I'd Love to Turn You On #198 - The Jesus Lizard – Liar (1992)

In the summer of 1993, I finally mustered up the courage to ask this girl I had been crushing on for a long time out on a date. To my surprise and discomfort, she actually agreed to it. The day of the date, I was so nervous and uneasy I didn’t know what to do. As a fourteen-year-old, I hadn’t exactly been the Casanova that I clearly am now, and I had convinced myself that asking was the hard part. But now I actually had to go on the date and be engaging. I was terrified. Usually, I could put on some music to put myself at ease, but for some reason, nothing in my collection was doing the trick. I decided to head down to the coffee shop where I was supposed to meet her. I was early but there was a record store downstairs in the basement of the building, so I figured I’d kill some time beforehand with my favorite pastime, record shopping. (Coincidental side note: This is the same building in which I would eventually open my own record store twenty years later and two floors up.) Anyway, the impending date was still giving me butterflies and I was kind of angry at my music collection for not pulling through for me. So, I decided I was going to buy something new. I picked up a Flaming Lips album I had read about in Alternative Press and a cassette copy of Liar, the newest release by a band I wasn’t familiar with, The Jesus Lizard. I went outside to smoke and put the tape into my Walkman.

I can’t really explain what happened next. One thing is for sure, though. My life was changed indefinitely in that moment. Liar, though it may not be my favorite Jesus Lizard album, will forever be the most important one to me as it was my entry point into their world. You see, musically-speaking, I was a bit torn in the early 1990s. Having grown up to that point as a die-hard metal kid, the newer “grunge” bands (as the radio and MTV were calling them) were killing my beloved’s reign. On the other hand, there was something about the Nirvanas and the Alice in Chainses of the world that I truly could not deny. Still… it seemed like something was missing. I was at a musical crossroads. When I hit play on that Walkman, suddenly I had it figured out. And I do mean suddenly, because right out of the gate, Liar takes off at breakneck speed with “Boilermaker,” perhaps one of the heaviest songs ever written. This segues into “Gladiator” and “The Art of Self-Defense” for a violent one-two-three punch. Side A ends with one of the highlights of the album, the phenomenal “Puss,” which would also later appear on a split 7” with Nirvana.

This was exactly what I was looking for. It was heavy, but it wasn’t metal. It was angular and strange, the guitar tone was bizarre and machine-like, the rhythm section was more precise than anything I’d ever listened to. And then there was Yow. The frontman to end all frontmen. Hoo boy… I don’t even know where to begin describing him. David Yow’s vocal delivery is not so much sung as it is retched at you, hollering with a kind of terrifying urgency about such topics as mental depravity and chemical dependency (yes, there are actual lyrics in there). Yow sounds like a man in trouble. Guitarist Duane Denison’s leads have a personality all their own on this album, ranging from the jackhammer speed of “Rope” to the slow, Slint-like crawl of the album’s closer “Zachariah.”

I just spent two paragraphs describing Liar to you and I still feel as though I haven’t done it (or the band, for that matter) enough justice. The truth is, I’ve never known how to describe The Jesus Lizard. They’re noise-rock, sure, but that label wasn’t even really around when I first discovered this album. In a way, they kind of represented a middle ground between the metal I adored so much as a kid and the “grunge” that inevitably usurped the limelight from them.

In case you’re wondering, the date went really well. I was charming and funny, and I even got to make out with her a little at the end. Had I not bought Liar immediately beforehand, who knows? I may have still been stressed out about the date, pacing back and forth in my room trying to mellow out to my Tool records or something. But any reason that I had for being nervous was out the window the second I heard that first note of “Boilermaker.” I bet I listened to the album three times in a row that day. The Jesus Lizard are one of my all-time favorite bands still, 25 years later, and I feel very fortunate that every time I listen to them I get to recount this story.

-         Jonathan Eagle

Fables of the Reconstruction: Nevermind

Twenty years ago, on my 23^rd birthday, I went with some friends to see Dinosaur Jr. at the Gothic Theater. I knew there were two other bands on the bill but I had never heard of them so we showed up late, after the first band had played. Soon after we got there, the second band came on. It was a three-piece with a tall, short-haired guy on bass, and a short, long-haired guy on guitar and lead vocals. They started playing, the crowd surged forward and we all sort of melded into one another and became a giant throbbing beast with a screaming grungy blonde guitar player for a head. It was rock concert as transcendence, one of the few times in my life that I’d reached such heights through live music, and I had no idea who I was watching.

During the break before Dinosaur Jr.’s set, a buddy and I went to the lobby and deduced from the designs on the T-shirts at the merchandise stand that the band was called Nirvana. My friend bought a black one with “BLEACH” written across it. We went back into the theater proper and were surprised to find the place noticeably less crowded. In my memory’s eye, it’s practically empty, but that seems unlikely now. One thing I know is that I was able to shimmy freely around the dance floor while J. Mascis whipped up monstrous clouds of super-loud guitar noise, whereas during Nirvana I was pinned in place by the press of bodies. Clearly, everyone had come out to see the opening act, and I had missed the memo.

My roommate bought Bleach on CD the following week, and we listened to it all summer. Then, soon after school started up again in the fall, I walked past one of several music stores that were on The Hill in Boulder at the time and I noticed a poster in the window for Nirvana’s new record, Nevermind. I immediately walked in and bought a copy on cassette, took it home and popped in the tape deck, where it remained for at least a month. I drove one of CU’s dorm buses back then, and I would play music on a little jam box while I drove, and when I had Nevermind on I swore I could feel my passengers getting infected by it. When I looked in the rear view mirror I could see students sitting up a little straighter, more alert, not cringing the way they often did when I would play, say, the Butthole Surfers’ Locust Abortion Technician or Sonic Youth’s Confusion Is Sex. One day, a really hot girl came up to the front of the bus while I was driving and shouted over the blare, “Is this Nirvana?!” That never happened when I was cranking the Buttholes.

The album very quickly became a monster hit, of course, and I like to think I played a role in it, like I was one of the pied pipers who lured the masses into the gales of feedback of the post-punk underground, a revolutionary who helped dirty up the Top 40. The Nirvana show at the Gothic and the release of Nevermind combined to form my rock-and-roll moment, the only time I was there at the exact moment when lightning struck and the whole world seemed to change course and travel along for a little while in tandem with my interests, and I cherish it as much as any of the other great moments in my life, like graduation and marriage and losing my virginity.

I told this story recently to an acquaintance from Seattle, and he said something like, “Oh, that’s nothing, I saw them a bunch of times in all these little clubs up and down the Northwest coast.” And I’m sure there are a few people reading this who caught the Nirvana bug long before I did. All those other people pushing toward the stage at the Gothic, pumping their fists in the air, obviously knew something I didn’t. Maybe they’d caught them at the Gothic a couple of years earlier, a concert that can be relived today on YouTube (to the extent than anything can be lived via streaming video). So yeah, my grunge hipster credentials aren’t the most impressive on earth. I’ve always floated somewhere between the avant-garde and the masses. But still, I was there on the opening date of Nirvana’s fabled tour warming up for Dinosaur Jr. at a time when the universe was lining up to make them the biggest superstars of the decade, and it’s now a sturdy pillar in my cathedral of experience. And part of what is driving me back into music collecting is the knowledge that there might be similar singular events waiting in the next bin at my favorite record store or ready to take the stage and warm up the crowd for some better-known band.

Nirvana - Bleach

History has been weird to Nirvana. At the time there seemed to be universal consensus that this was one of the great rock bands, but since, and maybe because of Kurt Cobain’s senseless, violent death there has been a lot of rewriting and denying history. Hopefully, the release of this special 20th Anniversary edition of Bleach (is it possible?) will settle the argument. Bleach shows Nirvana in the formative, explosive, pre-superstardom years, when they were clawing their way to the top with such other local contemporaries as Mudhoney and Tad. Cobain was not yet writing with the melodic sophistication he would find on Nevermind, and Jack Endino’s sludgy production creates a very different effect than Butch Vig would get with his crystalline rock perfection but the raw substance of Cobain’s greatness is right there to be heard. Songs like “Blew,” Negative Creep,” “Love Buzz” and the brilliant “About A Girl” show what a powerful songwriter Cobain was, and would become. The greatest strength of the band at this early stage was their rock and roll power. They could punish the audience with their three man attack like nobody’s business, and if you want proof, listen to the twelve song live show that is included in this edition of the album. Obviously playing to a local, partisan crowd the band just rockets out of the gates delivering one slab of hard rock after another and leaving the audience and the modern listener screaming for more. Nirvana was capable of an almost nuclear fury in concert and this show offers ample evidence of that fact. The fat booklet included with this release does not waste any time with wordy explanations of the times or the band, it just has a bunch of photos that show a group of kids - not grown-up men, just kids, living the rock dream. It is touching. Hopefully this excellent package will trigger a reassessment of Nirvana and they will once again be understood as the defining group of their era.

Paul Epstein

What Are You Listening To Lately (Part 11)?

Sly & the Family Stone - Stand!
If it were not for the just-OK "Somebody's Watching You" and the slight excess of "Sex Machine," this album would be perfect - the absolute inverse in its brightness, drive, and optimism of There's a Riot Goin' On's murk, languor, and pessimism. There's nary a hint of the darkness that would consume Sly a year or so after the making of this album - it's all hope and optimism and direct confrontation of problems, none of the resigned negativity he'd essay on the next record. And it's beautiful for most of its length, with "Everyday People" standing as not just one of Sly's best songs, but one of the best pop songs of all time. A true, indelible, A+ moment. But it's only one standout of Sly's grand statement of purpose - or at least of the purpose he espoused in 1969. On nearly any other record, "Everyday People" would be a career-topper the artist would try forever to recapture. On Stand! the song, brilliant as it is, finds at least three others on par with it - the bruising funk of "Sing A Simple Song," the tense equality plea of "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey" and the nearly-surpassing-it masterpiece of "I Want to Take You Higher." It's a landmark album, kept half a star short for me only by some minor flaws which in truth never cross my mind while it's playing, only in reflection afterwards.


Meat Puppets - II
In a way, their best because it's got the most breadth but it's also a little on the side of wild youth - they got wiser as they continued, and I for one appreciate that. But even so, they're pretty damn smart even this early on in their career and I don't think they were ever more fun, singing however they feel it without worrying about, y'know, pitch and stuff and playing their wacked out guitar/bass/drums the same way. Which just means that Kurt & co. cleaned them up a bit for their respectable stab at the MTV crowd, not that Nirvana improved on the melodies or the words. Cobain was right to pick three songs from this album for their big acoustic special because it's the Puppets' catchiest, their easiest to absorb (especially in the cleaner Nirvana versions) and he knew as well as anyone that "grunge" fans fans not acclimated to the underground that spawned Nirvana would be able to glom on to these shoulda-been hits more readily then the thrash of the first record or the wide-eyed (or should I say wide-pupiled?) psychedelic wonder of some of the later ones. So yeah, I guess it really is their best, a repository of melodies, riffs and memories, even though I find that I don't always go to this for my Puppets fix, which just means there are more great ones lurking out there.


Various Artists - Produced by Trevor Horn
Before I had any idea who Eno was, before I made any connection between Phil Spector and the multitude of hits he produced, I could identify a Trevor Horn production within a few bars. So his 80's material collected here holds a special place for me. He's the magic link between ABC, my heroes in Art of Noise, my favorite Pet Shop Boys song, the wacko "Buffalo Gals," and my otherwise inexplicable attraction to Yes and Godley & Creme. I don't necessarily need his 90's and 00's stuff the way I love his 80's, but neither do I mind hearing how he's developed (though I have yet to develop my own tastes enough to enjoy t.A.T.u for more than 2.5 minutes at a time.). Like the key AoN releases, like "Buffalo Gals," like "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and "Cry," the bulk of the 80's material here takes me to a sentimental place that I enjoy visiting. And if I don't love it all equally, this is a fundamental piece of my musical development. Eno and Spector came later and I can't in truth say that they've meant more to me.