From the front, Atom Smith’s Lincoln Heights home is drab and desperately in need of a paint job. But from the back, it’s an “Alice in Wonderland” playland for adults.

Overlooking the 1-10 freeway, the flipside of his home is a cartoonish Victorian funhouse painted in bright blue, purple and yellow. A slide from the deck twists down into a giant teacup-shaped Jacuzzi and two monstrous mushrooms sprout up from the ground. Nearby, a fire pit signals Smith’s love of evening get togethers.

The whole place has the feel of an old-fashioned backyard barbecues doused in counter-culture psychedelic silliness.

Smith, a music producer and graphic artist, lives here with his wife, Athena Demos. They are among the core members of the local performing arts collective The Mutaytor, an amalgam of electronic jam band, rock group and burlesque circus with about 25 people at its nucleus.

With its penchant for spectacle and pyrotechnics, there’s something distinctly Los Angeles about The Mutaytor. And something very Burning Man about it, too.

“In building my house, in building my studio, in my writing when I’m working on fresh music, I’m always thinking, ‘Is this something I want to bring to Burning Man? Is there some Burning Man in this?’” the 40-year-old Smith says in his upstairs studio where this past spring he worked on mixing the latest Mutaytor album.

This week, many of The Mutaytor members are back where the project began — Burning Man, a massive week-long event held annually in northern Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

This year’s party on the playa, the name of the dried up lakebed Burning Man sits on, officially began on Monday and runs seven days, culminating with fire, frantic all-night dancing, and even some reflection.

For many years, The Mutaytor had the beloved distinction of being the house band at Burning Man, and with that title came a devoted following.

Case in point: during a two-week tour this past spring, The Mutaytor were able to use networking and their Burning Man name recognition to get 700 people in Boise, Idaho, a town they’d never been to or know anyone in, to come out on a weeknight for their show.

“I don’t think I ever thought about community before. I probably learned everything about ‘community’ from this process,” explains 39-year-old Buck A.E. Down, Mutaytor’s self-described “raconteur and talking monkey,” who also helps build Burning Man’s temporary structures each year.

“I must have lived 10, 15 different places growing up,” he says. “I couldn’t tell you the name of a single one of my neighbors. They never came over, I never when to a single one of my neighbors' houses. You’re almost forced to do that at Burning Man. I bet you can ask 50 people at Burning Man if they know the name of their neighbor at home and they won’t be able to, but I guarantee they know the names of five people from each camp on all four sides of their camp. Bet ya.”

This week, The Mutaytor will perform at the event for the first time since 2007, a year when the collective’s friends, fans and extended family were suddenly forced to question their devotion to the group after a founding member was arrested on national television in connection with soliciting a minor.

It was Mutaytor’s sink or swim moment.

Three years later the group is still together, still keeping their heads above water, making music, moving into a new ambitious headquarters and set to perform two shows this week at Burning Man, back where it all began.

In the simplest terms, Burning Man is an experiment in creating a temporary city built on the ethos of radical self-reliance and radical self-expression. It springs to life late each summer in Nevada’s flat and barren Black Rock Desert.

Here, groups of people erect camps that range from a couple tents and folding chairs to elaborate themed villages that host secret-but-not-too-secret sets by famous DJs backed by high-tech sound and light equipment.

And everywhere, there’s art. Wild, odd, dangerous, interactive, contemplative and contemptuous art — a lot of which spits fire.

People here live religiously by the slogan “no spectators, only participants.”

That made an indelible mark on Down, who started going in the late 1990s.

“I’ve been in show business the totality of my adult life. By the nature of doing that you sort of have this relationship with art where you’re the vendor. Everyone’s looking at you and you’re looking back at them,” he explains. “The concept of Burning Man, all of a sudden, art became everyone’s responsibility.”

The line between consuming and creating art at Burning Man is blurred to the point you could be doing both at the same time. Anywhere else, says Down, it’s almost impossible to replicate that.

The art and music and partying come together to make the imaginary Black Rock City, a communal living experience that over the years has developed its own customs, jargon and a world-wide reputation. There's no in-and-out at Burning Man and no commerce, save for the sanctioned ice and coffee vendors. That means everything you need to survive for a week in the desert you have to bring with you. And then pack it out when it's all over.

Physically, it’s the hardest, most bizarre weeklong camping trip you’ll ever choose to endure — year after year.

Philosophically, it changes people’s lives.

Burning Man, the event, grew organically out of an intimate gathering in 1986 on San Francisco’s Baker Beach when artist Larry Harvey [pictured at right] set a wooden effigy on fire.

Since then it’s become the stuff of modern-day myth: it’s where Silicon Valley geeks go to think outside the box and, of course, blow off steam; it’s a bacchanal orgy of burnt-out hippies and ecstasy-dropping ravers; it was the place where Adam Lambert had the chemically enhanced epiphany to audition for “American Idol.”

All that’s true.

It boasts being the largest leave no trace event in the world and it’s where five years ago, following Hurricane Katrina, the Burners Without Borders relief organization was born. The underlying hope of this desert nation — where it’s easy to miss the message among all the body paint, non-stop techno music and recreational drug use — is that when the party ends, people take Burning Man’s best values off the playa and transfer them to the real world. 

During the week, upwards of 40,000 people will travel to the make-believe Black Rock City to be a part of the Burning Man experience. (The event moved from San Francisco to the Black Rock Desert in 1991.)

Out on the playa, dirty and tired, is where 29-year-old Andrea “Roo” Ruane is at her happiest while she operates the big machinery to build Burning Man’s 70- foot-tall namesake effigy, lovingly referred to as The Man.

Her art is geeking out over the technical, and her professional work in the movie industry as a grip lets her do just that at Burning Man, as well in her role as fire liaison with The Mutaytor. (Ruane taught herself to spin fire on the roof of her L.A. apartment after being fascinated by it at Burning Man.)

In general, she says, she’s not the pie-in-the-sky dreamer type artist. What she likes to do is use her technical skills  to make those big dreamer visions happen.

She’s even turned down movie jobs so she can be part of Mutaytor and of Burning Man.

“Which doesn’t make career sense or financial sense but it makes happiness sense,” Ruane says with a big smile. “And happiness sense has become a lot more valuable to me than money …

“To a point,” she adds after a pause. “So you find your balance.”

The Man [pictured at right] stands all week at the center of Black Rock City until Saturday night, when he’ll be set on fire and the place will explode in celebration.

It really is one hell of a party.

However, it’s not easy to go to Burning Man. It takes time, detailed preparation, a good chunk of money and you never quite seem to get the playa dust off everything. But devoted burners, the name for the people who go to Burning man — if you haven’t noticed by now, there is a rich vernacular surrounding the event — spend months preparing costumes, camping supplies, DJ gear, stockpiles of food and alcohol, batteries, wet wipes and hand sanitizer. They hold warehouse party fundraisers, save up vacation time at work and have the unconscious habit of starting every other sentence with, “This one time at Burning Man … ”

Artists who go to Burning Man invest countless hours, weeks, months, creating works of the heart, and of the pocketbook, that will probably never make it out of the desert in one piece.

Nor were they ever meant to.

It was at this place where you can taste and touch the creative chaos, where it feels so tangible and excitingly dangerous, that The Mutaytor was born.

“Special Olympics of art is not a bad descriptor. It really is,” Down says with a slight smirk. “You have this environment where you don’t necessarily have to be the best at what you do to do it. Your idea doesn’t even need to be great or well thought out or even safely performed but the fact that you have the gumption to get up and do it, I think that’s something The Mutaytor and Burning Man share is that potential. It’s part of what creates inspiration.”

The Mutaytor’s catch phrase is “Plot. Scheme. Toil. Smash! Repeat.” The group was built around one simple drum kit, but now includes DJ beats, guitar, bass, horns, fire dancers, aerial daredevils, hula hoopers and highly choreographed dance numbers.

In short, it’s a spectacle.

“That’s kind of the creed and the motto of the project,” says Ruane, “is to take our crazy little ideas that we think make us better people and make the world a better place and present that to everyone and inspire people to do the same. And it’s done that.”

There’ve been two pivotal performances for The Mutaytor at Burning Man. The first was an expensive swan song of slightly ridiculous proportions in 2004. The second was in 2007, and it was to prove the band could not be dismantled by allegations that founder Matty Nash had solicited a minor during a sting facilitated by NBC’s “Dateline.”

[Timelapse video of Mutaytor's 2004 performance. Video courtesy of Mutaytor.]

The core Mutaytor group began to coalesce in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By 2004, it decided to pool its resources and put some thought into putting on a big show at Burning Man.

For the large-scale artists and sound camps at Burning Man, it is a bit of a pissing contest, and Mutaytor was as guilty as anyone in competing in that, says Down.

“We kinda painted ourselves into a bit of a corner out there, one we’re still course-correcting from,” Down notes about 2004. “I think we got as big as we could of and spent as much money as we could of and put on as ostentatious show as was absolutely humanly possible.”

Following that year’s burning of The Man, Mutaytor presented a $25,000 fiery rock show mounted on two flatbed trucks. Cranes hoisted performers in the air. They used the most propane in their career. To feed all the volunteers that day alone cost $500.

They estimate 15,000 people saw them that night.

And then they had to tear it all down. That’s the toil part of their motto.

“It’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever love, is Mutaytor,” says 40-year-old Christine Nash, aka Crunchy, a founding member and the self-appointed group den mother whose career in the music industry allows her to bankroll much of Mutaytor’s projects.

There was a time, she points out, when Mutaytor did start paying for itself by landing lucrative gigs — and it’s starting to be that way again.

But for a while, the band was just too taboo to touch.

In early 2007, Crunchy’s then-husband Matty Nash, one of the key founders of The Mutaytor, was shown on “To Catch A Predator,” the NBC “Dateline” series where men who think they’re meeting a young teen they’ve been chatting with online, are instead busted on camera and arrested. 

The show with Nash aired Jan. 30, 2007. On camera, talking to the show’s host Chris Hansen, Nash admits he and his wife were seeing a marriage counselor for “sexual stuff that I have done … ”

Immediately, the Burning Man message boards started buzzing.

Longtime Mutaytor fans were not only shocked but disgusted and they vented openly online. The fallout was almost too much for The Mutaytor, which cut all ties with Nash but still lost its then manager and booking agency, according to an article in the L.A. Times.

This was the band’s sink or swim moment, says Crunchy, who, when talking about what happened to the man she still calls a friend, likes to remember the phrase: “You are so much more than the worst thing you’ve ever done.”

“Despite whatever happened when we lost the founder of the project, everybody realized that for years it hadn’t been just about him,” she says. “We had that moment of: Do we keep going, or is this worth it? And it’s that same refrain of, we wouldn’t still be here it wasn’t worth it.”

Still, Down says it was absolutely necessary for the band to appear that year at Burning Man. They teamed up with the artists behind “Crude Awakening,” an enormous art instillation in the shape of an oil derrick. Mutaytor performed next to the piece right before it shot a terrifying fireball in to the sky.

“It was the most anybody talked about us in a long time,” says Down, “and I think we felt like it was really important to shift the narrative and just say, ‘Look we’re still doing this, and how we’ve changed it, and this is what it looks like.

‘And by the way, here’s 900 gallons of propane going off behind us.

So there.’”

[Burning Man's Center Camp area, 2007. Visit this live webcam to peek in on the playa.]

As much as Mutaytor is part of Burning Man, it’s also as much of a part of Los Angeles — both full of dreamers and doers, public ups and downs, a taste for art and culture that’s refined and crude at the same time.

Plus, in what other town, notes Crunchy, can you call on the help of friends who are also professionals with skills in propane, special effects, aerial rigging, lighting, sound, choreography or marketing?

It’s here in what burners call the “default world” that groups such as The Mutaytor can throw work to fellow burners in the industry, and vice versa.

Again, it’s that hope of a community that lasts longer than just one week partying in the desert.

“When you think of a diverse community ... we really do have rocket scientists and mathematicians and a lot of amazing, talented production people,” says Crunchy. “The band has fed people’s talents on-playa, and I think on-playa has definitely fed talents with what we do year-round.”

The ongoing joke is that when it comes to Burning Man, “last year was the last good year.” Burners have been saying that since 1996.

Crunchy has a similar philosophy about The Mutaytor: “I’ve always said I’m amazed it’s lasted this long.

“But in a way it doesn’t surprise me.”