Blender joins the super-rock twin bill of the season — Jet and the Vines — for an all-access extravaganza of drinking, fighting and failed attempts to "minimize the destruction"

"WHERE'S MY badge?" shouts Jet drummer Chris Cester.

"Which badge?" queries guitarist Cameron Muncey.

"The badge," Chris replies, beaming, "that says CLICK YOUR HEELS THREE TIMES AND GO FUCK YOURSELF."

Chris Cester — an unholy union of Keith Richards and Sesame Street's Grover — has found the perfect souvenir of his trip to Kansas, and he's been in Dorothy's home state only an hour.

For Jet, the past six months have been paved with such good fortune. Last year, the band toured the Midwest in "the gherkin," a tiny, malodorous green bus. This year, with radio gung-ho for snaggle-toothed "post-Strokes" rock & roll, the Melbourne, Australia, four-piece can afford a huge, malodorous bus.

Heading a cross-continental wagon train of fellow Australians — punkabilly veterans the Living End, greenhorn indie kids Neon and co-headliners the Vines — Jet can feel like they've really arrived. Lifted by the rave-up single "Are You Gonna Be My Girl?", their debut album, Get Born, has quickly gone gold. As Chris Cester puts it with a shit-eating grin, "My band is huge, my girlfriend's hot and next year I'm gonna be a millionaire!"

But America is not treating the Aussie Invasion bands to an equally warm welcome. Chaotic nü-grungers the Vines are presumed to be the solid-gold stars of this tour in the wake of their blistering 2002 debut album (Highly Evolved), massive TV exposure and a stirring new record, Winning Days, to promote. Playing last every night, though, the Vines are attracting the worst concert reviews Blender has ever seen, with special bile reserved for zany-cherub singer-guitarist Craig Nicholls. So far, newspapers including the New York Times, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Chicago Tribune have decried his "prima donna antics" and "physically painful shrieking," while Nicholls has aimed some brickbats of his own, ending the Chicago show shouting "fucking morons!" and "disgruntled cows!" at the baffled crowd.

Rather than confounding expectations, the Vines' Lawrence, Kansas, set confirms them. After a drunken, brutish, passionate show by Jet — like watching AC/DC throw anvils off the back of a truck — the Vines have their work cut out for them, but Nicholls isn't helping. Whether bored or, hey, just being, you know, "jazz," he turns the vocal parts of all the band's slow numbers into a challenging battery of off-key howls, grunts and yodels. He ignores the lyrics in favor of hopping on one foot, writhing on the floor and trashing instruments — all in a detached manner. It's unbelievably irritating, and it's hard not to conclude that Nicholls, in some incomprehensible way, is laughing at you. Many of Lawrence's gig-goers appear to agree, swapping looks of consternation before finally filtering out.

Blender would like to discuss this with Nicholls, but since a disastrous recent interview with U.K. metal magazine Kerrang!, he has decided he hates journalists. We discover how strict his ban is the next morning in Omaha, Nebraska, when we approach Vines rhythm guitarist Ryan Griffiths and tour manager Mark McCann after breakfast at Louis M's Burger Lust.

"You can't join us," McCann says bluntly, nodding in the direction of an approaching Nicholls. Nicholls smirks merrily — yet silently — at your correspondent.

At 2:15 P.M., very much against medical advice, Blender is crammed into a car with a deliriously hung-over Nic Cester, Jet's primary singer, guitarist and songwriter (and Chris's older brother). We're speeding to an interview and acoustic session at 89.7 The River, Omaha's local community radio station. The Vines, needless to say, are not.

"Where the fuck am I?" Nic groans.

"I know that it's the lamest cliché, but I've no idea."

Last night's post-show frolics ended surreally, as Jet and the Vines trashed their shared dressing room while whistling "Greensleeves" in unison. Chairs were piled on top of one another. A lamp was smashed and the slats of a wooden bench splintered as Chris Cester beat them with an ancient ghetto blaster. In the only moment of Nicholls-Jet interaction that Blender was able to witness in two days, a delighted Nicholls intervened to topple boyish Jet guitarist Cameron Muncey from the top of the chair tower. Things looked pretty bad, but then the bill came in — a measly $32 per band.

Now in another state entirely, Nic Cester and an equally game Muncey undertake the sort of promo that will help them sell records in America. This means being polite to extremely loud afternoon DJ "Spicoli" (real name Jason) and trying desperately not to cuss on the air.

"Are you gonna crank one out for us?" Spicoli yells on our arrival, unknowingly using Australian slang meaning "to masturbate."

"Am I gonna crank one out?" Nick says, reeling. "What the hell kind of show is this?"

Stuffed into a broadcast booth with a bunch of sedated guests, Spicoli is keen to mine the cultural differences between Australia and America. Nic plays diplomat: "Well, you guys talk a lot louder. Other than that, America's the same as everywhere — you get a lot of nice people, and you get some arseholes."

A nimble program director manages to hit the bleep button in time.

"Shit!" Nic exclaims, still on the air. "I said arseholes!"

Back at the Jet bus, parked outside tonight's venue, Omaha's Sokol Ballroom, Chris Cester is pondering what it is in their past that drives his band forward so inexorably. The younger and more flamboyant brother (he's still only 21) sports an enormous pair of burgundy sunglasses with faux-gold inlays, behind which he appears to be wearing eyeliner.

Chris's first memory of Nic is of climbing into his playpen and "fucking his shit up." Observers of their dynamic might wonder if this is still Chris's role in life. To illustrate, here's a verbatim exchange from the post-show drinking session in Lawrence:

Nic: We tend not to do interviews together.

Chris: We tend not to talk.

N: That's bullshit.

C: It's fuckin' true. You just never admit it.

Blender: You don't talk?

N: [Snotty] According to Chris we don't.

C: It's true.

N: OK, seriously! [Slams down beer bottle] Let's fucking have this out right now!

C: Are you serious?

N: I'll fucking kick your arse. Is this what it's fucking come to?

C: Come on, then, let's go!

N: What is your fucking problem?

C: Fuck off — I'm just going to laugh at you. [Campy] Let's have an arm-wrestle!

N: What is it with you, pulling this shit in front of the interviewer?

C: Ahhh! [Kindly, while squeezing Blender's knee] It's good to be back.

Sixteen hours later, now sober, Chris will admit that he wanted to be the singer in Jet, but he concedes that it's Nic who "sings like a motherfucker" and is prepared to do the hard jobs, such as firing the band's old bassist ("He liked Primus and looked like William Shatner") and, as he did today, getting up early in order to do a radio interview.

"Even so," Chris adds, "it's a strange thing to end up in a band with your brother. The last person you want to spend the rest of your life with, in any normal situation, is your brother, right?

"It's hard to be four grown adults in each other's faces all day," he concludes. "Then you throw a lot of drinks in the mix, and fuckin' a, it's hard work. I always said that if I ever got to this stage I would never whine about how hard it is, because there's always one little kid out there who wants what you've got more than anything in the world. But fuck that little kid, because he's gonna get there and realize the same fucking thing!"

What is the lamest rock myth?

"The one about the godlike rock star who people don't understand. Like the myth around Craig Nicholls. Fucking crock of shit. No one's just 'out there.' They're out there because they want you to think that they're out there or because they take lots of drugs. You talk to the guy, and it's really obvious what's going on inside that fucking band."

*****

SO WHAT IS going on inside the Vines? Is it just that Craig Nicholls smokes a lot of weed — as much, some sources allege, as a quarter-ounce a day? Or does he really think he's better than the rest of us? In either case, what is he trying to achieve with all that horrible shrieking? Two hours before the Aussie Invasion's Omaha show, Blender manages to pounce on shy Vines bassist Patrick Matthews. We try the last question first.

"He wills himself into a state where he really doesn't know what's going on," Matthews contends in a genuine effort to help Blender understand the Vines' live experience. "Like a fugue state. It's not like he means to sing badly, but he's out of control."

In the summer, the Vines will begin a three-month stadium tour opening for Incubus. Despite the enthusiasm of their management company, neither Matthews nor amiable Vines drummer Hamish Rosser believes that this is a good idea. Matthews concedes that mainstream rock audiences will find the Vines difficult ("We look like pooftahs," he says), and that's before you factor in the shrieking. Can the Vines survive it?

"I always threaten — well, not threaten, but I always say I could go home," Matthews says, taking an unexpected tack. "It really wouldn't bother me. I'd like to make another record, but…it's not like I'll have to sign on the dole or go back and work in a factory."

Because you've got enough money?

"Because I've got enough money. Plus, I'd like to go back to school and be a doctor. I've always wanted to do that."

Matthews looks downcast, a condition he blames on "all this drinking." He wears a blue sweatshirt on which Nicholls had scribbled now-fading ballpoint-pen slogans. One says TRASHBAG. Another is NEW YORK CITY SUCKS — a commemoration of the last time the Vines made a ruinous appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman.

Does the Vines' singer like anyone?

"Nah. He's a good friend, but you can never guarantee that he's not going to do something… bad to you. On tour, we've learned to minimize the destruction. At the moment, it's all about leaving him alone."

You mentioned earlier that he likes to say "I am an artist." What does he mean by that?

"It's just his excuse, I guess, for why he's a separate case. Why the usual rules don't apply. He doesn't need to be polite. He must have pot, because he's an artist. When we made the first record, he couldn't do his own washing, because he's an artist. Anything he doesn't want to do."

Matthews insists that, reviews notwithstanding, the current tour is the most fun the band has had in a while. They've certainly had worse.

Onstage in Boston last year, Nicholls hit Matthews with a microphone during one of his gear-trashing sprees, and the mild-mannered bassist flipped out, chasing Nicholls down the street outside until he was restrained by the Vines' manager. "I would definitely have caught him," Matthews says. "Craig's not very fit, and I was very upset."

Ask Matthews about the band's future, and here's what he says:

"Craig is the one person in the band who wants it to go on forever. The rest of us can definitely see an end to it."

*****

TWO HOURS LATER, Jet and the Vines play the two loudest shows the Sokol Ballroom security staff has heard in 10 years. Jet begin with Nic Cester's best Rod Stewart soul scream and proceed to transcend the music of their classic-rock touchstones — the Who, the Stones, Faces, the Beatles — in a furious boogie that peaks with "Are You Gonna Be My Girl?"

More of a surprise to Blender, particularly given Matthews's earlier fatalism, is the Vines' set: It really is much, much better. Nicholls's weirder improvisations are taken in good humor by a tolerant Nebraska crowd, and the sheer (albeit incoherent) grunge power of the closing "Get Free" and "Fuck the World" justly wipe the slate clean.

As Nicholls undertakes his usual destruction of the drum kit and Rosser sprints offstage cradling his precious new snare, you could almost call it crowd-pleasing.