“For a long time I’ve been helping make people deaf — now I shush people,” says The Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison with a laugh. He’s describing his day job as a circulation assistant at the Bellevue branch of the Nashville Public Library. Most days, that modern-looking edifice is where you’ll find the architect of some of the heaviest, cleverest guitar riffs ever committed to tape, serving patrons and tending to books. “Checking things in, dealing with deliveries, holds, directing people to different sections. Sometimes I get to recommend things. I can’t complain.”
It’s a low-key gig for a guy whose band once did a split with Nirvana, and who spent the ’90s on some of rock’s biggest stages. All the same, some of Denison’s regulars from nearby Bellevue Middle School have done some sleuthing on the librarian.
“There’s a little gang of kids who I see who are into punk rock,” he says. “They’re always asking me silly questions like ‘Do you know Jello Biafra? Have you met Henry Rollins?’ I tell them stories, and they think that that’s cool.”
I’ve reached Denison on his day off, ahead of a rare Jesus Lizard show on Saturday at Marathon Music Works. The 60-year-old Michigan native has called Nashville home for the past two decades, since a gig with Hank Williams III brought him here. He lived in Austin, Texas, and Chicago during The Jesus Lizard’s initial run. From the group’s first show on July 1, 1989, until they decided to dissolve on July 1, 1999, he ate, slept and breathed band life. After that, he needed a change of pace.
“We played a lot — about a thousand shows,” Denison says, reflecting on TJL’s heyday. “Factor in recording, rehearsals and soundchecks, and we played some songs 3,000 times. On top of that, the four of us lived together for years in the same place in Chicago. Then we’d go on tour and were still on top of each other, traveling around, 24 hours a day. We were ready to give it a rest.”
Released in rapid succession between 1990 and ’92 — at the height of the group’s powers — The Jesus Lizard’s first three LPs Head, Goat and Liar, all recorded by Chi-Town icon Steve Albini, are pillars of the noise-rock subgenre, often imitated but never duplicated. For first-time listeners, it doesn’t get much better than Goat’s opening one-two: the menacing trudge of “Then Comes Dudley” careening into the raging, acerbic “Mouth Breather.”
But it isn’t mere noise — there is a finesse to the aggression. The steamroller-like rhythm section of David Wm. Sims on bass and Mac McNeilly on drums provides a strong foundation for Denison’s inventive playing, the linchpin of the band’s sound. Denison tears at his instrument, all the while carefully blending a wide range of influences — jazz, blues, post-punk, art rock, even flamenco guitar — into a signature style, in which dissonance and melodic ingenuity are equal priorities.
At the center of the fracas: slurring, howling frontman David Yow. Arguably the world’s most outrageous punk singer not named Iggy Pop, Yow pioneered a new frontperson archetype, refusing to be confined to any stage and giving each show a thrilling unpredictability. When The Jesus Lizard plays, one senses the room could descend into chaos at any moment.
“When we were playing in the ’90s, David Yow would go from the stage into the audience throughout the show,” Denison remembers. “And in that era, the audience could also get onstage, thrash their way up. We had a three-second rule, like in basketball. Get up, do your thing, then get off or you might get kicked or pushed. Our attitude was, ‘Hey, it took me a long time to get up on this stage. I’m not sharing it with just anyone.’ ”
Since the split in ’99, the band’s members have settled in different cities. Sims is in New York, McNeilly in Chicago and Yow in L.A. In the Aughts, Denison played in the alt-metal supergroup Tomahawk, with Faith No More and Mr. Bungle main man Mike Patton and Helmet drummer John Stanier. Yow briefly revived Scratch Acid, his pre-TJL project with Sims, for shows in 2006 and ’11 in between periods of focusing on his visual-art career. More recently, he’s slid into the frontman role for 2015 and 2019 tours with surviving members of proto-grunge heroes Flipper.
In 2008, to commemorate their catalog getting remastered and reissued by their longtime label Touch and Go, The Jesus Lizard reconvened for a series of performances. The Exit/In show that kicked off that run was professionally filmed, recorded and released as a live DVD and double LP titled Club. The band unretired again in 2017, and has played a handful of shows each year since. As anyone who has seen one of these recent shows can attest, just because audiences have mellowed out doesn’t mean the band has followed suit. Yow certainly hasn’t, mixing it up with the crowd as much as venues today will allow.
“We’ve told him, ‘David, you don’t have to do that so much — in fact, you don’t have to do it at all,’ ” Denison says. “But no, David Yow does not dial it back much. He’s not drinking quite as much. That’s probably a good thing. None of us are.”
There’s been a physical toll to being in The Jesus Lizard, a band that treats heavy sounds like an Olympic athlete treats a javelin. Denison catalogs a variety of injuries to and chronic pains in his wrist, elbow, neck, shoulder, back and knees. But he and his cohorts have gone too far to be held back now.
“People say ‘It’s always something’ — no, it’s always several things,” he says. “But you learn to deal with it. Every job has its hazards. You go to physical therapy, do the exercises, pop the pills if you have to, and carry on just like people in other walks of life do.”
