The Jesus Lizard Book. The Jesus Lizard
be compensated for if it’s lacking.
We started talking about potential drummers. David wanted to ask John Herndon, who then went by Johnny Machine and played in a Chicago band called Precious Wax Drippings. I knew John was (and is) a very talented, very smart drummer. He was (and is) also a very funny, smart, charming guy who would be a lot of fun to tour with. But, correctly or not, I couldn’t see him as the kind of Bonhamesque crusher I pictured for the Jesus Lizard. So, yeah, I was the jerk who vetoed John. We never auditioned him, so maybe I dropped the ball on that one. John went on to found Tortoise with awesome bassist Doug McCombs and become a huge rock star, so don’t feel too sorry for him.
We got in touch with Scott Marcus (inset) and asked him to move from Austin to Chicago and join the band. We sent him a tape of Pure and he asked for some time to think about it. Scott had been the drummer in a great Austin band called Glass Eye. Then he left that band and floated around, and was replaced by Dave Cameron (later Lisa Cameron). There was tension between Cameron and the rest of Glass Eye, and the other members of the band were considering getting Scott back in the band if Cameron quit. When we approached Scott, Glass Eye felt they had to jump on Scott or be left without a drummer if Dave Cameron quit, so they made their move. They fired Cameron and got Scott to rejoin Glass Eye. So, Glass Eye resolved their little personnel dysfunction, and we were still without a drummer. Glad we could help, guys.
A few years before, when we still lived in Austin, David and I had seen the Atlanta band 86 at the Cave Club. A friend had raved about the band, and particularly the drummer, Mac McNeilly. The show was great, and so was Mac. I met him briefly, and he and David spent time talking at the bar. Scratch Acid had just broken up and 86 was planning on disbanding at the end of that tour. David and Mac exchanged phone numbers and made vague talk about getting together to do a music project in the future. So, a couple of years later, and with no subsequent contact between them, I said to David, “Why don’t you call that kid from 86 and see if he’ll move up here and play with us?” It was a long shot. There was no reason to think Mac would be interested in our music, didn’t already have another band going in Atlanta, would be willing to move to Chicago, or would have a temperament we would be willing to work and tour with. The chances of all of those things being true were just too depressing to think about. We were getting worried and a little desperate, so David called him. As it happened, all those things were true, and we had found our drummer.
DAVID WM. SIMS
It was the summer of 1989, late on a weekend night at a dimly lit Chicago club in the nowhere section of the South Loop, two hundred people packed into a theater space called Edge of the Looking Glass. It was loud, very loud, and about ten seconds into the music he came flying off the stage like a possessed man. He staggered past me and I tried to focus on the stage. With only one lightbulb above the stage in a smoke-filled room, it was a little hard to make out, but there they were. Like a steam engine tearing through a tornado, they drilled the music into my skull. After about forty minutes of drink, sweat, and spit flying everywhere, they were done, and so was I. My life would never be the same. Like a junkie looking for his next fix, I had to see it again, right away, and as often as possible.
For the next ten years I went where they went, at least in the United States. My crappy well-paying job at a bank afforded me the opportunity to travel often to see them play in different cities. My motto was: Get close, get hurt, have a good time. I became friendly with David, David, Duane, and Mac over the years. It was truly a thrill to wake up, get on a plane, rent a car in city I may have never been to, go to a soundcheck, check into a motel, have dinner with them, drink, go to the show, drink some more, and then do it all over again the next day. I never got to Paris, but I’ve been everywhere else in Texas.
One of my fondest memories is the December 1993 show at CBGB. (It was the club’s twentieth anniversary.) When David jumped into the audience, he accidentally kicked me in the eye, leaving a shiner. I wore it with pride when I went back to work two days later.
Also in 1993, I was with them over a four-night stint in Southern California, the third night being at Jabberjaw in LA. Supposedly located in a rough part of town, it was about the size of your average dining room. They roared through a set for about ninety minutes that had the walls streaming with sweat.
England’s Bush became fans in the ensuing years, and invited the band to open for them at eleven shows in suburban outdoor sheds. This was 1997, and Bush was drawing upward of twenty thousand people to these mall-like venues. One of the stops was in Milwaukee during Summer Fest at the Marcus Amphitheater. As we walked toward the stage, just prior to them starting their show, I decided to watch from the photographer’s pit. During the opening song, David Yow jumped off the stage and made his way, mic and cord along for the ride, up one of the aisles. Spotting a kid in one of the Jesus Lizard’s T-shirts, Yow proceeded to climb all over him. Just then a security guard came over to me and shouted, “You’re going to have to get him back on the fucking stage!” I nodded and knew that wasn’t going to happen. As always, Yow would come back to the stage how and when he wanted. Forty-five minutes later, the Bush fans were still standing in disbelief at what they had witnessed. Singer Gavin Rossdale and the rest of his band similarly stood in awe at the side of the stage. As Greg Kot from the Chicago Tribune said, they weren’t Chicago’s best live band of the ‘90s, they were the world’s best live band of the ‘90s.
A number of years later, in November 2008, a press release was sent out. The Jesus Lizard would return to the stage in May of 2009, and play shows in Europe and America throughout the year. I went to see them in Nashville, their first US show. They roared through a ninety-minute set like a machine. Same as always, spit and sweat flying everywhere. Nothing had changed. They were what they had always been. Just four guys I knew as friends, who would walk onstage, plug in, and gloriously lay waste to any venue in the world. I traveled quite a bit in 2009, and saw them thirteen more times, the last on New Year’s Eve at the Metro in Chicago. After the last encore, they departed the stage with a quick wave goodbye.
If you’re reading this passage it’s probably because you have your own memories of seeing them perform. Maybe you saw them one time or one hundred times. It was always the same and always different. And always fun. Not much more needed than that.
BERNIE BAHRMASEL
Okay, so this is a rather multilayered story for me, most of which I don’t want to tell, some of which I can’t tell (and to be honest, you probably don’t want to hear it from me, at least in my roles of longtime friend, wife, mother of the Denison heir, etc.). But there may be a thing or two that those amongst you who are real aficionados of the history of this band might want to hear regarding my role as the one and only . . . band lawyer.
I’ve known Mac McNeilly since 1986, kind of ironic since at the time he was in a band called 86. I met David Sims and David Yow around the same time, when they were in Scratch Acid. It was my first night booking a club in Raleigh, North Carolina, called the Fallout Shelter. I had not booked the Scratch Acid show, but had been told it would be a breeze. I had not been told, nor had David Wm. Sims, that at least two or three local bands had been added to the bill, which pushed the set time back and the money down. For anyone who knows David Sims, you know that this kind of thing can lead to results of epic proportions. I can still remember myself standing at the bottom of the club stairs saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m really sorry,” and David towering above me with steam shooting out of his ears and his chest rising and falling in what can only be described as diabolical fury. I don’t remember him saying a single word. I was nineteen years old.
Fast-forward to 1989. I skip out of a Broadway performance of Les Miserables to go to the Pyramid Club to see my friend Mac McNeilly in the band he’s just joined, the Jesus Lizard. I remember few things about that night (it was a long time ago). The Jesus Lizard did something onstage that I didn’t understand but was enthralled with from the first moment. I don’t know what it was, but it meant something. This feeling