Crash Worship Knows How to Drive Fans Wild : The cult band that combines the assaulting feel of industrial dance music with the boom of three live drummers has a following stretching coast to coast.

With pulsing tribal drums, body paint, bonfires, sweaty dancers and unbridled sensuality, Crash Worship’s shows are more like pagan rituals than rock concerts. The San Diego band is renown for whipping audiences into feverish frenzies--and alienating club owners nationwide.

“We did a show in Denver recently where the audience was getting more and more into it, taking off their clothes and frantically dancing,” says JXL, one of the band’s two lead singers. “The venue ended up shutting the show down, but everything kept going for 15 minutes after they pulled the plug. At a certain point, you just get swept away.”

Crash Worship, whose cult audience stretches from New York to L.A., combines the assaulting feel of industrial dance music with the boom of three live drummers.

“We’re a combo of a band and an event,” says JXL--who goes by the initials of his undisclosed real name--regarding his six-piece band, which plays Friday at Club Lingerie. “It’s hard for me to explain because there are really no bands of the past to compare us to. We’re not performance art, the whole thing is very dependent on the audience--how spontaneously they combust.”

To ensure crowd ignition, Crash Worship employs up to 10 additional members to go out in the audience and motivate fans with reaction-provoking antics--from the spraying of fake blood to slipping into possessed, trancelike dances.

The animalistic howls, groans and wails of JXL and second vocalist Jack Tarino also hit a deep chord, tapping emotions that often prove spine-tingling and eerie. “There’s really no structured lyrics,” say JXL, a man of few words. “Most of it’s like speaking in tongues. We follow rhythms.”

Crash Worship started as a collaborative studio project of experimental musicians and studio nerds in 1987 and went on to release several independent singles and EPs on its own and other independent labels (it will put out its first full album next month on the Bay Area label Charnel Music). In 1989, the band evolved into a visceral live act.

“We started realizing there’s certain powerful elements that break things up as compared to a normal show, like intense drumming, relentless beat and fire that drives you,” JXL says. “It all has a deep effect on people in different ways.”

The band is influenced as much by the tangled clamor of Australia’s Birthday Party and the live intensity of the Stooges as by the coursing feel of ancient drum ensembles.

“There is a certain amount of discipline involved in our music too,” JXL says. “Once everything starts going, that’s just the foundation. Everything else on top of that is chaotic, frantic energy.”

* Crash Worship plays Friday at Club Lingerie, 6507 Sunset Blvd., 9 p.m. $8. (213) 466-8557.

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Phair Play: When acclaimed singer-songwriter Liz Phair appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone and in the pages of Vogue after the September release of her second album, “Whip-Smart,” the grumbling in the indie rock world was that she’s become a “media manipulator” who loves the spotlight.

But that doesn’t sound like the Phair who’s decided to postpone touring indefinitely.

“I hate doing some kind of ‘Rock the Nation’ tour,” says Phair, who will play a short solo set tonight at KROQ’s “Almost Acoustic Christmas” benefit at the Universal Amphitheatre. “It doesn’t suit my personality. I never grew up with fantasies about the rock world, so I never have a desire to conquer a show. . . . I have much more of a folky mentality of performing. The last thing I want to do is go out with a band and rock.”

The massive attention that came with the release of her second album proved claustrophobic for Phair.

“I don’t want to be the face of rock for 1994,” she says. “I’d much prefer to see myself on a more lasting chart--a slower ascension and longer graph. I’d like to stick around and last rather than ‘Do it now! Break huge! Break Big!’ I think this job is something that I just have to take in the kind of doses I can enjoy.”