

I ask him why he thinks his shows go so well. "Because of our chemistry," he says without thought. "We all have a really positive attitude about it and we play with the intent to kick ass, and so we do. We're all really confident in our playing, and we get up there and we play one song, and I look back and everyone's just smiling." Which is an enormous part of this band's appeal. "I just want those guys to go the fuck off up there," Davidson says.

At my next eXBeSTFRIeNDS show, there are problems with the sound. The power onstage goes off at the end of the performance, before the band has the chance to do "God Chang," the song during which Davidson blows fire. I'm there with a friend and I haven't told him what's going to happen. The band is discernibly pissed off. Just about everyone in the audience leaves. I'm just about to go as well when the power comes back on. The band does "God Chang." As Davidson points out in our interview, the sound of the fire is in itself an effect. Wright builds propulsively toward the end of the song. The guitars swell and arc, and the bass gets more brutal. This time, Davidson picks up an acoustic guitar and lights that on fire. He blows on it. The flames once again cover the ceiling of Graceland, only this time there's another gimmick, a better one. Davidson begins smashing the burning guitar against the stage. The stage catches on fire. Davidson has at this point grabbed his electric guitar, which he's kept slung behind his back during his entire Hendrix moment, and now he is playing it as he jumps up and down, possessed, stomping the flames out with both feet....

"Going the fuck off" is not exactly standard fare for many of this city's most beloved bands. "I think there's just such a tight-knit family of musicians that are all friends right now, so when you start playing out it's your friends that come to see you. So one day you're like, 'Hey,' flipping pizzas, and the next day you're like, 'Whooooo!' doin' the fuckin' splits, David Lee Roth style, you know what I mean? It's just the way the music scene is, and people are kind of snotty about it, so you get used to it. You can go out of town to fucking rock out."

Isn't that what's missing in Seattle right now? Showmanship? Davidson gives it some consideration. "Yeah, I think people should get over it. I think maybe that's why I'm growing my hair out, because once my hair goes into my face and I can't see anyone, I'll just go into a blind spot and I don't give a fuck anymore. Like if I fall down, which I have, you know? Fucking good. Maybe people are afraid to go off in front of their friends, but I think their friends would appreciate it more if they did. I remember one night at Graceland when we were going off and I jumped off this wedge monitor, and this one guy a few days later was like, 'Uh, you probably shouldn't just jump off wedge monitors, dude. People are going to think you're trying to be a rock star.' I was kind of discouraged by that. All I know is I played a fucked-up chord that made me jump around. You know, your hand moves and the cat attacks it. I want you to see me having fun and I want to share it."

Davidson's abandon manifests itself offstage as well. He laughs when I ask him about the Pine Street streaking incident. "Thomas and Nate [Johnson, of Pretty Girls Make Graves] had already done it down at the Cha Cha and they'd gone to Manray, but they had their underwear on. And they had sombreros with the Mexican wrestling masks. I said, 'Come get me, let's do it through Linda's.' And I don't wear underwear. So they brought me a sombrero and a mask. They had their boxers on, so I just like stripped down and cupped it. We're all like, 'Whaaaaaa, viva Mexico!' And we just ran through Linda's, dude. I was like dodging through tables totally naked, just holding my dick. And Thomas jumped on the pool table and screamed, 'Viva Mexicooooo! Yeeeaaaah!' Then we just ran out. But the fucked-up thing about it is that the mask was split in the back, so everyone knew it was me. My hair was hanging out. We went back in an hour later, and everyone was like, 'Nice ass.'"

I tell Davidson he's a born rock and roll star, and he laughs at me. "Sometimes I wonder if it's all hype," he says. I press him on the point: "What if I said, 'Ryan, you're born to be a rock star. That's what you're destined to be,' and I make you respond to that. What would you say?"

"All I've ever wanted to do is play music. And fuck, if possible, to be a rock star. And that's meant a lot of different things to me growing up, you know? It meant Elvis and the Beatles. Now, to a lot of people, it means porn stars and all that bullshit. To me, it's to have a lot of people really appreciate what you're doing, more than having 30 girls up front who just want to fuck you because you play music."

What does Davidson want for his band?

"I want us to play music for a long time and not get sick of it," he tells me. "Because we're more than best friends. We're brothers. And I want it to remain that, and for everyone to just keep loving each other. And I want other people to feel our love of music. Not a lot of people give a shit anymore."

And then, because it's nagging me, I ask him about Iggy Pop's primal showmanship. About the legendary roll in the glass. "You know what? If I was playing some riff one night and someone threw up a beer bottle and it broke onstage, and I was really into the song and I just fucking freaked out and dove into the shit...." He thinks. "But it would be spur-of-the-moment. Something like that can never be preconceived or contrived. I think that's what would happen with Iggy, though. He was genuinely into it. And there was nothing even fucking like the Stooges at that time. So he was just going off really fucking hard and then BOOM, SMASH, RRAAAAAAAARGH! It's aggression."

The following evening I go see eXBeSTFRIeNDS open for the Ex and Unwound, a show that many up-and-coming musicians would kill to be part of. The band is alive and impressive. I'm standing in the back watching as the crowd gets progressively closer to the stage, growing more dense, more intent upon the performance. When "Downtown" begins I recognize it immediately, though I've only heard it a handful of times at past live shows. Davidson is facing us, and I watch as his hair falls into his eyes. It's the blind spot. He is screaming the refrain, "Me and my friends gooooooooo downtown. Me and my friends raaaaaaaaace downtown."

I start screaming. I can't help myself.