“I’m tired of the rat race,” frontman of trailblazing noise-rock band Unsane reveals in a rare, recent interview. “So I just hang with my girl and wait for her to get a new dog. Going on tour is really fun now. It used to be not, because I didn’t play enough. My life was really chaotic before. Now, shit is a lot more centered.”
Continue reading
David Yow’s could very well lingering in obscurity without his iconic tenure as the frontman of the Jesus Lizard (and Scratch Acid) before that. But he’s also sprinkled in some bizarre side projects along the way, including his abstract-art “music” album Tonight You Look Like a Spider, released in June 2013 on Joyful Noise; a stint as the vocalist for L.A. underground rock trio Qui that culminated in their 2007 album Love’s Miracle; and guest appearances at concerts by Shellac, Melvins, the Dicks, Girls Against Boys and Cop Shoot Cop.
But one of the most notable excursions Yow – who self-deported from the U.S. for Portugal during the Trump regime – took in his equally florid and flatulent career was when he took on the role of vocalist for influential punk band and one of Kurt Cobain’s favorite groups, Flipper. After forming in 1979 and taking a decade-long break from 1994 to 2004, Yow filled in for ailing singer Bruce Loose during shows in 2015. Four years later, Yow reprised his role as substitute vocalist for Flipper’s 40th Anniversary Tour in 2019; at that point, Yow was effectively a member of the band, which advertised their shows as “Flipper with David Yow.”
But little do fans know – if any – that Yow wasn’t a shoe-in for Flipper’s replacement vocalist. Chris Spencer, frontman of Unsane – another hugely influential noise-rock band from decades past, along with the Jesus Lizard – recently revealed in an interview with this writer: “I was really a big Flipper fan, despite them having 30-plus members over the years. The ethos of that band was just great.”
Continue reading
(This recollection of a classic Jesus Lizard concert is brought to you by Danny Sein, drummer for self-described trashy grunge band mr.phylzzz from Chicago.)
—
The most unforgettable show I ever attended featured the Jesus Lizard performing at the Metro in Chicago on December 9, 2017.
There’s a reason I have a tattoo. The Jesus Lizard has been a consistent band in the soundtrack of my life from the time I first heard them at 18. I didn’t like their music when I first heard it, but like most things I end up obsessing over, it grew on me with a few oddly persistent listens. I went [to the show] with my buddies Allen and Donny. I was 22.
When Allen came to pick us up, he was already blasting Goat at a deafening volume. It was frigid and snowing on the drive from Grand Rapids to Chicago, and the highway was icy with a heap of snow already on the ground. We hit 131 South and “Mouth Breather” started. Likely because of the song, Allen had a bit of a lead foot in the Crown Vic, so we fishtailed into a ditch. Donny and I pushed it back up onto the highway. We were up to our calves in snow. As soon as Allen resumed driving, he said, “Where were we?” And he started “Mouth Breather” over again from the beginning.
Continue reading
It’s unclear whether the Jesus Lizard are an active band to any degree at the moment – an ambiguous status level the noise-rock tricksters seem to enjoy as much as they do occasionally reuniting for an unexpected swing of shows or even a new record. But with vocalist David Yow having ditched the U.S. for Poland, the chances seem slimmer than usual for another reunion of any sort.
But that’s not to say the other band members – we’re looking at you, guitarist Duane Denison – are inclined to rest on their laurels. At the end of a 20-minute video conversation with Melvins main man Buzz Osborne that Consequence posted two days ago, Denison mentioned – almost as an aside – that he’s formed a new band in Nashville, where he currently resides. It’s called D2 Archipelago and features two other players: guitarist Matt Swanson and drummer Brian Kotzur, formerly of Lambchop (also based in Nashville) and Silver Jews, respectively.
Continue readingDavid Yow’s penchant for physical prowess is not only evident in his four decades as noise-rock’s ultimate madman; the Jesus Lizard frontman also taps into his mesmerizing contortions and transformations as an actor. Fans of Yow and his bands – which have also included Scratch Acid, Qui and Flipper – may be aware of his various forays in film, but only a select few have seen this wacky demo reel he used to clinch acting roles.
A short list of movies on Yow’s resumé include 2017’s I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore with Elijah Wood; 2023’s The Toxic Avenger with Peter Dinklage; 2018’s Under the Silver Lake with Andrew Garfield; and the 2015 cult-favorite horror anthology Southbound.
Continue reading
The numbers are in, and boy are … the numbers in.
What the ranking of The Bad Penny‘s most popular posts of 2025 indicates about this website can be interpreted in any number of ways. Would you like us to prattle on and on with theories and statistical data backing the sharp uptick? Yeah, we didn’t think so.
Instead, let’s cut straight to the (Chevy) Chase. Ergo, we bring you the rundown of The Bad Penny‘s most popular posts of 2025:
Continue reading
Read the interview to end all interviews with woefully underrated Brett Bradford, guitarist for Scratch Acid and frontman for Suckling. Check out previously unpublished photos of Bradford with his Scratch Acid bandmates, including David Yow, in my extensive feature for Post-Trash.
“Some who voted for [Trump] are not necessarily bad or gullible people. If that’s the case, they should very well now regret their decision and do what they can to right the wrong. They helped put the fox in the henhouse and should help to get rid of it.”
–Brett Bradford
—
Recently, yours truly had the distinct honor of conducting an extraordinarily in-depth and all-encompassing interview with one of the most crucial figures in ’80s underground music and foundational guitarists in noise rock: Brett Bradford, formerly of Scratch Acid and now a member of indie-rock quartet Suckling.
The extensive feature will appear on Post-Trash on October 7, but in the meantime, we’re bringing you, separately, his thoughts on Authoritarian America as part of The Bad Penny‘s increasingly critical series called On Tyranny. Here is that portion of the interview, followed by some additional thoughts that Bradford later shared.
Continue readingAs our nation rapidly transforms into Authoritarian America, artists – who are typically among the first to be targeted when a dictatorship takes control of a country – are relocating to countries where their right to free speech is still protected.
One of the more prominent indie-rock artists to make the move is Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow, who relocated to Portugal earlier this year, according to multiple sources who recently confirmed the news to The Bad Penny. None of the sources said outright that Trump’s reclaiming of the presidency was their motivating factor for Yow fleeing the U.S., however.
When yours truly interviewed Yow and Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison last year for a feature on FLOOD, the vocalist whose lyrics were historically apolitical admitted that he felt boxed in by the inexorable partisan strife in America and said he was compelled to address current events on the band’s comeback record, Rack.
“A larger percentage of the lyrics than I wished were based on the political climate in the U.S. for the last seven or eight years,” he confided in a video conference call.
Continue reading
If you’re even fairly familiar with raunchy comedy, “The Aristocrats,” an ever-evolving running joke so dirty that comics used to only tell it to each other behind closed doors, probably rings a bell. The jape varies in length, vulgarity, structure, plot and tone, depending on whichever comedian is telling their version of it. But baked into the joke are, unwaveringly, graphic scenes of a family engaging in scatological, sordid and smutty behavior during an audition in a misguided effort to win over an agent to book their stage act. And the punch line always remains the same, with the family revealing at the end of the audition that their stage name is “The Aristocrats.”
Continue reading
