Austin Lounge Lizards
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The Austin Lounge Lizards are a band from Austin, Texas formed in 1980. The band includes founding members Hank Card, Tom Pittman, and Conrad Deisler, along with Boo Resnick (1994) and Korey Simeone (2003).
The band started out experimenting with folk but was still heavily country in its style, combining the bluegrass form which Pittman was familiar with the progressive-themed folk rock Card and Deisler had been accustomed to. Between the members a large number of different instruments have been played, including a rich variety of string instruments such as the banjo, mandolin, and fiddle.
The band got its name because, Deisler explained, "I think it was a slang term I'd heard my grandmother use to describe gentlemen of easy virtue who hung around in bars. When we started out, that's just what we were doing—hanging out and playing for beer and tips and stuff like that." The Austin Lounge Lizards began by playing covers, but eventually they wanted to move towards trying to write their own songs.
The sound became less country and progressed more to politically-aware songs. The songs they wrote tended to be humorous in an extremely off-beat way, in addition to their political nature, in a way reminiscent of Country Joe McDonald's Fixing to Die Rag. These songs tend to have primarily liberal messages, "The Ballad of Ronald Reagan", criticizes the Republican president, while "Gingrich the Newt" criticizes former speaker Newt Gingrich. One of their most famous songs, "Saguaro", is based on the story of David Grundman, who died from shooting a cactus (see cactus plugging).
[edit] Discography
- Creatures From the Black Saloon (1984)
- The Highway Cafe of the Damned (1988)
- Lizard Vision (1991)
- Paint Me on Velvet (1993)
- Small Minds (1995)
- Employee of the Month (1998)
- Never an Adult Moment (2000)
- Strange Noises in the Dark (2004)
- The Drugs I Need (2006)
