David Yow's brilliant theater...

On stage David Yow was a drunken, shirtless, cowboy-boot-stomping, slurred-speech wreck. It sounds like the kind of guy I hate to be near - especially at a show. But at Jesus Lizard shows, when they were still around and I was in my early twenties, I would press myself against the stage to be close to him and I would gaze up at him and smile--exhilarated.He had everything I always wanted in a rock star (though star status of the confessions-on-a-talk-show-couch variety Yow certainly never achieved). I wanted rock theater from my rock idols. I wanted to watch them enter into that ethereal and even absurd realm where the rules that organize a normal life dissolve. And I wanted to come along.At entering that realm and taking his crowd with him, Yow was expert. Barely a rock theater minute went by when Yow was not pressed up against the crowd, floating on it, or at least gripping a hand as he balanced on a monitor.But it wasn't just the theater of it. Any jerk with a stage and a shtick can give you theater (witness Gene Simmons). I want my rock idols to be vulnerable, and I want that vulnerability stitched somehow to the theater. Yow was vulnerable. Between songs - with the lunging and kicking and stumbling and crowd swimming - he could be almost sweet. And he was always that sort of tired-drunk funny. And Yow's rock drama, which does not usually thrive on sweet and funny, never suffered for it - it was precisely that tension between vulnerability and stage invincibility that kept me rapt.Nowhere is that contrast better staged than in this clip shot at a show in 1994. The band is not one minute into their euphoric "Seasick" when a flying beer bottle smashes into the left side of Yow's head and falls in pieces to the floor. A short second later, Yow too is on the floor - twisted on his back and barely conscious. The music stops, one player at a time. David Sims, the bass player, barely looks down at the fallen singer, he just leans his bass against his amp and walks off the stage (a man who has seen, perhaps, too much rock theater). Soon the guitar player is out of the way too. The drummer sticks around as a woman and a security guard appear to examine Yow, who is kind of writhing in slow motion on the floor. Soon the club's security guard is helping an unsteady Yow to his feet. Yow rubs the side of his head and checks for blood and you can't help but want him to get out of there (these things have a tendency to escalate). He is terribly vulnerable.Soon Yow is somewhat upright, microphone in hand. His first words - "Nice shot, dick" - are the kind of thing a drunk, shirtless man in cowboy boots is scripted to say. He conferences with the band a bit a returns to the center of the stage, where he braces himself with the microphone stand and clears the hair from the right side of his sweating head, facing it to the crowd and taunting: "Maybe we can get some kind of symmetry going here...get this side too." And then, in a singsong warble: "I'm waiiiiiitttiiiing..."He's invincible.It's a brilliantly disarming move. In seconds, "Seasick" has begun all over agian and Yow's brilliant drama - how I miss being pressed up against his stage - marches on.