The last time Kansas City band Moaning Lisa played in Iowa, it resulted in an early morning round of fisticuffs between lead singer David George and guitarist Desmond Ramos.

The gig was a festival in Clinton that also featured the likes of Buckcherry and Professional Murder Music, and George says he had driven all the way from Kansas City.

Knowing he would have to drive back as well, he decided to crash in the van for a while before the quartet hit the road again, only to discover that Ramos had other ideas.

“He had commandeered the van as the love shack, and he had a lot of pretty ladies hangin’ out and partyin’,” George says while driving home from band practice. “So I bided my time and later that night I was like `Someone’s going to drive and I’m going to sleep.'”

So the group made a stop at the I-80 Truck Stop in eastern Iowa to grab a bite to eat. George says Ramos was sound asleep, so in order to wake him up he started rustling things around in back of the vehicle, and Ramos promptly jumped on him, thinking George was actually throwing his stuff out of the van. But he quickly got off, and ran inside . Then all hell broke loose.

“He wouldn’t talk to me in line at all. I’m just like `Dude c’mon, talk to me, I’m not pissed, I just want to go to sleep,’ ” George explains. “Next thing you know he spits food on me and starts yelling at me and I just slugged him.”

The fight spilled out into the middle of the truck stop before being broken up by security. The cops were also summoned, but George and Ramos were excused for their rowdiness.

George just calls this behavior rock `n’ roll, an attitude the band is proud of. This Saturday that attitude will once again be on display on Iowa turf, this time at Hairy Mary’s in Des Moines.

Many times you will read that a band “is not a stranger to adversity,” but it might never have been so true with Moaning Lisa. One of the best examples of this is that Moaning Lisa has gone through seven bass players and four drummers since its birth in the late ’90s.

“Drummers are finicky, bass players are finicky and if you aren’t the one writing the music all the time, you get kind of lost; it happens,” George said about the revolving rhythm section.

The band has also had numerous problems with the distribution of its debut album, “Wonderful,” which was finally released in June of 2000 by Veronica Records after numerous holdups, including the shipment of records being sent to the wrong state.

“Wonderful” is a 12-track record that conjures up sounds of the more pop-oriented Goo Goo Dolls side of George, but also the hard rockin’ ’80s metal lover in Ramos. Tracks such as “If You Wanted” sound heavily influenced by The Foo Fighters.

While George doesn’t mind being compared to these bands, he has a little different description for the band’s sound, especially on the material that it has been writing since “Wonderful” was released.

“Presently I say Cheap Trick meets Guns n’ Roses,” George says. “We’ve got that old school punk-rock vibe of Cheap Trick with the ’80s metal rock of Guns n’ Roses.”

Recently the “Wonderful” album cover was named one of Playboy.com’s top 25 sexiest album covers of 2001. The cover pictures George’s girlfriend, Kristin, walking down the road, wearing nothing but headphones and carrying a boom box in one hand and a doll in the other. The picture was shot from behind so the strategically held doll covers most of Kristin’s tail end.

Plenty of attention has been given to this cover, in fact, sometimes more than to the album itself, George says. But he is confident in the songs he and his band write, so if that’s what it takes, so be it.

“That’s the first thing you see, so it does overshadow [the music] because it’s the first thing you come across,” George clarifies.

“But hey, I would rather have someone talk about the album cover than not, and now some people are going to pick it up because of the album cover and listen to it.”