The Jesus Lizard is back! The band is set to release “Rack” on September 13, their first new album of new music since “Blue” (1998).
TJL guitarist Duane Denison joins me for a conversation about the new album, the early Chicago days, and whether “Rack” and a lengthy tour are signs of what’s to come for the band.
In Chicago? Don’t miss the Jesus Lizard’s return: they’ll be playing the Warm Love Cool Dreams festival at Salt Shed on September 28.
While I’m on the topic of the Jesus Lizard’s live show, I’ve always loved this quote from John Haggerty (Pegboy/Naked Raygun) about an especially memorable night:
“They’re playing; they get through about two or three songs, and a full bottle of beer comes shooting from the back of the audience, hits Dave Yow square in the head. He goes down like a ton of bricks. He’s out cold, like a light. The band keeps playing for a little while, then they realize he’s not going to get up. So they stop playing. There’s a bunch of sauntering about—what are we going to do? What’s happening?
“It went on for what seemed like a really long time, but I’m sure it was only two or three minutes. After this extended period of time, being passed out cold on the floor, he gets up and he says, ‘Nice shot, asshole.’ Before the word ‘asshole’ was even out of his mouth, they were into the next song and they just continued as if nothing had happened.”
Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins
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The Jesus Lizard interview transcript (please allow for some AI-generated errors):
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I’m James VanOsdol, and Car Con Carne is sponsored by Easy Automation, easyautomation.net.
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So rock and roll at its best, at its most impactful, should make you feel uncomfortable, make you feel like dangers right around the corner, make you feel empowered and fierce, make you feel period.
From where I’m sitting, there is no band from the past 40 years that nails every single one of those things better than The Jesus Lizard.
The Jesus Lizard’s first new album in the 21st century is called Rack.
It arrives on September 13th.
They return to Chicago for the Warm Love Cool Dreams Festival at the Salt Shed on September 28th.
And joining me through the magic of the World Wide Web is Jesus Lizard guitarist, Duane Denison.
Duane, lovely to see you.
Likewise.
Hi, James.
It’s been a couple of years.
It has.
And this time around, we’re able to talk about the Jesus Lizard.
Now, when you guys put an end to things at the end of the 90s, the party line, the sense was that the band had just run its course.
Yes.
And it certainly seemed that way.
I mean, we had been an active recording and touring unit for about 10 years, for 10 years solid, actually longer, but we’ll say 10 years.
You know, and it seems like we had said what we wanted to say and we had done a lot and gone all over.
And we had changed as people and the music scene had changed and was continuing to change.
So it just seemed like, okay, hey, we kind of shook hands and said, stay in touch and everyone dispersed.
In the time since, in the 25 plus, years since we’ve seen you play, starting with The Reunion in 2008, even seeing you at Riot Fest, it never seemed like we’d get another album from you guys.
That seemed far-fetched.
We were excited to see you live, but we thought, okay, this is as good as it’s going to get.
Not the case.
Yeah.
Well, it didn’t seem like it was going to happen.
We started playing together again and it seemed apparent that we still sounded pretty good.
We still had our thing.
People seemed to like us, maybe even more than by the end of the late 90s.
As a possibility, it had come up, but not everyone was on board.
Not everyone was necessarily into the idea.
It took time for that to catch on.
I think while waiting for that to happen, I was doing plenty of other things, but I was also starting to write material and set it aside for that, for The Jesus Lizard.
I think David Sims on bass was too.
We tend to write the music.
Eventually, we just started working on it and kept going and then finally, we got everybody together and said, okay, listen, H, listen to this.
Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
Let’s do the fucking album.
I do think bands sometimes just need to go away to be wanted even more so in some cases than the first time around.
They can’t miss you if you never leave.
That’s it.
That’s it.
That’s a showbiz lesson for you kids.
But I mean, back in the beginning, you arrived in Humboldt Park in Chicago, maybe a buck in your pocket.
Yeah.
No real clear path to success.
These were the early 90s in Chicago.
Could the Duane Denison of the early 90s have ever imagined that you’d still be talking about the Jesus Lizard well into the 21st century?
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not, let alone putting out an album that people seem to be anticipating and doing interviews with people like yourself and others.
The Guardian, the feature in the New York Times.
On the other hand, there was a part of me, I have to admit, I always felt like something was going to happen.
Otherwise, I wouldn’t have moved to Chicago and I wouldn’t have worked at it so hard.
I figured something was going to happen, but you never know what.
I certainly didn’t.
I wasn’t thinking this far ahead, that’s for sure.
What do you remember most about kind of peak Jesus Lizard, peak goat liar era, Jesus Lizard?
Just being busy, just being busy, busy, busy and just going from one thing to the other, to the other without really thinking about it, getting to the point where you didn’t have time to think about it.
You didn’t have time to worry and you didn’t have time to gloat.
You just kind of did it and we would go from one tour, come home, wash your clothes, pay your bills and then immediately jump or fly.
We were going to Europe and the UK twice a year.
This went on for years, sometimes more, sometimes two, three times a year.
Then we’d come home and just watching it grow.
In those days, obviously, there was no Internet.
So you gauge your success partly by the people who would be in the audience, watching it every time we would come back to these towns, there’d be more people picking up the local weeklies, in whether you’re in Cincinnati or New York or Ottawa.
And hey, there we are again.
And then getting royalty checks, like the albums are actually saying, by the way, here’s your royalty check for the album.
And then watching that escalate just sort of organically was amazing.
And to have that mythology build around you, that kind of word of mouth, pre-internet is something special.
And for many people, it always goes back to the live show.
And I said before you came on, rock and roll should have an element of danger to it.
A feeling of edginess, and it should unnerve you in some way, shape or form.
The Jesus Lizard kind of does that in all the right ways.
And I think for a live touring band, especially in an era of setlist.fm, it’s hard for a band to surprise anyone anymore.
I feel like the Jesus Lizard never lost that ability through the internet age.
Well, maybe so.
And our album, I think, will hopefully have, it has a couple of surprises in there too.
There’s some of it, there’s similarities, our references are past, and then there’s some of things that don’t.
So to me, you always gotta try, you always have to try something a little different, if only for yourselves.
But at the same time, you can’t lose sight of who you are and what you do, because otherwise, to me, it becomes kind of contrived, a contrived attempt to be different or weird.
Like, to me, weird people don’t try to be weird, they’re trying to keep it together, and they’re just naturally weird, you know?
Yeah, you would have thrown us for a loop if the new album had two words, or multiple words in the title, but no, it’s rack out in a couple weeks.
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Former Navy SEAL Mike Ridland keeps it real on the Mic Drop podcast.
Welcome to the stage, Ben, the Hammer, Sledge.
They were always trying to get me to just drop my packet to become an officer, but I just discovered I loved being with the troops on the ground.
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Talking about keeping that consistency through that through line to The Jesus Lizard, I think Lord Godiva on the album, if someone’s looking for that Jesus Lizard sound that maybe hooked him in from the beginning, that might be one of those songs.
That one, exactly, and Falling Down.
And because actually it’s funny, James, we actually worked on those songs, those two songs in the late 90s.
They are, they actually date back to then.
We just never finished them.
And we actually, there are somewhere in a box of cassettes.
There’s a demo of them from that period.
So that’s a pretty good example of how, yeah, we started there and then just kind of pulled it into the modern era from there.
But that it’s funny that you, you would call that.
Well, and lyrically, I mean, I love David Yow’s lyrics, comically dark serial killer stuff.
Yeah, that one in particular, in particular, Lord Godiva is, I hope people don’t take it the wrong way.
It’s storytelling.
Some seconds after I kissed her, I crushed the skull of your sister.
Her head popped like a blister.
Those are turns of phrase right there.
It’s comedy, but of the bleakest sort.
Of the Jesus Lizard sort, of the David Yow sort, for sure.
Talking about taking chances or doing things differently, what if, on the album, feels like a bit of an outlier?
Absolutely.
Speaking of David, you have almost a spoken word.
Yes, exactly that.
Then the music is a lot more atmospheric and slow.
Creepy.
The guitar is mostly clean.
It is absolutely a detour.
But I love it.
It’s a nice thing, I think, in terms of albums.
I don’t know if you do, we’re of a certain age.
But I think of the way album sequences go.
It’s a nice turn in the middle of the album.
Absolutely.
That’s the intent.
To me, an album should fit together.
Those songs, that collection should fit together almost like a collection of short stories or an artist portfolio.
They’re getting ready for a gallery exhibit, so they’re going to have different paintings or installations or whatever.
Even though they’re all different, there should be somehow some continuity or some way that they reference each other.
You reemerged with Hide and Seek.
It seemed like that was the appropriate song to reintroduce the band and it’s an appropriate song to kick off the album.
Yeah, that one fell into place pretty quickly.
The fellow who produced the album, paul Allen, was involved with us in the demo stage on this stuff as well.
He recorded the demos too.
He had input every step of the way as well.
He made us, he’s like, this has got to be your first single.
This has got to be the lead-off track.
There’s actually a slightly longer intro before the vocals show up than we typically have of songs of this sort and that was his idea as well.
He’s like, no, you’ve got to let that song set up for a minute before the vocals come in.
So all these little things I think help make that song more effective.
And maybe it was a good one that grabs people.
People who already liked us hopefully aren’t put off by it.
And people who don’t, who maybe haven’t really listened to us before, maybe they get pulled in by it.
For sure.
And I love the way David Yow perverts certain pop culture expectations.
I heard the train a-coming, it was rolling around the bend.
Thank you very much, dear Lord God for the living end.
Well, and he’s quoting Johnny Cash, which is never a bad idea.
Right?
So I live in Nashville.
I have rockabilly friends who, that’s the part of the song they like.
That’s what they responded to.
Of course.
I mentioned the creepy undercurrent of what if.
There’s also a great sense of slow menace to Armistice Day.
There’s a tension, yeah, just waiting to blow on that.
Then we got that great guitar soloing from you on there.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
Yeah, I thought that was time to make a very lyrical statement in there that has a sort of this ascending tension kind of without being overly notey or techy.
You talked about working with David Sims, putting songs together on Grind.
There’s that, to his credit, that pulsing bass, it feels almost like a threat as you’re listening, as that song kind of builds and grows.
And it kind of goes almost against the beat and then comes back around in.
It kind of creates tension by just by the way it is.
Yeah, that one, other than that, it’s just pretty much the floor on the floor all the way through.
Not much I think to say about it.
Well, and going back to, I love David’s lyrics.
This is a great line.
This crumbling house you barely built is entirely screwed.
It’s elegant in its own way.
I think, yeah, I think in some ways, he is very underrated lyricist.
I think he has a knack for summing things up and stating things in a way that connect with people but aren’t obvious and I think that’s his strength.
Going back to songwriting when you created these songs, what’s the approach?
Do you hear riffs in your head?
Do they turn into songs?
Yeah.
It all starts with the riff?
It all starts with the riff or a beat.
More often than not, the riff.
The riff suggests the beat.
For me, I will literally be noodling around.
I might have an idea in mind.
The hardest thing is getting started.
When you don’t have any new songs yet, when you’re literally looking at a blank page, because you have nothing to compare anything to.
Once you’ve got a couple of things, you can see which way things are going.
Like, okay, do we need a slow one now?
Do we need a fast one now?
Do we need a jumpy one?
Is this too many in a row?
Do we need something with some odd timing, some sort of meter?
There are definitely decisions I make before I even start, just to narrow down the parameters, because obviously writing a piece of music, the hardest thing is just deciding where to start.
To me, putting limitations or putting a built-in verbal focus on what you’re going to go for, is a good way to start.
Even if you let go of it, obviously.
So you noodle, then I noodle around and improvise and come up with something that sounds good, repetitive.
Well, if it sounds good in and of itself, and takes on a life of its own, that’s different from what the preconception was, then you let go of the preconception.
You go with whatever is hot.
You go with the new idea and see where it takes you.
I think it’s the same thing writers do.
You’ll have a plot, you’ll have your dialogue, you’ll have your character development.
But if you get fired up about something and it starts going somewhere, well, you go with that.
You leave the other stuff behind and see where the new thing goes.
Then you can always go back and revise and edit, which we do a lot.
Listening to you talk about riffs, I hadn’t intended to go here, but one of the riffs you created that has stuck in my head for literal decades is Glamorous.
That song will always be a favorite of mine.
While it’s top of mind, can you talk a little bit about where that one came from?
I don’t remember exactly.
Honestly, but at that time, we were starting to take off and we were finding ourselves playing bigger and bigger places.
I noticed that when you’re playing bigger and bigger places, there’s a reason bands like ACDC and whatever sound the way they do.
To a certain extent, that architecture, it doesn’t dictate what you do, but it sure influences the way it sounds.
If you’re doing something that’s busy and fidgety and has all these tricky timings, that stuff can get lost in a big room.
I think I was consciously thinking about big rooms and festivals and something that was big and solid and wasn’t fancy, but still has some zigzaggy contours and has a lot of space.
There’s a lot of space between the events, especially in the beginning, and then as it picks up, it gets busier and more solid and then it thins out again.
So I like it was wanting to make a big heavy statement, but leave space for the listener’s imagination to participate.
But I swear I wasn’t thinking about all that at the time.
It really was just some big dumb rock riffs and to play in big places.
Big dumb rock riffs tend to speak to me.
They speak to everyone, really.
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Jumping back into the album, Motor.
No one really thinks of The Jesus Lizard per se is a singles band.
But this makes sense as a single.
This, especially in High N Stake.
Well, to me, anything that’s fast, upbeat, anything faster and is fairly stripped down, like this whole song has what?
Two, three parts total.
It’s got a verse, a chorus, and then the intro which also shows up in the middle as a break.
There’s a guitar break, solo we’ll call it, but what happens when the verse.
So that’s kind of what singles are.
They’re grabby and simple, but on the other hand, this one has a lot of momentum and drive to it.
The name Motto R, well, it’s not Motorhead, but it’s not Radiohead either.
So that’s what that’s all about.
But yeah, and David’s lyrics were very just off the top of his head.
Literally, it’s like, I think we even said, David, can you get some lyrics done for this?
We’ve been playing around for weeks on this and nothing is all right, all right.
And he just threw those out.
And at first he didn’t, he wasn’t into it.
And we’re like, no, it works.
It sounds great.
It’s simple.
It’s straight.
You don’t overthink it.
Let’s not overthink everything here.
Just that works.
Let’s go with that.
I get the sense that maybe you’re not someone who tends to look back.
You’re more of a forward thinking person.
Have you thought at all or has this given you the opportunity to think back about the catalog?
No.
In the sense lately I have, just because we’re getting ready to play some shows, so I’ve had to brush up on those songs.
There’s that.
Otherwise, I don’t listen to them.
Keep in mind, James, by the time between rehearsals and recording sessions and gigs and sound checks, I’ve played some of those songs 2,000 and 3,000 times.
I don’t need to think about them anymore.
They have a life of their own.
But for me, I think in relative to what you’re asking, I feel like this album, this is turning into maybe my favorite Jesus Lizard album, as far as when I think of the percentage of songs that I like versus the percentage of songs that I don’t like as much.
This is as strong as any of the others and maybe stronger.
Maybe I appreciate it more, maybe because it’s been a while since we’ve done anything, and so it means more to me.
Obviously, I’ve done lots of other stuff with other groups between now and then, between then and now, whether it was Tomahawk or playing as a sideman with various people.
But this is the first Jesus Lizard thing in whatever 26 years.
Back in those days, we were putting them out almost every year.
So we were on tour working on new songs at sound checks or in the hotel rooms, whatever.
I didn’t have time to think about it.
Then I did and I didn’t want to think about it.
And so I don’t, I don’t, I try not to overthink that this, these songs are out there.
They’ve been repackaged.
There’s been videos.
There’s collections.
If people still like them, that’s wonderful.
I still like them, but it’s like it’s a different world.
I’m a different person.
It’s time to, like you said, it’s time to move on.
Totally get it.
When you started the recording process for Rack, was it clunky at all, like you’re finding your sea legs again as a group, or was it just one of those, we’re in it again, we’re The Jesus Lizard, here we go.
Exactly.
It really was.
We had been playing shows.
We did that original run in 2009, went around the world.
Then we’ve gotten together a few times since then, 2017, 2018, 2019.
And so we had played together and then we started doing demos.
And demo is very, we would rent a big rehearsal space and the produce paul brought a mobile recording unit.
So it was like being in the studio, but not nearly as expensive.
And we had more time and it was kind of, it was almost like studio situation again.
You’re playing, but we played live.
We play all in the room at the same time.
So when we went for keeps into the studio to make, to actually make the album, by that time we were, we were ready.
And it was, we had a certain amount of time to try to get things done.
So in those situations, honestly, the pressure is mostly on the drummer.
For a band like us, and for a rock band that’s not using drum machines, or you’re not playing, you’re not on a grid, on a computer grid, and trying to tie everything down to a clock or a computer.
It’s up, the drums, you’re going for good drum takes.
And once you’ve got that for that particular song, you move to the next song, because now you can build on that.
Sometimes it’s good to get a complete take where everyone is happy with what they did.
And a lot of this is, a lot of these are keepers from the tape, the original, once we found a drum take, we kept that, we would listen back and I’m like, no, I don’t, I might need to fix one little thing here and there.
But so anyway, Mack was ready and he knocked his, he was done in three days.
And we did, well, I can’t, I shouldn’t give it away, but there’s more than what’s here.
So no, it was just like the old, it was like, okay, we know what to do.
We know you got to get ready and have your chops up and be feeling good and health strong and know how to pace yourself and all that, so.
I love hearing that.
And you’re coming to Chicago, you’re returning to Chicago for a show at the Salt Shed on September 28th.
You have dates through the beginning of 2025, which leads to the obvious question.
Is this again an ongoing concern?
Is The Jesus Lizard?
I don’t know.
Too early to say?
I don’t know about that, yeah.
But, I mean, you are writing this for a while, and that’s awesome news for all of us.
Yeah, we’ll see.
We’ll see.
It seems like people are keen, and we’re looking forward to playing.
So there’s no telling.
You never know.
This is the whole history of this band.
I never knew.
All right.
And you said it.
I mean, Rack is possibly your favorite release in this band’s history.
That’s a strong statement, and it is a solid album.
And I congratulate you on the work here, because I can’t wait for people to hear it.
Not to sound overly egotistical or anything, but we are all just just chomping at the bit for this to come out and people to hear it, because I feel like I’ve always felt like if we like it and we’re satisfied and excited, then our fans will be too, because we like the same things they like.
And that’s and it extends to everything.
So, yeah, I’m just so psyched for this.
And, you know, it means something.
We haven’t done anything in a while.
And so hopefully it’ll mean something to the listeners as well.
I’ve got my pre-order vinyl on the way, which I’m very excited about.
It’s always an exciting day, record release day, when it hits my mailbox.
Oh, well, thank you.
All right.
So we’re going to see you back in Chicago.
Duane, congrats on the album.
It sounds great.
I’m so glad, thrilled that The Jesus Lizard is back.
Well, thank you, James.
It’s great to be back.
But no, I just feel, I think we all feel deep down very fortunate.
We get to do this again.
The fact that we can, we’re all still here.
We’re all still fairly healthy.
We all still get along.
We made something that so far seems to be, people seem to like it.
And there’s shows waiting for us.
Yeah, it’s a great thing.
