Punk past

Revisiting the fury of Squirrel Bait

by Matt Ashare

It's been more than a decade since Homestead released the homonymous debut EP by the Louisville band Squirrel Bait, and I'm still trying to decode the lyrics to most of the songs. The voice of the then teenage guitarist David Grubbs can be clearly heard issuing the disc's opening threat, "I'm going to beat you up at the end of this." For the 17 minutes that follow, it's the strangled howl of Peter Searcy that takes over, pouring more soul than any 16-year-old can reasonably be expected to possess into eight furious songs that accidentally bridge the gap between punk rock and the music that will come to be known as alternative. "What's the use if you don't want it/What's the use if you won't take it," Searcy shouts against the distorted melodic roar of guitars and the hyperactive, Keith Moon bashings of drummer Ben Daughtrey on "Hammering So Hard." You don't have to know what "it" is to hear that voice as the missing link between Paul Westerberg's ragged eloquence and Kurt Cobain's clenched fury.

Squirrel Bait, which along with the band's full-length follow-up, Skag Heaven, has just been reissued on CD by Drag City, drew some rave reviews at the time of its release. Hüsker Dü's Bob Mould, who was in the process of signing with Warner Bros. in '85, told Spin it was as good as anything his band had done, an endorsement that set off a chain reaction of positive attention in the press. In retrospect, Squirrel Bait were, like Hüsker Dü and a handful of other American bands, simply bringing a broadening range of emotional nuance and melodic possibility to bear on the angst-driven physical assault of hardcore punk, participating in an evolutionary process that would eventually lead to Nirvana. But there's an innocence and timeless exuberance captured on the first EP that transcends genre, even if two members of Squirrel Bait -- Grubbs and guitarist Brian McMahan -- would go on to help define the vague boundaries of indie rock in the '90s.

"The first record was really just kind of coughed up like a hairball," recalls Grubbs, who now splits his time between playing guitar in the avant-rock outfits Gastr del Sol and Red Krayola and working on a dissertation on Cagean aesthetics as a English-department grad student at the University of Chicago. "And it was received remarkably well. It was crazy: all of a sudden we were being written about in the Village Voice and being interviewed by the New York Times."

As Grubbs tells it, the national media attention played a big role in keeping the band together long enough to put out a follow-up. He and bassist Clark Johnson had gone off to college soon after Squirrel Bait's release, adding physical distance to the musical differences that had begun to threaten band unity. "I was coming out of being interested in hardcore groups like Minor Threat and the Necros," Grubbs explains. "We wanted a drummer who played in that style, and that's not what we got. He turned out to be so much better for what we were doing, but at the time it just seemed he didn't have the same tastes and reference points as us."

Daughtrey -- who went on to be a Lemonhead briefly before starting the now defunct LA lounge-pop outfit Love Jones -- moved even further away from Grubbs's hardcore roots on Skag Heaven. But Grubbs and McMahan (whose résumé now includes Slint, the Palace Brothers, and his current project the For Carnation) met Daughtrey halfway, crafting songs that left plenty of room for his nonstop backdrop of busy beats, machine-gun fills, and occasional jazzy ride-cymbal rhythms. Some of the raw emotional tension that fueled the EP is sacrificed in the process -- and Searcy's vocals are even further buried under an avalanche of roiling drums and churning guitars -- but the result is a powerfully focused example of the kind of tuneful aggression that would define the sound of '90s rock.

Squirrel Bait couldn't have been the Silverchair of their day, even though there are echoes of Searcy's precocious pain all over the young Australian band's platinum debut. There simply wasn't a place for bands like Squirrel Bait or Silverchair on major labels in 1986.

"If Squirrel Bait started nowadays, would half our time be spent negotiating a bidding war with major labels?" wonders Grubbs. "I don't know, but even just thinking about something like that back then seemed ridiculous. There was one faction of the band that was determined that we were going to sign to a major label and be huge, just like Hüsker Dü. The other faction thought Hüsker Dü were making the worst move of their career by signing to Warner Bros., that signing to a major label was setting yourself up for a life of exploitation and bitterness."