The cool kids of BYOP are about as punk as you can get

John Eatherly is hesitant to reveal all the gory details, but read between the lines and you get a sense of what Be Your Own Pet gets up to on the road.

“I’m all refreshed,” the decidedly perky-sounding drummer says from a Toronto tour stop. “We had a hotel room and a day off yesterday so I’m feeling juiced up. Me and Jonas and Nathan had an intense detox. We’d go in the sauna and get really hot, and then leave the scorching-hot sauna for an ice-cold shower. We pretty much just kept going back and forth.”

For the uninitiated, Jonas is Jonas Stein, Be Your Own Pet’s awesomely Afro’d guitarist (and son of high-powered entertainment manager Burt Stein, who represents the New York Dolls, Steve Earle, and Vince Neil). Nathan would be bassist Nathan Vasquez, offspring of Nashville-based Latin-jazz guitarist Rafael Vasquez. And fronting Be Your Own Pet is peroxided dynamo Jemina Pearl, who evidently either keeps her body clean and pure on the road, or decided to keep drinking during the band’s sweat-lodge-style purification ceremony. (Keeping track of whose dad does what, Pearl’s father is rock photographer/video director/’80s Christian musician Jimmy Abegg).

The brilliance of Be Your Own Pet is that, despite its members coming from perfectly respectable families, few bands in America are more punk rock. One listen to Get Awkward, the Nashville-based quartet’s viciously entertaining sophomore album, confirms that. A pedal-to-the-floor turbo-roar of broken-glass guitars, mega-snotty vocals, and outright-explosive drum chaos, the disc blows the shit out of anything you’ll hear on the Warped Tour in ’08. Interestingly, the annual punk-rock road show is where Be Your Own Pet will find itself this summer.

“We’re all kind of dreading it,” Eatherly admits. “I mean, it will be fun—we’ll make it fun—but I’ve never heard of any of the bands on the tour. And I just know they are going to be the kind of bands that I’m not going to like. I really only know the Warped Tour as something that normally I’m not going to go to.”

The cause of his disdain is obvious: where the Warped Tour has long been oversaturated with emover-adorned clones and pop-punk pretenders, Get Awkward offers up something we haven’t heard seven million times on Last.fm. “Super Soaked” sets Damaged-strength sprays of guitar violence to a surf-monster backbeat, while “Twisted Nerve” switches from live-wire new wave to metal-buzzed art-pop. And, somewhere, you just know that the old men of the Descendents are marvelling at the one-minute ripcord-rawk ode to flying hot dogs and airborne birthday cake that is “Food Fight!” Through it all, Pearl comes on like a too-rad-for-the-cool-kids powerhouse who’ll happily scratch the eyes out of anyone who gets in her way.

Even though the label somehow fits, calling Get Awkward punk rock is a disservice; as much as it might be fast and loud, it’s also fiercely uncompromising, something that doesn’t count for much in the wake of Green Day and Blink-182. However, by the purest and original definition of the genre—i.e., the only rules are that there are no rules—the album is indeed punk as fuck. Helping the band do things the old-school way was first-wave L.A. legend Steven McDonald of Redd Kross. Tellingly, not even he was able to totally harness the adrenalized insanity.

“We feel really, really good about the record,” Eatherly says. “But what we’ve discovered since we’ve been touring is that the songs end up played a lot faster than they are on the record. Playing things faster makes the live show seem more balls-to-the-wall.”

For ultimate evidence of Be Your Own Pet’s badass-ness—besides the fact that Universal Music refused to release three songs recorded for Get Awkward on the grounds that they were too “violent”—consider that the band has previously attempted two assaults on Vancouver, only to be turned back at the border both times. While the underage Eatherly will happily cop to a weakness for weed and an endless appetite for Pabst Blue Ribbon, he gets a little vague as to what the trouble has been.

“I know we were supposed to play there two times, but, ummm, I don’t know what the problem has been,” the drummer says slowly. “Ummm, hey, how’s Vancouver compared to Toronto and Montreal?”

If Eatherly is wisely taking the Fifth on this one, let’s cut him some slack. After all, despite his recent self-imposed detox, it’s not like he’s sworn off wreaking havoc on the road. On its current North American swing, Be Your Own Pet has left the van at home for a bus it’s sharing with tourmates the Virgins. While life isn’t totally like something out of The Dirt, the drummer says that he and his bandmates are doing their best to be the class troublemakers, even if they aren’t always successful at it.

“What’s weird on this tour is that there are 18 people on the bus, and 18 bunks,” he says. “We’ve never even been on a tour bus, so it’s kind of crazy. And it’s really easy to get overwhelmed. It’s funny when you get stoned, but it’s also a little too much. I feel like we need to take a break for at least a week. Right now, it’s like if you can go two days without being drunk and stoned, you are doing pretty good.”

That might be because the members of Be Your Own Pet aren’t averse to jumping off the wagon at a moment’s notice. While Eatherly doesn’t get into details, he suggests there’s a good reason why the group decided Toronto would be a good place to sweat out some toxins.

“We were in Montreal recently,” he says. “We went to a bar and got some pitchers of beer. It was intense and really sweet-tasting. I don’t know what it was called—Chimay Blue or something. But whatever it was, um, I think it must have more alcohol in it than other beers.”

That night, he reveals, Vasquez ended up breaking his bass. As for what transpired after that, some things are best left up to one’s imagination.

Be Your Own Pet plays the Commodore Ballroom on Tuesday (June 17).