Squirrel Bait 1984 demo unearthed

If you remember when I posted the Squirrel Bait "Motorola Cloudburst" 7-inch three weeks ago, I mentioned that the two songs on the record were from an early Squirrel Bait demo from 1984-- a demo that I used to have a copy of, only not anymore. Well, one Pete Burn of the U.K. didn't throw out his copy, which he posted a week ago on his blog, Shitegeist, along with a .pdf of the Squirrel Bait interview that was in the same issue of The Pope that the Motorola Cloudburst 7-inch came with.

To make it easy for you to go to Pete's blog and get the demo, I'll make a break with tradition and actually put up a link-- here's three of them, so you can't miss it:

Shitegeist - Squirrel Bait demo
Shitegeist - Squirrel Bait demo
Shitegeist - Squirrel Bait demo
Here's the track listing for the demo, as it appears on Pete's blog. I'm re-posting the link to "Tense" and "Earth Shattering", which are my rips from the Motorola Cloudburst 7-inch. "Insult To Injury" is a track that I downloaded from Shitegeist, which I'm also posting here so you can listen to it first, just in case you need an incentive to go to Pete Burn's blog and download the rest of the tracks.

Tense/Earth Shattering (from Motorola Cloudburst 7")
Insult To Injury (from Shitegeist)
^ both these files are now listen-only ^
Black Light Poster Child
The Nearest Door
Rage for Life
Disguise
Occupant
Notice When
When I Fall

For the heck of it, I'll also post the b-side to the Motorola Cloudburst 7-inch, which isn't a Squirrel Bait track-- it's a recording that David Grubbs made for a class project while he was at Georgetown. Be sure to stick around for the all-important Rob't Nedelkoff answering machine message at the end.


Motorola Cloudburst b-side

(this file is now listen-only)

Beware The Plastic Jaw

The infamous Squirrel Bait "Motorola Cloudburst" 7-inch came with an issue of Tim Adams' fanzine, The Pope, one of the many hit-or-miss "me, too" zines that sprang up after the re-emergence of Conflict and Forced Exposure in the mid-80's. I've seen some misleading information passed around about this 7-inch, even from places like the Drag City web site, suggesting this is one last single that Squirrel Bait recorded shortly before their break-up, but it's not.

The source of the two songs on here was a demo that Squirrel Bait recorded around '84 or so. I used to have a copy of the demo, and while I wouldn't rate it as being anywhere close to their Homestead records, some of the other songs from it ended up as-is on Squirrel Bait's first 12" (when you listen to the record with this in mind it becomes pretty easy to tell which songs are from the demo).

Tim Adams has this record up for sale on his 3 Beads of Sweat web site (www.3bos.com), with this description:

7" record that came with issue #3 of The Pope fanzine in 1987. Nominally under the band name Motorola Cloudburst, the A side of this features 2 heretofore unreleased Squirrel Bait songs "Tense" and "Earth Shattering," from an unreleased album that preceded their Homestead debut. The B side is a project that David Grubbs recorded for a Gnosticism class while he was attending Georgetown University, featuring ambient noise and a splice-up of a live Phil Ochs recording. Edition of 500.

Not only is this practically the holy grail of Squirrel Bait collectibles, but it's a do-it-yourself project that makes its own jokes, as you can see once you plop the a-side (labeled "Bork! Gerard's dick") onto your turntable spindle-- the by-product of Tim being on the losing end of a feud with Conflict fanzine at the time. The Bob Mould reference on the b-side label is even less funny and more obscure.

The two songs on the a-side, "Tense" and "Earth Shattering", take up less than three minutes total and run into each other on the record, so that's the same way I'm posting them here. The b-side is just a Phil Ochs sound bite that gets chopped and looped over some electric guitar noodling, making it pretty easy to lose interest by the time it's even halfway through.




Squirrel Bait -

"Tense"/"Earth Shattering"

(this file is now listen-only)

I Don't Need No Pig Stomping On My Buzz

The near-unanimous hype that surrounded Squirrel Bait upon the release of their initial 12" was pretty strange for the time, seeing that a lot of it came from the newspaper and alterna-weekly types who held that the other bands on the Homestead roster (Sonic Youth, Big Black, Dinosaur, etc) were pretty much the scourge of modern music. Whatever the case was, the hype was more than realized by this single, which was a preview of Squirrel Bait's powerhouse "Skag Heaven" LP and in my mind their first really perfect piece of vinyl.

That isn't to say that the first Squirrel Bait 12" was bad, only that it was a little spotty, having been patched together using an early demo and some newer recordings. When you listen to that first record now, it's pretty easy to pick out which of the songs are the demo tracks. (Two songs from the demo that didn't make the record ended up being released by The Pope fanzine as the "Motorola Cloudburst" 7-inch.) When "Kid Dynamite" was released, though, it definitely gave notice that Squirrel Bait had reached an entirely other level.

It's said that "Kid Dynamite" is about a mugging on the street that some of the members of the band suffered on their first trip to New York; a weird back-masked voice was slapped over the bridge of the song, which I've never been able to figure out.

Another story that used to go around was that Squirrel Bait started out as Squirrelbait Youth, a name they originally took to make a jab against all of the "Youth"-named hardcore bands that were around at the time (Wasted Youth, Bored Youth, Reagan Youth, and so on). I think I read in Forced Exposure or somewhere once that when Sonic Youth first got together, Thurston Moore wanted to release a 7-inch with a folded-up, photocopied paper sleeve, so that straightedge kids would buy it thinking it was a hardcore record and then go, "What the fuck?"




Squirrel Bait -

"Kid Dynamite"

"Slake Train Coming"

(these files are now listen-only)