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"Hilarious, endearing,
and literary..."
-Billboard
As career turns often do, the Austin Lounge Lizards’ latest musical pursuit came about by accident. Though the veteran string band is known for humorously skewering everything from politics to parenting, it never occurred to the quintet to become satirists for hire. But when opportunity knocked, it soon banged down the door.
The lizards were asked by the Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, to write a song as part of its campaign called “Prescription for Change.”
“They wanted to make people aware of the abuses of the pharmaceutical industry, the obscene profits they’re making and how they’re able to get drugs to the market without adequate testing,” explains vocalist/bassist Boo Resnick. “We wrote a song called ‘The Drugs I Need.’”
Paired with animation and placed on the Consumers Union Web site, it drew 1.5 million hits and more than 120,000 downloads. Thousands signed a petition demanding more accountability from the industry. That led to another animated online tune, “The Tower,” which takes on big media conglomerates for the union’s communications choice campaign.
Then a PR firm in Washington, D.C. got hip to the Lizards’ lampooning talents and hired the quintet to write a song for an industrial boycott effort, and a California consumer group requested a ditty about the high costs of health care.
And their Consumers Union pal, who works out of an Austin-based regional office, came calling again, looking for a way to warn people about credit card companies who prey on consumers, especially during the holidays. The result – illustrated with Seussian elves that look like thuggish mob enforcers – is “It’s Always Christmastime (for Visa).”
“We’ve been getting a lot of attention for that,” Resnick says. “Being commissioned to write these songs has kind of forced us to be creative. Cranking out these songs, we’re most of the way toward a new album. … This process has been great because we’ve all been writing together.”
But for now, the band – also Conrad Deisler on guitar, Tom Pittman on banjo and dobro, Hank Card on rhythm guitar and Korey Simeone on fiddle and mandolin, – is still promoting its ninth release, “Strange Noises in the Dark,” and new DVD, “Lizards Times Twenty,” on Houston-based label Blue Corn Music.
And even after 26 years together, they’re still finding new places to play, like San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, a major event entirely funded by a wealthy venture capitalist (obviously with a good sense of humor).
Just like that festival, their repertoire is hardly strictly bluegrass, even though they started out spoofing country music clichés. They’ve since expanded their intricately layered harmonies and instrumental arrangements to puncture pop, rock and now, thanks to Simeone, even German hip-hop.
“I do my lame middle-aged white guy beat box and he raps in German,” says Resnick. “The crowds love it.”
Though members of those crowds have been asking the band for a greatest-hits album, Resnick promises there won’t be one anytime soon.
"When we put out a greatest hits album, that means we have quit writing," he explains. "As long as there are corrupt politicians and greedy corporations doing what they do, as long as the media are so lowbrow, as long as you’ve got religious nutcases out there, and as long as Nashville keeps putting out ridiculous cookie-cutter music, we will always have something to write about."
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