Squirrel Bait

Squirrel Bait were a legendary band of Midwestern rock. Their story unfolded in Louisville, Kentucky, far from the major metropolitan centers. They recorded only two records, one of 17 minutes and one of 25. But that is enough to build a legend.

From the self-titled EP (LSR, 1985) to the masterpiece Skag Heaven (Homestead, 1987), one of the landmark works of the 1980s, the uncontainable energy, manic distortions, superb melodies, and tragic singing made them instant classics. The lineup consisted of Peter Searcy (vocals), David Grubbs and Brian McMahan (guitars), Clark Johnson (bass), and Ben Daughtrey (drums). The idea had been Grubbs’, an eighteen-year-old student at Georgetown University.

When they recorded their first record, they were still teenagers (the oldest, the drummer, was twenty). Searcy sang with a far-from-melodic wail, while the guitars erected walls of awkward riffs and the rhythm section hammered in a disorderly fashion. It was not a very professional sound, but it was inspired by the fusion of hardcore and pop that Minneapolis bands (Hüsker Dü and Replacements) were making famous. The Squirrel Bait almost sounded like Hüsker Dü with Paul Westerberg of the Replacements slightly hoarse on vocals. The quintet certainly inherited the legacy of Zen Arcade (the monumental masterpiece of Hüsker Dü), but added something of its own, especially in the interaction between vocals and guitars. On one side there were Grubbs’ monolithic riffs, relentlessly coiling; on the other that broken scream unable to disentangle itself from the noise: so much emotion emanated from one’s cry, while ice dripped from the other’s riffs. The anguished singing of Searcy was unique in the punk front-man landscape: it was the voice of a terrified kid, helpless in the face of life, in which despair is so intense that it often turns into euphoria. The slightly jazzy bass and the aerial duels with the other guitar completed the transgression from hardcore conventions.

That first EP marked them as one of the most authentic and brutal voices of teenage alienation. The album’s “anthems” were Hammering So Hard and When I Fall, but behind the epic stance lay a sophisticated harmonic craft. The first was exemplary of how the band controlled punk urgency, bracing it with a monolithic riff and elastic slowdowns. When I Fall brought the raw, naïve garage rock of the 1960s into the realm of 1980s street hardcore. Punk rock here loses its geometric (albeit ferocious) precision and degenerates into pure neurological spasm.
The more complex Thursday and Mixed Blessing are pure concentrates of rage and helplessness, and form the natural bridge to Paul Westerberg’s songwriting. But the true masterpiece lies elsewhere, in the most dynamic and articulated episode: Sun God. In this track, the anguished melody relies on that “slow-fast” dynamic that would later define bands like Nirvana. At the same time, the guitarists build a spectacular balance between the postmodern deconstruction of the guitar (reminiscent of minimalist Sonic Youth), incendiary bursts that recall the prehistory of grunge, and epic echoes in the style of the Gun Club.

Skag Heaven (Homestead, 1987) was the album of maturity, but also the swan song. The single Kid Dynamite is worthy of the Replacements’ finest repertoire, melodic yet desperate, driving yet noisy. The rhythm of Virgil's Return is almost tribal, the guitars clatter like in the most acrobatic rock and roll. The breathtaking acceleration of Slake Train Coming and its tectonic syncopations derail the Gun Club’s revisionism and turn it into a choral anthem. In brutal, ferocious, and traumatizing ballads like these, Neil Young confronts the Stooges and together they hurl grenades at the world.
The music perfectly complements and stages the lyrics, which are a model of both realism and metaphor. This record is the definitive testament of that generation of provincial kids with no past and no future. Thus passionate songs such as Black Light Poster Child are born. The band’s energy is uncontainable even in tracks where it is tempered by more dramatic atmospheres, such as the hoarse blues of Choose Yr Poison, over which the shadow of Janis Joplin stretches, featuring one of the most memorable choruses of their career.
The Squirrel Bait stood at the boundary between Hüsker Dü and the Replacements, heirs both to the fiery power-pop of the former (accelerated and intensified by overdoses of alcohol and heroin) and to the aching poetry of the latter (darkened by a fatalism that admits no redemption). Theirs is a journey into the infernal consciousness of the “every-kid”.
After this record, Grubbs and Johnson returned to their respective universities and the band broke up.

This formation, rather underrated at the time, actually represented one of the milestones in the evolution of punk rock toward a more organic and mature form that would later give birth to grunge, slowcore, and a large number of alternative rock talents: Peter Searcy (later founder of Big Wheel), Brian McMahan (author of another fundamental chapter in rock with the phenomenal Slint and later back on the scene leading the masterful
For Carnation), David Grubbs (later in the great Bitch Magnet, in Bastro, and in Gastr Del Sol). Among other bands descending from Squirrel Bait, it is enough to mention King Kong and Palace.