The Jesus Lizard + Black Elk - Crystal Ballroom (Portland, OR; Oct. 22, 2009)

Zigzagging between puddles, I walked hesitantly down 13th Avenue toward The Crystal Ballroom, motivated purely by the thought of my dear friend, Jonathon, waiting patiently for me inside. Though I had never seen, nor listened to these guys, and even though Jonathon had seen them four times before, he insisted that the Jesus Lizard would be the “greatest concert experience of your life.” I scoffed at his audacious prediction but, after weeks of his incessant begging, I agreed to go.

Basilisks are lizards from Latin America who sometimes run like bipeds across water. These creatures are called “Jesus lizards” in reference to the Bible story. Sometime in the late 1980’s, a man named David Yow decided that he really liked the idea of lizards that run across water. David Yow is now, like Jesus, a worshipped man. And like lizards that run like men across bodies of water, he crawls like a lizard across crowds of people.

A few blocks from the venue I was joined by one, two, then three men, none of whom knew each other, but who were all wearing the same basic getup:baggy jeans, faded tee-shirt under a hoodie, and cowboy boots. The one ahead of me flipped his head around, curious to see whose feet were tap-tapping behind him. He uttered a polite, “Hey,” and kept shuffling along, head down to avoid the rain.

“You headed to The Crystal?” I asked.

He stopped to crack a smile and replied, “Yeah. Jesus Lizard show? Man, I haven’t seen them play since 1993 in Chicago. They are so bad-ass!”

The third cowboy-booted man overheard our conversation and rushed up, nearly slamming into a parking meter in the process, and began gushing about how The Jesus Lizard “Puts on the craziest shows, man! Don’t stand near the stage unless you want to be spit or pissed on. Ha!”

I took his warning to heart and scurried off to let the boys continue exchanging bodily fluid stories.

After being pat down and interrogated by a fleet of rent-a-security-guards, I found Jonathon sprawled out on a big mahogany couch in the lobby. “Hey, the lead singer of the Jesus Lizard was just here being smothered by a horde of nattering fans. You should have seen it. Ahh, I miss those star-stricken days.”

We migrated into the ballroom, where (thank God!) not one person was testing out the Crystal’s famous bouncy hardwood floors. In fact, the crowd was more or less stationary until the last couple songs during opener Black Elk’s set. A rowdy mosh-pit ensued.

Black Elk are a post-hardcore, post-punk, metal band from Portland. They sound like Black Flag stuck in rush-hour traffic on a hot day with no air-conditioning. I recommend seeing them live if you are into watching grown men throw sweaty, amplified, kind-of-awesome temper tantrums on stage.

The Jesus Lizard crawled on stage next, greeted by upwards of 1000 people cheering and hollering. With only a few long strides, David Yow rushed to the edge of the stage, yanked the microphone out of the stand, and stood there mocking the crowd: “Yaaaaaay! Yaaaaaaaay! Yaaaaay! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!”

Not ten seconds after launching into the first song, “Puss,” Yow leaped into the crowd. Impressively, he kept singing the whole time he floated and dipped and kicked his shiny black cowboy boots over a sea of hands. A number of people ran past me to the front of the stage at this point as if running from hungry zombies. People were holding up indecipherable “gang” signs, throwing shoes, shirts, and a variety of other projectiles all over the room—a room which was looking less and less like a ballroom and more like a . . . Jesus Lizard concert. Weird.

Keep in mind that the Jesus Lizard formed in 1987. They broke up in 1999 and reunited this year. If you ever feel too old to party, just think of David Yow, now in his fifties, pulsing, twitching, yelling, and heaving himself around like a belligerent Peter Pan, unwilling to let go of his youthful dexterity. Yow personifies the power of alcohol by pushing his body to perform in ways it definitely shouldn’t at that age.

The Jesus Lizard’s sound is not easy to describe. David Yow sounds like a drunken homeless person shouting angrily at the sky with David Sims’ frantic bass in the background. It’s very punchy and fuzzy. The lyrics are the aesthetics of ugly; tackling the tragic, crass, and awkward. “Nub,” for example, is about an amputee, “Coldwater” is about kidnap victim trying to make his way out of a basement slowly filling up with water. Yow uses a freeform poetry semi-drunkenly, incoherently, and intensely, all to create a queasy sound that is likely to make you sick. “Seasick” is particularly telling—another dizzying song about drowning.

There is an unmistakable element of ugliness and absurdity in their songs that is fittingly mirrored by their live performance. The Jesus Lizard revels in the darker side of the psyche. They are an ugly, harsh-sounding band, and make an aesthetic out of distasteful subject matter. Although they use simple instruments, the instrumentation is anything but. Max McNealy’s drumming is bombastic, influenced by flamenco jazz and classical rock guitar styles. The bass is complex and improvisational, alluding again to the sporadic peaks and valleys evident in East Coast jazz.

It’s an ugly spectacle indeed, and the Jesus Lizard are unashamed of this. The song “My Own Urine” is particularly disturbing: “I awoke in a puddle of my own urine . . . and someone else’s blood.” They wrap ugly up in very Stooges-esque rock presentation, and as a live band, they take that bar-rock aesthetic and hit you with it by diving into the crowd, spitting, and taking their clothes off.

After four crowd-surfing sessions, Yow calmed down and paced the stage. The band started “Here Comes Dudley.” He pulled the back of his shirt up over his head, his arms outstretched. By the end of the song, Yow has birthed himself from the shirt. He raised one hand, counted down from four, and dove in for a fifth crowd-surfing session.

During the show I thought about how folk chanteuse Alela Diane was playing the same night just across town at The Doug Fir. I so badly wanted to rush over at that moment into the familiar arms of musical delicateness—I wanted to heal my eardrums with the mellow, pastoral serenades of acoustic guitars, honey-dipped vocals, woodwinds, and songs about dry grass, thistles, and sweet lavender. But I persevered through the deliberately nauseating “serenades” of the Jesus Lizard well into the night. Not only because I had an allegiance to Jonathon and a curiosity about what so many people consider being “The greatest concert experience of your life,” but because I knew that in order to know beauty, you must also know ugliness.

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