I saw the Jesus Lizard perform on April 30, 1990. It was a legendary Norfolk, Virginia nightclub called King’s Head Inn, the kind of place that had a black and white checkered dance floor, and hosted three-bands for three-bucks Wednesdays. They didn’t have a liquor license because they didn’t serve food, so it was just the warm, sticky swill of beer that encapsulated the place. It had a single bathroom that was certainly a portal to a special part of hell, a graffitied room of drunken sadness, break ups, meet ups and fuck ups. On the weekends, the place would be packed, the floor shaking with local vagabonds, drug dealers, Virginia Beach transplants, Navy squids, and ODU students clad in school sweatshirts and backwards ball caps, all showing up to see one of the local original bands vying for attention. In other words, it was just like every other bar in the United States at that point: a place where you could feel that punk was on the verge of breaking and spilling over into the mainstream. It was a glorious time to be alive.
On this Thursday evening, the Jesus Lizard took the unusual choice to get off 95 South and take 64 East to play this club in the small naval town of Norfolk. By the time they took the stage, their were still only eleven of us. I could name every single person to this date. Xavier Daryl Lewis, who was already a local rock and roll legend; Buck Down, who would move to LA and make his own musical mark there; Ron Spencer, a brick-framed guitarist who fronted a popular local band Buttsteak; and Matt Odeitus, who would go on to form the seminal bar punks the Candy Snatchers, among others. I don’t do this as some sort of name-dropping, as these names are hardly worth dropping in the grand scheme of celebrity. I do this because of the hundreds of shows I’ve seen in my lifetime, this one seems seared into my soul like a Texan cattle-prod, and this was one of those experiences that revel in a shared discovery, a feeling of witnessing a cultural shift in the tectonic plates of rock and roll.
David Yow, David Wm. Sims, Duane Denison and Mac McNeilly had been touring so long and hard at this point that it was impossible for them to put on a show that wasn’t physically electric- hard around the edges and pulsating at the joints. Yow, of course, was wild shaman, a cast down warrior with psychological issues. The microphone and it’s cable became an extension of his limbs, hanging loosely as Yow made a move from one screech to another, or wrapped around his neck in moments of self-immolation. He would spit on the roof of the King’s Head, watch it linger for a moment as it slowly dripped from its own inertia, and then he would catch it again in his own mouth. And all this frontman chaos took place in front of a band that had somehow mixed a hodgepodge of avant-jazz, King Crimson, punk rock, math and flatout noise into a mesmerizing mass of sound. And this was in front of an empty house.
It’s hard to believe that was 34 years ago, and it’s even harder to believe that the last time these guys released an album was 26 years ago. A lot of artists from this time that have either regrouped (re: Smashing Pumpkins) or have never gone away (re: Pearl Jam) find themselves in the unenviable position of being on the right side of woke, of desperately trying not to feed into the old-man-shouting-at-the-sky trope. But the Jesus Lizard, while definitely shouting, were never doing it at the sky. Theirs is not a social critique on how one should carry themselves through the world. The band has always dealt with the off-kilter, the Upside Down where the weirdos among weirdos lived. In other words, they were a special kind of ‘weird.’ It’s important to know that while David Yow has never set out to be political, his job has always been to remind us that all of us are just a few base codes away from being schizophrenic sociopaths. So how does their new album Rack add up in all of this?
The band announced their return with the single “Hide and Seek,” the album’s opening rallying call. It’s vintage the Jesus Lizard, the interplay between Sims’ propulsive bass line and McNeilly’s workman-like drums providing the oceanic swells for Denison’s crafty stewardship of six-string navigation, as Yow howls, screams and moans about witches committing filicide. As a single- and a lead off song- it’s about as safe as the Jesus Lizard will ever come, and even that’s not very safe. It’s like getting hit by a three thousand pound Corolla as opposed to a seventy two thousand pound Mac Truck; however, the highway that Yow and company traverse definitely has its share of hearses, 18-wheelers and military transport vehicles.
Second song “Armistice Day” slinks across that highway like a python on ketamine, a heroine-drenched dirge of stop-gap guitars and a slow, funky exchange between Sims and McNeilly. Yow’s lyrics can always be fabulously obtuse: he perches on the edge of being a kind of psychedelic story-teller, with all his protagonists being delightfully, yet disturbingly deranged. “Armistice Day” tells the story of Mrs. Gayton, who died in the snow on the day the second world war ended. It’s one of those satisfyingly odd songs that only the Jesus Lizard could pull off, a brief, spontaneous glimpse into a life that seems to exist on the lingering edge of pathos.
The album continues with this musical yin and yang. One song will push ahead like a runaway truck, all kinetic energy, the music propelled forward in an intense three minutes of anxiety. “Grind” fits this mold perfectly, perhaps the most personal song on the album. ‘I was sold and I was bought,’ sings Yow. ‘I was told and I was taught. I was old and was forgotten. I was old.’ It’s a rare veteran of ’90s rock and roll that can look at the face in the mirror and realize that their cultural relevance has diminished as times have changed and the wrinkles have increased, but none seem to have honestly acknowledged this more than the Jesus Lizard. In every sense of the word, the music these guys have delivered seems to be timeless, and yet it’s firmly and loudly played by guys in their 60s. On the other hand, songs like “What If?” are the smoke pouring from the engine of the wrecked truck, metal and rubber mashed up in a sea of oil, gas and antifreeze. It’s the sound of the guys pulling themselves out of the cab, dazed from the collision, and trying to make sense of the world through blurred eyes. Second single “Alexis Feels Sick” pulls all of these disparate parts together into four minutes of chaotic rock and roll, Denison’s guitar the sound of a blowtorch breaking the body from the chassis. Indeed, Rack sounds as if the band has recovered from a twenty-six year crash- a never ending cascade of Newton’s laws of motion at work- only to come out of the carnage stronger, angrier and more inspired than ever.
And this is just the front half of the album. What makes the Jesus Lizard such a musician’s band isn’t so much the technical poweress of the individual players. All are adept, of course, but what the band demonstrates on Rack – and what they demonstrated over three decades ago in that empty Norfolk nightclub – is how much each instrument matters. David Wm. Sims’ bass has never been buried in the mix, and he’s never simply laid down a 4/4 beat so the guitar can do the heavy lifting. His bass sound jumps forward like one of those screaming goats at the end of some shitty millennial’s YouTube video. Indeed, he even seems to have a bass solo on “Lady Godiva.” And McNeilly’s drumming is a physical extension of Sim’s playing. It’s not a response so much as it’s the percussive equivalent of whatever bizarre voodoo magic is happening on the low end. Denison’s sound is crystal clear and deliberate, a phase-changing chameleon of reptilian-like dexterity. In this case, particularly on songs such as the punk rock rager “Dunning Kruger” or the twisting, psychedelic closer “Swan the Dog,” the guitars are the chemicals and radiation coursing through the cells of a cancerous body, gobbling up all that’s in front of them. And the disease itself? Well, let’s just leave Yow to tell us all about that, cure or not.
As the Jesus Lizard prepare to embark on their tour in support of Rack, I know that some of the guys I stood on that sticky, beer-soaked, black-and-white floor years ago are planning to see the band work their sensational magic once again. It’s a different time and a different century, but Rack seems to be a vital link to what exploded across the great USA those years ago, when a van full of Texas misfits decided to take each city by the proverbial horns and leave a bunch of wannabe musicians who understood what it meant to be in a band and motherfucking bring it. Maybe this time they’ll inspire another collection of weirdos to pick up their instruments like weapons of mass destruction and declare war on cultural complacency. I mean, one can hope, right? Even if it is just eleven lost souls of rock and roll.
