"'Physical Graffiti' in a Funhouse Mirror": Chat Pile Bassist Stin on the Jesus Lizard

As the '90s underground legends return, a member of one of today's greatest bands in a similarly unhinged vein weighs in on their legacy

Photo: Joshua Black Wilkins

The Jesus Lizard are, simply, one of the great bands of my lifetime — a band I loved in the ’90s 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’re 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–centric conversation I had with the man known simply as Stin, the bassist for Oklahoma City noise-rockers extraordinaire Chat Pile.

I’m 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’s 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’ No Coast and Minneapolis’ Caterwaul serving as key summits, and as you’ll read, in these circles, the Jesus Lizard — now, as on their 1990 debut LP, David Yow, Duane Denison, David Wm. Sims and Mac McNeilly — still remain top dog.

The first thing I was hoping to get your take on is the current state of the Jesus Lizard’s 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’ve 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’re not necessarily the inventors of noise-rock, but they’re 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… I feel like the Jesus Lizard is sort of the dragon that everybody’s chasing, so to speak. There’s 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’t 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’re two completely different things. But at the end of the day, whether it’s Zeppelin or Sabbath or the Jesus Lizard or Shellac, it’s all heavy rock music, and many of the objectives are the same.

Well, that’s always what’s so funny to me about that generation of underground rock — we’ll say late ’80s, early ’90s — is they’re kind of coming from this punk-rock world and it’s so uncool to like classic rock, for whatever reason, but it’s so obvious in those bands’ DNA, like you’re saying, that they’re 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.

It’s funny you say that because there’s one song on Physical Graffiti, “The Wanton Song,” where my friends and I are always like, “That’s basically just a Jesus Lizard song.”

Totally. I mean, “Custard Pie,” too, which Yow did a cover of. But yeah, “The Wanton Song,” especially. It’s unrelated, but there’s a song on Evil Empire by Rage Against the Machine that is just a beat-for-beat remake of that song, too.

Oh, wow, “Vietnow”? I never quite made that connection, but now that you say it, I totally see what you’re talking about.

If you play them back-to-back, it’s 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’s 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’m 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’s labeled noise-rock, there’s 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’s 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’s take a band like Big Black, for instance. There’s a lot to love about that band, but the whole package isn’t quite there. There’s something that just isn’t 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’t think so.

That’s 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’re writing incredible, well-structured songs that will stick with you. You can listen to Goat wall-to-wall. There’s not a bad song on that album. And in fact, I would say they’re all incredible. And so between how pristine the recordings are, how tight they are and how well-written the songs are, it’s 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 — well, obviously it’s recorded by Albini — but tonally and in terms of how well written the songs are. But yeah, it’s just kind of rare from that era. I mean, even the bands that are good, they just can’t come close to the feats that the Jesus Lizard achieved.

First of all, each of the three instrumentalists is on such a high level and not just on a high level technically, but they’re so distinctive.

Yes. They have their own style and they have great taste.

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

I mean, I would go as far as to say that that’s a problem with 99% of all underground, alternative rock in general, whether it’s 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’s 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’s really not. He has such impeccable timing and he’s so locked into the push and pull of the band. Not that he’s necessarily even copying what the band is doing rhythmically; it’s 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’s like he has a sixth sense, or something. It’s incredible.

Also I feel like there’s 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’s being swept up in it, or dragged along in the wake.

He’s kind of beating his way through it, surviving.

Yes, exactly.

But also, he’s just a great frontman presence. That’s such a rarity: people who can go up there and actually have charisma.

So I’m guessing you’ve heard that they’re doing shows and festivals. Have you gone to see them during any of the past reunions?

I did see them. I want to say it was 2009. I saw them headline Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin, and I’m 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 — not necessarily the most ideal of conditions — and I mean, the hair on my arms was standing up the whole time, and Yow was going just as crazy as I’ve 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’t have happened that way if it weren’t for Yow and Sims’ prior band sounding like they did.

No, I mean, I feel like Scratch Acid is sort of a forgotten-about major piece of the puzzle in terms of the Nevermind takeover of culture, because all the early Nirvana recordings, Kurt references Scratch Acid so much as an inspiration. I mean, the back half of Incesticide, it just sounds like a Scratch Acid record, and then of course In Utero, to me, it’s full-on just Scratch Acid / Jesus Lizard. I mean, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anyone directly connect the two, but to me it just seems like them trying to chase some authenticity by trying to basically do a Jesus Lizard thing.

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.

Oh, yeah. I mean, they have four unassailable albums and then a collection of B sides that I would say is equal to those.

Just out of curiosity, where you stand on Shot and Blue?

I think they have some great songs, but as a whole, something is missing. I think part of it might be the Albini Factor. I kind of consider him almost like a fifth member of the band, at least on the recorded side of things. I would just say that there’s some great songs on there — “Thumbscrews” is the song on Shot that is incredible — but I think as a whole, they just kind of lose sight of something. I don’t know if it’s that they’re out of ideas or they’re tired or if it was a tumultuous time for them, or whatever, but they’re just not the same.

So, before you were saying you felt like within this broader scene that Chat Pile are a part of, the Jesus Lizard are still sort of the top of the mountain. Do you think that’s a generally agreed-upon thing among your peers?

I think so. I think it would be them and the Melvins that are the two paths people go down. There might be more esoteric stuff that people love, but I think if you were to ask basically anyone at, like, No Coast or Caterwaul who their favorite bands are, they’re either going to say the Melvins or the Jesus Lizard.

That makes sense. And yeah, obviously, as you dig a bit deeper, we all have our favorites — for example, for me, bands like Hammerhead and Vaz are really important too — but it’s hard to put anyone else up there on the level of those two.

A funny thing too is, so I’m 41 years old, and when I was going to shows in the late ’90s, early 2000s, that’s kind of the era where this stuff couldn’t have been less cool. It fell so hard out of fashion, and so you would kind of be clinging on to any port in a storm that you could, like Vaz being one of those, Young Widows, Mclusky. And those bands are all great, but I still feel like there’s some bit of juice or some bit of magic that they just don’t have compared to the Jesus Lizard. And I’m not slagging those bands at all; they’re still incredible. It’s just hard to… I don’t know. Once in a generation, a band comes along and anyone can try their damnedest to make it to that level, but they’re just not going to.

Yeah, I think it’s probably true for every musical niche. Whatever the micro scene is, everyone knows who the top dog is.

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.