It’s a very special week on this show because I’m dedicating four episodes to interviews with every founding member of one of the world’s greatest rock and roll bands, the Jesus Lizard. David Yow, Mac McNeilly, Duane Denison and David Wm. Sims each ended up in Chicago at some point in the late 1980s and then they went and changed things. They were a dangerous, precise, profane, and devastatingly great band for 10 years, making amazing records and playing great shows from 1989 to 1999 and then they came back to play some more shows in 2009. This past March, a Brooklyn-based publishing house called Akashic released BOOK, a gorgeous coffee-table photo book that captures the life and times of the Jesus Lizard via thoughtful essays and reflections about a truly significant past. Beginning in February, I tracked down each member of the Jesus Lizard and we talked about BOOK. It took a while to get everyone pinned down but we did it and, for whatever reason, here am I at episode #89 of this show I make in Canada and I’m dedicating a week to the Jesus Lizard, who played their first show on July 1, 1989, Canada Day, at a Chicago restaurant called Bangkok Bangkok opening for Slint and King Kong. Here David Yow, who was on this show 80 episodes ago, and I discuss where the idea for BOOK came from, why there was a desire to make it themselves, who they wanted to get to contribute to this story, his hang-ups about some aspects of how the band was represented and promoted historically and why he insisted on designing BOOK, Henry Owings of Chunklet and his role in making this project come to life, the Polaroids that document various eras of the band and people who are gone, David’s nipples, buttcheeks, and penis and how his stage presence wasn’t sexual, why David was drawn to ‘danger’ as a performer, the book’s interweaving chronology and unique structure, why Yow’s participation as a voice in BOOK is relatively slight, how the Jesus Lizard might present themselves as a ‘musician’s band,’ why more dudes than ladies gravitated towards the band, how funny Duane Denison is, David Wm. Sims’ prickly relationship with the Jesus Lizard’s long-standing recording engineer Steve Albini and what Yow thinks of the albums they made together, Yow’s drunken shenanigans in the studio and Albini’s unique mic-ing techniques, why Down was the band’s worst album, whether or not BOOK marks the final chapter for the Jesus Lizard, casting Catherine Zeta-Jones in the biopic about the band, Yow’s desire or lack thereof to be in any bands these days, how close the Jesus Lizard came to writing new songs together when they ‘re-enacted’ in 2009, David’s plans as an actor making movies, David’s new cat pun book Copycat: And a Litter of Other Cats, my cat Gary and the body issues the world has imposed upon him, and that’s all.
Related links: akashicbooks.com/catalog/the-jesus-lizard-book/ vishkhanna.com
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