“It’s all about having fun, and I think what we’re having right now is more fun then we’ve ever had,” says Janis Figure’s Chris Coyne. The band is out for fun, and wants you to come with on an interstellar journey to the center of your crotch...
   A show will involve any number of elements. For starters, there’s singer Billy Bisson, doing his thing. “If Billy is having a good night, then it’s a fun show,” Coyne says.  Also, audiences tend to get naked at Janis Figure shows. Offstage, the band is apt to get naked themselves and do some streaking (especially in backwater towns), or maybe antagonize tourmates, like they did to tedious AmRep heavies Nashville Pussy (when they played together on St. Patty’s Day) in Kansas City. All good fun, of course.
   Janis Figure is not about a look into some tortured musician’s battered psyche. “It’s more of a celebration, as corny as that sounds. It’s fun. The four of us get together and celebrate what’s right in our lives” Coyne explains. “We’re not an alterna-hippie band, though!”
Indeed not: Janis Figure is many things -- rock, surf, country, punk -- but they ain’t hippies. “It’s one crazy omelet, you know? You put some of this in there, some of that in there, and wrap it up,” says Bisson, who, by the way, owns a restaurant that serves fine omelets.
Although Janis has only been playing with its current lineup for a couple of years, the band itself has been around for much longer. Founding members Bisson and Coyne would rather feign amnesia than talk about the band’s past incarnations. “We feel like this is THE BAND now,” bassist/unofficial manager/all-around nice guy Coyne explains.
   “THE BAND," as Coyne would say, got started when guitarist Dave Feirn signed on two years ago, and drummer Darin “Chachi” Laufenberg (a Madison native) joined six months later. All previous sounds (and also all previous songs) were scrapped with the advent of the new players. “We didn’t know what we were all about,” says Bisson of the band’s previous musical forays. “Then Dave and Chachi got into the band, and we discovered ourselves.”
“This is what it’s supposed to be,” enthuses Coyne. “It feels right for everybody.”
   Although Feirne says, “We’ll clear people out of the clubs, if they do come. We’ll make sure they go home early,” the truth is that Janis Figure’s tunes, extolling the virtues of fast cars and hot chicks, have made them incredibly popular in their home town of Minneapolis and beyond. (Wichita and Kansas City are big fan bases. “We played with Gene Loves Jezebel in Kansas City!” remarks Coyne.)
Coincidentally, even though their songs thematically cover macho big-guy greaser topics, the four members of the band are actually quite small, and combined probably don’t weigh as much as, say, Wynonna Judd.
   In the last couple of years, Janis has put out three EPs and one full-length album. “We’re bad ass!” says Bisson, of his band’s musical output.
   Janis Figure’s CD Transformer is out now, which contains different versions of songs released over the past year on the three EPs (collectively titled the “Three-Pack Tight Pack”). All recordings are released on the band’s own Flak label.
   “We released a three-pack so while we were working on material for the full-length, we could release stuff and sell it real cheap,” Coyne says. “We recorded all the songs for the full-length, plus a few more new songs.”
   The band has sold out of 500 copies of Burn Out!, the first installment of the “Tight Pack,” and is nearly sold out of Mechanical Bull, the second in the series.
And, what does the band’s name mean? “A Janis Figure has, through history and time, a few different meanings,” explains Bisson. “During the Greek period, it was for January, and there was an actual Janis Figure, which has two faces on it, showing the two sides of people. In the Renaissance period, if there were composers they couldn’t peg into one particular direction, they’d call them a ‘Janis Figure.’
“But that old Janis used to be spelled ‘Janus.’ We put an ‘I’ on there because we thought it was too close to ‘anus.’ We didn’t want people to think we were called ‘Anus Finger.’”
   It’s too fitting. Go figure. For more information on Janis Figure, or to order any of their stuff, check out their Web page at www2.bitstream.net/~wowflak/, or e-mail them at wowflak@bitstream.net  (snail mail: 2441 Grand Ave So., Minneapolis, MN 55405).