Читать книгу The Jesus Lizard Book - The Jesus Lizard - Страница 18

After we recorded Pure, but before it was released, we decided we wanted to be a full-time rock band rather than a recording project. Duane moved from Austin to Chicago, and I loaned the band money to buy a van. For us, being a rock band meant playing live and touring—a lot. There were bands around then playing live with drum machines. I hadn’t enjoyed the ones I’d seen. I was huge fan of Big Black’s records, but the live shows I saw felt flat. You have to have drums in a real rock show, so we needed a drummer.

We wanted somebody who was powerful and smart with their drumming. It was important to find someone we could get along with on tour in a van for weeks at a time. Having played with Rey Washam in Scratch Acid and Rapeman, and then with Scott Marcus in Prohibition, I was pretty spoiled about the caliber of drummers I had played with. I can say from lucky experience that playing with a great drummer makes you sound great.

Drummers are crucial in rock bands. I’ve always held that the drummer sets the ceiling of how good a rock band can be. There are millions of great bands with crappy bass players and guitarists. Let’s not even start about singers. The same can’t be said for drummers; rock bands are never better than their drummers. On recordings, this is partly due to the ability of the other musicians to punch in their recorded parts and fix minor errors. Drummers can rarely do this because the drum track is almost always recorded in a single take, and it usually doesn’t work to go back and try to fix one bad measure of a drum part. This is also true for the live performance, for reasons that are more visceral and primal, and not easy to articulate. A great drummer provides an energy and visual component to the show that just can’t be compensated for if it’s lacking.

We started talking about potential drummers. David wanted to ask John Herndon, who then went by Johnny Machine and played in a Chicago band called Precious Wax Drippings. I knew John was (and is) a very talented, very smart drummer. He was (and is) also a very funny, smart, charming guy who would be a lot of fun to tour with. But, correctly or not, I couldn’t see him as the kind of Bonhamesque crusher I pictured for the Jesus Lizard. So, yeah, I was the jerk who vetoed John. We never auditioned him, so maybe I dropped the ball on that one. John went on to found Tortoise with awesome bassist Doug McCombs and become a huge rock star, so don’t feel too sorry for him.

We got in touch with Scott Marcus (inset) and asked him to move from Austin to Chicago and join the band. We sent him a tape of Pure and he asked for some time to think about it. Scott had been the drummer in a great Austin band called Glass Eye. Then he left that band and floated around, and was replaced by Dave Cameron (later Lisa Cameron). There was tension between Cameron and the rest of Glass Eye, and the other members of the band were considering getting Scott back in the band if Cameron quit. When we approached Scott, Glass Eye felt they had to jump on Scott or be left without a drummer if Dave Cameron quit, so they made their move. They fired Cameron and got Scott to rejoin Glass Eye. So, Glass Eye resolved their little personnel dysfunction, and we were still without a drummer. Glad we could help, guys.

A few years before, when we still lived in Austin, David and I had seen the Atlanta band 86 at the Cave Club. A friend had raved about the band, and particularly the drummer, Mac McNeilly. The show was great, and so was Mac. I met him briefly, and he and David spent time talking at the bar. Scratch Acid had just broken up and 86 was planning on disbanding at the end of that tour. David and Mac exchanged phone numbers and made vague talk about getting together to do a music project in the future. So, a couple of years later, and with no subsequent contact between them, I said to David, “Why don’t you call that kid from 86 and see if he’ll move up here and play with us?” It was a long shot. There was no reason to think Mac would be interested in our music, didn’t already have another band going in Atlanta, would be willing to move to Chicago, or would have a temperament we would be willing to work and tour with. The chances of all of those things being true were just too depressing to think about. We were getting worried and a little desperate, so David called him. As it happened, all those things were true, and we had found our drummer.

DAVID WM. SIMS