Lizard Lady

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Lizard Lady

Duck Stab!/Buster & Glen Side B label art, 1978

Artist

The Residents

Album

Duck Stab!/Buster & Glen

Recorded

1978

Released

November 30th 1978

Studio

Grove Street studio, San Francisco, California

Length

1:54

Track chronology
Previous	Next
"Elvis And His Boss"	"Semolina"

"Lizard Lady" is a song by The Residents, originally recorded for the EP Buster & Glen, and released on the album Duck Stab!/Buster & Glen on Ralph Records in November 1978.

The song features contributions from the group's friend Snakefinger, who is credited in the album's liner notes as "slithering almost everywhere".

History[]

The_Residents_-_Talking_Light-The_Residents_perform_Lizard_Lady,_2011 — The Residents - Talking Light-The Residents perform Lizard Lady, 2011

This song was recorded with Snakefinger in 1978 for inclusion on the planned Buster & Glen EP, which evolved into the Duck Stab!/Buster & Glen LP. The song would have featured in a sequence in the unproduced Duck Stab! film, conceived by Graeme Whifler shortly after the album's release.^{^[1]}

It was first performed live as the opening song during the 13th Anniversary Show from 1985 to 1987. This live version features a new intro, a slower tempo and shorter solos.

"Lizard Lady" was revived for the 1997 Adobe Disfigured Night performance, this version features Molly Harvey in the role of the Lizard Lady. The 1997 version is significantly slower, and feature a new intro as well as outro.

The next performance would be for the Way We Were Australian mini-tour in 2005, which was modeled heavily after the 13th Anniversary Show, and as such featured "Lizard Lady" as the opening number. This arrangement is the inverse of the Adobe version, in that it features Molly Harvey singing the first part of the song, and The Singing Resident taking over the closing rant.

In February 2011 the song was re-recorded for the album Lonely Teenager, being one of the few songs on that album not performed on the corresponding Talking Light live tour. The song was then subsequently added to the tour on its fourth and final leg.

Ten years later, the track was recorded live in the studio and featured as the opening song in The Residents' streaming TV special Duck Stab! Alive!. Subsequently, it was featured in the September 2021 Dog Stab performances.^{^[2]}

Lyrics[]

What's a woman going to do
But throw away her bread;
Her feet are feeling funny
As she lies beneath the bed;
She reminisces of the pungent
Adriatic Sea,
And then she crawls and counts
her cans
And twitches like a flea.

What she really likes to do
Is sit upon a pew,
And make believe that time has
stopped
And motionless is new;
Planes are stranded in the sky
And drains are stopping, too,
And she alone is laughing under
Eyelids full of flu.

She scurries hurries worries that
The wicked will receive
Their candy from a handsome
man
And coffee from a thief;
She gazes at a hourglass and
Asks it if it cares,
And then she wonders if the lizard
Likes his lettuce rare:

"Lizard, yes a lizard, little lizard of
the sea,
Conspicuously alcoholic, flicks his
tongue at me!
Release me lizard! Licking lizard,
blizzard of the bea,
Mushed inside a sock you still
dare me - to die
Dare me to die - at home..."

"Coating all my lungs with honey,
Sticky coating running runny,
Feet of lizard fly!
And stop and fly and stop and fly
And flicker tongue is licking out
To find me - feel me. Hide!
Hide from the tongue!
The tongue is coming! Cruising!
Oozing!
Over land and under ashes,
In the sunlight, see - it flashes,
Find a fly and eat his eye,
But don't believe in me.
Don't believe in me.
Don't believe in me."^{^[3]}