PIG FUCKER MUSIC

It’s the day after Halloween and nearly seven years since the Jesus Lizard last performed in their second hometown of Austin. They are here to headline at the giant outdoor venue the Far Out Lounge as part of Levitation Fest, and Gang of Four have already delivered an intimidating set that left at least one household appliance annihilated (for the record, Jon King and microwave). But instead of the people leaving, they’re staying in droves, not just the aging 1990s faction but people under 30 too. The Jesus Lizard are more popular than ever—not that they actively sought out this new recognition, but like all the best things, it sorta just happened. But how? Journalistic research has uncovered younger fans’ interest in using handheld devices to stream modern bands influenced by the Jesus Lizard (Chat Pile, Metz, etc.). Or maybe Jesus Lizard never stopped being great.

Even though the Lizards have been touring on and off around the world since reforming after a 10-year hiatus in 2009, this feels different. These are not just reenactments of musical brain damage from the classic era; this time there is new material. Rack, which was released in mid-September, might be the best nonfood item to return to shelves since Twinkies resumed production in 2013. When this thing came out, rock critics nationwide, especially in the Southeast, spilled their lattes falling over each other to get to their computers and talk about how great it is.

“Fuck your family!” David Yow sweetly tells the newly expanded, vast, all-ages audience at Far Out, and they crash into the opening of “Puss” from their classic Liar LP. Mac McNeilly, Duane Denison, and David Sims still do not so much play their instruments as use them to rearrange and destroy all molecules in the immediate vicinity. At age 64, it’s some sort of medical miracle that McNeilly still hits the drums this hard. And that the drums survive! Immediately Yow is enveloped by the crowd. On reemergence he is, as always, lewd, funny, and debaucherous; his weathered face and graying goatee make him look like an aging satyr with a can of Lone Star, an agile shaman trickster who still dances, spits, and sings in rock glossolalia and varying stages of undress.

Off stage, he is well-known to be among the most unassuming of rock stars. Just a few days prior we were having a calm discussion about cooking. Yow knows his way around a BBQ smoker, and he had recently made a green turkey lasagna that, it turns out, is not actually made with green birds. “I didn’t use any recipe, I was just winging it.” (Turkey humor?) “There’s a bunch of spinach and pesto and it was really good."

Cooking being just one of his pastimes, others include visual art, penis origami, and Scrabble. He’s an actor, too, and a really good one. His role as Marshall in Macon Blair’s 2017 / Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is one of the more effective movie weirdos in recent memory. (“That was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in my life.”) He’s also in Blair’s new Toxic Avenger movie as “a cheerful hobo with anger management issues, a guy who gives the Toxic Avenger some advice, but he’s crazy.’’ At times it seems possible that Yow’s lyrics are somehow subconsciously evocative of these same types of charismatic creeps: “Yeah, there’s been Killer McHann and Dudley. I sort of think that some of the lyrics are like a script to a movie, like a little story. Typically a movie has some people in it, so the lead character just sort of shows up. I don’t really know why. Certainly not all the songs are like that.”

On their most well-known albums the late Steve Albini, as producer, famously buried Yow’s lyrics in the mix. But the vivid, even poetic, depictions of misadventure in the songs are easily uncovered by anyone who can read a lyrics sheet. Yow himself doesn’t read much. “I've never been much of a reader. Once I started doing movies, I started reading scripts. So I’m better than I used to be. I was always kind of a slow reader. But I love words and love wordplay and I’m better at Scrabble than anybody I know.”

Currently, it almost seems trite to recognize musical influences as being disparate. In the realm of rock writ it is practically required, when describing bands who are influenced by the Jesus Lizard (and many who are not), to mention “chaotic precision,” “cerebral illiteracy,” or maybe “troglodyte sophistication." But at one point it actually took some guts for a group to invent an original recipe and make it seem like they were “winging it. ” Coming up through the punk scene in the 1980s, the embryonic Lizards were unaffected by dogma that treated everything that came before as anathema to whatever punk was supposed to be. In other words, they took themselves unseriously enough to be into serious music, like prog.

Sitting in the band trailer at the Far Out, guitarist Duane Denison recalls: “As teenagers in the ’70s it was prog and glam. Those guys were the shredders of our day.” On the first early meetings with his bandmates in Austin, he confirms, “they weren’t afraid to admit that they liked Led Zeppelin, Roxy Music, bands of that era. There was bloated arena rock that we all hated, though, too."

Though Yow rarely listens to music now, there was a time when, he says, “I was into Alphonse Mouzon, Weather Report, Return to Forever, Brand X, and Gentle Giant. Mac was really into that stuff too. And Robert Fripp might be Duane’s favorite guitar player [ I don’t know about that, but he’s in there,’ Denison comments], and we just had a review of the record where they said Lord Godiva’ sounded like King Crimson. And the beginning is very King Crimson-y, but it hadn’t occurred to me.”

Yow is referring to an opening bass line played by David Sims, a pick player whose sound is up front, loud, both antagonistic and complementary to Denison’s guitar. A mild-mannered NYC accountant by day, on stage his gaze transforms into someone who maybe learned economics counting steps in a prison yard. But it’s an amiable version of Sims who acknowledges bands like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and Motörhead as “direct antecedents, at least in part, to what we’re doing," but goes on to say that “bands that really feature the bass—like Magazine, the Buzzcocks, the Stranglers, Gang of Four, and Public Image—were where my sensibility about arranging rock songs really formed. The prominent bass comes more from those British punk and new-wave bands rather than AC/DC and Motörhead and Led Zeppelin."

But doesn’t “Armistice Day” from the new album include a reference to Zeppelin’s “For Your Life”? Not quite. “I was thinking more of ‘In the Light' from Physical Graffiti ” Sims answers. Okay, but Lizard songs are littered with references to Motörhead. That repeating riff from their classic “Tight n’ Shiny” is very similar to Motörhead’s “Metropolis.” “I may well have been listening to "Metropolis’ when that riff happened,” confirms Sims. Even CREEM gets it right once in a while.

“Tight n’ Shiny” is a phrase once coined by Steve Albini as a reference to an onstage scrotum mutation in which Yow excels—gripping his scrote until the skin gets shiny and resembles a light bulb. His nutsack has been through a lot, and for a while during the ’90s, his dick seemed to have a career of its own, existing at the vanguard of public exposure. But when asked if this might have started with the antics of Jim Morrison, the self-titled Lizard King, Yow does not take the bait. “Yeah, maybe. I’m definitely not a fan of the Doors. Jim Morrison is tremendously overrated. There’s nothing I like about him. But stuff like that would happen with Iggy. The first time I saw the Cramps at Duke’s Royal Coach in Austin, Lux Interior was climbing back onto the stage and me and a buddy held his pants and he just climbed out of them and he was naked. Gibby [Haynes] used to get pretty close to naked. I guess I’m an exhibitionist. I haven’t been doing any of that on these recent shows because I’m 64 years old and there’s no way that anybody wants to see that. They probably didn’t want to see it back then, but now it’s just not possible. I’d look like an old, shitty lunch bag."

In keeping with food analogies, Yow then recalls the time he was crowd-surfing in England and someone took a bite out of his ass. “We played the Reading Festival a couple years in a row and one of those times somebody, through two layers of denim, bit my ass so fucking hard that an hour or so later it was still really hurting. In the center of the bite there were teeth marks and a bruise, and they suggested that I go see the doctor. The medical tent was a dirt floor, like a World War II movie. I go in and there’s these Englishwomen dressed like nuns and she’s like [in a British accent], ‘What seems to be the problem?’ and I said, Well, someone bit my ass.’ And so she wrote down on the paperwork ‘Bit bum,’ and they gave me a tetanus shot.’’

It sounds like a lost scene from An American Werewolf in London, an analogy not that far removed from the type of lycanthropic transformation that occurs when Yow goes on stage. This is partly due to the magical properties of alcohol. “The brown liquor is for after the show, but I’ll still have a few beers beforehand and several during. I mean, back in the old days in Austin, with the Dicks and stuff, we always called it drunk rock, not punk rock.” Speaking of the Dicks, their song “Wheelchair Epidemic” (which Jesus Lizard cover at the Levitation show) has taken on a whole new meaning amongst a sea of aging bands out there performing with almost zero original members. When factoring in the long list of injuries Yow has sustained over the years—hitting the floor and getting knocked out, bruised tailbone nerve, bottle to the head, multiple concussions—the current return with all original members becomes that much more remarkable.

Even though Denison, Yow, and Sims have known each other the longest (Yow and Sims going back to the Scratch Acid days), it was Mac McNeilly’s initial departure that spelled doom for the band in the late ’90s. It does not work without these four. It’s rare to find the type of affection among bandmates that these guys share. And since we’re sharing: “I love those guys,” Yow says. “We’re like a four-person platonic marriage.” Steve Albini wrote about a sort of balance, with McNeilly and Yow making up “the goofy axis, balancing and offsetting the cerebral duo of Duane and Sims....” When this quote is brought up to David Sims, the shadow of a smile crosses his face and he says, “I mean, it’s reductive. And there’s some truth to it. I can be fun and Mac and David get their bills paid and take care of their grown-up lives. But yeah, I suppose it’s broadly true.”

“Chaotic” and “noise rock progenitors” are often used as offhand descriptions for the dichotomy that makes the group tick, but there’s really not a name (besides rock ’n’ roll) for what they do, though Yow has been known to favor the description “pig fucker music.” Part of it might go back to being an Austin band from Chicago, or is it vice versa? “Punk rock was very regional in those days. Each part of the country had its own identity,” Denison comments regarding their development, on which Sims elaborates: “Location is a weird point for the Jesus Lizard. We live in four separate cities. At one point we were very much a Chicago band and thought of ourselves as a Chicago band. Now I’m not really sure if we really think of ourselves as being from anywhere.”

Their current status is helped by the fact that when they are in their separate cities and inner sanctums, they are not the type to hole up with piles of drugs or regress into permanent brain freeze. Instead, they settle into Clark Kent offstage alter egos as relatively laid-back dudes who only turn menacing when the house lights go down. To reference the Dicks again, David Sims remembers, “They were, personally, very cool to me. But when I was, like, 16 years old, they did seem like genuinely scary people.”

There is a recognition by David Yow that “we’re definitely playing to more people than we were on that reenactment tour before, and most definitely [more than] in the ’90s. Chicago was the largest headlining crowd we’ve ever played to." All this newfound respect raises the question of whether the Jesus Lizard are as scary as they once were. Their stage persona as the technically razor-sharp band behind a lovably deranged frontman is as entertaining as ever. But in an era when societal horrors have become commonplace, it seems almost counterintuitive that their scare tactics would have the same potency, let alone translate to a wider audience. And yet maybe it makes perfect sense that the audience has expanded along with the widening gap between common sense and stupidity in America. Regardless, David Yow has had enough. Not of the band, but of the country. By the time this article comes out he will most likely be living in Portugal.

“Fuck this country,” he states as explanation. “I think that if I was to give one reason why we’re moving out of the United States, it’s because the most common cause of death for people 17 years and younger is a gunshot. It makes me want to cry. It makes me so fucking angry.”

Back at the Far Out, I question Denison on if he would ever define the band as instigators of the high/ low dadaist cheerful anger that has been around at least as long as punk rock itself. “Like a slasher movie that has laughs?” he asks, which is as good a description as any. “Things like that tend to be teen-oriented, and we really never were a kids’ band. I’m glad we can play places like this [now] where younger people can come and see us. But they usually had to try a little harder to get our thing. We weren’t skaters. We didn’t play poppy, catchy anthems. I’m surprised that a lot of younger people like the Jesus Lizard now.” The reason might be the same as it was in the ’90s—it’s easy for young people to laugh at the type of misfortune reflected in these songs. And nowadays, with whole Instagram accounts dedicated to schadenfreude, it makes sense that Yow & Co. are more popular than ever. Because let’s face it, it’s fucking hilarious watching someone hurt himself in the name of rock ’n’ roll.