photo by Pat Graham
“When I think of the Jesus Lizard, I think of the greatest band I’ve ever seen,” Steve Albini writes in BOOK, a vividly decorated coffee-table oral history by and about the highly influential Chicago band. For those among us who were around to experience them in their heyday, the Jesus Lizard were like the second coming of Led Zeppelin: A confluence of four badass dudes (Duane Denison, David Wm. Sims, David Yow, and Mac McNeilly) who took an old-fashioned bass-guitar-drums-singer dynamic and did with it something forceful and unique. Their sound was commanding and unsettling, seemingly riff-simple but slyly intricate and dark as fuck. Everyone saw David Yow’s balls a lot.
"[I]n a genre that rightly doesn’t give a shit about ‘legitimacy,’ they were legitimate anyway—as good as the best that ever played,” writes Fugazi's Guy Picciotto. For a band that initially existed between 1989 and 1999, when underground culture entered the marketplace in its most vulnerable, compromised state, this notion of legitimacy was important. It's also become a distinct part of the Jesus Lizard's legacy, illuminated in BOOK through thoughtful pieces by members of Pavement and Tortoise, Mike Watt, The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones, producer Andy Gill, friends, family, fans, and more.
The Jesus Lizard are most celebrated for the four records they made with Albini: 1990’s Head, 1991’s Goat, 1992’s Liar, and 1994’s Down, all of which were released by Touch and Go. Albini’s legacy is inextricably linked to his work with the Jesus Lizard, too; many clients have cited these albums as exemplary of what he does best and what unfettered, authentic hard rock should sound like. (Kurt Cobain discussed the early Jesus Lizard records with Albini before the In Utero sessions.) And yet, the band's relationship with Albini is the source of most of the tension in the book.
Sims in particular has beef. When Scratch Acid (his band with Yow and drummer Rey Washam) disintegrated, Sims followed Washam to Chicago and started playing with Albini in 1987. The band they formed didn’t last all that long and their moniker, Rapeman, still haunts Sims. “In my musical career, it is the only decision of which I’m truly ashamed,” he says, admitting that at the time the opportunity to play in a potentially busy, lucrative project with a guy from Big Black trumped his desire to dispute “an unconscionably stupid name.”
It’s the first of many subtle barbs Sims sends Albini’s way. Of all the band members, Sims does the heavy lifting in BOOK, anecdotally detailing each song from the band’s albums and discussing his process (he often came up with bass parts by playing along to music by other people, including AC/DC, Melvins, Kepone, Motörhead, and even Wu-Tang Clan) and, in hindsight he isn’t shy about being self-critical of collective decisions. But when he’s not speaking fondly of his bandmates, the work they did together, or their business acumen, Sims sometimes sounds like a man who resents the era the Jesus Lizard is most renowned for.
For his part, Albini writes that the Jesus Lizard were “the best musicians I’ve ever worked with…the purest melding of the sublime and profane,” though he admits the Down sessions were not fun. “The band—Sims and Denison at least—seemed detached and touchy," he recalls. "It was their first record that felt like work to me.” He also suggests that at some point Sims “quietly assumed the role of little general commanding the whole show.”
This is the sound of two heartbroken men. In Sims' view, Albini is not only central to what many view as the band’s glory days; he represents all independent music ideologues that hold corporate music apologists in contempt. In Albini's, Sims was being kind of a dick. And the band he knew and adored was slipping away: “It isn’t overstating it to say that the Jesus Lizard’s descent into ‘professionalism’ felt like a betrayal, and that I was in a period of mourning afterward."
In 1995, the Jesus Lizard left Touch and Go for Capitol Records, a move some in the underground saw as blasphemous and opportunistic. Yet Sims claims their 1996 major label debut Shot (recorded by GGGarth Richardson) is the best-sounding album he’s everplayed on. “I’d waited years for an album mix like this,” he gushes, a sub-textual jab at Albini and anyone who never gave their post-Touch and Go output equal consideration. Its follow-up, 1998’s Blue, was overseen by Gang of Four’s Andy Gill but not before the band made a wishlist of producers that included Steve Lillywhite, Nile Rodgers, RZA(!), Flood, and Barry Adamson. The choices reflect creative impulses by a group who clearly had aspirations beyond subversive scuzz-rock.
“We got to record two albums that we could never have made on the budgets available from Touch and Go,” Sims says. “We could have made two more records on Touch and Go, but we couldn’t have made those records.”
And yet, commericially, both of the Capitol albums bombed. Critics and fans were mostly indifferent, sending the Jesus Lizard limping into oblivion. McNeilly (a freakishly outstanding drummer) left in 1996, which was a blow to the band’s remarkable chemistry. They were dropped from Capitol and broke up in 1999.
The story of the Jesus Lizard now reads like a quaint cautionary tale about musical orthodoxy, perception, and a fear of change. It calls “success” into question; the band made a lot more money by being part of the major label’s mid-90s indie-rock feeding frenzy but sold far fewer records than they ever did when they were on a great independent imprint. Ironically, the move to Capitol diminished their cultural capital; many fans abandoned the Jesus Lizard and they never had the same cachet again, not simply because they maybe didn’t make records as good as they once did, but because they seemingly turned their backs on the ideals of punk rock.
Amidst all of these beautiful photographs, thoughtful essays, biographical curios, elaborate discussions of gear and music theory, personal reflections, hilarious anecdotes, Yow’s recipe for chocolate bourbon bread pudding, and a complete list of every show the Jesus Lizard ever played, BOOK feels, at its core, like a meditation on this idea of "legitimacy." We live in an era in which defunct bands are routinely commanded to reform, play reunion shows, reissue their back catalogues padded with warts-and-all ephemera, and gleefully cash in on nostalgia (in 2009, the Jesus Lizard did this in what Yow calls a “reenactment tour”) and this makes some of us very happy. By the codes and measures of the 1990s, where proponents of underground culture were ambushed by some seemingly anomalous commodification of unpretty and alienating art, modern times are anything but legitimate. Maybe that still matters to some of us, maybe it doesn’t, but either way BOOK is a valuable document that brings us back to the era when artists were conditioned to practice the art of self-defense.