It’s been roughly a decade since The Jesus Lizard was a full time, regularly touring band, and despite all that time off, their reunion tour stop at the Fillmore in San Francisco on Saturday night served as a blunt reminder: The Jesus Lizard is the single greatest live rock band of all time.
There are a million thoughts and observations banging around in my head from last night’s show, and I am still high from the experience. So rather than try to lace it all together into one well-crafted, cohesive piece, I figure the end here is better served by a good old fashioned brain dump. And there’s a photo gallery, too (click over to the set on Flickr to see the photos all big and stuff)…
Not only do I feel fortunate to have been in the building for this show, but bass player David Sims — who is one of my greatest influences as a bass player — left a couple of after-show passes for me at the door, so I was able to meet the man face to face very briefly and thank him for the show, the after-show passes, and just for being an inspiration. At least, that’s what I meant when I shook his hand and stammered out “thank you.” I’ve met plenty of rock stars over the years, and I never really miss a step ’cause most of ‘em really aren’t that special. But Sims is a bit of a hero to me. And he’s a super nice guy.
At 49 years old, David Yow is as explosive and charismatic of a frontman as ever. He spent a good third of the show floating on top of the crowd.
Killdozer, who were scheduled to play second in the evening’s line up, cancelled, so the only opener was Black Elk. As soon as I walked in I recognized the frontman. Black Elk’s lead singer, Tom Glose, is also the bass player in Portland, OR band Cougar, who we (Ovipositor) played with two weeks ago at Kelly’s Olympian in Downtown Portland. Colin and I caught up with him at the after-show meet-and-greet, and we talked for a bit about Portland and playing in too many bands. Nice guy. Small world.
(Bass nerd alert.) I immediately noticed that the bass rig David Sims had on stage was not his traditional Gallien-Krueger 800RB head and two 1×15 cabinets. Sims is touring this time around with an Ampeg SVT 8×10 cabinet powered by an SVT VR head, a tube-powered, tone rich beast. Not only is the specter of it on stage way more imposing (the thick VR compared to the relatively svelte profile of the 800RB, and the refrigerator sized 8×10 compared to two 15″ speaker boxes), but in my opinion, the sound really benefitted from it as well.
Duane Dennison was playing a really nice custom guitar from the Electrical Guitar Company. And, no surprise, he was playing it really well.
I pretty much lost my shit when the band played “Nub,” “Monkey Trick,” “Glamorous,” “Blue Shot,” “Boilermaker,” “Puss,” “Mouth Breather,” and “Seasick.” That short list is just scratching the surface of great songs on the set list, but those are the ones that really got me hyped.
Mac McNeilly is a truly one of the most amazingly drummers I’ve ever witnessed. The band wrapped up their initial set by dropping out one at a time — first Yow, then Duane, then Sims — leaving Mac on stage playing drums solo, pounding out almost lyrical patterns between the crack of the snare, the rumbling punch of his kick, and two monstrous sounding toms (one rack-mounted and a big fat one on the floor).
After the show, as I waited in the balcony area for the bands to come out and do the after-show meet-and-greet thing, I looked over the edge of the balcony just in time to see my friend Eugene, who was still down on the venue’s main floor, get pelted from above with a sopping wet shirt. I looked over to see David Yow leaning over an adjacent balcony, cackling like a mad man and giving Eugene the finger. (They are, apparently, well acquainted with each other; must be a freaky frontman camaraderie thing.)
They get tagged with the “noise rock” handle pretty frequently, and while they can certainly do that, I generally see The Jesus Lizard as a pretty straightforward rock band… A really inventive and skilled band that makes aggressive, interesting and unique music, but a pretty straightforward rock band nonetheless. Admittedly, though, there’s something about them, especially in the live setting, that borders on complete chaos. Maybe it’s Yow’s general presence, maybe it’s the fact that most of their songs get faster when they play them live, maybe it’s that the studio recordings are merely caging the beast. Whatever it is, there is certainly the sense that, at any second, shit could careen out of the control into mass hysteria, total bedlam, riots in the streets, the end of the fucking universe. Yeah, that sounds a bit extreme. But that’s real rock ‘n’ roll as far as I’m concerned.
I’m still mulling it all over, and I reserve the right to add to this list of random thoughts as more come to mind, but it all comes back to this: The Jesus Lizard is the single greatest live rock band of all time.