Musician and actor David Yow (Jesus Lizard) on making mistakes

You wear a lot of hats. You write lyrics, you perform as a vocalist and semi-acrobat, you’re an actor, you make art, you draw cats, you’re a graphic designer and layout guy. Do you have a creative philosophy that ties all these things together?

I’ve always said that you should take what you do seriously, but you should not take yourself seriously. That goes for any artistic endeavor I’m doing or my regular job. I do Photoshop for key art, for movie billboards and stuff like that, and typically that’s really fun. They provide you with some photography or whatever it is, and you have to maybe reassemble it or whatever and just make it look a lot better, and that’s fun. And if you do it well, it can be really rewarding.

How do you apply that to acting?

Acting is a little different. Acting is just terrifying, although I don’t get as scared as I used to. When I started dabbling in acting, I would get so scared—particularly before or at auditions, I would just be terrified. But at some point, I’d finish something and go, “Oh, fuck. I forgot to get scared.” I think it just went away from cumulative experience. I took classes hoping that would make it go away, but it didn’t work. I think it was just the pile of acting that I did that finally led me to be unafraid, which is really good because I think for acting you shouldn’t be afraid while you’re doing it. I think it’s okay to be afraid when you’re drawing or painting or doing music, but you shouldn’t be afraid while you’re acting.

Did you find the acting classes helpful in any other way?

Yes and no. I took several acting classes—some improv classes, some audition classes. Some of it was absolute crap. There were a couple teachers I had, they were just so fucking full of themselves and Hollywood bullshit. But I had a really good teacher named David Proval. He was in Mean Streets, and he was Richie Aprile in The Sopranos. A friend of mine is a friend of his, and I took a class from him for about two years, and that was really fun. A couple of other ones have been fun and helpful, too.

When you were starting out, what was your method for tamping down the fear so you could get the job done? Did you have one?

No, I just muddled through. With the auditions, I’d pretty much be scared the whole time. But once we were shooting, it was a little bit like being onstage. I’m always scared before we start a show, but then about two or three seconds into it, I’m not. So, with the acting, the fear would dissipate pretty quickly, especially if you’re doing good or whoever you’re working with is doing good because that is truly magical.

Doing a scene with someone or some people where everything’s going right and everybody’s doing it the way they should, it’s just miraculous. When the director calls, “Cut,” and suddenly you’re back on set, it’s like, “What the fuck, man? I wasn’t me and you weren’t you,” or “We weren’t here, and it was fucking crazy.” It can be really magical. I mean, it’s so oddly personal when that happens. And that’s the goal for me with acting. I would want to be able to do that every single time I worked, but that’s asking a lot.

I like that you made the connection to being onstage with a band. Did you have to get into a certain headspace to get onstage with Scratch Acid or the Jesus Lizard?

Yes. I call it “lubricated,” and it was beer and whiskey. But there was a fine line. I mean, way too many times I was far drunker than I should have been, but that was an accident. I didn’t want that to happen; it just would. These days, for the shows we’ve done ever since the first reenactment in 2009, I try to hold off on the whiskey until after the show.

I love that you call the reunion shows “reenactments,” and I want to come back to that. But first: Do you feel like a different person onstage? Or maybe a different version of yourself?

Yeah, yeah, exactly—it’s a different version of myself. People would say, “Man, you’re frightening up there,” or “You’re so crazy and dangerous onstage, but you seem like such a nice guy otherwise.” I’m not exactly certain what that’s all about, but I think it’s largely due to the punk rock that I was weaned on in Austin, Texas, with bands like the Dicks and Sharon Tate’s Baby and the Butthole Surfers and Really Red and Bobby Soxx. There was always an element of danger in the room when those bands were playing. You might get hurt by somebody in the audience, or you might get hurt by somebody in the band. Although I don’t want to get hurt and I don’t want to hurt anybody, I always love that risk of not knowing what’s going to happen.

My first Jesus Lizard show was in 1994, and I still remember it vividly. The way you threw yourself around onstage and into the crowd, I’d never seen anything like it. I later found out it was one of your trademarks. How did that start?

Wow…I don’t know. It happened with Scratch Acid, but not as much. I mean, a thousand times I fell into the audience, and a thousand times they grabbed me and pulled me in. Or there was the stagediving, which I liked to do when I went to see the Dead Kennedys. Stagediving and crowd-surfing are fun. But honestly, with the Jesus Lizard, those shows can be really exhausting. If I’m just lying around on top of the crowd, it’s a lot easier. I don’t have to support my own weight.

Are you more cautious about that stuff now? Your 20s are in the rearview, so you’re not made of rubber anymore.

Yeah, my 20s, my 30s, my 40s, my 50s. [laughs] Yeah, I am a little bit, largely out of concern for my wife. She gets really nervous watching me play, and I don’t want to get hurt. Fortunately, the crowds are pretty good these days. If it’s crowded enough, if it’s packed at the front, they’re far less likely to drop me. I also aim for more dense spots.

Last time we spoke, you said that when you’re onstage you rely on the precision of the band, while you often make mistakes. Has that always been the case with the Jesus Lizard?

Yeah, I think that was the case in Scratch Acid as well. None of them cue off me, ever. I’m never in their monitors. They don’t want to hear me because timing has never been my forte, and I’ll fuck stuff up all the time. It’s really funny because sometimes people will talk about, “Wow, you did all this and all that, and you didn’t miss a beat.” It’s like, “Oh, yes I did. I missed a whole bunch of beats.” But it doesn’t really matter. I mean, we’re not trying to reproduce the recorded version of the songs. So yeah, I’ve got the freedom to do whatever I want.

There have been times I just make up new words or don’t sing at all. One time we were playing in Milwaukee, and we came to “Then Comes Dudley” on the set list. I don’t know why or what, but I just completely blanked. I could not remember what the words were. So, I was just going, “Yeah, Dudley!” the whole time. But sometimes it’s my decision whether to keep it right or not.

We have this new song, “Hide & Seek,” that we’ve played a couple times now—in Nashville and then a couple of days later in Orange County—and [Jesus Lizard guitarist] Duane [Denison] said I’ve got to work on my timing on that, and he’s right. I’ve got to get that down better. I mean, it will be nice to not fuck up, but it doesn’t matter if I fuck up. The other guys get very upset if they fuck up.

Ten years ago, you told me, “Once a band breaks up, why revisit it?” At that point, you were talking about the Jesus Lizard reunion shows of 2008/2009, which you called “reenactments.” You’re still using that term, but what’s changed? You were reluctant to revisit the band 10 years ago, and obviously now that reluctance is gone because you’ve got a new album coming out.

Well, it was not my idea to do a record. We did those 2009 reenactment shows, and at some point, I don’t remember when, Duane played a few things that he had done some work on—actually, I think that all three of them had done some work on without telling me—and I liked them. I thought, “Ooh,” and I said, “So, what are we going to do with that?” And Duane said, “We can make a record.” I guess I wouldn’t say I got talked into it, but they persuaded me with some of these tunes that I thought were as good as anything else they’d ever come up with. And I love those guys. It was always fun being in a band with them.

When you were making the new album, did it seem like the Jesus Lizard of the ’90s or is there something different? Has anything changed?

From my point of view, it was not a good way to write a record because [bassist] David [Sims] lives in New York, Duane’s in Nashville, [drummer] Mac [McNeilly]’s in Chicago, and I live in L.A. So, we would from time to time converge in Nashville and go to a practice space and work on stuff like that. But for the most part, these songs were born into mp3s, and we just sent mp3s back and forth. So, it wasn’t nearly as organically collaborative as it always had been before. For some years, all four of us lived together in a three-bedroom apartment, and we were touring together all the time, recording together, and practicing all the time. We were always in each other’s company. But then doing it like this, it just seems so completely unnatural to me, and I don’t really know how that reflects in the finished product.

I know that there are some structures that I would’ve changed, but we didn’t. And some of the ideas that I had, I rearranged to accommodate the music that they had come up with. If we do another record, which I don’t know how likely that is or not, I have suggested that we go to Bermuda for two months and just sequester ourselves in a big room and write and record an album. But I’m not at all dissatisfied with Rack. We recorded a total of 14 songs, and each one of us has said, “I don’t hate any of them,” so that’s good.

Did you ever get stuck while writing lyrics?

There were a few times I got stuck and I would do automatic writing where you just decide, okay, for five minutes or eight minutes or 10 minutes, you just write and you don’t stop for a second, and you end up with pages and pages of stuff that way. And there’s stuff you can glean from it. There’s vague ideas or just a couple of sentences that’ll make you think of something. So that would be an easy-ish way to worm myself out of hitting a wall.

You’ve said that your old art teacher once described your lyrics as “startlingly specific, yet ambiguous.” Do you agree? And is that what you’re going for?

Yeah, I’ll go along with that. Very often, any song that I write will have several ideas that may not have anything to do with each other, and it’s not important that they have anything to do with each other. There have been many times in the past when I would just have an idea that would work on this part of the song, and then for the music that we have on this other part of the song, I would have something completely different. So, I can see how there would be specificity and there would be the more vague, ambiguous stuff.

But I don’t think that I was really aiming at anything. Hopefully, if I finish a song, then it’s good enough to do. Like I said in the beginning, I take what I do seriously. I try to come up with shit that I’m proud of. Most of the songs will start rough, but they get polished a lot, just changing words here and there, sometimes completely rearranging the idea. So, I think the only aim that I have when I’m writing lyrics is to make myself happy or proud of myself.

Do you give any consideration to the audience and what they might think—or your bandmates?

No. I mean, I enjoy hearing other people’s opinions, but I’m not concerned about their opinions. I’m not going to come up with an idea and think, “Oh, somebody might not like this.”

Which means you were probably never overly concerned with bad reviews or anything like that.

I love bad reviews. Bad reviews are a lot more fun to read than good reviews.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by J. Bennett.