From Wire Reports:

Lorain, Ohio - A thirty-five year old man was arrested and charged with trespassing at a local Middle School yesterday after he refused school officials requests to depart school property and to refrain from distributing free home recorded cassettes to students. The cassettes reportedly contained home-recorded versions of the now defunct hard rock act Squirrel Bait’s 1987 recording Skag Heaven and contained a note that read, “It’s my gift to you. Rock and roll is NOT dead; it lives in you - the young. Please listen, learn, and let it LIVE” “It’s not the most frightening thing like this that we’ve had happen around here,” said one school official, “But it is by far the weirdest.”

“Remember Fun House?” my friend Kenny asked. “The Stooges Fun House? Remember that fucking record? That was the goddamn record for the whole bunch of us back when we were asshole know-it-all punks. You know, when we were fucking younger and shit”

The rest of us nodded our heads for a while and, after a moment of silence, Ronnie put down the makeshift foil pipe that was making its rounds and went over to the set of old milk crates that contained our collection of “house” records. Fun House was, of course, one of them. And everybody dug in as the needle dropped onto the fucking thing and Iggy started to wail.

“Fucking polyrhythmic master-fucking-piece,” I said as Iggy and the Asheton brothers induced chaos. “Forget that fucking world music shit…this is the shit right here. Straight out of the primitive fucking American life we’re stuck with man.”

It was the sort of scene that, if we were still as young as we once were, would often end up with an irrational decision to form our own band. The Magnificent Dicklers…now that was one memorable incarnation of our pot-deluded Stooges by way of free-form blues dream. And the Dicklers were but one of at least a dozen “bands” that were the inspiration of melting minds and modern music, but of all those lost ideas and stupor-induced inspirations I most vividly remember the Ungodly Giants - a band that came about when one of us (must have been Kenny - he was the only one amongst us who was employed at the time, and thus had at least a few dollars) bought an old Albert Ayler record that he’d brought home and we wound up playing for four and a half hours straight while we swallowing the contents of four bottles of three dollar Beaujolais before ultimately deciding that the tenor saxophone that Ronnie had in his closet would be a good centerpiece for a new, white (caucasian), suburban blues/jazz fusion group. The Ungodly Giants spent an hour arguing over that useless name and a full forty-five minutes or so as an actual performing combo - but burned itself into my history because it was the only time in my life that my music obsession paid of with a woman and got me laid.

Ronnie played his sax in the Ungodly Giants as I let loose on Kenny’s three-stringed bass and Kenny tried to play his better-equipped guitar. Old-friend Gary Hastings was the handclap percussion and spiritual inspiration (his old man owned a liquor store - spirtual by default). It was a chaotic free form jazz group with an aggressive up-tempo blues guitar line (the only riff Kenny knew was something off a lousy old B.B. King platter that only he could stand listening to) that defied the very idea of free form. The bass was expected to hold it all together - on a mere three strings being played by an untutored player. This odd configuration (and substance abuse) had us convinced that we would be nothing but visionary originals - unknown for now, but revered forever in the future. Forty-five minutes of loose and wild jazz-blues explosions and an ensuing hour of arguing about the title of our fresh composition gave us a band in turmoil (and, in fact, in disintegration - I suggested a trip to the roof of the apartment building for a Let It Be type farewell performance) and one thirty-three minute composition that would ultimately become known as “Tab’s Mother is Calling” (Kenny was in the midst of an affectionate relationship with a chunky little waitress at the local Ponderosa Steak House named Tabitha who, it turns out, was only 16 years old at the time - although Kenny swore up and down that she showed him a drivers license that gave her age as 18 - the Ungodly Giants own Yoko Oh no!).

It must have been 1986, or 87 - whenever the Squirrel Bait Skag Heaven record came out on Homestead - that this queer obsession with getting blotto’d and then deciding to start our own band reared its ugly head. I remember the time frame because my life is measured in these sorts of things - record release dated and other such nonsense. I remember being obsessed with the thrash bass-beat of Squirrel Bait and stealing a Skag Heaven cassette from some chick I’d been seeing (which, considering the lengthy time frames between women in my life, is a pretty accurate way to pin down the time frames of my life) after she’d bought the record (a fairly pathetic effort to, believe it or not, try to impress me) and played the damn thing for me on her shitty car stereo in her shitty ’86 Chevette. She was a cute but imprudent gal who’d parlayed the misfortune of drinking with the whole lot of us on a night during this “let’s form a band” period on which we all got fumed up on either Nyquil, beer, vodka, pot, or Jack Daniels and decided that we’d be a pretty damn killer Husker Du styled band into a short but volatile relationship with me.

After enduring hours of insane and violent stupor-induced noodling she’d happily declared us “brilliant” and followed it up with a point blank statement that she wanted to sleep with me - “right this minute, now and forever!” (“Forever,” laughed my friend Nick who witnessed this open display of emotion, “ain’t really all that long a time”. He winked; I understood))

Nine days later Kathleen Sue Irving was slapping me across the face in her parents living room in front of a Sunday dinner everybody’s there crowd: mom, dad, two younger sisters, aunt, and a really dopey looking twenty-something male cousin. All becasue she caught me trying to merely brush my hand over her thirty-six year old Aunt’s Carol’s ass (hey, it was perfect, I swear!). I was booted from the premises and became completely annoyed with myself for trying to cop a cheap feel before fucking dessert was served (food thus remaining ahead of the ladies in my life forever more). I then had to walk what must have been three miles to a fucking Burger King to place a collect call to Ronnie for a ride home (“Go get the Aunt,” he said, “And bring her too!”). During the walk and wait I replayed the relationship in my head - to assuage any guilt I might muster - and all I came up with was that I had possession, back in my room, of the Skag Heaven tape she’d bought. So, it seemed to me, that the entire ordeal was an irrefutable, albeit emotionally scarring, win.

Now that seems a pretty damn heavy load to toss onto a single record, and I know that. But Skag Heaven was and still is (recently re-issued by the smiling faces at DragCity) a walloping howl of a record. It just happens to be a very good record that became a great one to me via its role in a part of my life. A big part of this whole music shindig is exactly that: taking a record for what it is, what it means to you, and understanding the frame of reference from which it tattooed your psyche. Different music matters to different people for very different reasons, and the music of permanence in your life doesn’t rely on some knob-headed critic telling you the value of your tastes, or what tastes you may need to establish to be worthy of higher rockcred approval.

Which really is about the only honest way to say my peace here because the music on Skag Heaven isn’t the sort of undeniable life-altering brilliance that I’m bound to take any of you to task over. That sort of music seldom flies off of those shiny silver discs these days. But Skag Heaven plants itself squarely onto my list of immortals via the unbridled sweat, youth, energy, nonsense, fear, amateurishness, sincerity, mimicry, idolatry - in other words, everything that the past fifty years of rockroll has been all about - all in concert with the moments it shared in my life as it crept into my being some fifteen years ago.

Peter Searcy’s uncommon teen growl (and it is the best and only thing you’ll probably want to ever hear of Searcy’s - I know he’s made the rounds since, but trust me…) is nothing more or less than Little Richard pressed forward into history’s ugly future, which, by the time the band dwindles and fades away on Phil Ochs “Tape from California” (“I'm not sure that any of us had been there by the time Skag Heaven was recorded” says guitarist David Grubbs in the liner notes) we find out isn’t really so different from an ugly past. Skag Heaven, like so much of what can pass for rockroll brilliance, exists in the moment; it is a slice of revivified air, inhaled every time it’s played. That is where the secret of rock’s power truly rests - the kick you get at the point of consumption, when it becomes another pleasurable-dose in the never-ending narcotic syndrome.

I’ve never specifically tried to be a critic, at least not in the sense of trying to place concrete value (personal and subjective assessment portending truth) on music. I tend to despise this approach and thus avoid writing - as much as possible - the new standard “capsule” review, either rated or graded. That sort of thing (and I know a lot of my good friends get by on such fancies) is just vile and unsavory as hell to me. I don’t feel that I have the ability (not to mention the stomach) to squash an album’s worth of work into a 75-100-word babble that will tell you nothing substantial about the music but will unfailingly assign some sort of symbolic rating or grade that relieves (restricts) the dear author (or more likely advertising sensitive publisher) of having to be clear, honest, or hell, even involved. That, to me, is an insult not only to those who make the music, but also - and moreover - to those who care enough to want to read about it. A single record sought out on the counsel of a short, thoughtless, letter-graded blurb has personally never fulfilled me. Thus, elongated rants like this one that is selling the idea of a little record by a semi-obscure band that called itself Squirrel Bait; or rather a glimpse into my relationship with the music that I think matters.

In the end it all comes down to a matter of tastes and we all know that. You’re the pothead and I’m the drunk; she digs pills and he craves powder; he says, she says, and que sera sera to the motherfucking hilt! We’re all going round and round chasing the same tail only to end up in the identical goddamn place - the place that we all seem to want to be anyways: anywhere other than here. I don’t ever (intentionally) profess to have any of the answers. I don’t necessarily know which records are “good” records, but I do know which records matter to me, and as the means to an end of these silly rockwrite exercises I go through I try like hell to share twisted perspective on rockroll’s meaning in our lives and culture as I live it (and I only hope that maybe you can relate - I ought to be cutting checks to all of you out there who read this shit and send me note because its you who are doing me the service of retaining the sliver of sanity that I cling to).

A “great” record, one that I find mattering to me over the course of years and years, according to my, um, aesthetic (I pause because that word is such a groaning knowitall’s term), is one that can just about always bring on that elusive rockroll jolt that I so often seek and lean on to get me through the day. The music isn’t everything in my life, but it sure damn well helps, and the ones that seem to help most are the ones I consider dear.

So with all that said, in my mind “great” records (the ones I call great) don’t necessarily infer that they’re transcendent, or even remotely accessible for that matter. They just happen to be records that (and this is the hardest part for most people) honestly stand up to time as a personal source of escape and pleasure. A great record, to me, not only sounds great (which it should), but it also - and this may be the most important part - feels great. Those feelings can come from a myriad of places, especially, but not limited to, the personal (i.e. I finally got my hands down Amy Jenkins pants in 8th grade while Tom Petty’s “Louisiana Rain” played on her brothers record player - a crass but fairly accurate and completely honest example, I still devour that song whenever I hear it).

But, whilst approaching one of these writing exercises to share my musical thoughts and ideals with some hopefully like-minded souls I do take careful consideration of the records I happen to be writing about because - as anyone who has followed my ramblings can attest to - when I pour myself into one of these howls of mine, I’d damn well better be comfortable that the music is at the very least “good” (which is sort of self-prophesizing because I probably wouldn’t, or couldn’t waste my time with something I didn’t have a hankering for), otherwise you’d all see straight through me.

But ultimately it all boils down to preference of course - my preference. If a record gets me going, and if it does so often as it becomes one of those rare rackets that can be counted on to deliver me from whatever the fuck it is that I am trying to escape every time I turn to it, well then, that’s when I’ll suit up and get into the game. There is no honesty in telling you that the noise that turns me on is the noise that you need to hear, but I can try my goddamned best to convey to you the moments and music that just make me go. And that sure as hell isn’t to say that I think that I’m the one who is right, or even that it is me who ought to be telling you what it is that you should be listening to (or worse - how you should be listening to it and what you should hear). I don’t review records - I even sort of hate that idea; I just try to relate them to you.

What’s it matter? What’s it all mean? And, why the fuck should you care? Well, you shouldn’t really. But this rockroll life isn’t the normal life that most others lead, although it remains similarly short, so you’re stuck with what’s out there.
And in the end these are the real reasons that I tend to stay away from “reviews” (especially in the disingenuous hegemonic form that thrives these days). What does it really matter if I think that Britney Spears sounds as though she’s swallowed an alien when I could just put a coupla stars or an A, B, or C, or a check mark by the record title? It seems to me that all noises tend to have their places and their fans, but that my job is merely to sell concurring people the reason’s to believe - in something. Anything.

Skag Heaven is today’s reason. Right now, right here. Squirrel Bait’s second record still shoots through me as an ice cold reflection of something I once was - which is also something I still, and will always, aspire to be (an entirely unattainable state, this one of rockroll bliss - thank God - because it forever remains worth the reaching for, and it is the reaching for that ideal that keeps us alive). So my “purpose” ends up becoming an inexplicable and merely theoretical adventure at best. But the reason for living the purpose, like listening to a record like Skag Heaven and discovering that wicked bent once again, is always pure revelation. Somehow that moment, when the needle hits the plastic (so to speak), erases the lines of improbability and carries me across the boundaries of impossibility straight into a place where not only is anything possible, but where it all is downright likely. And that’s where I’ll always want to be. That’s all I’m trying to say.

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