Tell us about your tour vehicle.
Craig Smith (Drums): We last toured in 1997 but the four of us have been completely engaged, separately, in music since then and reformed in cyberspace in 2020 to record Arizone!. There were 2 touring beasts – The Eagle and The Pegasus. The Eagle flew when not regularly crash-landing and The Pegasus soared before exploding in flames during a blizzard one night in New Jersey. Bottom line, though, is we never missed a gig with them flying us around!
Chris Apple (Bass): The Eagle was our de rigueur Econoline tour vehicle. She was a beaut. Pretzel brown exterior, mustard-yellow interior and hi-fi cassette player to make the days less lonesome when it worked in both speakers. She blew a gasket somewhere in western PA on our way to Chicago to record our first album with Steve Albini and we’d still be there to this day if not for the kindness and good ol’ American know-how of a name none of us can ever forget: Boyd, from Barkeyville. Thank you, Boyd – you let Mike and I ride shivering in that broken-down van while you towed us to “safety”. I’m sure it was illegal and I’m sure you didn’t care a lick. But it got us to Chi Town and so began our dream as legitimate recording artists. The Eagle eventually perished but then The Pegasus came into our lives and we forgot all about that old Eagle.
The Pegasus was the opposite of the Eagle in that she was brand new and reliable. With that pristine white marvel we embarked on several cross-country tours in relative style. MJ and I built a functional loft for sleeping and storing our gear and covered the whole interior with wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling royal blue shag carpet decorated with questionable polaroids and souvenirs from the road. But then The Pegasus went up in flames and, well, you know the rest…
Mikael Jorgensen (Keyboards): Before we had the Pegasus & The Eagle, we each had to haul our gear in our own cars. I had a 1986 two-door Ford Tempo at the time and somehow had to fit a hulking Fender Rhodes Stage 73 in a rolling road case into the trunk. My unsustainable solution was to tip the roadcase on one end so it was now taller than it was wide, and then tip that into the car, lifting from the bottom and sliding it in as far as it could go. The problem is that it was about 16 inches too long so it just stuck out of the trunk. I put a red handkerchief on the end that was sticking out of my car because in my mind, somehow this made it less illegal. I had a bulky Traynor Amp + 4×12 cabinet which went in the backseat, meaning I had to put the front seat up, and then jockey the massive cabinet through this awkward opening into the backseat. Finally, in goes the orange suitcase.
I remember first seeing Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo using a small suitcase for his rock and roll sundries, and this hip-retro practicality resonated with me so I went to a thrift shop and bought a small orange Samsonite suitcase for a dollar and put all my cords, pedals, guitar strings and some tools into and it lasted for years. Once we got the Eagle, and then The Pegasus, the grunt-laden load-outs became less profane as all of our gear fit neatly behind the bench seat and room for all of us to ride to Craig’s dad’s house where we practiced and kept our gear.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
Smith: Buying travel-friendly food in bulk (nuts, fruit, 20-gallon drums of peanut butter, etc.) and avoiding bistros, ristorantes, grilles and places with “fine dining” attached to the name.
Jorgensen: We toured the UK in January of 1996 and somehow managed to survive on £10 a day. That budget was for breakfast, lunch, dinner, beer, and at the time, cigarettes. If memory serves, we would just buy a loaf of Hovis bread + some butter and that would be breakfast. Lunch was fish and chips wrapped in newspaper and dinner was sometimes batter sausage & beer. It didn’t matter at the time because we spent the whole time being stoked on being in England for the first time, listening to and buying records by skipping a meal, and playing shows. It was hard and unfamiliar at times but also the best fun.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
Erik Paparozzi (Guitar): I’ve been playing guitar for 40 years and I still suck at changing guitar strings. I don’t break a lot so every 6 months or so I get guilted by my guitar to refresh the string situation and it’s a whole ordeal that I need to take the better part of an evening to do…I always feel better about it in the end but I liken it to cleaning the toilet.
Jorgensen: I don’t care for the guitar. How much does it cost to replace them?
Paparozzi: I just crunched the numbers and it would appear that my total time spent changing strings has been 6 weeks, 3 days. That’s the hidden cost they don’t tell you about at guitar center.
Apple: I’ve played the bass for several decades and only ever broke a string ONCE – in the very first song of a set opening for The Legendary Wailers somewhere in upstate New York. First song, first chorus, Low E string – Thwaaannnk! Then I had to play the rest of the set with 3 bass strings slightly out of tune. How many players can remember the one and only time they ever broke a string?
But I am of the James Jamerson school of changing strings, which is: DON’T DO IT for as long as humanly possible because those strings absorb and retain your sweat, sometimes blood and all your creative vibes, which you want to keep under your thumb at all times. Total cash outlay: $67.50
Where do you rehearse?
Smith: Back in the ‘90s, we rehearsed a ton for the first two records and coinciding gigs and tours in Bob Smith’s spartan and functional basement in Matawan, NJ…with occasional rehearsals at by-the-hour places where the mics smell like sour cream and onion chips mixed with shit and the carpeting has inexplicable substances ground into it – but the vibe is funky as hell! I don’t think anything peculiar or crazy ever happened during rehearsals besides the music.
Jorgensen: Lots of great memories in that basement and all the basic tracks for the “Lobster T” EP were recorded there. Endless gratitude to Bob Smith for support during this important chapter of our lives. If memory serves, I took a circular saw to a misbehaving DX7 and hung the carcass like a side of beef from the rafters. We all have our things I suppose.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
Jorgensen: One of the first songs that we wrote as a group was “Naked In Las Vegas.” I was working in Manhattan during a cold snap where it was literally 19 degrees outside, which for New York City is an uncommonly low temperature. Hence the lyric: “19 Degrees and the ice wind, cuts like stone No one stops for the fire trucks, in New York”. It would always bum me out to watch cars speed across intersections regardless of the fact that a fire engine was blasting down the street, sirens wailing in an attempt to clear a path through the traffic to get help to those who needed it. The song was a staple at our unofficial Tuesday night residency at the misanthropic-beatnik-run coffee house called “The Inkwell” in Long Branch, NJ. We would sing songs, drink dutch coffees and eat toasted pound cake with butter until it was time to drive home in order to get enough sleep to wake up in time to catch the 7:05 bus into NYC for work the next day.
Describe your first gig.
Paparozzi: Lizard Music got our start by being both the opening act and backing band for David Peel. We were “The Lower East Side” for the evening. We did this twice. Before the first show, Mikael, our first guitarist Bill Bendick, and I drove into Alphabet City to pick him and his friend Greg up and drive them to New Jersey for a rehearsal and the show the next night. We were very green and hadn’t seen anything quite like the Lower East Side of Manhattan circa 1991 or 1992. David was a real character as you can imagine and he regaled us with John Lennon stories for hours. He signed my “Some Time In New York City” album, “To Erik…Jointly, David Peel”, which I still have to this day. Of course, all the songs were marijuana-themed so it just added to the weirdness when we rehearsed at Bill’s parents’ basement, who were devout Born-Again Christian.
Jorgensen: In the spirit of historical accuracy we did play a show *prior* to the infamous David Peel show (which is arguably the better story) however… It was December 26th, 1990 and we had gotten a show booked at a club called “Chasers” in Keansburg, NJ. We had been rehearsing without a drummer for months and months and now found ourselves in the predicament of requiring one. We recorded ourselves practicing in Bill’s parents’ basement on a boombox and I took the cassette to the music store I was working in at the time and asked my manager, Chris McKenna, if he’d play with us. He was a highly-respected drummer around town and somehow, mercifully, he agreed to play the show. The only hitch was there was no time to rehearse, and to my naive mind, it didn’t seem like such a big deal.
So while Chris is driving us to the venue and we’re listening to the tape and I’m trying my best to tell him what we want drum-wise on these seven songs, it begins to snow. As we unload our instruments into this absolutely revolting and frigid club, I can’t help but notice several foil catering trays of jell-o and a blue kiddie pool being set up on the floor in front of the stage. There was another band on the bill, whose name might have been The Penetrators or another thinly-veiled sexual innuendo. The snow is really accumulating outside – it’s been upgraded from a snow storm to full-on blizzard over the course of just a few short hours.
I don’t remember which band played first to the not-surprisingly empty club *or* the actual show. It is possible that the experience of playing songs with a drummer who learned the songs on the way to the gig was potentially traumatic and I blocked it out. We may never know. Despite the fact we were in this disgusting, freezing, empty club in a town that we had no connection with, I loved the pageantry of it all and felt that this was for me. After the show we start to load out the equipment only to discover, to our horror, that our new drummer’s car has been towed. It had been parked in a snow-removal tow-zone and in that moment he became our old drummer. We all chipped in to pay the fine and got out of there in plenty of time to escape the main event: Jell-O Wrestling.
This event paved the way for two important things: First, for us to meet, play and connect with the great Craig Smith some months later. Craig’s soulful and spiritual drumming elevated these crazy songs about TV shows, celebrities, and the characters in the Lizard Music Expanded Universe to this whole different level. The chemistry was fantastic and it was exciting!
Second, for us to meet Chris Apple. Erik + I met Chris at a New Year’s Eve party watching Ren + Stimpy cartoons. I want to appear cool and say we were also listening to Bowie but in reality it was Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” (it was the early ‘90s after all). Erik asked Chris to join and just like that, Chris was bringing his funky McCartney-meets-Colin Moulding basslines and wonderful voice and sense of humor to this ever growing pile of oddball music. The core lineup was in place!
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
Jorgensen: My last day job was office temping in the logistics department of Morton Salt in downtown Chicago. I had one vintage wool suit to wear to work and it was so scratchy and uncomfortable that I would wear thermal underpants in August to make it less hellish. It kinda worked.
The lady in the cube across from me was technically blind and raised rabbits out in the mysterious Chicago suburbs. The guy next to her had a family that lived several hours away downstate which was too far to commute to/from daily, so he had a 1-bedroom apartment in a suburb between his home and downtown Chicago. He would stay at this apartment Mon-Thurs and would only go home to his wife and kids on the weekends which didn’t seem like an enjoyable existence, but who am I to judge.
The manager of this department was one of those people who just said “That’s so funny” but she never once laughed at anything. The guy behind me got fired for not ordering enough road salt for the season ON PURPOSE. In the summer, barges of salt would be pushed up the Mississippi from where it was mined in Louisiana to prepare road crews in the northern states for winter weather. This guy apparently had enough and shorted some town a barge-load of salt which left them unprepared for winter and they led him out of the office with security.
After that happened I went down to the snack room to buy a Choco-Taco and noticed that the chairs had been arranged in two long columns, 3 seats per side. There was a mail cart filled with sodas and small packets of honey-roasted peanuts. I asked what was going on and was told that this was a “flight” where employees who don’t get to travel as part of their jobs get to come down to the snack room sit in these seats while someone rolls up and down the aisle handing out honey-roasted peanuts and soda to help pretend that they’re on an airplane. It was so colossally depressing. The temp position ended shortly thereafter and I knew I was not cut out for that world. From then on out I earned a living recording and making music and never looked back.
Smith: Last one was driving a dump truck and landscaping for a friend’s company in NJ in 2009. Favorite one was landscaping in Sarasota, FL – chill work, hot sun.
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
Smith: Fluctuated. 5-10 years from now – how to know? EP: To quote Lizard Music, “black rose comes & goes”. To quote Alan Thicke, “You take the good, you take the bad, you take ‘em both and there you have the facts of life”.
Apple: I concur
Jorgensen: The record biz is such a complicated and frustrating mess right now. Feels like it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. Middle class musicians & songwriters are feeling the pinch pretty hard right now. By middle class I mean artists who don’t have world conquest on their agenda and simply want to make a respectable living making and sharing their art. There are glimmers of hope in places like Bandcamp.com I must say. Being a musician is similar to being a farmer, in that you make a pile of money that then has to last for months at a stretch until the next harvest. My budgeting skills have improved significantly over the past 25 years.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
Smith: Emulating the lifestyles of dead rock stars is no way to roll!
Apple: Most important to me has been that you can make money and support yourself using your musical talent and creativity in many different ways. As a kid, I thought that if I wasn’t playing at Madison Square Garden to a sold-out crowd every night then I’d be a failure in life (The back cover of KISS “Alive” made a deep impression on me).
But to me, the only way you fail is if you give up doing what you love and take money for doing something you don’t love. In addition to recording and touring with Lizard Music and other acts, I’ve earned money playing in a TV house band, writing music for shows and films, teaching guitar, bass and drums, singing at kid’s birthday parties, playing at school assemblies, composing jingles, recording songs for a singing doll, playing in a cover band, posting videos online, doing session work, busking, you name it. Somehow I’ve been able to pay the bills with music and I haven’t had a proper day job in over 20 years. *ALSO FILE UNDER – What Is Your Current/Last Day Job and Music related income changes, above
Paparozzi: Every single member of this band is fully qualified and capable of writing and playing their parts. I wish I had grasped that earlier on but I was very driven to write and arrange full songs in my younger days. I now know that that isn’t the point of Lizard Music. Lizard Music is about the chemistry of the four of us riffing in real time.
Jorgensen: Listen to the quiet voice that whispers ambitious things to you. Do the thing(s) that give you joy and don’t worry so much about what is cool or hip. I like this analogy from my friend: “Remember, rental ski boots are designed to fit everyone so they wind up fitting no one.” (Sure, the skiing part may be considered a bit bougie, but the point is what’s important here.)