LARRY SCHWARTZ
AS A TODDLER, he’d sit behind a toy steering wheel in the back seat of the family’s Buick and imagine it was he who was driving around the beachside resort that was their American hometown.
Mark Lizotte thought of these outings when he went back to Rhode Island in search of their old home a few months ago. “You know, funnily enough, when we lived there, the houses had no numbers,” the lanky musician says. “Now they have numbers, it kind of confused me. After about
five driveways, I think I found the one that was our house. I wasn’t sure.”
The ARIA-award-winning performer, better known as Diesel, returned to his native US three years ago. He thought he might make a name for himself there too. But it won’t be the one with which he arrived in New York City, where he lives with his wife and two young children.
He came to town as Diesel. But extensive advertising for a clothing manufacturer with the same name helped persuade him to revert to his own.
“It became very apparent that the name was associated with that,” says Lizotte, who is touring Australia following his latest album, Soul Lost Companion. “It’s just too obvious.” Then there’s the New York band called Sweet Diesel and a DJ who calls himself Diesel Boy. “I just thought, `my
name is going to be crushed’. It’s got so much notoriety it’s not funny. What a bummer.”
He’s quietly spoken, with short-cropped hair. There is no air of celebrity about him as he sinks low on a comfy couch and talks obligingly about himself.
“It just makes me chuckle,” he says when asked about the sentiment in the Sinatra song, New York, New York. “The lines, `Start spreading the news. If I can make it there I can make it anywhere’. You start questioning, is it really the case? If I make it here, will I really have made it anywhere?
“I’ve known some bands that have been big in New York that just haven’t gone beyond New York. I think it still is relevant to the theatre world, the jazz world, other worlds. But there are bands that are chronically big in New York but just can’t break out. Like New York is too weird and
oddball.”
Lizotte came to national attention in Perth almost 12 years ago fronting Johnny Diesel and the Injectors.
“When we started out, I guess we were pretty ambitious. It sounds like a cliched story but we got on a bus with $100 between us.
“I was 21 years old. Even at that age, I felt like I was getting old. I was thinking, `something’s got to happen really soon’. Otherwise I would have got stuck in this desperate thing. We worked our arses off.”
He had been playing in bands since he was 14 and had no other career in mind. “A few bands made it across to Sydney and, within months, were all working in bakeries or whatever … But we stayed together and, within eight months, went over to Memphis and made a record. It was a
meteoric rise.”
The Injectors eventually went their separate ways; now Diesel is gone too. Lizotte is back in America among people who tell him, he says mimicking an American accent, that they’re perplexed that anyone born in the USA should be raised elsewhere.
“If you ask the average American where Australia is,” he says, “they’ll have a hard time telling you.”
He was five when the family migrated to Australia, although he remembers moments from his early years in America. “All kind of blips, images,” as he puts it. His father had a TV and electronics business; his mother was a nurse, when not tending to her seven children.
The youngest, Lizotte believes that as much as a sense of adventure, the daunting prospect of having to put all seven through college encouraged them to journey to Australia.
“To their relatives and their friends, they did something really bizarre,” he says. “Totally. In the “70s, nobody hardly knew where Australia was, let alone what it was.” They settled in Melbourne, then Albury, and finally, after journeying around Australia, Perth.
Recorded with producer Terry Manning in Memphis and released in 1989, Diesel’s self-titled debut with the Injectors sold more than 280,000 and won ARIA awards for best new talent and bestselling album of the year.
Lizotte left the Injectors and brought out a single, Love Junk, in 1991. He was featured on brother-in-law Jimmy Barnes 1991 album, Soul Deep. “This whole legacy of Cold Chisel,” he says. “(Growing up) I was a fan of that band. So to get to know him later and now he’s family and whatever,
it’s still kind of, `how did that happen?’.”
His next album, Hepfidelity, won for Diesel best album and best male artist at the 1992 ARIAs. He collaborated with Chris Wilson on Short Cool Ones and did some writing for Vika and Linda’s Princess Tabu before departing for New York in 1996, saying he “didn’t want to be around familiar
things”.
Lizotte, his wife, five-year-old daughter and son, eight, live in the part of lower Manhattan known as SoHo, because it is south of Houston Street. “There’s pros and cons,” he says. “You don’t need a car which is kind of handy. It’s kind of liberating. The education standards are really great if
you get into the right school … (But) most of the public schools tend to be overcrowded.”
His children are exposed to a side of life they might not have encountered in Australia. “I am aware they see homeless people, beggars and the whole bit on the street.
“I think it gives them a really good sense of reality. I don’t think they’re made callous by it. My son gets really upset. Which upsets me. You’re trying to shelter your children all the time.”
Though he’s just a few hours from Rhode Island, he’s come a long way since he negotiated its streets with a toy steering wheel attached to the back of the driver’s seat.
The journey is not yet over. “It’s hard to crystal ball it in the music business,” he says. “I’ve come to accept it a bit more now. But it still frustrates me and unsettles me. I wish I knew what was going on in the next year but I just can’t.
“It’s hard to tell. I know I don’t want to live there forever. But I’ve set up base camp. I’ve got a foothold. I’m going to see it through.”
The Age, 03rd of December 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 