‘Things got a little bit crazy’: Diesel aka Mark Lizotte is celebrating 30 years in music
HE started off as ‘Johnny Diesel’ and became one of the most respected Aussie rockers of his generation. Now, Diesel aka Mark Lizotte looks back at his 30-year career.
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MARK Lizotte’s status as the teen idol frontman of Johnny Diesel and the Injectors came back to haunt his family during a sex education video.
His daughter Lily and her class were watching the educational film when her father’s youthful visage appeared.
Every time a fan happens to mention they used to have a poster ripped from teen pop magazines on their bedroom wall, Lizotte can’t help a wry smile and an inward wince at the memory of the sex education video.
“To them, that memory is exclusive and unique, which is really cute and endearing. It really meant that much to them,” Lizotte says.
“But right at that moment, I want to tell the story of my daughter sitting on a carpet in Year 6 or 7 when they start showing sex education videos. They are awkward enough but in one scene, they depict this teenage girl in her bedroom and up on the wall is a picture of me.
“How to be even more embarrassing to your child … The kids in the class were all ‘Hey, isn’t that your dad?’ It’s pretty funny. But for my poor daughter, having to endure that. Traumatised.
“I’ll get it in the retirement home. My grandmother was into you.”
As he marks the 30th anniversary of his professional musical life with Diesel 30: The Greatest Hits released this week and a national tour, Lizotte reveals how shocking it was for a blues rocker from Perth to become a teen poster boy.
All from one album, the self-titled Johnny Diesel and the Injectors record which was the highest selling debut album for an Australian act when it was released in 1989.
Recorded in Memphis, the album would peak at No. 2 in the charts and generate three top 10 hits, Don’t Need Love, Soul Revival and Cry In Shame.
The rise of the band was set in motion when Lizotte and his bandmates caught the bus from Perth across the Nullarbor Plain to Sydney, Diesel with just two guitars in soft cases, a duffel bag and a Rose Tattoo Scarred For Life cassette.
Despite urban myth asserting Jimmy Barnes’ wife Jane discovered the young rocker, it was The Angels drummer Brent Eccles who had signed on to manage the Injectors and thrust Lizotte into the orbit of Australia’s biggest solo rock star of the time.
Eccles and a couple of The Angels were helping record B sides and some other parts to finish off Barnes’ third solo record Freight Train Heart and the drummer asked if he could bring his young charge into the studio.
“The true story is Brent Eccles told Jimmy he had this guitar player crashing on his couch, could he bring me in?” Lizotte recalls.
“I played on a few things and then they said ‘We’ve got this song, Too Much Ain’t Enough Love and it’s missing something, just have a go.’ The lead guitar playing was incredible but it was missing a rhythm part so I did that.
“Within the next few days. I was playing at the London hotel in Balmain and I think that’s where Jane came and saw me and reported back to Jimmy. Then he came to the next show at the Middle Harbour Skiff Club and that’s when Jimmy asked me to join his band.
“I said no, I had just brought our band across the desert. So he said I could play in his band and our band could do the support as well.
“Right on the spot, it was done just there. We went straight into rehearsals … I reckon they had someone else booked for that tour and they gave them the boot for us.”
That tour put the Injectors in front of tens of thousands of Barnes acolytes and by the time they released their debut single Don’t Need Love plenty of people knew who they were.
Arriving back in Sydney from an overnight drive after a gig in Melbourne, Lizotte remembers hearing Don’t Need Love come on Triple M and thinking “I think something’s happening.”
By the time the album was recorded and released, police were closing city streets in Perth as pandemonium erupted during an instore signing session at a record store in the local shopping centre where Lizotte had spent his teenage years as a mallrat.
“It was almost Beatlemania in Perth; I’ll never forget it. We were touring, playing the Entertainment Centre and there was another signing session and this whole city street went crazy, they had to bring in the police and everything, it was pretty nuts. No one could see it coming and it was a bit out of control,” he says.
“How many thousands of kids woke up that morning and all decided to go into town to a record store?”
The Injectors would never record another album. Within two years, Lizotte knew he wanted out to pursue a solo career.
And while some of the more staunch fans who preferred the band’s pub rock stylings fell off, most came along for the ride when he relaunched as career as Diesel with the debut record Hepfidelity in 1992.
He was the biggest male pop star in Australia through the mid 1990s, winning Best Male Artist at the 1993 ARIA Awards and again in 1994 for his second record Lobbyist and again the following year with his third album Solid State Rhyme.
Just as it had with the Injectors, the success felt “too, too much” and Lizotte feared the tall poppy scythe was being sharpened to cut him down.
“Things got a little bit crazy for me around 1995 when I won Best Male Artist three years in a row and the excitement and adrenaline of another award had been replaced with paranoia,” he says.
“’Can they give this to someone else, I’m going to get lynched.’ That’s what went through my mind as they read out my name. Winning isn’t everything, really.
“It felt embarrassing … thank you so much this is very nice of you but it’s someone else’s turn. How do you say that? I couldn’t enjoy it.”
Lizotte and his family, wife Jep — Jane Barnes’ sister — and daughter Lily and son Jesse relocated to New York, where the American-born rocker could start again.
He relished his anonymous life, riding his bike every day to his studio downtown, playing regular gigs at small clubs including Arlene’s Grocery, playing in side projects with British chart-topper Lloyd Cole and scoring another record deal purely off the back of his musicianship and songs.
That fresh start stalled when the record label was taken over and he was put on gardening leave after his contract was paid out.
Lizotte and the family returned to Australia after six years and he released the album Hear in 2002, firmly re-establishing his career here as an independent artist, determined to control his recording and touring destiny for the past 15 years.
“I released a greatest hits back in 1997 when I left EMI and that’s what they do when you leave a label — you have accumulated 17 charting singles so here you go,” Lizotte says.
“It meant I could go out to Coney Island to do the cover shot. I love that place, the decaying glory of it, you can see all the holidays of the families who have gone out there. It’s all gentrified now, of course.
“It might be somewhat of a vain thought to think I am going to be around forever with tis music. Who knows? This music I’ve made could just go into the ether and disappear.
“But I’ve been doing these interviews, an oral history, for the National Film and Sound Archive and that’s cool because if anyone is interested I’ll be there forever more.”
Diesel 30: The Greatest Hits is out on Friday.
For all Diesel tour dates and tickets, dieselmusic.com.au
Originally published as ‘Things got a little bit crazy’: Diesel aka Mark Lizotte is celebrating 30 years in music
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