Parisenne Hotel

The Zoo Crew has got Johnny Diesel & The Injectors rolling through the speakers right now, and the cut the Zoo Freaks keep leaning in for is "Parisienne Hotel," track two on the band's self-titled debut. You can hear the whole story of that record the way the Crew likes it, freeform and commercial-free, over at THE ZOO. The spelling on the sleeve is Parisienne, one of those French-hotel names that looks a little crooked on purpose, and the song itself is crooked in the best way. Mark Lizotte wrote it, sang it, and played the guitar that leans into the groove like a man who has already seen the lobby and decided to stay anyway.

The lyrics do not dress the place up. You can ring the bell if you have got something to sell. If you have been there for years, you have done your time in hell. There is a hole in the wall from a shotgun shell, and you are either buying or you sell, at the Parisienne Hotel. Fire down below, girls up above, sideshow alley every night, zombies walking with their eyes so white. It is a four-minute postcard from a joint that never made the brochure. Lizotte never pinned the song to one real building in the interviews that have surfaced, and that hush has kept the track interesting. Fans treat it like a road song anyway, the kind you put on when the highway gets long and the neon starts looking a little too friendly.

What we do know is where the record was made, and that story is better than a map. In August and September of 1988 the Injectors set up at Ardent Studio and Alpha Sound in Memphis, Tennessee, with producer Terry Manning, the same hand who had worked with ZZ Top, Joe Cocker, and the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Chrysalis had signed the band worldwide. They were still a Perth pub outfit that had only just learned how to live out of a van on the east coast, and suddenly they were cutting a debut in the town that invented a lot of the soul and Southern rock they had been stealing from. Lizotte has talked about those sessions as a cultural jolt, young Australians dropped into the middle of American music and told to keep up. The album came out on March 6, 1989, climbed to number two on the Australian charts, and later took the ARIA for highest selling album, moving something north of 280,000 copies. "Don't Need Love," "Soul Revival," and "Cry in Shame" were the singles that did the chart work. "Parisienne Hotel" never got that push, which is probably why it still feels like a deep cut when the needle finds it.

Set lists from the era show the song was already in the bag before the record even existed. The Injectors played it at the Sydney Showground on April 2, 1988, months before the Memphis dates, and it was still turning up as late as May 26, 1990, at Selina's in the Coogee Bay Hotel. That is a long life for an album track that radio mostly skipped. On the official Diesel Music page, Lizotte still walks fans back through the Johnny Diesel & The Injectors years when he digs into the catalogue, which tells you the old band was never just a first chapter he wanted to forget.

A fair chunk of that first album was written in a far less glamorous room than Ardent. In an old interview Lizotte remembered splitting from his earlier band, the Innocent Bystanders, heading overseas for a few months, and ending up broke, pumping gas near his sister's place in Connecticut. Bored out of his brain, he wrote a pile of the songs that ended up on the Injectors record. "Parisienne Hotel" fits that stretch of life better than a Memphis postcard does. A kid from a sax player's house, working a station, dreaming up a hotel where everybody is buying or selling and nobody is getting out clean. When he came home he put the band back together, and The Angels' drummer Brent Eccles caught them on a run through Western Australia, kept calling, and lined up the Sydney gigs that changed the story.

The name on the marquee was an accident, and Lizotte has told it the same way for years. Bass player John Dalzell had one kid and another on the way. A friend used to call them Johnny Diesel and his little injectors. Lizotte thought it was funny. Then the woman at the Perth room where they played once a week rang up and said she was putting an ad in the paper, did this nameless band have a name? He gave her the joke so Dalzell would see it in print. The name stuck. Management in Sydney asked if he was going to go along with everybody thinking he was Johnny Diesel. He said fine. He had already spent a stretch pouring petrol, so the word was not exactly foreign.

Mark Denis Lizotte was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, on May 31, 1966. The family moved to Australia in November 1971, drove down from Sydney in a station wagon, and eventually settled in Perth. His father, Henry Lizotte, played saxophone for a living on both sides of the Pacific, so soul and R&B records were just what was on in the house. The other kids leaned toward teaching. Mark leaned toward the electric guitar. He has talked about a moment in year eight at Scarborough Senior High, staring at algebra and deciding he did not have to do this, he could play music as a job. School bands followed, Dark Spot, The Kind, Close Action, then the Innocent Bystanders, who cut "Lebanon" in 1984 and went to Sydney to record "Dangerous" with Peter Walker, the man known for Midnight Oil and Cold Chisel. That single hit the top of the independent charts. The band did not hold. By June 1986 Lizotte had the Injectors: himself, Dalzell, drummer John "Yak" Sherritt, sax man Bernie Bremond, and for a short while a second guitarist, George Dalstrom.

The move that made them was a bus across the Nullarbor in September 1987. Lizotte has described traveling with two guitars in soft cases, a duffel bag, and a Rose Tattoo cassette, Scarred for Life. Eccles had signed on to manage them. There is an old story that Jimmy Barnes' wife Jane discovered the kid. Lizotte has corrected that one. Eccles told Barnes he had a guitar player crashing on his couch, could he bring him in. Lizotte played on a few things, filled a missing rhythm part on "Too Much Ain't Enough Love," and within a day Barnes was asking him to join the band. He said he had just hauled his own group across the country and wanted to keep it. Barnes was fine with that. The Injectors opened the Freight Train Heart tour, and Diesel played both sets. He later married Jane's sister Jep, in 1989, so the Barnes connection became family as well as a gig.

The Injectors did not last past the start of 1991. Lizotte went out under his own name, then simply as Diesel, and the solo records Hepfidelity and The Lobbyist both hit number one. He kept the guitar voice that Memphis had framed, though, and "Parisienne Hotel" still sounds like the room where that voice got its papers. If you want the man himself, the official home is dieselmusic.com.au, where the tour dates and the old catalogue still live side by side. He keeps the conversation going on Facebook and on Instagram. No separate official X account turned up that we could trust, so the Crew is leaving that one off the rider. Spin it again if you want. The shotgun hole in the wall is still there.