GORY DAYS "There were times when I could get away with fucking murder," recalls David Yow (left). "Smash some guy in the face, kiss the next guy, squeeze some girl's tit, and hit the next guy over the head with a microphone."
They were heady, giddy times: black was white, up was down, and scruffy long-haired drug addicts dressed like John Fogerty were toppling pop royalty on the Billboard charts. The cultural upheavals of the early ’90s rang as a signal that some had grown tired of the pompous, preening megalomaniacal myth of the pop star. This shift had unintended consequences, however, as some of the strangest music of rock’s storied history wound up on a worldwide stage behind a veneer of what sure seemed normal — regular-looking guys and gals creating really, really twisted music. Exhibit A: the charmed career of Chicago-via-Austin art-noise punks the Jesus Lizard, who, reincarnated, come to the Paradise this Saturday.
Lizard mouthpiece David Yow sums up the chasm between his band’s innocent appearance and the demonic demeanor of their music: “Some people did perceive us as dark, or angry, or crazy, or whatever — but we were kind of just . . . normal guys who liked to . . . enjoy stuff.”
One can only imagine what lurks between those ellipses. During the band’s initial run, from their 1989 debut, Pure EP (Touch and Go), to their major-label 1998 swan song, Blue(Capitol), Yow and company became internationally infamous for 1) putting on the most incendiary live shows of any band around; 2) sporting the tightest rhythm section in rock; and 3) having, in Yow, one of the genre’s most perverse (and prolific) minds.
It’s all there on track one of that first EP: even as the delirious horror show of senseless and pointless revenge in “Blockbuster” reaches ludicrous lows (“We’ll nab your kids/ Take ‘em out back on the deck and barbecue their ribs”), it remains swinging and catchy. As psych-guitar flourishes swirl around a taut bass whump, Yow’s litany of tortures-to-come is capped with “Do you think you’d like that?/Do ya, motherfucker?!”
“A lot of the songs were based, lyrically, on dreams that I had,” he explains. “Or nightmares. I don’t know where the more desperate and morbid stuff comes from — maybe if I sought out professional help I’d find out! I’ve got a pretty healthy juvenile sense of humor. My father was really clever and quite the wordsmith, and I think I got that tendency from him — the combination of my love for Scrabble and my love for dirty jokes.”
Yow’s quest for smutty lyrical subversion was matched by the sly, surging machinations of the music behind him. For every instance of balls-out riff rock in their catalogue, the Lizard had a handful of creepy lurchers — disorienting tirades that pounced and stumbled through mirrored halls. Their sound (augmented on record and often live by spartan engineer Steve Albini) was stark, each instrument ringing clear and distinct: Mac McNeilly’s drums, dry and effectless; Duane Denison’s guitar, crisp and cutting; and David Wm. Sims’s bass, the sonic equivalent of a mean drunk who won’t leave the party no matter how many hints you drop. Top it with Yow’s demented caterwauling and you had an intoxicating mix of nausea and adrenaline.
Live, they were a dynamo, and that due mostly to Yow’s unpredictable antics — his wildman weirdness in flailing contrast with the inhuman precision of his band’s attack. This was insane art punk that came after bands like Nick Cave’s Birthday Party but well before modern-day Lizard-esque rafter swingers like Lightning Bolt, Fucked Up, and Pissed Jeans.
“There were times when I could get away with fucking murder,” says Yow. “You know, like, smash some guy in the face, then kiss the next guy, then squeeze some girl’s tit, and hit the next guy over the head with a microphone. Or maybe give the next guy a beer. To me, it all felt perfectly natural.”
One reason Yow could do whatever he wanted was because his band never screwed up. (“Ever,” he adds.) If there’s one problem to having a band with perfect execution, it’s that fans demand that consistency year in and year out. For Yow and company, this pressure started to wear, especially as they tried to branch out. “It’s a weird thing. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. A band like AC/DC are allowed to do what they do and not change, and everyone’s happy. Other bands, if you try to change, the fans don’t care for you anymore. Or if you don’t change, then you’re accused of stagnating.” Although the Lizard never stagnated, by the time they’d grabbed the major-label brass ring with Shotand Blue, it was hard to tell who their audience was supposed to be — they were too bizarre for the mainstream and no longer producing the psychotic maelstroms of their Touch and Go years. In 1999, they quietly disbanded, leaving a generation of millennial noise-rockers to pick from their corpse.
Now that the ’80s nostalgia of the ’90s has given way to the ’90s nostalgia of the fast-ending naughts, the proper audience might finally be in place. Yow warns us not to expect any new albums, however. “I have no desire to write Jesus Lizard songs. But I’ve said ‘never’ before and it has bit me on the butt and made me look like a fool. Let’s just say that it’s sort of been like hanging out with the old girlfriend. It’s cool, I don’t want to fuck her. But, I dunno, she’s kinda hot.”
THE JESUS LIZARD + ANIMAL HOSPITAL | Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | November 14 at 9 pm | $25 | 617.562.8800 orwww.thedise.com
