Duane Denison is the guitarist in two explosive hard rock outfits: The Jesus Lizard and supergroup Tomahawk. The latter is going on tour for the first time in 13 years, giving music from their last album, 2021's Tonic Immobility, its live debut. Fellow outside-the-box rock titans Melvins are also on the bill for the tour, dubbed "A Huge Waste of Your Time and Money."

TND's Tyler Roland sat down with Denison for a chat in mid July, mere hours before the band were set to start rehearsing for the first show on July 18.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tyler @ TND: Tonic Immobility is now a five-year-old album. Does that album, and that material, still feel fresh to you? 

Duane Denison: Absolutely. It's like a new album. We've never played it live. That album was on the heels of the COVID thing. Because of scheduling and other things, we weren't able to play. Now we're about to. It's exciting.

You've been rehearsing for those shows, I take it. How's that been going? 

We are so seat-of-the-pants. We haven't actually started rehearsing as a group yet. That starts later today, and all through this week. The first show is Saturday. If everything goes right, everyone will show up on time, and we will practice all week. 

Break a leg!

Thank you. 

What song from Tonic Immobility do you think will kick the balls of the audience the hardest when you unleash it for the first time? 

It could be the second song, "Valentine Shine." It could be "Business Casual." It could be "Predators and Scavengers." It could be a weird sort of atmospheric one, like… the working title was "High Noon," but [it's now called] "Doomsday Fatigue."

The tour is a doubleheader with Melvins, and I've long put you and King Buzzo in a similar camp – of being unafraid of the avant-garde while maintaining a commitment to heavy riffage. 

Sure.

I want to know if you think your guitar work is a little more cerebral than his, given that you have had formal training on classical guitar, or do you have his attitude? "Good music doesn't come from the mind. It comes from the pelvis."

Oh, that's a loaded question. Yes, I am far more cerebral than King Buzzo can ever dream of being. How's that for a quote?

I try to come up with things that are interesting on an intellectual level, yet they have to sound good. Meaning: you can take a guitar, some effects, an amp, and crank it up. All the theory and composing in the world doesn't help you. Do the other musicians like it? Do they feel good about it? And then, finally, the audience: how do they feel? It's always a balancing act between things that are theoretically or philosophically interesting to you and things that plain old sound good. 

My favorite Tomahawk record is Mit Gas. On that and the first record, there's a small handful of experimental exercises. The last track on Mit Gas is a spoken-word Tom Waits thing, and it segues into a sonic hell at the end. Who had that idea? Or the idea of having a Spanish ballad ("Desastre Natural") played straight in the middle of that album amongst the hard rockers? 

I always write the bulk of the music, if not all of it, and then Mike does the vocals and the melodic content. I would make demos, Mike would add his thing, and then we would get together and make a final arrangement. That was a while ago. I don't remember exactly who thought of what.

We've always had a certain amount of experimentation. I play classical and flamenco guitar, and Mike speaks Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. So there's always been a touch of Latin stylings, if you will, on all of our records. We are primarily, obviously, a rock band, and we play rock songs based on riffs and beats [that] have a certain amount of repetition, but we leave room for the odd detour. 

Even on the last record, there's the song "Howlie," which goes straight into "Eureka," that ambient spatial thing. 

Yeah, it never stops with us. Who knows? There might be a couple of surprise ballads thrown in, things that people haven't heard that aren't on any records, in the setlist. 

I'm looking forward to it. I've read a little bit about how you were, or are, a librarian in your downtime.

I was. Not when [Tomahawk] started; I was a full-time musician from 1990 'til probably 2005, then I took a break. Things got slow. There was no point in me waiting around. I did some other things: The Unsemble, that came out on Ipecac; and U.S.S.A., with Paul Barker from Ministry. I did some one-offs.

I worked in a library when I was in college. I just went out and got a library job, and did music on the side. I retired from there a couple of years ago and then wham, Jesus Lizard was back, and now Tomahawk's back, so it all worked out pretty well for me. 

Being a bookworm, I want to know if you and Mike Patton have ever discussed any literary references or imagery when you've been crafting these Tomahawk demos and records.

No. And he reads a lot, as does everybody in the band; we might say "hey, did you read so-and-so's new thing?" or "wow, I'm kind of digging Ottessa Moshfegh these days" or "Paul Auster just passed away." In passing, we’ll throw these things around. As far as, like, "why don't we try to do something based on the ideas of this?" No, never.

I have a degree in music. Mike doesn't, but he's super knowledgeable about composers and things, as is John [Stanier], and Trevor [Dunn] also. If I say, "oh, by the way, the main riff on 'SHHH!' is based on this thing I nicked from Luigi Dallapiccola," they know who that is. I like taking little bits of things from these weird sources that most rock guys don't know, but those guys do.

Back during the pandemic, a lot of Ipecac artists put together playlists for the quarantine, and I remember flipping through yours and finding a couple of oddball things.

I remember doing that, but I don't remember what the list was.

I think some John Cage was on there, stuff like that.

I mean, literally, whatever I was listening to at the time. Lately, I think because it was the Fourth of July, I went on an all-American kick: Charles Ives, Sun Ra, and Steve Reich.

Are you at liberty to say if the setlist, besides Tonic Immobility, has any bias towards any of the previous four?

Oh, absolutely.

We have a master list that everybody's been working on, about 28 songs and then, with covers and oddballs, it's in the thirties. That's a lot of material. In a typical night, [we] might play between 20 and 25. The first two will definitely be represented. They will all be, even one from Anonymous – even gonna throw one of those in, one of the more rocking songs. 

[Note: check out this interview's bonus content for further discussion about Anonymous, Tomahawk's outlier LP from 2007.]

You've said that you've received more comments about your chord slur on the Jesus Lizard track "Then Comes Dudley" than anything else. Is there something you've done on a Tomahawk tune, any guitar thing, that you wish someone would talk about as much as that "Then Comes Dudley" riff?

I don't sit around thinking about that kind of stuff, but it's nice when you come up with something that you think is unique, or really good, or has a lot going on, and people appreciate it. I could go through the albums and point at things. For instance, on the first album, that song "Laredo" – the solo is very pointillistic, and it goes out of time and then comes back in. I thought that was pretty good. The second album, Mit Gas, I thought that "Captain Midnight," if I may blow my own, was one of the best songs of the era. I thought it might be my favorite Tomahawk song of all time. You've got that pretty, clean tremolo guitar, then power chords, and Mike's vocal is otherworldly on that track. I thought that should have been a worldwide number one. 

Maybe it wasn't because the chorus was only played once. 

But that's a big payoff! You couldn't bring it back, it would have been hammy and overkill. And then the song "Rape This Day," that chattering, minimalist guitar figure that comes in at the top and then shows up again in the middle, and the big, almost Johnny Ramone-type chords. It's not technically a marvel, but it's also physically hard to play. There's an element of endurance involved that I think a lot of jazz guys don't understand. In hard rock, there's repetition and endurance where you have to keep it steady, and you have to maintain a certain level of attack. That's the kind of stuff that Buzzo and I are good at. 

That also brings to mind Page Hamilton a little bit, what with Helmet doing that aggressive power chord stuff with the occasional hint of jazz. Or, also, an old Jesus Lizard song called "Bloody Mary," where you're twisting your fingers into these add13s or add11s…

I like coming up with things that sound harder than they are. They sound baffling, and if you don't know what's happening, it just sounds impossible. I worked at the Gibson guitar company briefly – in 2005, my wife was pregnant, so I stayed home. There was a guy who did transcriptions for guitar books. And he's like, "I can figure out anything. I can transcribe any guitar part." And I said "really? Here you go," and I gave him "Dudley." He couldn't do it! He couldn't get it. I was like, "dude, this is probably easier than almost everything you do." It's not really that easy, but you just make a chord shape and slide it back and forth while alternating between the strings. 

Enough of this guitar geekery!

Yeah, I always bear in mind, not everyone who reads this stuff is a musician. Tonic Immobility and your fairly recent Jesus Lizard project, Rack, both came out after long release gaps. Tonic Immobility was eight years after Oddfellows, and then Rack was a whopping 26 years after Blue. Fans of both bands were quite surprised, maybe taken off guard, with those releases. Do you think the heads of your fans will spin similarly in the coming few years of your career? 

I hope so. I've never stopped writing. You mentioned those gaps, but I did other things in there. I did a lot of one-offs, played sessions for people, and sat in with local people. I was always playing, and always [had] ideas going. Even now, I've got a local group called the D2 Archipelago that I'm playing with here in Nashville. There's always things in the pipeline. I'm not done yet. I still enjoy it, I'm still good at it, people seem to like what I do, and musicians like working with me. When that changes, then I'll know it's time to stop.

Find Tomahawk tickets here, and find them on tour at the dates below.

07/18 Nashville, TN @ Brooklyn Bowl
07/20 Austin, TX @ Emo’s
07/21 Dallas, TX @ Granada Theater
07/23 New Orleans, LA @ House of Blues
07/24 Atlanta, GA @ Buckhead Theatre
07/26 Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
07/27 Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
07/28 Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Steel
07/30 Boston, MA @ House of Blues
07/31 Buffalo, NY @ Electric City
08/01 Cleveland, OH @ House of Blues
08/03 Detroit, MI @ The Fillmore
08/04 Chicago, IL @ The Riviera Theatre
08/05 Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue
08/07 Denver, CO @ Ogden Theatre
08/08 Salt Lake City, UT @ The Union Event Center
08/10 Portland, OR @ Pioneer Courthouse Square
08/11 Seattle, WA @ The Showbox
08/12 Seattle, WA @ The Showbox
08/14 San Francisco, CA @ The Warfield
08/15 Los Angeles, CA @ The Belasco

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