Читать книгу The Jesus Lizard Book - The Jesus Lizard - Страница 8

I was born March 12, 1960, in Atlanta, Georgia. My earliest memories are of watching all the adults around me fall apart after hearing of the death of JFK, and watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Both events were brought to me courtesy of a black-and-white television set. Funny that these things stick in my mind, but that’s what I remember.

On my third birthday, my parents gave me some black-light posters and a mushroom candle. My fourth birthday, I got rainbow-colored toe-socks. One Christmas, I got a plastic rabbit and a gun to make it stop. Kids in my neighborhood would put playing cards in the spokes of our Stingray bikes and ride up and down the street yelling at each other. We thought we were hot shazz. I would go to my next-door neighbor’s house a lot. The neighbor kid was a lot older than me, probably around twelve or thirteen, had a crew cut, and his name was Joe. He had a chemistry set in his garage and was always making stink bombs and lighting stuff on fire. One time, I got in trouble for painting the street. There were some cans of paint someone had left out on the curb, and I found a big stick and started to paint from the curb out into the middle of our street. I was told “no.” Also, there was an old guy who came around selling peaches in the summer. He was kind of grisly looking, and the grownups were always saying something about him, but all of the kids liked it when he came around. He would give you a peach even if all you had were a couple of pennies.

When I was about five years old, I started listening to my parents’ records. They had some folk albums, like Peter, Paul, and Mary and the Kingston Trio. AM radio was a big deal, and I listened to the Jackson 5, Supremes, Temptations, Curtis Mayfield, and Isaac Hayes. I loved soul and Motown, even though I didn’t have any idea that’s what I was hearing. I listened to the 1910 Fruitgum Company, who, along with the Ohio Express, made real bubblegum music for real bubblegum kids. I liked a good pop song, and AM radio was full of those sounds. Later, I started listening to the Beatles. Their music made sense to me, sonically. It was like rock music was the language I understood natively. The first record I got was Rubber Soul, bought it from Jim Salle’s Records in Atlanta. Soon after that, I asked for The White Album, and played it on a dinky portable record player that seemed to groan with just the weight of one record on it. I would play along with a little tambourine thing that had a cymbal and a wood block attached to it. The White Album would spin, and I didn’t have a clue what they were singing about, but I knew I loved the sound of the band. They helped galvanize my dream of playing music and being in a band myself.

My parents divorced when I was still a kid, and I bottled up those feelings that come along with your folks splitting up. I turned to music, really digging down deep to try to hear what the instruments sounded like. My dad said it didn’t matter what I did for a job, just be the best I could be at it. If you love what you do, it doesn’t matter how much hard work you put into it, you’re never going to think it was too much, because you get back what you throw into it. It doesn’t always turn out like that, but I’ve found it to be true so many times.

I wanted to play electric guitar (I still wish I could), and started to take lessons. My teacher asked me what type of music I wanted to play. I said the Beatles. He started to play the main riff from “Day Tripper.” That was so cool. He told me I had to learn scales and I had to practice if I wanted to play like that. Well, I didn’t want to do all that. I just wanted to rock immediately, and so it wasn’t happening with me and the electric guitar.

I had a best friend named Ken, and I would get dropped off at his house when I was around eight years old. We used to steal Cokes from his kitchen when no one was looking. He had a trampoline, and we ate cinnamon rolls that Ken hid under his bed. He would invite this younger kid Taylor over to play, and when Taylor came up the hill in front of Ken’s house, we threw lit firecrackers at him until he cried and ran back home. We did that over and over.

There was a kid who lived down the street from me named Olin. He was kind of a wiz at math and scientific things. He told me he knew how to build a time bomb. Well, I was curious, so we built this time bomb, and set it to go off next to a neighbor’s house. The mechanism was just an alarm clock with a tack stuck in the face of it, with a magnesium-coated wire wrapped around it, connected to a lantern battery and a firecracker. When the minute hand connected with the tack, the circuit was complete, the wire heated up, and a small flame lit the firecracker. We set our device to go off after fifteen minutes, and fled the scene to listen for the big explosion. We waited and waited. We never heard anything, so we forgot about it. We heard the next day about how the neighbor’s house had almost burned down. We had covered the time bomb with dry leaves to conceal it. The firecracker turned out to be a dud, so there was no bang at all, but the wire did catch fire, and so did the leaves. The neighbors just happened to pull up and see a pile of leaves on fire next to their house. Man, we got in a lot of trouble over that one.

For a while, I would stuff paper towels into our mailbox, and when I saw a car coming down the road, I would set them on fire and hide. The car would slow down and stop, the driver trying to figure out why this mailbox was flaming with no one around. I would watch from a safe distance, where they couldn’t see me. They would slowly drive off, and I would think how funny it was that I had inserted myself into their reality in an anonymous way. I got a big kick out of wondering what they were thinking, how they were trying to make sense of a burning mailbox with no one around.

When I was ten years old, I went over to my older cousin’s house. He played drums in a band. They let me watch while they rehearsed. They played “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” and my cousin did the drum solo—I thought that was the coolest thing I had ever seen. He turned me on to some great music. I remember him saying, “You have to hear this guy; he plays so fast you won’t believe it.” He was talking about Mitch Mitchell and the song “Fire,” from Are You Experienced by Jimi Hendrix. He played “Light My Fire” by the Doors, some Steppenwolf, and Paul Revere and the Raiders (I still love that guitar solo in “Just Like Me”). That day was a revelation. My life was changed, and I had a new direction.

I remember a few teachers from elementary school. One teacher in fourth grade was a big mountain of a woman, and she got mad pretty easily. One day, a girl in our class was caught taping the teacher on a little reel-to-reel machine. The teacher found it, turned purple in the face, and threw it out the window. The girl started crying, and all the boys in the class thought that was hilarious for some reason, and we started laughing, which only made the teacher get hotter and hotter. The same teacher threw scissors at a kid one time, and they flew across the room and stuck in the wall. During free time before the start of the day, we listened to “Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin (the single, with the red and black Atlantic logo) and “The Pusher” by Steppenwolf. We thought we were rolling pretty high when John Kay kept saying, “Goddamn the pusher man,” over and over, and we wondered when our teacher would come barreling into the room and blow her top.

My best friend Max Koshewa and I would mime songs in front of the whole elementary school during recess. We set up metal chairs so I could air-drum, turned on a record player really loud, and three other guys played tennis rackets. We thought we were pretty cool. Max and I were in a sixth grade talent show: I played cardboard boxes, with “drumsticks” torn from a dogwood tree in my front yard; Max sang into a microphone. We did “Cold Turkey” by the Plastic Ono Band and “I’m Eighteen” by Alice Cooper. We were awesome, I’m sure.

I was hooked. I had to have a drum set. My first was a Royal Star with a cool gold bamboo finish. I didn’t know how or what to play, so I listened to records with headphones on and tried to play along. The Rolling Stones and Beatles were good to try and imitate. My mother had to put up with all the horrible banging. She said at least it was “positive noise” that was probably keeping me out of trouble. I don’t think it worked that way.

I went through a phase for several years where I felt compelled to throw things at cars. It was usually from a ledge or cliff. Both houses I lived in during this time had landscaping features where a parkway was around forty or fifty feet below a ridgeline. I threw mud balls, snowballs, eggs, water balloons, dirt clods, hard pinecones, even a rock or two. I shot bottle rockets. I thought this was hilarious. I made dummies out of old clothes and pine straw, then set them in the road with a string tied to one of the arms. The string went under the guardrail and up the hill. When a car came around the curve, I would pull the string, and the dummy would appear to be waving to avoid being run over. This worked best at night, but I did it in the daytime too. Usually, I had to take off running when a car stopped and the driver got out and saw that it was only some clothes filled with straw. They were furious and usually cursed at me, even though they couldn’t see me. I really thought that was fun.

I got hit by lightning when I was twelve years old. I mean a direct hit. We had a golden retriever, and he stayed outside in a fenced-in area in the woods behind our house. During a thunderstorm at night, I had to go out and bring him some food. I had an umbrella in one hand and the metal dog bowl in the other. I had almost gotten to the dog when the whole sky lit up. It was brighter than day, just white light. The next thing I knew, I was scrambling around on the ground in panic and fear, not knowing who or where I was. Slowly, I came to my senses and realized I had been hit by lightning. I was thrown about twenty feet. I am lucky to be telling this story. Weird. True.

Around that time, I started hanging around with a friend named Leonard who turned me on to Queen (Queen, Queen II), Alice Cooper (Billion Dollar Babies), and Black Sabbath (Paranoid, Master of Reality, Vol. 4, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath). That was the soundtrack to my life then. We would listen to those records, burn incense, and imagine what it was like to be in the bands. We went for walks along the railroad tracks behind Leonard’s house at night, coming up on hobo fires with nobody around them. Then we got to see Black Sabbath in 1974 at the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta. Leonard’s mom drove us down and dropped us off. I think a band named Warm from Texas opened up, followed by Spooky Tooth, then Black Sabbath. After each band the lights would come up, and it was almost impossible to see through the smoke from all the weed. Joint after joint came down our row, a real community high. We didn’t yet partake of the great herb, so we passed it along. Soon enough, things would change.

By now, music was all that mattered. I would stay in my room, listening to as much music as I could, getting my mind blown by Grand Funk Railroad (like Live Album from 1970, still one of my favorites; Don Brewer on drums is unbelievable) or hearing “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin for the first time, trying to figure out how that guy could play drums like that.

In ninth grade, a guy named Chris came up and said, “I hear you play drums. Want to jam with me sometime?” He introduced me to a few guys, and we formed a band that rehearsed and played out once in a while, mostly parties and the occasional school assembly. We played some Robin Trower, Trapeze, Flash, Dave Mason, Kiss, ZZ Top, Aerosmith, and whatever we thought was cool. The band’s name was Acropolis. Our bass player grew mushrooms in his room; he was really good at that. We played a battle-of-the-bands contest at a local Jewish community center. We didn’t win, but we did all right. The whole experience of being in a band, playing songs, and trying to get better was a real thrill and, after a while, something I felt I needed. The next band I was in was called Island. Pretty original, I know. I was fifteen, and the guitar player had to pick me up for rehearsals because I couldn’t drive yet. We played some interesting songs: “Raging River of Fear” by Captain Beyond, some Jo Jo Gunne, Spirit, Hendrix. The other guys were a few years older than me. We played pool parties, things like that, mostly getting paid in beer. The drinking age was eighteen then. We played in another battle of the bands, this time at Six Flags. We were in a big tent, and it was raining hard with a lot of thunder. Right before we were supposed to play, the power went out. The guy emceeing the show came over to me and said, “Why don’t you play a drum solo?” I didn’t have time to think about it or be nervous, so I played a twenty-minute solo, and when I finished the crowd was pretty kind to me. We got something like fourth place, behind Mother’s Finest and a couple other bands—not bad for being the youngest of twenty acts. It was amazing being onstage with people enjoying themselves.

The beginning of my descent into the progressive rock wormhole included Gentle Giant, Amon Düül II, Curved Air, Spin, Family, Camel, Nektar, Yes, King Crimson, Genesis . . . the list goes on. I liked the way these bands could play in odd time-signatures and still put the music in a rock context. I still enjoyed my Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Beatles, Neil Young, Traffic, and Grand Funk, and lots of other rock music. Some of my good friends went deep into jazz, and they would bring all those records to parties. We would listen to Mahavishnu Orchestra, Miles Davis, Don Cherry, McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Terje Rypdal, Billy Cobham, Chick Corea, Larry Coryell, Gary Burton, and lots of ECM records. It was kind of mind-blowing.

I went to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth for a couple of years, majoring in broadcast communication. The guy across the hall was a religion major, and he said he was going to become a preacher one day. He kept a cold keg of beer in his room at all times. My dorm was situated away from the rest of the campus and was considered the one with all the “weird” people in it. Maybe they knew something about me ahead of time. We threw big jars of mayonnaise out the third-floor windows, just to see what it was like when they shattered below. There was a cafeteria next to the dorm, so it was easy to take industrial jars of condiments. Whether it was ketchup or pickles or mustard, it was all good ammo for the window fling. We used to take Pepto-Bismol tablets before we started drinking so we wouldn’t get sick. Someone put acid in my chili once.

I made a record in 1980 with a project called the New Age. It was kind of prog, kind of rock, and part I-don’t-know-what. The recording and rehearsals were fun. The kid putting it together was a really good keyboard player. His name was Larry, and he had a Hammond B3 with a Leslie cabinet. If you have ever had the pleasure of standing next to one of these monsters and hearing it growl and churn really loud . . . well, it’s one of the coolest sounds on this planet. I have a copy of the record, but not many were made, so good luck trying to hold me accountable for that.

When I returned home from my great time at TCU, my grades were discussed, and I was informed I would be going to college locally. I started at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta and got an apartment near campus. I joined a band, and we played power pop, for lack of a better description. We were called Formal Behavior. Even our name was kind of uptight. Our guitar player was listening to Elvis Costello and the Cars. We didn’t really sound like any of that, but we played around Atlanta, mostly at a club called the Bistro, a converted house in Midtown. We got some demos played on a college radio station. We had a singer who played violin, and that sort of put us in another shoe box. We liked prog, we liked pop, we liked rock, but we were still a little fresh to really have a go at anything. There was a band called the Producers, and we wanted to be like them. We weren’t.

Punk rock was, among other things, a reaction to the overinflated ambition of prog rock, and the attitude of do-it-yourself-and-see-what-happens was gathering steam. Suddenly, you didn’t need wigs and boots and shiny suits. That was now pretentious, unless you were Devo. It was a necessary move, at least for bands and fans, to make music that was more immediate and accessible. You wore your regular clothes, not “stage gear,” and you just played music, raw and in your face. When the Sex Pistols came to play Atlanta, most people thought they were just a joke, me included. I would have rather seen Brand X than the Sex Pistols.

My friends Max Koshewa and Ken Schenck were now playing in a band called Lobetan, and a bunch of us would go to see them at a bar called Hedgen’s. They were kind of slowing down as a band, so Max, Ken, and I started a band called 86. This band was kind of different; most of our songs came from extended jam sessions that we always recorded, then listened to later to find any hidden surprises we could turn into songs. It worked well for us; as we kept passing things through our bodies, ideas kept passing through our heads too.

After a while, we got tired of practicing in this girl Glenda’s place, so Max and I rented a house. We could rehearse there, barbecue, throw a good-sized party, or just hang out. There was always someone coming or going, mostly musicians. There was usually some kind of jamming happening, and people would trade off playing different instruments. A musical session might start at one or two in the afternoon on a Saturday and end around the same time the next day. We started to get into a lot of head music: Eno’s ambient songs, Jon Hassell, and heavy doses of Roxy Music to balance it all out. 86 toured whenever and wherever we could, starting in the Southeast and gradually working our way around the country.

The Athens scene was starting to blow up, and the B-52’s, Pylon, and R.E.M. were getting some real attention. The North Carolina thing was starting to happen as well, with Winston-Salem acts like Mitch Easter and his band Let’s Active, and the dB’s. It was a good time for music in the region. Clubs were springing up to support all these bands, and soon bigger punk bands started to tour in our part of the country. We listened to things like the Cure, Joy Division, Siouxie and the Banshees, Echo and the Bunnymen, Wall of Voodoo, the Fleshtones, and Comsat Angels.

For a while I did radio promotion for Fundamental Records in Covington, Georgia. I was moving records around their sweatbox of a building, and loving it. My boss, Gary Held, said we should start a band. He was going to play drums, so I said, “Let me play bass,” even though what I did was more like play some notes on a bass. The band was called Phantom 309. John Forbes played guitar, and scraped his vocal cords over the microphone. We played around Atlanta, and had a few regional shows. We recorded in Nashville with Jon Langford, and Edward Gorey even let us use his artwork for the cover. These were fun times, but the future was about to come knocking on my telephone.

I met David Yow and David Sims while touring with 86 in Austin. I talked with David Yow about doing something someday. We traded phone numbers and then time passed. I got a call from him saying they were putting together a full-time band that would tour and eventually go to Europe. Would I like to come up to Chicago and try out? Well, I was playing bass in Phantom 309, but I’m not a bass player. This was a chance to play drums again, and I really liked what David sent me to listen to. It turned out to be Pure, on cassette. I figured I could lay down some drums to this music. After the smoke cleared and I had been accepted as the drummer, everything just fell into place.

MAC McNEILLY