David Yow was having brunch outside at a little restaurant near his home in California recently when a Jaguar pulled up. Out stepped Billie Eilish. “I was so starstruck, I was hyperventilating,” he says on a phone call. “She walked, like, inches behind me into the restaurant. No makeup, nothing fancy, just Billie Eilish. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to tell her how great she is, but [stars] get that shit so often, so I didn’t bother her.”
Yow — the 64-year-old singer whose band, the Jesus Lizard, released a noisy, foundation-shaking new album, Rack, last week — still sounds amazed that he spotted Eilish since, by his own admission, he doesn’t listen to much “modern music.” He likes British post-punks Idles, and he’s obsessed with the late folk singer Lhasa, whose 2003 album, The Living Road, informed some of his vocals on Rack. Then there’s Eilish, whom he’s become a “really big fan” of in recent years.
“I think that if there had never been a Billie Eilish, my vocals on this record might not sound the same,” he says, kind of jokingly, “but I don’t know that I can specifically point to anything that I would have done differently if there had not been a Billie Eilish.”
That’s because even with a 26-year gap between albums, the Jesus Lizard are incapable of sounding like anything other than the Jesus Lizard: a seething, snarky noise-rock bulldozer led by untamable wild man Yow’s sneering vocals. Three decades ago, the group walked the edge between post-punk and grunge, never really falling into either category since they were unpredictable rock expressionists at heart. But the way they splattered and grinded their noise, with Yow’s yowls guiding the way, earned them a dedicated cult following on their early-Nineties indie releases, Goat, Liar, and Down (all recorded by the late Steve Albini), and even into a short run on major label Capitol, which fizzled out before the decade was up.
Rack is the group’s seventh album and its first since 1998. Even though the musicians are nearing Social Security eligibility age-wise, they sound just as frenetic on songs like “Hide & Seek,” “Lord Godiva,” and “Is That Your Hand?” as they did when they were releasing split singles with Nirvana and traveling on the Lollapalooza tour during the Clinton administration. Making a record that lives up to the group’s legend after so many years was a tall order. Yow tells Rolling Stone it took a little work to find his sea legs again, but he’s happy he did.
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What convinced you to agree to another Jesus Lizard album?
Well, the other 75 percent of the band were working on ideas for songs that I didn’t really know about. And then they came to me with six or eight songs, and I thought they sounded really cool. I said, “Well, what do you want to do with this?” They said, “Let’s make a record.” So we thought, “What the fuck?” I mean, it seems weird. Any kind of reenactment or reunion stuff is weird.
We broke up in ’99, and then in 2009 we did some touring around the world, and then a few years later did some more. I don’t even know how to articulate this, but it’s sort of like fucking an old girlfriend. I love the other guys in the band, and getting to play with them again is an honor and fun. I think Rack might be our best record and we’re having fun, so, I guess, why not?
Were you hesitant at all about making a new album?
Back in ’96, we had signed a three-record deal with Capitol and there was a clause saying that if [drummer] Mac [McNeilly] needed to leave because of his family, he could do so. When Mac left the band, I hated it. I hated not having him in the band. It became a job instead of the most fun thing you can do. So the moment that Capitol said, “You don’t have to do a third album,” I called our manager and said, “I quit.”
I was the most eager [Jesus Lizard member] to stop playing and I think that the other guys knew that. I think they expected that I was not going to want to do it. I think that’s partly why they worked on some stuff without really saying anything to me. Once I heard the songs, I don’t know that I was hesitant from there on.
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Were you worried you’d screw up your legacy?
No, I don’t really know what our legacy is. The two records on Capitol never sold any more than the records on [indie label] Touch and Go. And there was a large contingent of, I use the term loosely, “fans” of the earlier stuff. Already there were fewer people showing up for the shows when we broke up, so I think it was a good time for us to stop.
You’d recorded with the band Qui and did a solo album since the last Jesus Lizard record. Was it easy to get back in the Jesus Lizard frame of mind for Rack?
It did seem a little bit weird. I did feel like I don’t know what I’m doing when I first started [writing for Rack]. But I did a thing called automatic writing: I allowed myself five minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, and you just start writing and don’t stop. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to make sense. You just don’t stop writing. And that was very helpful. A lot of ideas came out of that.
Also, the current events in the last eight years or so. There’s a guy, Trump, who, I hate him more than anything that’s hateable, and he and some of his bullshit works its way into a few of the songs. I don’t know how blatant it is, but it was unignorable. So the ideas came about from automatic writing, some of the current events, and also an incredible woman named Lhasa de Sela. Are you familiar with her?
Yes, I love her album, The Living Road.
It was very inspirational for me when I was writing this album. It’s absolutely incredible. I think it might be the best record ever made. I like how emotional she is, how good she is at conveying really strong feelings. I don’t remember how I stumbled across her music, but I got so excited and looked her up thinking, “Oh, maybe she’s on tour,” and she had died I think seven years prior. I was heartbroken.
Where do you hear Lhasa’s influence on Rack?
Some of “Falling Down” is taken lightly, not plagiaristically, from a song on The Living Road called “Con Toda Palabra.” The first line is like, [sings]”Con toda palabra”, that sort of phrasing and then I’m doing, “Don’t call me courageous.” So, I haven’t done much stealing of other people’s musical ideas in the past, but I kind of stole that. But no one would ever know if I didn’t say anything.
When you’re listening to the music the guys gave you, just by itself, how does it make you feel?
For “Armistice Day,” where Duane [Denison’s] guitar playing is just stellar — it sounded very Led Zeppelin-y to me. I wanted to do a Plant-esque kind of thing, like there’s a part where the music modulates from a higher key to a lower key, and I sing just draped over it. That was largely inspired by the part in “Kashmir” when Robert Plant sings this really long note as it floats across this music’s changing. To me, it implies motion.
One of the other things that Duane did, the guitar on “Hide & Seek,” it’s one of the rudest, sassiest guitar things I’ve ever heard, and that was inspirational to me. That really helped me just sort of run with it for that song.
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You mentioned Trump earlier. I was wondering if in “Is That Your Hand?” where you repeat “I forecast them stupid,” over and over, was inspired by him.
Yeah. Most of that’s about those rallies and stuff, but the most comical part about that is when I repeat, over and over and over, “I forecast some stupid.” It sounds like I’m saying, “I saw Captain Stubing.” I wish I had thought of that beforehand, because that would be some great lyrics, like, “I saw Captain Stubing.”
You could change the lyric sheet.
It’s too late.
Why did you title the record Rack?
The most difficult thing about being in the Jesus Lizard is the four of us agreeing on a four-letter title for the record, and Rack was my idea. There are so many double-entendres and multi-entendres: It’s a torture device, or you can rack your brain trying to think of something, or, hey, “rack your balls,” or there’s an outboard rack in the recording studio, or a pair of boobs. It’s just like it goes on and on.
What’s different about being the singer of the Jesus Lizard at age 64 compared to when you started the band at age 28?
A lot more wrinkles, a lot less hair. When we knew that we were going to be doing all this touring this year and next year, I hired a physical trainer to help me to get in better shape because I’ve been sedentary for so long with my job where I just play Photoshop all day and I’m just sitting in the chair. [Yow retouches photos for ads as his day job.] I’m so grateful to him. It was never easy, but without having this physical trainer, there’s no way I could do a 45-minute set. And the last show we played in North Carolina, I think we played for 90 minutes, and I could have kept going.
There’s an old Rolling Stone Jesus Lizard profile, and this is how it describes you: “Shirtless and covered in sweat, singer David Yow stalks the stage like a drunken hobo crossed with the bastard son of Robert Plant.”
[Laughs.] Oh, wowie.
Do you feel a lot of pressure to live up to your own legend?
Well, honestly, there have been a few times when I felt like that, but it’s usually if we’re about to play a show and I just plain and simple don’t want to do it. If I’m too tired, or feeling sick, or just completely just don’t want to do it, then I kind of have to go through the motions of like, “Well, this is what I would usually do.” And hopefully, ideally, the adrenaline and the chutzpah will take over, but I would feel the pressure to just do it the best I can even when I don’t really want to do it at all.
What was it that attracted you to push boundaries as a frontman and do eyebrow-raising performances?
I think when the Talking Heads first formed, that they were saying, “We’re going to be intelligent dance music.” And I love bands like Wire or even XTC — bands that are kind of intellectuals. I am definitely not, but I think that there’s a fair amount of intelligence in the music that we make, but there’s also a whole lot of humor in it. And I just get a kick out of putting things together that you wouldn’t necessarily think would work together.
A lot of your legend began with the early Jesus Lizard records that you recorded with Steve Albini, who recently passed. You knew him as Big Black’s frontman before you recorded with him. When did you know he had a knack for recording?
I don’t know. I mean, I know he’s self-taught, and I’m sure he read a shit ton of stuff about recording. I’m not sure how he arrived exactly on the experimental, groundbreaking ideas that he did with microphone techniques. It was a whole lot of fun to record with him, particularly for me because we would play around with strange microphone techniques. I’m not sure that the weirdness of the way it was recorded actually comes through, but it was a great deal of fun.
How weird was it?
For maybe “Wheelchair Epidemic,” he had me lie on my back and I held a microphone pointed at my mouth above my chest. And then there was another microphone on a stand placed relatively close to my mouth. Then there was another microphone hanging from the ceiling. When we started recording, I sort of would throw that microphone a little bit, so that it would circle around me and those microphones during the duration of the song. So the phase would be shifting constantly. And for “Nub,” he’d tape a PZM microphone to my headphones and then I’d stick my upper body in a gigantic trash can. Stuff like that.
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The Jesus Lizard did a split single with Nirvana before they worked with Steve. Did you recommend Steve to them?
I don’t think so. But Steve said a couple of times when they recorded that record [In Utero] up in Minnesota, Kurt wanted him to push the “David Yow button,” which flatters the fuck out of me.
What do you think the “David Yow button” is?
I don’t know. But when we were recording with Steve, I used to always say, “Push the Elvis button,” which, at the time I didn’t know, it’s just slap-back reverb.