Friendship Commanders with The Jesus Lizard 

At The Blue Room 

It’s Thursday and another school night for this dude, but the music calls me out into the darkness once again.  It sounds a lot like a vampire novel is about to be penned here. It some sense my life sometimes feels like that.  It’s like my day job is just me hibernating indoors and away from the sunlight.  I wait patiently in my coffin and then it’s nighttime and I need to feed.  At least I’m not ripping the flesh from the necks of unsuspecting human beings and slurping down their blood for sustenance.  I’m just going to a rock n’ roll show.  Geez, that got morose there for a second. 

Tonight’s music meal is The Jesus Lizard and what a fine feast I was looking to devour.  This show sold out in just under 15 minutes from what I heard.  When I heard from my fellow undead coworkers about the show, we made sure that we took a break from our morning so that we could jump online and frantically hit refresh on our phones to ensure our placement in the queue. We are that technically advanced kind of savages.  

The tickets were secured, and we waited through the weeks until it was time to walk among the living.  Myself, along with my dudes Casey and Logan, and my concert bestie Andrea met at The Blue Room in Nashville.  I have described The Blue Room in detail in another article on this site.  I’ve set the link here.  

The first band up was a local heavy duo called Friendship Commanders.  First off, love the name.  It sounds like you’re heading into the magical rainbow forest with your teddy bear friends and then when the music hits everything goes dark, the trees die off and your furry buddies turn into demons, and in that scenario, everything is truly perfect. 

From the artists website, “The band is vocalist/guitarist Buick Audra and drummer/bassist Jerry Roe. Their new album, MASS, is a concept record about memory, language, and the state of Massachusetts. The ten-track body of work was co-produced, engineered, and mixed by Kurt Ballou at his Salem, MA studio, GodCity. The album will be accompanied by a memoir in essays by Buick Audra. Both were released on September 29, 2023”. I should have picked up the book at the show, but that’s what the internet was set up for by Al Gore.  After seeing this thunderous twosome live, I must read. 

Let’s start with the drums. Jerry is an absolute beast on the skins.  I swear I thought the whole kit was going to implode everything he swung his tiny wooden hammers upon their being.  My friend Logan, kind of knows him from a few years back and told me about what demon this dude was.  You can tell people until you’re blue in the face about something, but until you see it live sometimes it’s hard to explain.  I guess that’s what I do constantly on this site and that is why I implore people to get off their asses and support live music, venues and especially the musicians that are absolutely grinding and giving it their all. Jerry gave me a Dale Crover vibe.  I’m coming to Nashville via Seattle so to pick a former Nirvana/Melvins drummer (besides Dave Grohl- technically from DC) seems natural. 

Then there’s this omnipresent lady up front who just engages you immediately with a voice that cuts through the air and grabs you by the face. My friend Andrea said, “she looks like a 4^th grade teacher that fucking shreds”.  I loved that.  I told that to the woman at the merch table who seemed to have a direct connection to the band.  She laughed.  In the hope that Buick and Jerry read this, it was meant as an absolute compliment.   

The fact is, she did shred.  The group Friendship Commanders is a band you want to keep your eye on in the future.  Here’s a link to the set list.  Follow them on all the socials and GO SEE THEM LIVE! 

We broke after the set and my three friends set off for some fresh air and conversation.  I ventured off to find a beer, and I entered the line right as another body was attempting to get the same spot.  He motioned forward with his arm and said, “Sorry, you go first.”  I was about shoulder height to this man and as I turned to my right and looked up I murmured, “No, you go…Patrick?!”  I had recognized this presence.  It was Patrick Carney from The Black Keys. 

I couldn’t believe it. I immediately asked for a selfie because I am a dork and he kindly obliged me. We talked for the next ten to fifteen minutes as we slithered closer to the bar.  I thought, what a great time to sneak in an interview, but all he did was ask me about me.  I told him that the company I work for was the one that pressed his last record.  He thought that was great and loved how it turned out.  I mentioned that I had just seen them a few months back at Brookyln Bowl and we talked about that event and music and Seattle and Nashville, and it was an awesome experience, and he was really cool.  We arrived bar side and he ordered first and then said “…and whatever this guy is having.”  Yeah, Patrick Carney bought me a beer.  That’s the story.  Ooh, we Cheers’d for one more selfie. 

Back inside the space The Jesus Lizard graced the stage. This was the very first stop on the new tour and in September, their first album will release since 1998 with the BLUE album. There was also an allotment of video cameras throughout the venue making people mumble about the possibility of some sort of documentary. 

If there were ever a frontman’s frontman, that man is David Yow. At age 63, Yow was still full of pure piss and vinegar. Crushing the microphone in the palms of his hands and belting out the classic Lizard hits, Yow and his mates left nothing but sweat and spit on the stage floor. The crowd swayed and moved with the post-hardcore ensemble like wheat blowing in a field, only this field was filled with more denim and leather and there were more elbows flailing.  

The initial three songs were Puss, Gladiator and Seasick. Puss, The Jesus Lizard’s first UK hit single, was originally released on a 1992 split 7″ with Nirvana’s Oh The Guilt, and released through Touch and Go Records.  It was produced by the late Steve Albini and was later included on the full-length album Liar. And with this track David Yow wasted no time getting the crowd engaged and amped up. Behind Yow are bassist David Sims, Mac McNeilly on drums and Duane Denison on lead guitar. This is the medicine that I needed tonight. The raw energy on vocals, the crashing drums, the wailing guitar all created a synthesis of punk rock amalgamation that reminded me of the unmistakable sounds of Iggy Pop & The Stooges or The Damned. 

Shortly after they went onto the track Mouth Breather off the Goat record, from 1990. Yow really gets into the feel now, stage diving into the crowd, yet keeping the vocals on pace with the band playing in time, because they see this every night and its probably old hat or nothing new, but for us it’s what we needed. A lot of us are transformed back to our youth. We are out of our daily sarcophagi, and we have left our screens and emails behind us. We are with the witching hour and synced to our heroes. The band is just extravagant tonight. On September 13^th we will get the full album, but tonight we get a listen to their first single off the album, RACK. The song is called Hide & Seek. 

In an NYT interview, The Jesus Lizard say that they’d been working on new music since 2017, with Yow committing fully to making a new record in 2019. RACK was recorded last year in Nashville, at Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney’s Audio Eagle studio. In the New York Times, bassist David Wm. Sims says that the 11-song set is “maybe one of our best.” After doing that research I now get why I crossed paths with the aforementioned drummer. 

Eventually it was house lights up, and just when we thought, maybe for a minute that the night was coming to an end, and we would sleek back into hiding and have start think about those deadlines and meetings again, they returned to us with more flesh and veins in their hands in the form of an eight song encore. More stage diving and crowd surfing. More middle fingers raised in the air in solidarity, and more internal smiles that made our hearts full.  

Thank you to The Blue Room for putting on this visceral show. The combination of Friendship Commanders and The Jesus Lizard was what I needed for sure. I know from the looks on people’s faces on the way out, that they felt the same way.