Although Jack Waterson has been a constant presence in Los Angeles' underground music community since the start of the 1980s, the multi-instrumentalist and producer has led separate lives between his membership in Green on Red and his prolific work with Adrian Younge, distinct roles separated by two decades. An even greater length of time passed between Waterson's first and second albums, Whose Dog? (1988) and Adrian Younge Presents Jack Waterson (2019), the latter of which indulged in analog psychedelia with a fervor even greater than that of Green on Red's earliest output.

Waterson was a founding member of the Tucson, Arizona-based Serfers, who formed in 1979, moved to Los Angeles in 1980, and became Green on Red. Waterson was the band's bassist from their self-titled 1982 debut through 1987's The Killer Inside Me. Toward the end of the run, Waterson made his solo debut on the compilation Don't Shoot with a version of Fred Rose and Hank Williams' "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive." Once out of the band, he recorded Whose Dog? with the Long Ryders' Tom Stevens. The loose set, closer in makeup to Green on Red's latter roots-oriented recordings than those of their early psych-pop phase, was released in 1988 through Pat Thomas' Heyday label. A split single with Thomas followed shortly thereafter, but Waterson didn't cut another solo album for 30 years.

During the first few years of the long interim, Waterson was in the short-lived Two Lane Blacktop and continued to assist with Rain Parade offshoot Viva Saturn. At the tail-end of the 2000s, after he took part in a Green on Red reunion, he became a long-term recording and performing associate of composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Younge, one of the customers at his L.A. music shop. Starting with the 2009 soundtrack for the blaxploitation homage Black Dynamite and continuing throughout the 2010s with Venice Dawn, Younge-produced sessions for Souls of Mischief, Ghostface Killah, Bilal, and the Midnight Hour, Waterson remained a common and crucial factor. He primarily played guitar but also contributed sitar and drums, and for Younge's The Electronique Void, he provided narration. The majority of these albums drew from psychedelic soul and rock, but Waterson and Younge took sonic acid mania to the hilt for Adrian Younge Presents Jack Waterson, released in 2019 on Younge's Linear Labs label. ~ Andy Kellman, Rovi