The Jesus Lizard's David Yow talks going solo

As the frontman of two seminal bands, Scratch Acid and The Jesus Lizard, David Yow is a central figure in the history of American noise and post-hardcore throughout the 80s and 90s. It’s difficult to imagine Austin or Chicago’s underground scenes in those decades without him; something due partly to his bands’ relentless twisting of hardcore templates into new shapes, but also a reflection of his unforgettably vociferous stage persona. For those who’ve witnessed Yow’s writhing, spitting and stage-diving live perfomances, the prospect of interviewing the man engenders a degree of trepidation.

When The Skinny catches up with him ahead of the release of his first solo LP, Tonight You Look Like a Spider, however, it quickly becomes clear that the live persona is just that. Speaking on the phone from his home in Los Angeles, Yow comes across as affable, charming, even humble, always taking the time to think through his responses carefully. Although happy to acknowledge that “drinking as much as possible” remains one of his priorities, his life nowadays revolves around a variety of projects, including graphic design, visual art and acting; Spider, he explains, doesn’t reflect any plans to return to music full-time.

Produced at a leisurely pace between 1998 and 2007, the LP signals a dramatic departure from Yow’s work with Scratch Acid, The Jesus Lizard and latterly at the helm of LA noise-rock trio Qui: a series of creepy-yet-playful instrumentals utilising low-tech synths, murky saxophone, scattered piano stabs and guitar feedback, Spider eschews those bands’ brutal efficiency for an approach which emphasises abstraction, indeterminacy and digression. Did this new approach to structure and texture reflect a conscious desire to pursue creative avenues that didn’t really mesh with Yow’s bands?

"Mike Patton grabbed me and said ‘you’re doing a solo record’. I thought, well, how fortuitous..." – David Yow

“It’s not like I was aching to do that,” he explains, evidently wary of romanticising or glamorising the creative process. “It wasn’t anything important that I was trying to get out. But once I got started I enjoyed it so much that I fucked with it for several years before deciding to call it quits.” Spider’s inception was more or less accidental, resulting from a chance meeting with Ipecac owner Mike Patton: “I’d been messing with Pro Tools, and a couple of weeks later I met Mike, and he just grabbed me and said: ‘You’re doing a solo record, and I’m putting it out.’ I thought, well how fortuitous, because I’d just started working on it.”

With its dark, twisted corridors of noise and occasionally puerile humour – evident in song titles like Lawrence of a Labia – Spider would seemingly be at home on Patton’s label; but in the event, “so many years went by, and the music climate changed, to the point where Ipecac don’t fuck with stuff like that now, it’s either the Melvins, or stuff that Mike is doing.” Instead, the record eventually found a home on Joyful Noise, who – as Yow puts it with characteristic self-deprecation – were “cognisant of the crap that I’ve done in the past, and they got all excited about the idea.”

The label were also enthused by his proposal to release a limited run of 50 copies encased in a concrete monolith, crafted by Yow himself: “I had made these cement things to display my interactive portfolio, when I was doing photo retouching,” he explains, “and I just sort of bastardised that mould to make the thing. I mean it was a motherfucker to make 50 of those things, but it’s a really cool package.” The choice of such a heavy, imposing artefact could be seen as a response to the ways in which technology is eroding the materiality of music. “I’ve always liked cool packaging, like PIL’s Metal Box, or like that Big Black Headache record,” he explains, suggesting that despite the rise of digital music, there will always be a market for packaging which is “out of the ordinary, creative, fun... and cool to look at.”

Packaging aside, Spider is also noteworthy for the absence of lyric-based songs, which reflects a “fear of redundancy, and not necessarily feeling that anything I had to say was worthwhile or important enough, or that I hadn’t already said it.” Ironically, Yow’s decision to make a solo record seems at least partly to have been motivated by a desire to escape the limelight. In The Jesus Lizard, he explains, “part of the reason I wrote lyrics was because I was the singer, and it was part of the job, so then when I got to make a solo record where I’m the sole decision maker, I chose not to have a lyricist.”

Instead, Spider represented an opportunity for Yow to explore the communicative potential for sound, texture and melody alone. “I like the idea of the musical language of instrumental stuff, and the imagery that it might conjure up, where you don’t have to be shackled to any actual narrative that might inhibit someone’s imagination.” His influences in pursuing these ideas might surprise fans of Yow’s former work: Edvard Grieg, he suggests, “shows up a couple of times,” in the way the music sometimes “sneaks in in these little chunks." He also mentions Prokofiev and Angelo Badalamenti. On the other hand, some of the compositions didn’t feel like a conscious engagement with influences: “Senator Robinson’s Speech, I think that was just an attempt to bum out the listener,” he laughs.

In that respect, some of the old volatile, antagonistic persona remains in evidence on the record. Yow is acutely aware of the degree to which such images are cultivated and perpetuated by the media, but he explains that this “doesn’t irritate me, because I understand where it comes from. If you saw us live or saw videotapes or listened to the records, I can imagine why people would think that. So it doesn’t bother me that people think that, I just find it funny when they take it very seriously.”

Although Yow is amused by some fans’ inability to distinguish between persona and personality, then, he is also aware that blurring this distinction might sometimes be of value. Does he see any connection between the development of his image as a frontman and his recent forays into acting? “I think a lot of directors had thought that I might be good at acting because of the music stuff,” he acknowledges. “But the performance part I think is very different. With acting you have specific things that you have to do and say, at a certain time, whereas with music, or at least the music that I’ve been involved with, I always had the freedom to do whatever the fuck I wanted at any point at any time.”

Along with his acting work – including a supporting role in the upcoming film High and Outside, as an alcoholic caregiver – Yow has also been pursuing graphic design, visual art and video art in recent years. These projects, he explains, have become more central to his creative output than music: “I’m much more into drawing or painting or acting or directing videos now.” Nonetheless, a recent stint touring with Girls Against Boys – “they had me along to ruin a couple of songs for them” – was “wonderful,” and The Jesus Lizard will reunite to play the Release the Bats festival in Melbourne this October.

Yow is also cautiously hopeful that Spider will be toured at some point, although he refuses to make any promises. “Initially I didn’t think it would be possible, because some of the compositions were so fucked up and screwy that it’d be very hard for an ensemble to play, and I didn’t want to stick a computer on the table and push play, I didn’t wanna do that. But I’m definitely gonna make an effort to see what kind of live presentation we could do with it.”

Despite his contemplative, thoughtful attitude to the creative process, Yow retains a remarkable energy and vitality; his irrepressible enthusiasm for new projects is central to his continual reinventions of his artistic role. As for rock music, however, he feels it is a “young man’s game.”

“Powerful, aggressive rock music is not intended for people who are far past halfway in their life,” he laughs. He’s also amusingly pragmatic about the appeal of visual art for a man in middle age: “I’ve been hospitalised so many times with the band, and hurt, and got bloody and bruised up,” he reflects. “That doesn’t happen too much with the painting or drawing.”