UPDATED -- Walking on water with the Jesus Lizard, risen once more

In trying to integrate my punk rock past with my culture warrior blogging present, I've chatted here a bit about bygone alt-rock geniuses such as Smashing Pumpkins and the Replacements.

Next on my list is the legendary Jesus Lizard, whom I enjoyed or endured not just in 1993 in Austin, Texas, as I first thought but -- according to ticket-stub evidence in my CD insert for Lash -- late in 1994 at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.

Back then, I would have recently broken up with a motorcycle mama whom I met after moving to the Bay from Chicago, where the Lizard hatched, shed its drum-machine scales and rose to fearsome foursome infamy.

Extant from '89 to '99, the Lizard recently reunited and will set siege to the Bay Area in October at the Fillmore. Tour details are on LiveDaily.com. And lo and behold, opening for the band in a super-hip double bill is fellow travelers Killdozer. More on dem guys later.

To be very unhip in retrospect, I would opine that one of Jesus Lizard's best albums was their latter-day major label disc Blue, although it's their early indie records that gave them cool cachet. The song that most sticks in my head is "Puss" from the disc Liar:

The band's success didn't just hinge on the Lizard's sombre, Sabbath-y groove and scalding, metallic guitar work. What gave another dimension to the group's hype was singer Dave Yow's NSFW stage maneuver dubbed the tight and shiny. But that's really a gimmicky aside to the potent brew of sonic angst the band spewed at audiences.

Yow has a pretty out-of-control reputation, although from what I know, it comes mostly from slurring words and performing without a shirt. He seems to be pretty incisive guy after all, as exemplified by his words of wisdom in Magnet magazine on leading a band:

The worst thing a frontman can do is be Dullsville. Sometimes, you get the toe-tappers. On the other hand, there are people who try too hard.

I remember one band from Tennessee called the Diarrhea Of Anne Frank. I was impressed with the name, but they were just trying so hard to be as wacky and offensive as they could—wearing diapers or whatever—that they just came off like dumb clowns.

I think there has to be a fair degree of honesty in it. It’s got to come from inside you instead of coming from an idea you act out.

Before I heard that the Jesus Lizard was going on tour, I had thought about flying to Chicago to catch one of their recent singular reunion shows. I'm reminded of when I almost got on a plane to see the last Pussy Galore show in the late '80s in New York City, but didn't.

Now I'm thinking of a special trip next month to the Windy City to catch my all-time fave indie group, Eleventh Dream Day, although you likely haven't heard of them.

(Pussy Galore, by the way, begat John Spencer's bands Boss Hog and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, which performs Anthony Bourdain's TV show theme and did other notable stuff with blues dudes.)

Maybe Screeching Weasel rings a bell for you; that Chicago-land band opened for Berkeley's Green Day on tour in Europe years ago, and Green Day's bassist has played with them. The Weasel plans to reunite for a show in October in their hometown, although original guitar player John Jughead (whom I went to high school with waaaaay back in the mid-'80s) apparently wasn't invited.

But back to the Lizard. As memory crystallizes from the fog of the '90s, I realize I saw the band again in Mountain View when they were on the Lollapalooza bill, a then-mind-numbing coup of coolness for a supremely alt-rock band. Looking back, we can only wonder, what the f*** happened to the scene after it finally achieved world domination? (I like to think I played a small role in all that as a college radio DJ, by the way.)

In retrospect, Palo Alto's ingenius Ramones-meet-Runaways replica The Donnas were pretty much an also-ran in rock history, instead of the biggest thing to emerge from the Bay Area since the aforementioned Green Day. The San Francisco-based Melvins never reached escape velocity from cult status, either, while local yokels Painless Martha and Mother Hips are likely just memories to aging hipsters rather than household words among today's emo kids.

In a nutshell, it seems that alt-rock morphed into Limp Bizkit, which begat System of a Down which, somehow, begat the Jonas Brothers. So much for all that Pavement that '90s record-buyers laid in order for "math rock" to steal the spotlight from the Motley Crues and Poisons of the world -- who of course are now back on top like grunge never happened.

That budding, hopeful '90s San Francisco scene seems as far away now as the fabled Barbary Coast, a limitless world where rapscallion art was bursting at the edges of everyday culture. Where we saw posters on light poles for hot upcoming gigs, now you would look for blogs and tweets promoting concerts, I guess.

There is a brilliant passage In Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that I bet resonates with every generation, about the rise of underground culture up to a popular, almost transcendant point, and then the slow, inelegant backslide to zero:

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Start over, next wave. Remake the wheel again.

In the end, I'm sure it's I who changed, not the world. We all grow older, get tired, leave the muck of rock rebellion to younger, faster cats to give it their own inspired spin. I hope too many don't succumb to the horrors of running naked in the streets, howling for a fix, this time around.

For more info: Exactly what "genre" of rock does Jesus Lizard belong to? Post-punk, math rock, noise rock, grunge? Here's a relevant, lively and informative discussion for those with too damn much time on their hands trying to figure out who Killdozer was. Here's a nice review of Liar by Jesus Lizard.

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Visit my other blog on Examiner.com for more dis-and-dat commentaries an' such.

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UPDATE 1 p.m. 6/22:

Make one wisecrack about a randomly referenced band, and this is what happens. A commenter on my identical post on Examiner.com complained that I had no clue the briefly mentioned band Killdozer is still a driving force in music (yuk).

I see Killdozer did perform some reunion shows last year, as evidenced by this blog post. So yeah, they too transcended the faded glory of pre-Nirvana underground scene. (Both Killdozer and Kurt Cobain's band were recorded by Madison, Wisc., producer Butch Vig, of course.)

I'm glad to learn the ur-grungy Killdozer are back. Most of those turn-of-the-decade '80s/'90s bands seem to fit in the "where are they now?" category, so the conversation typically takes a retro direction, hence my ignorance of their comeback.

It also seems that Killdozer will be playing a high-profile, hometown show in September -- and with legendary So-Cal punks The Urinals at that!

Grab your hardhats and plungers. Thanks for the awakening comment, Dan.