Time to celebrate the unmourned passing of January with something monstrous. Put your hands together please ladies and gentlemen and let’s all welcome Tad to the 1537 dancefloor.
I saw Tad way back in 1991-ish in Leeds and they were as heavy as they were scary. Their publicity painted them and lead singer Tad Doyle* as lunatic semi-literate, barely housetrained redneck lumberjacks who would probably kill and eat you somewhere deep in a rain-sodden pine forest; entirely wrongly as it turned out. They frightened me and so I never bought any of their music until comparatively recently.
I am a full-blown idiot.
This is the ultramegaheavy first Tad 12″ on Glitterhouse!
Spine of Wood Goblins 12″
Yup, you couldn’t argue with that description; or could you? In 1989 Wood Goblins was released on Sub Pop**, three slices of heavy life topped off by a Charles Peterson photo of Mr Doyle on the cover and an Ed-Roth style drawing of him as monster truck on the rear.
Tad let the cat out of the bag straight away on ‘Wood Goblins’, the predominant feature of the sound is the quick-footed shuffle of the drums and Kurt Danielson’s bass which propels the song towards the heavy humps ahead. ‘Wood Goblins’ is a helluva track about depression, as I read it, twisted guitarscapes amidst the guitar scrapes and, yup, a fleet-footed heaviness.
Tad doing their level best to dispel any psychotic lumberjack rumours
B-sides are ‘Cooking With Gas’ and ‘Daisy’. The former opens with my favourite ever elongated ‘well’ in recording history and is a cleaver of a song, Doyle repeating the song title to a psychotic degree, taking any meaning out of the words through sheer repetition, pounding them until they’re translucent, sounding like he’s talking in tongues. Quite brilliant if, like me, you’ll happily ditch melody for rhythm in order to whiteout.
Danielson opens ‘Daisy’ again and Tad lurch forwards, Doyle sounding like he’s singing himself into herniation. It’s menacing as again Gary Thorstensen plays overarching atmospheric noise with his guitar, letting the bass and drums carry the song again. It’s a clever signature move.
Well, just write about some real things that have happened to you
Steve Albini to Tad Doyle
Jack Pepsi, named after a drink enjoyed by Kurt Danielson, Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic on tour^ was truly a beast of a record.
My copy has the brilliant cover photo of a parading hose dude on a John Deere tractor^*, rather than the banned bastardized Pepsi logo artwork (only available very briefly on CD single).
The song ‘Jack Pepsi’ is a hoot, the tale of what happens when Tad and his friend, full of the titular drink, took his friends father’s brand-new pickup truck onto a frozen lake outside Boise, Idaho to do 360s and 180s … with inevitable results^^. They barely made it out alive, as the song tells it, breathing the last bits of air up near the roof of the cab and praying to Jack Pepsi.
I love the way that the song is narrated over yet another sinuous bass line and menacing guitar screeds. You can really hear the menace, it’s such a brilliant track.
The B-sides on Jack Pepsi are ‘Eddie Hook’ and ‘Pig Iron’. The latter is all unsanitary threat, sludgy dark grunge and muttered lyrics, albeit with a melody that could easily have been twisted into something very commercial and 70’s rock.
‘Eddie Hook’ is another work of Danielson’s perky bass genius, this time its the tale of a killer with a hook for a hand. I think this is yet another great cut, you can smell an Alice Cooper influence along with a certain dash of Sonic Youth. Such a clever band.
Wood Goblins and Jack Pepsi were my musical beachhead into Tad’s recorded world which I am still exploring. There is a lot more musical subtlety and nuance here than you might have been led to believe. Sadly Tad always seemed to be every bit as unlucky as they were talented^* and it just never caught light properly for them.
I commend these gentlemen to you and your intimates.
1305 Down.
PS: cannot recommend Everybody Loves Our Town: A History Of Grunge by Mark Yarm enough to you all. An absolutely excellent book.
*Thomas Andrew Doyle.
**like all early Sub Pop licensed out to Glitterhouse Records in Europe.
^Cobain wasn’t much of a drinker but one night he went for it on Jack Daniels and Pepsi in San Francisco.
^*I do still really like a tractor, product of my rural upbringing that.
^^That’s when I heard the most horrible sound I ever heard in my life! And I knew we Going through the ice! Help me Jack Pepsi!
