Читать книгу The Jesus Lizard Book - The Jesus Lizard - Страница 13

My pa, Frank Lambeth Yow Jr., was born and raised in a charming little East Texas town called Commerce. He went from kindergarten through college within a half-mile radius. Like his mother Octo (she was the eighth child), he was a talented artist with a gift for descriptive line drawings and a great eye for composition. In his high school and college years, he was torn between becoming a visual artist or a fighter pilot. Talk about the duality of man. In Vietnam, he flew over one hundred combat missions in the completely badass F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bomber. I suppose “survived” would fit in place of “flew” in that last sentence. Pa was a clever wordsmith. His initials were F.L.Y., Ma’s were D.A.Y., so Pa used to say that their anniversary (having a name like Yow) was Flyday, even if it came on a Tuesday. He named our first cat Me Yow. He could be a lot of fun to talk to.

Ma was born and raised in an even smaller town named Gap Mills, situated on the west side of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains in West Virginia. As I write this, the population of Gap Mills is about 1,070. Ma was born in 1932. This was hillbilly country; it probably still is. Ma never finished high school, but in the mid-1970s she took a correspondence course and became a bookkeeper. She was soft-spoken, polite, funny, and stood just under five feet tall. I’m not lying when I say that Doris Yow was the sweetest little woman to ever walk the face of the earth.

My sister Kathy showed up a little less than two years before I did. She’s an extraordinary woman who was an extraordinary girl, always smart as a whip and a go-getter. When we were in our preteens, Kathy had me wrapped around her finger. This wasn’t her doing, it was that I looked up to her so much, she enchanted me. She excelled at the things I didn’t.

I was born August 2, 1960, on Nellis Air Force base in Las Vegas, Nevada. Pa was generally stationed at any given location for about four years at a time. We moved from Las Vegas to Tripoli, Libya, to Durham, North Carolina, to Fairfax, Virginia, to Upper Heyford, England, to Austin, Texas, where Pa retired. While in those places we would vacation to nearby destinations, including Norway, Germany, an amazing Mediterranean cruise where I got really sick, Spain, and occasional summer jaunts on a rented boat through the canals of the British Midlands. I think my childhood was a pretty happy one. I hated school, and I was not a very good student, although I didn’t despise my teenage years as much as it seems everyone else in the world did.

I became a Beatles freak when we lived in Fairfax. My best buddy Chuck and I bought the 7” singles when they came out. I recall taking “For You Blue,” the B-side of “The Long and Winding Road,” to class for show-and-tell and nobody—not the teacher, not my friends, not the other students—could’ve given a shit about that song, which at the time was my very favorite. My sister and I used to play “D.O.A.” by Bloodrock over and over, taking turns feigning death, lying motionless with our mouths agape and staring as long as we could manage off into space. Right after we moved to England in 1971, we saw Led Zeppelin on Top of the Pops and made fun of the way the singer twiddled his fingers in his long curly hair. Kathy and I referred to whatever song they were playing as “crazy music.” It didn’t take long at all for me to be won over by T. Rex and Slade and the Sweet and Led Zeppelin. I have a very clear memory of being in the car with Ma while Queen’s first hit, “Killer Queen,” was on the radio. I was a big fan and mentioned that I thought “these guys are gonna be big!” She replied, in her delicate and relaxed vernacular, “I don’t think so, David. I don’t think they have staying power.” By the time we moved back to the States, I was a card-carrying Led Zeppelin devotee. When Presence was released, I was floored by how powerful and dissonant it was. I’d never heard anything like that, and it made me wonder how far you could take music before it became nothing but noise. On May 21, 1977, I took a Greyhound bus from Austin down to Houston to see my first rock concert, Led Zeppelin at the Summit, for $9.85. There was no opening band, and I think they played for over three hours. My ears rang for days.

When I enrolled at Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University–San Marcos) in 1978, I was planning on becoming a commercial art major. I had no idea there was such a thing as a fine arts degree. I could draw well throughout my earlier life, I had focused on art classes in high school, and I figured making a living by drawing and painting was right up my alley. I toyed with trying architecture, but I loathed math. SWTSU was renowned for being a party school. There were two girls to every guy and several bars in the town of San Marcos, thirty miles south of Austin. It didn’t take long for me to completely immerse myself in art classes and completely fuck off all my academics. Mark Todd’s first year as an art professor was coincidentally my first year as a student. I spent a lot of time fraternizing with some of the art faculty, Mark in particular. We became fast friends for life. He was a tremendous influence on both the way I drew and the way I pictured the surrounding world. He told me once that Jesus fucked sheep and that’s how venereal disease came about. Now, I think that’s hilarious. At the time, even though I wasn’t religious, I expected a lightning bolt to take Mark out of the frame. I was a late bloomer in lots of things, and Mark helped show me some of the ropes. We used to go shoot pool and drink before the classes he taught. We had a bunch of fun. I knew that college is not supposed to be all play and no work, but I didn’t pay attention. After two years and one summer semester, my parents quit paying for me to waste their money at Southwest Texas State University.

My best friend from high school, Rob LaPointe, and I had heard stories about a punk rock bar in Austin near the University of Texas campus called Raul’s. Halloween Night 1979 we went to see the Huns. That show absolutely changed my life. It had never occurred to me that an audience member could, or would, be intimidated by the rock band they were paying to see. The Dicks, who later became good friends, would make you think twice about being close to the stage. On several occasions, I saw injuries inflicted by band members, accidental and intentional. There was a fear factor mixed up with a big, fun, energetic factor. Most of the bands I saw at Raul’s and other clubs in Austin, Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas were not only fun and entertaining to listen to, but a blast to watch. I started hanging around Raul’s and a great club called Duke’s Royal Coach Inn and making new friends. One of the guys who became very dear to me was Steve Anderson. Steve grew up in Dallas and was attending UT when we met. He was something of an enigma. He was able to walk across town and arrive at whatever place before we got there in a car.

One afternoon, Steve and I were eating some tacos when he noticed an article in the paper about a brand-new disease called toxic shock syndrome. Before we had finished lunch, we decided to form a band called Toxic Shock. We made offensive and provocative flyers announcing our impending band which we plastered, stapled, and taped up all around central Austin. Folks referred to us as a “poster band” until we finally played some shows. Neither of us knew how to play any instruments, but we weren’t going to let something like that get in our way. I bought a copy of a Gibson SG bass and a little toy amp and we started asking folks to be in our band. Steve was going to be the singer, and we recruited Boston Irish Brian Flaherty for drums, downright militant Fred Hawkins on guitar, me on bass, and my slinky, beautiful girlfriend Karla Eppler as a second vocalist. Our music was kind of Sex Pistols meets the Ramones. We didn’t last very long, something like nine months or so, but we had a blast playing around Texas. Steve quit singing after two or three shows—I don’t remember why.

Sometime during Toxic Shock’s tenure, David Wm. Sims and I became friends and then roommates. We were both fans of local heroes Jerryskids, the drummer and guitarist of which were, respectively, Rey Washam and Brett Bradford. I don’t recall exactly how it came to pass, but David, Rey, Brett, Steve Anderson, and I started Scratch Acid. David and Brett both played guitar, Steve sang, and I was the less-than-adequate bass player. Initially, we practiced in my bedroom, which we outfitted with a shitty old carpet and egg crates in order to “soundproof” it. We later practiced at our friend Suzi Riddle’s house, but I think we left that place after David fell through the ceiling into her boudoir. Steve would complain that he was either not drunk enough to practice, or too drunk to practice, or that screaming would ruin his voice for when an actual show happened.

We played our first show at a little club called Studio 29 opening for Kamikaze Refrigerators and the Butthole Surfers. We neglected to tell Steve that we had the show, and just played a few instrumentals without him. After that bit of lousy communication, I moved to vocals, and David switched to the bass guitar. The next time we played, we were first on the bill, followed by Butthole Surfers, Austin legends the Big Boys, and TSOL at the Skyline in North Austin. This was a pretty big show, and I had never sung in public. I was terrified. I spent most of the day throwing up. One of us had gotten hold of a whole bunch of LSD. We gave out about eighty hits of acid before we played. Hopefully, a few of those who imbibed found it an enjoyable experience.

After a while, Scratch Acid started gaining a modicum of attention and a little momentum. Our friends Stacey Cloud and Laura Croteau, who had recently found a bag of money, made a record company, and asked if we’d like to put out an album on their newly formed Rabid Cat Records. We said, “Yup, thanks.” We recorded with a wonderful Christian guy named Kerry Crafton at Earth & Sky studio. Although we’d had a weensy bit of studio time before, this was my first real, honest-to-goodness recording-studio adventure as a vocalist. It turned out all right, and we very cleverly named the eight-song EP Scratch Acid. We did some touring of the US, went to Europe in December of 1986, recorded a full-length album for Rabid Cat, and got to open for Motörhead and Public Image.

Before Scratch Acid broke up in 1987, we left Rabid Cat in order to release what turned out to be our last record, Berserker, on Touch and Go Records. The people at Touch and Go would prove to be very good friends.

DAVID YOW