How's this for a do-it-yourself, five-step plan to becoming a rock star?

Step 1: Sneak into MTV and get them to play your homemade video.

Step 2: Play Canada's EdgeFest with your pants down and incite a mud-flinging riot.

Step 3: Open up for Cheap Trick and have a helicopter fly over the stadium, dumping a half-ton of cereal on the crowd, making headlines on Hard Copy.

Step4: Perform, as an unsigned band, in front of 100,000 people at Woodstock.

Step 5: Turn Everclear's Art Alexakis into such a fan that he takes you on the road, writes songs with you, produces your album and signs you to his label, Popularity (a joint venture with Artemis).

Easier said than done? Maybe. A better story than that of most new artists pitched to programmers in hopes of airplay? Absolutely! But these five steps, along with constant touring in between, songs placed in numerous indie films, a manager [Bill Aucoin] who has worked with the likes of Kiss and Billy Idol, have all gotten Flipp, a hard-working Minneapolis-based quartet, to where they are today--destined to "knock people on their asses," as flamboyant front man Brynn Arens excitedly put it in a recent conversation from a Minneapolis recording studio. With Arens' nutty onstage antics, including his half-black, half-white painted face and his old-school rock & roll attitude--along with three crazier bandmates backing him--Flipp just might be the breath of fresh air that radio needs right now.

How did the band get together?

The band got started as a complete fluke. Sometime in the early '90s I was in a New York recording studio, which our drummer Kilo owned, writing songs for another artist. One of the songs I was working on was a remake of The Who's "My Generation." I'm really into taking somebody else's tune and making it my own, so I took "My Generation," which is a very fast, sped-up, amphetamine-fueled song, and recorded it as if I'd smoked a dime bag of pot. Anyway, a buddy of mine who is a professional lighting guy came over to the studio and set up all of his lights and me, Kilo and our old bass player recorded a video for our version of "My Generation."

What did you do with the video?

My apartment wasn't far from the Viacom building, so I decided to sneak my video into the MTV programming offices--what did I have to lose, right? My hair was green at the time, sticking up all over the place, I was walking down the streets of New York smokin' a joint and pretending like I'm a delivery guy who needs to get this video in to the MTV people. I snuck up to the top floor where the offices are, got to the check-in desk and played it off like I had a legitimate package to give to programming. A woman met me outside her office, saw me standing there with my eyes all bloodshot and TOTALLY knew what was going on and started laughing. I handed her the video and said, "Hi, my name is Brynn. I play in a band called Flipp. I just smoked a lot of pot and snuck in here to give you my video."

Are you kidding me?

She took me into the office, we watched the video together and she said, "Holy shit, this is the best homemade video I've ever seen." MTV started spinning it on 120 Minutes and the next thing you know, I'm back in Minneapolis putting the band together for real.

Unbelievable. So you're back in Minneapolis, you get the band together--what's next?

We rehearse for two weeks and play our first live show ever--in front of 30,000 people at EdgeFest! It rained, we were muddier than fuck and I pulled down my pants and incited a mud-throwing riot! MTV News covered it--it was a good time.

In 1997 you signed with Hollywood?

Correct. One week after the record Flipp was released, the president of the label left and we kind of got lost in the shuffle. I can't slag the label, though--the experience we had with them was phenomenal. Anyway, time went by, we played Woodstock '99....

Wait a minute. You're dropped from the label, yet you're now an unsigned band on the Woodstock lineup? How'd you pull that off?!

My brother and bandmate Chia Karaoke did some of the graphic design for the Woodstock that happened a few years prior and made friends with the guys who put on the concert. It was wild. After playing that night in front of, like, 100,000 people, we got invited up to the lookout tower by the head honchos at the concert and we smoked pot and drank beer with them.

You self-released your second album.

Yeah, we had a billion songs written and no label, so we put out Blow It Out Your Ass on our own in 2000.

Um...what was that again?

(Laughs) Blow It Out Your Ass. I wanted to call this new album Go Fuck Yourself, but we didn't think that'd go over so well.

How did the indie release do sales-wise?

I never really keep track of numbers. I know that when we play in Minneapolis, every kid knows every fuckin' word to every song and that's what is most important to me. It's rock & roll and it should be about loud-ass guitars and "fuck-you fingers" flying in the air and spitting on your neighbor and shit like that--all the spirit of good old-fashioned fun. In the beginning, I found myself wanting to be a businessman, and at some point I just went, "Fuck that, I'm a singer and a guitar player and I just wanna rock." So getting back to the question, the numbers escape me--10 copies, 10 million, I don't care.

Let's talk about the new album, Volume, and the Art Alexakis/ Everclear connection.

Well, we spent about $500 on a video for a song that was on Blow It Out Your Ass called "Rock Star." Somehow, Art Alexakis got ahold of the video and supposedly watched it nonstop on his tour bus. Art somehow found my phone number, called me up and said, "Is this Brynn from Flipp?" I said yeah, it is, and he started singing the song to me over the phone! That's when he asked us if we wanted to go out on the road as their opening act.

What was that like?

SO rock & roll. SO unbelievable. We were a bunch of fuckin' babies. It was our first time out on the road as a real rock & roll band, so it was heaven on earth. Throughout the course of the tour the bands got along really well and had so much fun. Art and I ended up in the back of the bus noodling on the guitars together and we wrote "Freak" and another song on the record called "I Still Love Rock & Roll."

"Freak" is the debut single. Is it autobiographical?

I wrote the lyrics for that tune and it's very much autobiographical. Writing rock songs has become my way of anger management. Occupational therapy, I believe they call it.

Art produced the album too, right?

Yeah. He also signed us to his label, Popularity, which goes through Artemis.

You recently finished the album and I'm sure you plan on getting back out on the road. Are you excited about that?