Squirrel Bait
Squirrel Bait/Skag Heaven (Drag City)
by Nik Rainey
To preface this with the kind of self-indulgent autobiographical background that is the ‘zine world’s stock in trade: When I was seventeen, I finally got to record my first music after several years of bored, lonely exile with only books and records to cushion the blows of my supreme emotional, social and sexual frustration and absolutely no outlet to release any of it. I descended into the basement of a friend (what comfort cold, empty granite rooms have to a young man – rock clubs are starting to make sense now), and with him on drums, me on a borrowed bass, and a second-hand (stolen?) four-track as blind documentarian, we blew off nearly two decades’ worth of steam in half an hour’s worth of raw improvisation. My bass playing was resolutely primitive and the acoustics atrocious, but the untethered howl that came out of me that day still frightens me. Art, vision, rock star daydreams – none of those things mattered. Pain, doubt and ugly, scrawny, blemished confusion – that was all that would come out. That was enough.
A few months later, I happened upon a record by a group of kids not far from my own age in a yellow sleeve adorned by a picture of a bespectacled kid making as if to eat his Walkman. The only thing I knew about Squirrel Bait was that Hüsker Düde Bob Mould liked them, which was as ringing an endorsement for a maladjusted teen anguish-junkie like me as pituitary cases with shaved heads shilling athletic shoes was for my healthier counterparts who preferred to slam into each other without musical accompaniment. When I got home and put it on, I experienced less an epiphany than an affirmation. A voice muttered, “I’m gonna beat you up at the end of this,” words I’d heard before (usually from the kids who wore those shoes), but the last syllable was swallowed up by a trebly riff and a hoarse scream over sloppy drums that mooted the threat. No need to wait – let the pummeling commence. There it was, the very same shit that clogged up my own soul being spewed out with the uncomplicated urgency that only fucked-up kids can muster, but shaped into roughly coherent shapes that I could only hint at. Only seventeen minutes total, Squirrel Bait’s eight brief bluster-blasts were like threads so tightly wound they didn’t know whether to snap or unravel, so they decided to do both at once. Anthems you can’t decipher to sing along to, songs like “Hammering So Hard,” “Sun God,” and “When I Fall” burst with giddy textural energy, Peter Searcy’s hoarse shouts mixed with David Grubbs’ and Brian McMahan’s delirious buzzbomb guitars and the volatile rhythms of Clark Johnson (bass) and Ben Daughtrey (drums) (with future King Konger Britt Walford appearing on two tracks) to capture the sound of imminent collapse; that is, true teen spirit.
Ah, but nothing good ever lasts, even when that good thing is inextricable from something very bad. To wit: nearly a year later, I went back to that same basement to re-record those same songs, with that same friend, on that same borrowed (stolen?) four-track. A lot had happened in the interim: I had gotten exponentially better on the bass, I had a satisfying social life, hell, I even got laid semi-regularly. The new versions were therefore smoother, more technically proficient… and boring as dirt.
Around the same time, Squirrel Bait released their second album, Skag Heaven. The ingredients were much the same as on the first, with one crucial difference: the urgency that informed the first was largely gone. Searcy sounded less crazed, the guitars and drums more orderly, the song lengths more typical, the lyrics spelled out carefully on the inner sleeve. While I in no way consider this boring, I missed the fire. How telling it was that the most furious-sounding number was a cover of Phil Ochs’ “Tape From California,” a fine gesture to a fine songwriter but a move better suited to aesthetes ten years the Bait’s senior. (A truth borne out by the generally satisfying but way artier work [Slint, Gastr del Sol, etc.] proffered by ex-Squirrels in the years since.) Not a bad album – if it were their debut, I would have raved – but the lack of electrafriction brings to mind what my friend told me after that second session: “You need problems, man.” (Little did any of us know that the real ones, from the mundane miseries of adulthood to the metal-flecked-Bait depression of Nirvana and its legion of imitators, would be here soon enough. Suddenly, being a maladjusted teen doesn’t seem so bad.)
Consumer caveat: though the packaging on these reissues is a distinct improvement on the originals, the budget-minded might do well to scour the used bins for Homestead’s out-of-print Skag Heaven CD, which includes both LPs in their entirety.
