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I was born on January 21, 1959 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was third of three, my brother and sister and I all being born within four years of each other. I grew up in a suburb called Plymouth, almost equidistant between Detroit and Ann Arbor. We had a fairly normal middle-class upbringing. Both parents worked. My dad was in sales and management, usually involving industrial supplies or transportation-related products. My mom did secretarial work and was a teacher’s aide as well. My dad got me summer work at his plant (they made brake shoes for trains) a couple of times. It was hot, heavy, and dirty, definitely not how I wanted to spend my life.
There was a piano in the house, and both my parents played and sang. My dad had been a bit of a singer when he was young, but his mother’s death and then WWII service (he was a Morse code operator in the US Navy) put an end to that. My mom had taken a lot of lessons and read music well, so there was always something musical going on. They had a lot of big-band records, and crooners like Perry Como and Frank Sinatra were played a lot, and those Sing Along with Mitch programs with Mitch Miller. Once the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, though, that was it. Suddenly, we kids only wanted to hear rock and roll—which at that time was the British invasion bands like the Animals, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. Motown was big too. Living in the Detroit area, it was inescapable. I felt a little pride when the Supremes were also on The Ed Sullivan Show. My older cousins made me listen to other stuff—the Kinks, the Who, and then Hendrix, who I thought was terrifying. They also played me the Beach Boys, Surfaris, and other surf bands, which I liked quite a bit. It all seemed so exotic and faraway, nothing like the humdrum reality of Midwestern suburban life.
I think I was seven or eight when I started taking piano lessons. That lasted about three years and I did pretty well, I guess. My teacher encouraged songwriting. I’d take Christmas carols and patriotic songs and just put different words to them! I also sang in the Methodist church choir, which I enjoyed. (I still enjoy choral music.) Then my sister got an acoustic guitar, and when she wasn’t playing it I’d take her lesson book and teach myself the basics.
When I was in eighth grade, I got my first electric guitar, a big hollow-body Crestwood made in Japan. It looked like a Gibson 335, something BB King would play. I took lessons at the local Anderson Music in Plymouth, and that did it; I became an electric guitar player. I didn’t have an amp yet, just plugged it into the home stereo. Eventually, I got some better guitars, first a Rickenbacker and then a Fender Stratocaster, and started playing in bands. We’d play school dances, youth centers, things like that. I was still too young to drive; I remember my mom bringing me to my first gig.
At that time, if you wanted to play gigs, you had to play three sets. Original material was frowned upon. I had a good ear, so I was the guy who got stuck figuring out the tunes from the records. It was all Rolling Stones, Foghat, Mountain, etc. Copping riffs off the stereo was a lot of work. I started noticing how a lot of songs had similar chords and structures, and that’s when I began writing my own rock songs. We’d pad the set with the odd original song, and since they weren’t much different from the other stuff we played, no one cared. We’d also throw in our adolescent blues jams, which must’ve been excruciating for everyone but us.
I have to mention Anderson Music again. It was a local chain, your basic all-purpose music store. They had some great guitar teachers come and go. There was Paul Warren, who’d played with the Temptations and later with Richard Marx. There was a jazzbo named Steve Ezzo, who went on to play with Tom Jones in Las Vegas. And there was an eccentric character named Lynn Bender, who played in a local prog-rock band called Clockwork. His playing made quite an impression on me, as did his cape and snakeskin boots. He got me back into reading music, playing classical guitar, and taking all of it seriously. I eventually ended up going to college, graduating in 1984 from Eastern Michigan University with a BA in music. Not very rock, but hey, I figured any degree is better than none, at least when you’re looking for a job, and music was the only thing I had any real interest in.
By the time I left school, my world—or maybe just my perception of it—was quite different than it had been when I started. The economy in Michigan was, and still is, a shambles. I remember my dad being laid off and not working for two years. It was grim. For a while, I’d been getting into different music, and the punk and postpunk that I was hearing on small independent labels like SST, Dischord, and Touch and Go seemed more attuned to the times than some guy plucking an acoustic guitar. So I packed up and moved to Austin, Texas, where I knew a couple of people. I’d been told that jobs were plentiful, the weather was nice, and the music scene was happening.
They were mostly right. I got a job right away and started going to shows and playing. I think it’s a little too hot for too long down there, but it was a welcome change from Michigan’s endless winters. I started a band called Cargo Cult with the late Randy “Biscuit” Turner, who was a local celeb as a result of being the singer for the Big Boys, a popular punk/funk band. We only lasted two years, but we put out an album on Touch and Go (1986’s Strange Men Bearing Gifts) and played lots of local gigs. We supported Scratch Acid, another local act, which was how I met David Yow and David Sims. They weren’t like most punk bands. They were smart, funny, and played well. They weren’t hung up on playing fast all the time. Their music had more of a sexy grind than the hardcore bands that were everywhere back then, and there’d actually be females at their shows. When I heard they’d broken up, I approached David Yow about working on a project with me, and he then enlisted David Sims, and that’s how the Jesus Lizard started.
We eventually ended up in Chicago, living together in a fairly dangerous neighborhood called Humboldt Park. Our label, Touch and Go, was based in Chicago, as was our booking agent, and the studio, and the producer, so it was pretty neatly tied together, all in one place. We put out our first EP in 1989, and then recruited drummer Mac McNeilly and became a real band—recording, touring, all that. It was slow going at first. We’d head out for a few weeks in a dilapidated van, just the four of us, playing in front of small crowds, little or no money, sleeping on floors. Then we’d come back home, and we’d still be on top of each other! We were all living in the same place, not much room or privacy. But, in retrospect, we handled it pretty well, and some of our best music was written when we were all together in that little place. We were becoming a unit, making original music that sounded unique. The constant touring made us a very solid live ensemble. It was us against the world!
We kept slugging away: writing, recording, touring. The crowds started growing, the album sales went up, and we spent more and more time traveling. Our sound evolved. We went overseas, a dream of mine since childhood. We’d actually come home from tour with money, and sometimes there’d be articles or photos in papers and magazines. I’d hear our tunes on the radio now and then, also a childhood dream. The venues got bigger and nicer. We started playing big festivals. I could afford more than one guitar and amp at a time! I could chuck the day job! It was nice coming home from a tour and not immediately having to go to work the next day. It was nice getting royalty checks in the mail too.
This went on for years, and then we got in on the major label boom of the mid-1990s, signing to Capitol Records in 1995. None of us ever imagined a band that sounded like ours—noisy, dissonant, abrasive—would ever be offered a major label recording contract, but it happened and we signed it. We’d all been playing in bands for a long time with modest commercial success. If someone wanted to give us a hunk of money for something we were gonna do anyway, well, why not? For the first time in my life, I’d actually be getting ahead instead of barely getting by. We took some flak for it, but in retrospect, I think we did the right thing, and I’d do it all over again.
We went about our business for a few more years before disbanding in 1999 on our tenth anniversary. It was an amicable split, and we were all kinda doing other things by then anyway. I was already living in Nashville, Tennessee (still do). We did a tour in 2009 that went just great, and the back catalog was remastered and reissued by Touch and Go the same year. We communicate regularly and still do business together, so it’s all good in my book.
