Slint's Spiderland (4 page)

Though the band was not breaking up, Grubbs and Johnson’s imminent departure — Grubbs to Georgetown, Johnson to Northwestern — cast a pall on everything they did. It was during this time that a line began to develop between the members of the band — Searcy and Daughtrey, both of whom were happy to indulge in the more social aspects of being in a band; and Grubbs, Johnson, and McMahan, all more interested in the music itself. The division became explicit for the first time when Grubbs set up a show in Cincinnati with the Meat Puppets. It was to be the band’s last show before Grubbs and Johnson left for school, and it felt like it could be their last show ever. But Daughtrey and Searcy pulled out just a few days before the gig.

McMahan, Grubbs, and Johnson couldn’t pass up an opportunity to play with the Meat Puppets. In a panic over Searcy and Daughtrey’s cancellation, they called Britt Walford. “We practiced with him twice and went up there and played,” Johnson recalled. It was the only show in Squirrel Bait’s history in which McMahan and Walford actually shared the stage, according to Johnson — and it might have been a prescient experience. Lacking a frontman, the foursome played all their songs as instrumentals, while Grubbs simply told stories over the music.

For the rest of the year, Squirrel Bait was in limbo. Then, the record came out.

Squirrel Bait
was released in November of 1985 — Homestead’s twenty-eighth release. In retrospect the eight-song, seventeen-minute blast is probably the band’s best achievement. It’s raw, urgent, and young. The bulk of the album was comprised of the six songs they’d recorded that April, just after McMahan had joined the group. The tracks were recorded with Howie Gano (who also did the original demo as well as
Skag Heaven
) at Sound on Sound Studios — aka Gano’s basement — for $400. Though they had more songs, the band lacked the funds and the time to record them for the debut. To fill out the record, then, they added two tracks from the old
Nearest Door
sessions, “When I Fall” and “Disguise.” Walford’s name found its way into the liner notes, and Squirrel Bait would forever be known as the progenitor of Slint — despite 95 percent of the record, both music and lyrics, coming from the mind of David Grubbs.
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Cosloy wanted Squirrel Bait to make its New York debut in support of the new record. It was the kick in the pants the band needed, so that Christmas Grubbs and Johnson returned to Louisville to reconnect with their bandmates. After nine months of not playing a show, Squirrel Bait headlined a Sunday-night gig to a hometown audience numbering — to their utter shock — 300 people. Prior to their album’s release, they had never drawn more than forty people to a headlining show. But the kids in Louisville had had a month to get into their hometown band’s record — released on the same label as fucking awesome bands like Big Black, Dinosaur, and Sonic Youth. Squirrel Bait had been anointed.

The show was a major confidence boost after so much inactivity, and it prepped them for their trip to New York in January. Coinciding with their arrival in New York, the newest issue of
Spin
had hit the stands. It contained the first official
Squirrel Bait
review, a rave. It wasn’t the first time their name had appeared in
Spin
, though; two months earlier in a feature on Hüsker Dü, Bob Mould called
Squirrel Bait
“on par with anything we’ve done”; elsewhere Grant Hart called the EP “the best $400 I’ve ever heard.” Such a ringing endorsement from one of the most revered punk bands of the day put Squirrel Bait on everyone’s radar. Johnson recalled the band’s attitude once they hit the city: “I think we were all pretty scared. Even the first show in Louisville in front of three hundred people. It was like we put out this record and everyone loves it, and then
we go to New York, and every fucking rock critic in the country is here.” They were: reviews and features in the
Village Voice
,
NME
, and
Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll
, among others, all followed in quick succession. “They were all positive reviews,” Johnson noted, “but we got pretty sick of the Hüsker Dü comparisons.”

The weekend in New York — one show at CBGB’s, another at Maxwell’s in Hoboken — was a success (barring the theft of two of McMahan’s guitars after the second show). Squirrel Bait were reenergized. Over the holidays they’d written two new songs, “Kid Dynamite” and “Slake Train Coming,” which they ironed out during the New York gigs. That March, over spring break, they recorded the songs for release on a Homestead 7” later that summer. They’d have it in time for their first bona fide tour. These Louisville boys were making good — but they weren’t the only ones. While McMahan was sitting around waiting for his band to play in the big leagues during school breaks, his classmate Britt Walford was busy making his own connections with punk legends: Maurice was about to go on tour with Glenn Danzig.

* * *

Despite not having a single recording to their name, Maurice had attracted the attention of the former Misfits frontman who was now cultivating a more macabre sound with his band Samhain. It was Garrison
who made the connection. Louisville was lousy with Misfits fans, and Garrison might have been the biggest. “Rat was a huge fan,” Pajo said. “He would buy all this stuff from them, which led to he and Glenn talking on the phone. They became friends somehow. When he heard that Samhain was touring through the Midwest, he told Glenn that he had a band.” They made their one and only recording at Danzig’s request, so he could verify that they were the real deal, and when Samhain played the Jockey Club in nearby Newport in November of 1985, Maurice opened. Danzig liked what he heard, so when Samhain came through the Midwest on tour the following spring — the
Unholy Passion
EP had just come out and
November-Coming-Fire
was on the horizon — Maurice tagged along for a week’s worth of shows. They were on board for a string of shows through Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana. Along for the ride as roadie was Walford’s childhood friend Will Oldham. Neither Walford nor Oldham was old enough to drive.

To be asked on this tour went beyond any of the boys’ wildest dreams. Both the Misfits and Samhain were unanimously regarded as the greatest. “Will had a blonde devil’s lock, and Britt did as well,” Pajo recalled. Reminiscing to
Pitchfork
in 2005, Oldham expanded on his level of fanaticism: “There wasn’t a day went by we didn’t talk about the records, about Glenn. At one point, I put together a huge collage of images pulled from school encyclopedias . . . voodoo and gargoyles,
lots of blood and nastiness. I sent it to Glenn, along with a cow skull and ten dollars, hoping against hope for something to come back. Well, not too long after, the mailman brought me a package from Lodi, and in it was a ‘Cough/Cool’ single and a beautiful pale-yellow Samhain t-shirt.” For a kid willing to mail a cow skull to his favorite band in return for a 7” and t-shirt, to be a participant on an honest-to-God tour was a miracle.

Musically, it seemed like it would be a good fit: Garrison’s voice occupied a similar range as Danzig’s, while Walford laid down beats shifting between dirge-like tempos and hardcore blasts. Pajo, meanwhile, fucking shredded. Nearly every song Maurice pounded out featured his flashy style: dexterous solos and shrieking harmonics alternating with dark, Swans-like riffs. Though coming out of the hardcore scene, Maurice was clearly enamored with a more metallic strain. It was a direction that Danzig himself was moving in as well.

The week of shows largely lived up to the boys’ dreams. “The shows blew my mind, every night,” wrote Oldham. “‘Death Comes Ripping,’ ‘Bloodfeast,’ and ‘Die! Die! My Darling’ thrown in with the songs from the three Samhain records. Powerful, awesome. Always front and center we were, screaming, sweating, singing along with every song. The band was a united front. I have never seen such great songs played so fiercely just for the audience that was right there.”

Offstage, Walford and Oldham would entertain the Samhain guys with their impressions of people with
cerebral palsy (bear in mind, they were fifteen); Danzig sat on a porch in Bloomington strumming a guitar and singing “I was born with a small dick” to the tune of John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Small Town” (bear in mind, he was thirty-one) — eminently profound experiences for the Louisville juveniles.

But there were also darker moments. Garrison recalls the tour differently from Oldham; he found Danzig to be surprisingly bitter. “I think Glenn had become very hyper-aware of the fact that he was going to miss his window of opportunity to make a national dent, to actually have a career . . . And it made him extremely bitter. He was very pissed off about something that he knew was happening. He was cognizant of it . . . It’s very hard to deal with a guy that age who is that bitter.”

Pajo agreed. “It was amazing to play with Glenn Danzig, but in some ways it sort of deflated what I thought of him at the same time. He was an aggressive guy. He’s got this New Jersey thug attitude.” At their show in Columbus, Pajo witnessed the thug attitude firsthand. “This guy Kevin Mitchell, a friend of ours from Louisville, was supposed to bring some t-shirts Glenn had sent him up to the show in Columbus, and he forgot them. When he told Glenn that he forgot them, Glenn hit him in the neck with his forearm and got him in a headlock in one motion. He had him in the headlock on the ground and was yelling at him, ‘Are you fucking with me?!’ And he was like ‘Glenn I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’ I remember thinking, ‘That is totally
uncalled for. That would not be my first reaction.’ I would be disappointed, but I don’t think I would put someone in a headlock, first thing.” In a post to his blog in 2008, Pajo recalled a second event at the same show, where Danzig and bassist Eerie Von leapt off the stage mid-set and ran into the parking lot, brandishing baseball bats as they went after a skinhead who had allegedly slashed their van’s tires.

In addition to battling Danzig’s personality, Maurice also had to deal with the audience. At each show, as with their local shows, Maurice’s strange hybrid of metal and punk confused the audience more than anything else. “There was one show we played with Samhain in Bloomington,” Pajo recalled, “in the basement of a library, which was really weird. That was the only show where I saw people who had never heard us before totally reacting to the music. They invented this dance while we were playing: they all started doing this weird sort of caterpillar, slithering all over each other on the floor. I remember playing and just being like, that’s the only way you can move to this music. There’s no other way to respond.”

The biggest show was in Detroit. As Garrison remembers it, the audience numbered more than 500, including, it was rumored, the guys from Metallica.
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Maurice hit the stage and promptly baffled them all. “The place was packed, and nobody knew what to do when we played. They just didn’t know what it meant,” Garrison recalled. It was a reaction they were used to, even when they played locally, though perhaps felt more acutely at the Detroit show. “They never booed us,” Garrison clarified. “The competence of Britt and Dave was so overwhelming that nobody really knew what to do . . . People would just stare at us. They didn’t boo. They’d clap very nicely, but nobody knew what to do. You couldn’t dance to us, you couldn’t fight to us. You definitely couldn’t fall asleep . . .”

The audience were not alone in their confusion. The more material Pajo and Walford wrote, the stranger it got, leaving Rat and Bucayu in a fog. Much like Squirrel Bait, a line was being drawn through the middle of the band.

* * *

When Grubbs and Johnson returned home from college that summer, Squirrel Bait was ready to go on a belated tour in support of their eight-month-old album. Along the way they opened for Dinosaur and Sonic Youth in Cleveland and the Descendents in New Jersey, as well as a string of dates with Boston’s Volcano Suns. Overall the band couldn’t have asked for a better tour, though the unspoken division between
Searcy and Daughtrey — the party animals — and Grubbs, Johnson, and McMahan — the music heads — continued to make itself more apparent. When music journalists came around, Searcy and Daughtrey were the most eager to put their mouths in front of the microphones and faces in front of the photographers. The other three members, while not against publicity, were more modest. This might have been a fine proposition in any other band, but Searcy, for one, didn’t even write the lyrics to his songs — Grubbs truly was the brains behind the whole operation.

The friction in the band continued for much of the tour. Grubbs held out hope that things would get better once the band returned to the studio. They spent that tour road-testing new material, and in August they returned to Howie Gano and Sound on Sound to make their second album. As with the first album, though, they didn’t actually have enough new material to fill out a full-length. So the already released “Kid Dynamite” and “Slake Train Coming” were added to the track list, along with the sub-par “Too Close to the Fire,” an old song from January ’85 which featured Searcy’s sole lyrical contribution to the band’s output, and a re-recorded version of “Black Light Poster Child,” a song which dated back to the
Nearest Door
days. Certainly due to the fact that the band rarely had time to practice and write together owing to their long-distance set-up, they also threw in a cover of Phil Ochs’ “Tape from California.”

With the recording sessions behind them and sophomore year ahead, it seemed that Squirrel Bait were in exactly the same scenario they’d been in a year prior: a record in the can but not yet released, and college splitting the band up for at least another five months. For Grubbs and Johnson, things seemed to come full circle. Back in 1983 they’d dismissed Rich Schuler precisely because college kept him from committing full-time to the band. Now they were guilty of the same opposing priorities. Although
Squirrel Bait
had gotten good buzz and the band was feeling good about their new album, neither Grubbs nor Johnson were willing to quit school and devote themselves to the band. Grubbs was the first to realize the situation was untenable. He confided to Johnson that he was weary of the band. “I’d gotten the feeling all along he wasn’t really into doing it that much, and the only reason he was still doing it was because I wanted to do it, and we were really good friends. Not that he didn’t want to tour and put out records, but he wanted to be freer to do other stuff, to do a band in Washington and put all his songwriting into that, you know? That would be better than only doing it three months out of the year.”