Customer Reviews

Highway Cafe of the Damned

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The Austin Lounge Lizards have a way with lyrics. They also have nice voices and a good touch combining pop-style with bluegrass. The introductory riff to the title song is bluegrass sped up by a factor of 10.

The title song sneaks in references to mythology, the bible, Elvis, Kafka, and Shakespeare. It also rhymes "wallop" with "trollop."

The a capella "Chester Nimitz Oriental Garden Waltz" is lovely if you don't listen to the words, and sidesplitting if you do listen to them. Includes a round. Rhymes "banyan" and "companion."

The Austin Lounge Lizards have produced quite a few albums over the years, but this is the one I come back to again and again. Highway Cafe of the Damned, the title track, is simply brilliant, and there is not a single cut which misses. Unfortunately, the Ballad of Ronald Reagan is no longer topical, but you can't fault the band for making funny, biting satire about (then somewhat) current politics.

Fifteen years ago you could drive 50 miles every Thursday night and sit with the same 75 people in a closed down cafe to listen to the Lounge Lizards sing the best they'd ever do. Those songs are available today as they performed them then and recorded them on vinyl. Highway Cafe of the Damned and Creatures of the Black Saloon contain them all. The fact I wouldn't trade a single song from any those guys released later doesn't take anything away from the ones they produced during that, their zenith. If you've never heard (of) the Austin Lounge Lizards and you buy these two albums you'll be compelled to buy the others just to make absolutely certain I'm wrong. You won't feel cheated, but you will feel a little disappointed.
Introduce yourself to them with Highway and Creature. On those you'll feel no letdown at all.

The Austin Lounge Lizards' second album opens the title track with a lightning guitar solo and a lyrical introduction to much of what's to come--"I had seven vices on my mind. Sloth and avarice, ----cation, television, whiskey, beer and wine." The rest of the song brings Elvis, Kafka, Barry Manilow and a two-headed cerberus into the singer's world of "stale rolls and warmed-over casseroles, until the end of time". Both the musicianship and hilarious lyrics of the title track are Lizards' hallmarks. "Wendell, the Uncola Man" is a bouncy song about the consequences of infidelity. The hero comes to a bad end as his unfaithful wife coldly "chews an ice cube from her Scotch and soda." "Dallas, Texas", another song about infidelity almost starts in Nashville (but the singer's never been there), so he threatens to "go back to Dallas, Texas to see if anything could be worse than losing you." Whiskey, beer and wine are the subject of "When Drunks Go Bad", Conrad Deisler's exploration about how the rest of the barflies cope when one of their kind "discovers virtue." The guys close the album on a musical and lyrical high note (with some harmonizing chords) in the a capella "Chester Nimitz Oriental Garden", a touching love song about a couple who declare their love in the titled garden in Fredricksburg (where breakfast and Texas make their second rhyming appearance of the record). The song closes with lead vocalist and songwriter Hank Card leading the Lizards in a yodel about Admiral Nimitz's "island-ho-ho-hopping campaign." Amazing stuff--good for a laugh every time. Try some satiric bluegrass with the Austin Lounge Lizards.