Meet Robert “Bubby” Lewis, Snoop Dogg’s bass player. He plays MTD basses, and Gallien-Krueger amps…A LOT of GK amps. I mean, damn, I thought Jared Warren (Big Business / Melvins) had a massive bass rig, but this is absolutely jaw-dropping…

(I’ll never have the need to push that much air, but, um….I want.)

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.

[I've been a horribly neglectful blogger lately — I just realized that I went to the entire month of May without a single post. Ouch. Sometimes life just runs away with all my time, but I'm really going to try to be better...even if it just means posting a shitload of TED videos and short music reviews, if that's what I have to do to keep this thing moving.]

I’ve had bass playing on the brain lately. Ovipositor has been working on some new songs, as well as tackling a few covers — Gene Pitney’s “Last Chance to Turn Around,” MX-80’s “More Than Good” and Velvet Underground’s “I’m Not A Young Man Anymore” — and I’ve also been writing a little on the side over the last few months, churning out a handful of pieces for a noted bass magazine. I’ve been doing gear reviews, but I’ve got an artist feature on deck, and I’m currently auditing the bass certification courses at a reputable music school’s online program for a feature in the same magazine later this year.

Truthfully, I’m not totally pleased with the editing job on some of the reviews — I feel like my own voice has been squeezed out in favor of a more prosaic approach — but whatever, it’s not horrible, I’m happy for the side work, as well as the opportunity to expand my bass palette, and I’ve spent plenty of time on both sides of the editors’ desk, so I now how it goes. Anyway, here are links to some of my most recent pieces:

Electro-Harmonix Bass Big Muff Pi. I actually kept this pedal after the review and use it quite a bit. I like it because I’ve spent so much time running though distortion pedals that are built for guitar, and end up sounding like shit on a bass signal. This one is built for bass, and nicely dials in the classic, gloriously fucked up Big Muff tone for bass frequencies.

Xotic X-Blender. This pedal was cool too, but I didn’t keep it when I was done reviewing it. I’m just not the type of player who would make use of it — it’s an effects loop bypass pedal, which is good for players who have a lot of pedals. I’m a bass player; I look and feel like a fucking tool if I show up somewhere to play with an array of pedals. Gimme a distortion box (maybe a low-pass filter) and I’m good.

Sterling by Music Man. I kind of regret testing this series of basses. Sure, I was unbiased, and yeah, they’re pretty nice basses. But I love my Jazz bass (Fender American Standard), and have spent a considerable amount of time dialing it in the way I want it to sound and feel. Playing other, loaner basses just made me want to play my own. I think I’m done reviewing basses.

Warwick Sweet 25.2 & Sweet 15.3. The editors sugared up this review a bit. Not that I hated these amps, but I definitely had a tough time with them. I think it goes back to what I was saying about those Sterling basses vis-a-vis review gear versus my own gear. In this case, I love my Ampeg amp rig. Anything less is…well, less. Still, I wrote this review from an unbiased perspective, and I honestly put these amps through their paces, and they’re decent little combos. It’s just that what I turned in wasn’t as nice as what ran. But that’s how the game is played.

Bonus Bass Nerdery: A few years ago, I was in NYC on business and had the opportunity to see and film bass player extraordinaire Victor Bailey do a clinic for a Bass Player magazine event at the Millennium Broadway hotel on Times Square. This particular clip blew my mind at the time, and has not yet ceased to amaze me. Bailey rearranged the Weather Report classic “Birdland” as a solo bass piece (with some vocal additions; Bailey played bass in Weather Report after Jaco Pastorius left the group), and his style, while not always inhumanly perfect, is so dope, and so totally soulful, whenever I hit the wall with whatever I happen to be working on, I watch this clip and am reminded that I have a long, long way to go and a lot of room to grow as a bass player:

Watch the rest of this clinic — which is basically six clips of Bailey showing why he’s among the best — over at BassPlayer.tv.

Photo by Thug E. Fresh: me playing with Oviositor at Li Po Lounge, SF.

I’m a bass player (if you couldn’t tell from the subtle references to bass — Charles Mingus and David Wm. Sims — in the masthead graphic at the top of the page), and though I’m certainly no virtuoso or bass shredder, it’s something that gives me a substantial creative outlet, it affords me the opportunity to play out and record, and I can sit and noodle for hours.

Anyway, one of my coworkers, Jonathan Herrera, is the senior editor at Bass Player magazine, and was part of a “Smackdown” debate today on WNYC’s Soundcheck show. He and New Yorker magazine pop music critic Sasha Frere Jones were set to debate what the show’s host, John Schaefer, refers to as the increasing irrelevance of the bass guitar in hip rock music (Sasha on the pro side, Jon on the con). Sounds like Schaefer is reaching a little for debate fodder.

As not only a bass player, but also as a rabid consumer of music, I was skeptical of the topic from the moment Jon told me about it late last week. I mean, seriously, a handful of bass-less bands — The White Stripes, The Kills, The Black Keys, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs — find success and suddenly the bass guitar is becoming irrelevant in rock? Please. Those bands are representative of only one direction of rock music’s evolution, not a fundamental shift in the instrumental makeup of the archetypal rock band.

However, the show turned out to be less of a debate and more of a thoughtful discussion on the state of bass in contemporary, hip rock music. It was cool, definitely worth checking out (if only for the bass-centered humor: “How many bass payers does it take to screw in a light bulb? 1-5-7, 1-5-7, 1-5-7.”)

Peep it on the WNYC site.