“Do you want earplugs?” he asks.

“Do I need them?”

The grin widens. “You’re going to need them.”

In the upstairs, high-ceilinged rehearsal space and recording studio at Beachsound, an audio-production company based in Miami Gardens, Elba sits at a long, wood conference table topped with pizza boxes, paper towels and a plastic shopping bag filled with bottles of Guinness and Corona. A recording console occupies the opposite side of the room, and in the middle, guitars rest in their cases near large amplifiers and an imposing drum kit. Two microphones await the voices of Elba, best known to South Florida music fans as the lead shouter of the veteran punk act the Holy Terrors, and Brian Franklin, a singer-songwriter whose career as a Springsteen-idolizing solo artist and sideman has trafficked in music of a more-moderate volume than he will play here tonight.

Elba and Franklin have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about volume lately. More specifically, they’ve been contemplating noise and the South Florida man who has become synonymous with the word: Frank Falestra, a music producer, musician, firebrand and quasi performance artist who operates under the sobriquet Rat Bastard, though most everyone just calls him Rat. A producer who has recorded legions of local acts within the past 30 years — he was one of the first people to commit to tape the music of Marilyn Manson — Rat also has been credited (and blamed) for pioneering “squelching,” a form of assaultive, improvisational musicmaking that challenges the very notion of music as a form of entertainment. As Rat terrorizes a violin with a bow or bloodies a guitar’s fretboard while abrading his fingertips, a listener doesn’t necessarily enjoy what he’s hearing — he feels it, though painfully and often momentarily, as the ability to clear a room is another of Rat’s trademarks. An encyclopedic knowledge of under- and aboveground music, an outspokenness that easily crosses over from compelling to scabrous and a preternatural ability to attract beautiful women to his side are some of his other traits. Additionally, Rat has enjoyed a long career working in operations and ticketing for a major airline — he declines to say which — at Miami International and other airports.

All this, Elba and Franklin say, make Rat the ideal subject for a rock opera. Hearing Damage: Songs Inspired by the Life and Noise of Rat Bastard debuted this past October at Churchill’s Pub in Miami, featuring a band fronted by Elba and Franklin and including bassist Will Trev, guitarist Russell Mofsky and drummer Andre Serafini. The show also offered between-song readings of personal anecdotes about Rat that the songwriters solicited on Ratopera.com. [Hearing Damage will make its Broward County debut Saturday night at Cinema Paradiso in Fort Lauderdale.]

“It just seemed like his life was this big story,” Franklin says of Rat while seated across the table from Elba. “It was the classic Clark Kent-Superman thing, where you have this guy who by day works for this major airline, who is somewhat responsible for planes coming in and out of an airport, and by night, he’s this incredible character that everybody knows who is producing some of the best music in town. And the next day, he goes back to work. It was just this very strange story.”

Rat’s antics are legendary, and stories about him often involve elements of humor, insubordination, obsession, destruction and violence — though, it must be noted, Rat is more often than not the target of violent intentions rather than the perpetrator of them. For all his provocative musical tendencies, the tall and stocky Rat is something of a pacifist; he would rather raise the volume of his guitar than his fists. In the late 1990s, during a performance with the extreme-noise trio To Live and Shave in L.A. at Fort Lauderdale’s Edge nightclub — now Revolution Live — Rat continued to play his instrument while a member of the security detail attempted to cut short the group’s set by wringing Rat’s neck with his hands. During a solo performance at the same venue, Rat was accosted onstage by several hulking members of the rap-rock outfit L.U.N.G.S., who were incensed that he had recorded a song titled “L.U.N.G.S. Ink Lane Bryant Endorsement Pact,” a wry, insulting reference to the plus-size-women’s clothing line. Unscathed and undeterred, Rat improvised a song about the band as the bemused rappers stomped offstage and out of the club. After a particularly sonic appearance by Rat’s Laundry Room Squelchers at the City Link Music Fest, a downtown Fort Lauderdale bar faxed this magazine’s editorial office demanding that “the Rat Bastard” be banned from further festival appearances. And, of course, as writer Tom Bowker recalled in a recent story for The Miami Herald, a self-appointed music critic in 2003 ordered Rat at gunpoint to stop playing during one of his long-running Thursday night “squelches” at Churchill’s. Rat dared the man to shoot him and kept on playing. The man lowered the gun from Rat’s forehead and fled the pub. (In a recent phone call, Rat confirmed the story, saying the man returned to the bar the following week to apologize, explaining that he is a decent family man who simply snapped during the Squelchers’ set. “The music made him nuts,” Rat observes.)

“When I met Rat, it was at [the defunct Miami Beach venue] Blue Steel and he was basically hanging out with all of the singer-songwriters,” Franklin recalls. “I was invited to come up and play, and suddenly, this crazy guy comes up to me and says, ‘Your songs are great but you gotta stop eating the mike, man.’ And he starts giving me all this direction. I had never met the guy in my life, and next thing I know, I’m in his studio. As far as I knew, this was a guy who liked acoustic music. We were at his house and he showed me the Spin worst-band-in-America thing and he played me Scraping Teeth, and I was like, ‘What the hell is this?’ [In 1993, Spin magazine famously named Rat's group Scraping Teeth the "worst band in America."] So I didn’t know him as a noise guy until much later.”

As Elba and Franklin make clear both in conversation and in the songs of Hearing Damage, Rat’s noisier endeavors are not devoid of artistry or substance. There is, they argue, a method to his eardrum-piercing madness.

“The thing about squelching,” Franklin explains, “and the thing about noise rock in general, even though it’s not what we do, is that there’s something very liberating about the whole thing. You spend a lot of your time trying to be a good musician within a genre or within the constraints of what you think music should be. And then, you go up and play [with Rat], and none of that matters anymore. You just get up there and make noise, and suddenly, you realize there’s textures that seem attractive at the time when you’re playing them.”

“It helps if you’re really drunk,” Elba interjects with a laugh.

“He has himself described it as unlistenable,” Franklin continues. “But I’ve always thought of him as something of an Andy Kaufman figure, too. Because I always felt that he was testing the audience to see if they were in on the joke. I think he is legitimately bored by stuff. He told me once, and I’ll never forget this: He said, ‘Bad is interesting, but mediocre is worse.’ I think he finds things that are bad compelling.”

Hoping to reach an audience beyond Rat’s core group of admirers, freaks and fellow antagonists, the songwriters have tailored the opera to reconcile Rat’s idiosyncrasies and contradictions with the more-relatable aspects of his life. To do so, these first-time librettists engaged in poetic license when addressing Rat’s childhood and personal relationships. “He’s My Nothing,” which sounds not unlike a lost Lucinda Williams song and which Elba and Franklin take extra care to note is not based on any particular woman, is told from the perspective of a girlfriend who wonders how she ended up washing Rat’s skullcaps and coming in second to his music. “A Boy Called Rat” and “Francis Is Special,” meanwhile, imagine what his parents made of their tinnitus-inducing child.

“Basically, we made up stuff about his childhood,” Elba says. “The most-speculative things are imagining what his parents say: ‘What do we know about this little boy?’ We took artistic liberties.”

Two nights later at Tobacco Road, Elba walks through the crowd dispensing construction-grade earplugs from a large box. “You’ll need these,” he offers without argument, flashing that ever-ready grin. Within bordello-red walls lined with old publicity photos of blues artists such as Buddy Guy, James Cotton and John Lee Hooker, an audience has gathered to get its first opportunity to hear a rock opera that Franklin quips “is like Tommy, except here it’s the audience who is going deaf.”

The performance also showcases a collaboration between two seemingly disparate songwriters. With the Holy Terrors, Elba delivers intense, abstract songs that read like a topographical map of territory covered by the best post-punk bands of the past 30 years, particularly the Pixies, Fugazi and Hüsker Dü. Franklin, meanwhile, has long found comfort in a more-earnest, narrative style of songwriting, often performed with acoustic guitars, triumphant choruses and minimal yelping. Both men have anticipated a certain level of skepticism about their working together.

“I’m a big Holy Terrors fan and I’ve been in a lot of singer-songwriter bands,” Franklin says. “Rob didn’t realize that we had so much in common in our musical interests. Like, I’m a big Clash fan and we’re both Elvis Costello fans. None of that stuff came out in my music, [but] it’s always been in his music. So I was naturally drawn to the idea of working with somebody who could bring that out in me.”

The result is an impressive collection of songs that depend on the strengths of the songwriters’ respective styles. The music can be loud, naturally, but it’s never gratuitous and is insistently melodic. Even the songs that Elba and Franklin mockingly describe as “ballads” — “Outside This Bar,” “He’s My Nothing” — evoke a remarkable degree of tension, though this is offset by the peculiar subject matter and the obvious fun the musicians are having with the material.

No one, perhaps, could be more amused by the outcome than Rat himself. Standing close to the Tobacco Road stage, he bobs in place to the music, occasionally raising a beer bottle in salute to the performers and unable to suppress a knowing smile while Elba and Franklin introduce the potentially embarrassing “He’s My Nothing.”

“It’s more like a roasting. That’s the way I looked at it,” Rat says the next day, adding that he approves of the songwriters’ embellishments. “That’s their perception, you know. That’s all right. They’re just throwing it out there. I thought it was funny.”

For Elba and Franklin, the rock opera may be a means of teasing Rat, but it is obviously born out of an abiding respect, fascination and friendship. It’s also, in a way, a sincere expression of gratitude.

“My life would have been different if I had not met Rat,” Franklin admits. “Rat was the guy that said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come in to record in the studio?’ Three weeks later, I had my album and then, three weeks later, I was in L.A. playing for the president of Mercury [Records]. And that whole experience changed the way I looked at not only my own music, but I learned so much from the whole thing. And I learned that he was right the whole way through about everything he was telling me about music.

“Except for the whole, ‘[You] should listen to To Live and Shave in L.A.’ I put it on for my parents once and it nearly killed a dog.”

Hearing Damage: Songs Inspired by the Life and Noise of Rat Bastard will be performed 9 p.m. Saturday at Cinema Paradiso, 503 S.E. Sixth St., in Fort Lauderdale. Tickets cost $12. Call 954-760-9898