All Hail the Flying Lizards!

It’s getting late and the wind is howling here in Royersford, Pennsylvania, but I need to take a moment to hail the Flying Lizards and their eponymous debut album, which I bought on this date, 44 years ago.

The Flying Lizards was the brainchild of conceptual artist David Cunningham, who produced the album. The “band”, such as it was, is most famous for its clangorous but oddly catchy cover of Barrett Strong’s 1960’s hit, “Money (That’s What I Want)”, which featured the deadpan vocal stylings of Deborah Evans-Stickland. The song was a big hit in the UK and a much smaller one in the USA.

Despite “Money (That’s What I Want)” not quite cracking Billboard’s Top 40, I still managed to hear it and subsequently bought the 45 and, on Feb. 28, 1980, the debut album.

Here is my diary entry from that momentous date:

This micro-review of The Flying Lizards — “**** Weirdo!” — is the first of thousands of words that I have written about music over the last 44 years.

It wasn’t enough on Feb. 28, 1980 that I now owned the Flying Lizards’ album. I needed to share my discovery, so I took it to school the next day. We were encouraged to bring records to listen to during our ninth grade art class. Typically, these albums would be Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door but I had managed to ensure that Chuck Mangione got some turntable time with his Live at the Hollywood Bowl, an album that was greeted with a certain degree of confusion (“Where’s the singing?” wailed a classmate about two minutes into “Feels So Good.”).

The Flying Lizards clearly would have been a test of my classmates’ patience, but according to my February 29 diary entry, the album was warmly received:

Not sure how much of a “huge success” the Flying Lizards album was in my art class, though I know it was one more odd thing for my good friend Bob and I to love together.

One thing was certain: I now had a taste for provoking innocent bystanders with odd music, and I liked it. I would continue to devote a certain portion of my life to making sure friends and strangers alike heard “weird” music of all kinds.

The Flying Lizards made a few more records, but the band was more of an art project for Cunningham so it wasn’t necessarily built to last. However, if you are curious there are several music videos, as well as older and more recent interviews with Cunningham and Evans-Stickland if you’d like to explore the Flying Lizards further.