Postscripts
By Clay Smith, Fri., Aug. 7, 1998
Denison's Dollars
About a month and a half ago the Chronicle's "Dancing About Architecture" column covered a civil case brought against Liberty Lunch and the Jesus Lizard by Austin resident Melissa Slepekis (Vol. 17, Nos. 41 & 42). Slepekis attended a May 1996 Lizard gig at Liberty Lunch and alleged that Lizard frontman David Yow had injured her in the jaw by throwing out a beer can during that show. Duane Denison, who lived in Austin from 1984-89 and now lives in Chicago, is the guitarist for that band (which was found not negligent) but his name didn't really galvanize attention in news reports of the case. That's fine with him, because at the time of the case, Denison was busy as a new investor in a little-publicized but much-admired local bookstore, Desert Books, that caters to the academic crowd. Anyone who has met Lynn Bender (if you've been to the store, he's most likely the one behind the register, and he's also the owner) knows just how funny it is for Denison to ask, "Can you imagine him with really long, thick sideburns and a cape?" He reports that when the two met in Plymouth, MI, Bender had "long hair and sideburns and he was a guitar teacher at this local music store when I was a kid, and I kept hearing about this guy named Bender, this crazy-looking, just immensely talented guy and he sure enough was. He never had less than 10 guitars in his car at a time. He really was an awesome guitar player and I credit a lot of whatever success I've had to him because he was the first guy I ever really saw who took it seriously, who actually said, `Look, you wonder how these guys sound so good? It's because they work on it hours and hours a day, systematically.'" Bender for his part says that, "We had him playing Bach fugues within a few weeks. Whatever we gave him, he was up to the challenge. We just became the best of friends."
For Denison, years of living in Austin as a musician taught him how to live as cheaply as possible, so when The Jesus Lizard became successful, Denison began saving money - "which had never occurred to me. And so then people just started telling me about things like buying stocks, buying CDs, thinking about that kind of stuff. And the more I looked into things, I just realized it just made sense to me. Lynn certainly wasn't struggling by any means and so we just kind of talked about it. I brought it up actually and we came up with a situation that's mutually beneficial. Plus I love books myself.
"We were roommates for a while, and at that time the only books I saw Lynn read were Music Theory or maybe the occasional science fiction book. I was moving in and he was looking through my box of books and I think at that time I was into Nabokov, Christopher Isherwood, that kind of bohemian decadent mid-20th-century Euro novel. And he was looking them over going, `What's this? What are these?' And I said, `These are novels, Lynn. This is literature.' And he claims that that kind of turned him around. Lynn Bender has always been just absolutely savvy at managing his finances. He manages to provide what people want in an interesting, offbeat kind of way as well as putting his own personality into it. You know, I've always kind of liked that about that guy."... Speaking of rock stars, Margaret Moser and Bill Crawford's book Rock Stars Do the Dumbest Things is now out from Renaissance Books ($12.95). The next dumb book in the series will be about movie stars, with the third lucky category of dumb-doers yet to be decided...
The winners of the Chronicle's Short Story Contest will read from their winning entries at Book People Sunday, August 9, 2pm.
