Mik's 80's Bands

Lizard Music Story
Lizard Music Poster
Lizard Music Poster

Lizard Music is the title of a book by D Manus Pinkwater. It is also the name of a band that featured Owen Maercks singing, writing and playing guitar, Rob Hotchkiss singing, writing and playing bass, Ralph Davies playing drums, and Mik Dow singing, writing and playing guitar and synthesizer.

The picture of Owen (to the right) was taken from his late 70's lp. I really liked the record the first time I heard it so he gave me a copy. He had just come out from the east coast and I was working at Rather Ripped Records. I've kept it all this time even though I no longer have a turntable.

Owen and I formed Lizard Music in the summer of 1983. The last year of The Jars saw us breaking new ground and I wanted to continue in more or less the same direction. Owen was a fan of that particular brand of psycho-pop and he possessed some awesome guitar chops.

Lizard Music recorded five songs at Tom Mallon's 8-track studio in San Francisco in October 1983. Prior to that we performed at The Berkeley Square with Analisa Zumola playing woodwinds. The chemistry was not right and she left the band shortly thereafter.

In early 1984 a local promoter booked us into Ruthie's Inn in Berkeley for a month of Wednesdays. The first show was sparsely attended, but the second and third were those ignominous affairs were the band out numbers the audience.

The mp3 player to the left plays the Lizard Music demo. The songs are Terminal Beach (Maercks), To Women (McDow-Maercks) and House Of Cards (McDow-Hobish-Mollica-Gunther).

Early in 1987 I answered an ad in the back of BAM magazine. Upon arrival at the studio I found that myself and Jose Rodriguez were being auditioned for keyboards and drums, respectively. When the band had heard enough we were asked to leave while they discussed things.

Jose invited me to his car where he pointedly asked, "Do you like these guys?" I just as pointedly replied, "No."

He put on a tape and turned it up. "This is my band," he said. It rocked hard and sounded very corporate, but cool like early Boston. I was keen to know why he was there. "I'm looking for you," he replied, "We need a keyboard player. Do you want to come check it out?" To which I said yes. We were called back inside and told that we hadn't passed the audition. A week later I was the newest player in the John Nady Alliance.

John is the inventor of the wireless guitar system that bears his name so twice a week we would convene at Nady Systems in Emeryville to rehearse, arrange and record. John solicited the best songs from proven writers and others besides and of a couple of his own, I suspect. We played one show at The Omni in Oakland, which he owned, before retiring exclusively to the studio.

Not far into the sessions I was asked by our producer to fill in at The Omni. After the show I was hired by California Concerts, which John also owned, and I started work at The Omni as a FOH (Front Of House) and monitor engineer.

The saga of the Alliance sessions is tortuously complicated. We recorded two dozen songs from 1987 to 1990, and except for two cassette demos we never issued a thing. Along the way we lost Jose to a drum machine and our original singer, David Rosen, to his own band, Big Picture. In the end it was I, who have never claimed to be able to write the dots, who knocked the project into it's final form by programming the rythmn machines and playing all but a few of the keyboard parts.