and that has been my main bass amp ever since. I actually like the sound of some of the Ampeg SVT amps a little better, and have done a few tours with the SVT-CL, but the Gallien-Krueger is a dream for a working touring musician. It’s rugged and loud. The components are built into a metal case which also serves as the heat sink, so it’s remarkably small for something that moves so much air. Even packed in a flight case, it’s easy to carry in one hand. In the Jesus Lizard, I play a Gallien-Krueger 800RB amplifier through three Dietz fifteen-inch speaker cabinets, which are designed to be part of a PA, but you see a lot of bass players from Austin using them. My friend Jay Tiller once said, “I have to love a guy that has a $2,000 bass rig and is driving it with a $50 bass.”
The only pedal I use in the Jesus Lizard is a distortion pedal made by Pro Co called the Rat. It’s built into a durable metal enclosure and has a heavy-duty switch, so it’s nice for touring. I only use it on a few songs, though. To be truthful, I was just too lazy to bother with a bunch of pedals and all the AC adapters and cables that go with them. Most of the time, my sound has just been the Memphis straight into the Gallien-Krueger.
DAVID WM. SIMS
Besides filling out the low end of the frequency range, the bass guitar is what glues things together in most rock bands. It fills space when needed, other times creates space. Ideally, a good bass line should reinforce the rhythmic feel of a song while providing a harmonic groundwork for everything else—guitars, keyboards, vocals, etc. If it does more than that, like stepping out on occasion and bringing peaks of activity or dynamic thrusts where there previously weren’t any, that’s added value. Subtract points for slapping and popping, excessive noodling, too many strings, too many effects, wearing the instrument too high, and other uncool transgressions. This applies to guitar players as well, actually.
David Sims is really good at coming up with bass lines that mesh well with the guitars and drums and yet still sound almost independent of those parts. I noticed this while watching and listening to Scratch Acid, well before we ever jammed or worked together. He also had a massive, grinding tone that was fairly unmatched by anyone else at the time, at least in our little corner of the world. Oh, and he wrote a lot of material too, not unlike other bassist/composer types like Willie Dixon, Barry Adamson, and Nikki Sixx.
Head has some prime examples. The opener, “One Evening,” is a good sample of what early Lizard was all about: right from the start, the bass line plays a malevolent-sounding minor/diminished pattern while circling the drums, then a distorted voice announces itself, and finally it all gets crowned by a jarring guitar chord which rings in the upper register. Songs like “My One Urine” and “If You Had Lips” have bass lines that creep and swing, and the underappreciated “Waxeater” is a tour de force of low-note legerdemain. “Killer McHann” has my favorite bass sequence from the Jesus Lizard—shortly before the final verse, as the drums cut back momentarily and the guitar slices and chops a simple Motown pattern, there’s a slashing series of descending bass runs that really kick everything into high gear.
Tunes like “Then Comes Dudley” and “Monkey Trick” (from the album Goat) were a blast to play over, guitarwise. I mean, how could I go wrong? I could surf over the undertow created by these bass lines, which were more strongly thematic than anything up to that point in our collection. “Fly on the Wall” (from Down) was another one—widely spaced bass intervals create holes for the guitar and vocals to glide and chatter through. Later material on the albums Shot and Blue show a willingness to try new things: the fluid ripples of “Thumper,” the brief solo on “Blue Shot,” and the finger-style dub-isms of “Eucalyptus” all point toward new directions.
In short, David Sims has had a remarkable career playing bass guitar. Others may have sold more albums, made more money, and become more famous, but I can’t think of too many other guys who have been as influential on their contemporaries. He has a sound and feel that is unmistakable and immediately recognizable. Some of the bands he’s been involved with (not just the Jesus Lizard, but Scratch Acid and Rapeman as well) are among the most respected in underground or independent music and have helped the genre of rock evolve . . . and he’s still doing it! Everyone, on your feet!
DUANE DENISON
Playing with David Wm. Sims was always easy. I never had to worry about us being together in the song. And that sound. It was an unmistakable mix of growl and the bite of steel that makes me think of being held in the air fifty feet high with one of David’s bass strings whipping me back and forth. We had an easy relationship as a rhythm section. We listened to each other. David’s ability on the bass was fearless. He played things that were challenging and brutal, and he knew when to stay out of the way, to give another player some room. The first few years of playing live, often in clubs with inadequate stage monitors, we put an extension bass cabinet right next to the drums, so I could hear and feel the bass. If I could hear it, I was happy. I’d have Duane angle his amp so it was slicing the top of my head off, and David’s Dietz box was churning up my insides. I was in heaven, smashing through that to give them something strong to play on. When the first song of a set started, we were off, and the momentum and energy didn’t stop until the end of the show.
MAC McNEILLY
My pa, Frank Lambeth Yow Jr., was born and raised in a charming little East Texas town called Commerce. He went from kindergarten through college within a half-mile radius. Like his mother Octo (she was the eighth child), he was a talented artist with a gift for descriptive line drawings and a great eye for composition. In his high school and college years, he was torn between becoming a visual artist or a fighter pilot. Talk about the duality of man. In Vietnam, he flew over one hundred combat missions in the completely badass F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bomber. I suppose “survived” would fit in place of “flew” in that last sentence. Pa was a clever wordsmith. His initials were F.L.Y., Ma’s were D.A.Y., so Pa used to say that their anniversary (having a name like Yow) was Flyday, even if it came on a Tuesday. He named our first cat Me Yow. He could be a lot of fun to talk to.
Ma was born and raised in an even smaller town named Gap Mills, situated on the west side of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains in West Virginia. As I write this, the population of Gap Mills is about 1,070. Ma was born in 1932. This was hillbilly country; it probably still is. Ma never finished high school, but in the mid-1970s she took a correspondence course and became a bookkeeper. She was soft-spoken, polite, funny, and stood just under five feet tall. I’m not lying when I say that Doris Yow was the sweetest little woman to ever walk the face of the earth.
My sister Kathy showed up a little less than two years before I did. She’s an extraordinary woman who was an extraordinary girl, always smart as a whip and a go-getter. When we were in our preteens, Kathy had me wrapped around her finger. This wasn’t her doing, it was that I looked up to her so much, she enchanted me. She excelled at the things I didn’t.
I was born August 2, 1960, on Nellis Air Force base in Las Vegas, Nevada. Pa was generally stationed at any given location for about four years at a time. We moved from Las Vegas to Tripoli, Libya, to Durham, North Carolina, to Fairfax, Virginia, to Upper Heyford, England, to Austin, Texas, where Pa retired. While in those places we would vacation to nearby destinations, including Norway, Germany, an amazing Mediterranean cruise where I got really sick, Spain, and occasional summer jaunts on a rented boat through the canals of the British Midlands. I think my childhood was a pretty happy one. I hated school, and I was not a very good student, although I didn’t despise my teenage years as much as it seems everyone else in the world did.
I became a Beatles freak when we lived in Fairfax. My best buddy Chuck and I bought