Graffiti Bass

[Patrizia Leones]

Thebasses in this limited edition run showcases one of a kind electric art from the renowned airbrush artist Dan Lawrence. In his first ever collaboration with Spector, Dan created twelve remarkable works of art that not only take us right to the streets and subways of NYC, but pay tribute to the rich history and origin story of Spector Bass.

Dan Lawrence is famous for his incredible airbrush artwork on custom guitars and has created some truly insane pieces for manufacturers and guitarists. The NYC Graffiti Collection marks Dan's first ever collaboration with Spector basses.

The contours of Spector's NS bodies make working on them challenging, but Dan did a phenomenal job - even incorporating the pickups into the paintwork! There are also countless additional improvised details from Dan on each bass - a real testament to how much fun he had while creating these!

As far as the recorded output, another thing that strikes me is that certain bands might have this one perfect album whereas with the Jesus Lizard, there was a pretty strong track record of them being able to deliver that year after year.

Yeah. I wish I knew what the formula was. I just really think it is a true lightning-in-a-bottle kind of thing where the universe just kind of swirls into position every couple of decades and creates a band like that.

The Jesus Lizard are, simply, one of the great bands of my lifetime \u2014 a band I loved in the \u201990s whose music only sounds more brilliant and essential to me with age. Their sporadic resurfacings during the past 15 years have been a gift, but this time around, they\u2019re upping the ante with a fresh round of shows and, marvelously, their first new album in 26 years: Rack, due out in September. In late April and early May, around 12 years after I surveyed what was then their full catalog for Stereogum, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to speak to them about Rack for a New York Times feature that ran last week.

I have a bunch of leftover material from the interviews that informed this piece, and I plan to roll some of that out here as Rack approaches. In the meantime, I wanted to share another bit of bonus content: The full text of a Jesus Lizard\u2013centric conversation I had with the man known simply as Stin, the bassist for Oklahoma City noise-rockers extraordinaire Chat Pile.

I\u2019m a big fan of Chat Pile, and had a great time chatting with Stin and his bandmates for Spin back in 2022, the year they released their harrowing and savagely heavy debut LP, God\u2019s Country. But beyond that, I was hoping he could give me a window into how a younger generation is engaging with the legacy of the Lizard. Much like screamo, shoegaze, Finnish death metal and many other micro-scenes, so-called noise-rock has been having a real moment in recent years, with bands like Chat Pile, Couch Slut and Uniform leading the charge and fests like Denton, Texas\u2019 No Coast and Minneapolis\u2019 Caterwaul serving as key summits, and as you\u2019ll read, in these circles, the Jesus Lizard \u2014 now, as on their 1990 debut LP, David Yow, Duane Denison, David Wm. Sims and Mac McNeilly \u2014 still remain top dog.

The first thing I was hoping to get your take on is the current state of the Jesus Lizard\u2019s legacy, and just sort of how they read in terms of younger bands working in a vaguely similar style. What does the band mean to you, and more broadly, what do they mean to your peers?

Personally for me, I\u2019ve always kind of considered them to be the true American version of Led Zeppelin, in the sense that you have these four incredibly powerful musical personalities converging to make these very unique, incredible, powerful sounds. And in terms of American underground music, I just think they really stand on their own. I know they\u2019re not necessarily the inventors of noise-rock, but they\u2019re certainly the best version of whatever that sound might be. And you were talking about bands that run around that noise-rock scene in the modern age\u2026 I feel like the Jesus Lizard is sort of the dragon that everybody\u2019s chasing, so to speak. There\u2019s plenty of bands that kind of run congruent in that scene, but nobody as masterful and flawless as the prime period of the Jesus Lizard.

I couldn\u2019t agree more with that. And I think that Zeppelin comparison rings very true. Especially because a lot of times people really separate out so-called classic rock from underground rock, as though they\u2019re two completely different things. But at the end of the day, whether it\u2019s Zeppelin or Sabbath or the Jesus Lizard or Shellac, it\u2019s all heavy rock music, and many of the objectives are the same.

Well, that\u2019s always what\u2019s so funny to me about that generation of underground rock \u2014 we\u2019ll say late \u201980s, early \u201990s \u2014 is they\u2019re kind of coming from this punk-rock world and it\u2019s so uncool to like classic rock, for whatever reason, but it\u2019s so obvious in those bands\u2019 DNA, like you\u2019re saying, that they\u2019re going more towards a classic-rock sound. To me, the Jesus Lizard sounds like a distillation of Physical Graffiti, the most bombastic, hard-hitting songs on that record. If you sort of put Physical Graffiti through this kind of nightmarish funhouse mirror, you get the Jesus Lizard.

If you play them back-to-back, it\u2019s hilarious how like close they are. But with the Jesus Lizard, especially in the rhythm section, the John Bonham kind of groove is very much a part of Mac\u2019s drumming style. I have no idea if that is a direct influence for him, but I hear it fully. And then, separate from all that, I\u2019m a bass player, and I truly think that there has never been greater bass tone in the history of rock & roll up to that point, and since. It is, without question the peak of what recorded rock bass tone should sound like.

Amen! Just getting back to the specific zone of what\u2019s labeled noise-rock, there\u2019s kind of this loose pantheon of stuff that kind of gets batted around, and I dig tons of the bands that are labeled that way, but in my mind, there\u2019s not one single one of those bands that does for me as a listener what the Jesus Lizard does.

No, because none of them are as consistent. A lot of them may have elements that are great. Let\u2019s take a band like Big Black, for instance. There\u2019s a lot to love about that band, but the whole package isn\u2019t quite there. There\u2019s something that just isn\u2019t totally baked yet. Or you can take more outlier bands too, like, say, Killdozer. They share some tonal qualities with the Jesus Lizard; they even share a label. But do they have songs? I don\u2019t think so.

That\u2019s the amazing thing about the Jesus Lizard: For as chaotic and disjointed and frightening as they may seem at times, at the heart of it, they\u2019re writing incredible, well-structured songs that will stick with you. You can listen to Goat wall-to-wall. There\u2019s not a bad song on that album. And in fact, I would say they\u2019re all incredible. And so between how pristine the recordings are, how tight they are and how well-written the songs are, it\u2019s just like nobody can come close.

For me, maybe a band that kind of comes close would be the prime era of Tad, but even that is really sloppy and hit-and-miss, or I consider In Utero by Nirvana to be as close as you can get in terms of \u2014 well, obviously it\u2019s recorded by Albini \u2014 but tonally and in terms of how well written the songs are. But yeah, it\u2019s just kind of rare from that era. I mean, even the bands that are good, they just can\u2019t come close to the feats that the Jesus Lizard achieved.

Right. And then to have Yow as this whole other force\u2026 I feel like in a lot of bands in this area, the vocals are sort of an afterthought. They serve a purpose, and they\u2019re rhythmic, and they\u2019re just another kind of noise that\u2019s happening in the sound field\u2026

I mean, I would go as far as to say that that\u2019s a problem with 99% of all underground, alternative rock in general, whether it\u2019s metal, punk, anything. Like, you may have the most incredible band musically, but then whoever is taking the vocal duties is either terrible or completely forgettable.

Right. Yow gives the whole thing sort of a narrative, almost cinematic intrigue. If the Jesus Lizard\u2019s songs were instrumentals, they would be the coolest, heaviest surf-rock band in the world, or something, but the Yow thing just gives it this sort of nightmarish quality, like you said.

Well, it gives it an emotional edge. Because I think for maybe the untrained ear, it might sound frenetic or random, but it\u2019s really not. He has such impeccable timing and he\u2019s so locked into the push and pull of the band. Not that he\u2019s necessarily even copying what the band is doing rhythmically; it\u2019s like he knows how to get into that lane and fill out the space in the way that it needs to be filled out emotionally. It\u2019s like he has a sixth sense, or something. It\u2019s incredible.

Also I feel like there\u2019s a certain vibe in heavy music where the vocalist sounds very commanding and in control. And with Yow, it sounds almost like the music is a storm and he\u2019s being swept up in it, or dragged along in the wake.

I did see them. I want to say it was 2009. I saw them headline Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin, and I\u2019m telling you, man, it was so good. They had been on a long hiatus and they were all older and they were playing an outdoor festival \u2014 not necessarily the most ideal of conditions \u2014 and I mean, the hair on my arms was standing up the whole time, and Yow was going just as crazy as I\u2019ve seen in old videos and stuff. It was phenomenal.

Since you mentioned Nirvana, I was also thinking about how, even before the Jesus Lizard, Scratch Acid were an influence on Nirvana. That whole alternative-rock thing probably wouldn\u2019t have happened that way if it weren\u2019t for Yow and Sims\u2019 prior band sounding like they did.

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