be the defining event of my life. I’ve done other music, before and since, but if anyone knows who I am, it’s probably because of that band. I’ll always be “that guy from the Jesus Lizard” for some people. I can live with that.
DUANE DENISON
Duane Denison always struck me as having the best combination of technical ability, an innate feel for rock music, and the vibe to play it well. The special quality of all Duane’s guitar work is that he is able to give what is essential to the song with striking restraint. Instead of filling space, Duane creates shapes within space, which complement and take advantage of the holes. His tone always impressed me as well. Duane went straight into his Hiwatt amp, with no pedals or tricks. It was a burning, clear tone that could really spear you. There was so much power between him and David Sims; the interplay they created was lean and efficient, with no wasted notes. Duane once said something in an interview that stays with me. The interviewer was asking about the intent behind this chord and that sequence, what he was thinking about when he chose a particular guitar voicing. Duane said something like, “Hey, let’s not overanalyze this. This is rock music; it’s entertainment, not some highbrow art concept!” That was a perfect way to put it in perspective. We took our music seriously, yet it was still under the banner of rock, so there was no reason to treat it like a precious object. We worked hard at what we did, yet always saw the humor in what we were doing.
MAC McNEILLY
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.
