The Lounge Lizards - The Lounge Lizards (1981)

Listening to The Lounge Lizards I can’t help but think of those film noir parodies you’d see on kids TV shows, where you’d have the main character as the fedora-wearing private eye and the leggy dame and the unlit office filled with alluring shadows. In other words, all the touchstones except the fifth of rye. I cannot even begin to think of the names of any of the shows that played with this kind of joke (the image is so indelible in my mind that I really hope I didn’t make it up) but I’m sure they all had the same kind of music - a smoky, sleazy jazz leaking in through the slant-blinds. This is that type of jazz.

What these lizards are doing here is pulling an elaborate joke. At least, from what I’ve read, this was their initial intention. After this album they settled down and became just an ordinary jazz band. The joke, as imperceptible as it may be, is mostly in the sound, the way genre constructs are flashed and then quickly translated into a blaring spoof. There are the basic ingredients of jazz – the sax, trumpets, upright bass, drums and piano – but they’re bastardized into an outlandish cartoon. Once you understand this you can begin to appreciate the way the joke extends to the cover art, and also just how subtle a send-up this is, the laughable earnestness of skinny white guys in starched shirts looking pensive in their dressing room.

It’s tempting to opt for a Roy Lichtenstein comparison and say the entire joke is in the way the product relates to actual traditional jazz. It seems, from the cover at least, like this should be a jazz album, and so in presenting the style as is but in a different context you’re forcing the original style to make fun of itself. But Lichtenstein pieces were veritable copies, and really, there is no jazz that sounds anything like this, at least none that takes itself seriously (if there is, it really shouldn’t). What we have instead is a wet bag of clichés swollen up and jostling against one another.

This is the same referential stance that other acts (Tenacious D for one) take in mocking their genre of choice, by attaching themselves to the most extreme, absurdly bombastic aspects and winking a lot to make it clear they’re not being genuine. The Lounge Lizards are different; they go even further into the reaches of absurdity but they’re not so much joking (forget how I’ve described it so far) as they are screwing with genre limits. This isn’t an album that you laugh at.

Of course, it’s also not all that easy to mock jazz in the first place. You can dislike it (the best criticism I’ve heard is a comparison to masturbation – interesting only to those involved and a select group of fetishists) but for the most part the genre lack the dumb strut that makes rock and rap so easily lampoonable. So to play around with jazz the Lizards inflate its elements to a ridiculous proportion, at which size anything would look silly. It fails as criticism then (who knows if this was what they were even going for), but this failure is inconsequential because the album still succeeds musically. This is a great record. It’s like jazz, but it does things that it doesn’t, making it satisfying as a bizarre interpretation of the genre.

Generally, these songs sound like they’re about to explode. They strain at their limits, shaking them around like a dog with a rag doll, but as loose as the mask of genre slips it never really falls off. This sound has a lot to do with the guitar, which is offering commentary on the music behind it and at the same time effecting it. The best example is the opening track, “Incident on South Street,” which, besides the exaggerated back-alley horns and the campy sleaze of the piano actually starts off pretty normally. Things sound smooth; the cymbals do that little rain drop patter and the bass thumps along. Then the guitar kicks in, and, far from acting cordially, it tears a big hole in the song, screeching and grinding, sending the saxophones and drums into an epileptic fit in the process.

This kind of squelching nightmare has roots in free jazz and recalls well-costumed punk but relates most to no-wave, the movement that the Lizards are most closely identified with. They certainly apply its aesthetic, atonal and repetitive, but blast it through the jazz filter, blowing out the genre into garish, gaudy expositions. Again, the Lichtenstein comparison seems just out of my reach.

It’s hard to identify the point where self-aware mockery turns into a satisfying example of what’s being mocked, but that’s exactly what The Lounge Lizards are providing. In some ways, what they do here doesn’t seem to bizarre. Compare it to Sun Ra, as reinterpretation on a grand and bizarre scale. One abducts jazz and flies off with it into space; the other takes it into a back alley and beats the shit out of it.