Regarding their moniker, Austin Lounge Lizards guitarist and founding member Conrad Deisler remarked: "I think it was a slang term I'd heard my grandmother use to describe gentlemen of easy virtue who hung around in bars. When we started out, that's just what we were doing -- hanging out and playing for beer and tips and stuff like that." The Lounge Lizards originated in the late '70s when Deisler, at the time a Princeton student, joined forces with Hank Card to pursue their mutual passion for folk and country through progressive folk ensembles. The pair arrived in Austin during 1980 and encountered Tom Pittman, a banjo and pedal-steel player who had recently relocated from Georgia. They merged Pittman's bluegrass background with the folk and country styles that Deisler and Card had developed in their college bands farther north. Discontented with performing bluegrass and traditional country covers, the Lizards discovered a talent for crafting bizarro social and politically themed songs brimming with tongue-in-cheek twang.
Although the band has cycled through numerous mandolin players, bassists, and fiddlers, its foundation has stayed consistent with Pittman, Deisler, and Card, alongside extended tenures by bassist Boo Resnick, drummer Paul Pearcy, and multi-instrumentalist Richard Bowden. Across every configuration, the Austin Lounge Lizards have remained recognized for their Texas-sized twisted tales and humorous songs, endearing themselves to audiences for more than twenty years. As they have put it, "Our accents are the drawliest, our howdies are the y'alliest/Our Lone Star flag's the waviest, our fried steak's the cream graviest."
The group's debut album, Creatures From the Black Saloon, appeared in 1984, succeeded by 1988's The Highway Cafe of the Damned, 1991's live album Lizard Vision, 1993's Paint Me on Velvet, 1995's Small Minds, and 1998's Employee of the Month. Never an Adult Moment came out in late summer 2000. They proceeded in 2003 with Strange Noises in the Dark and issued Lizards Times Twenty: Live at Antone's, a DVD marking the Lizards' 20th anniversary, in 2004. Drugs I Need followed in 2006.
