Whsshkkkk! - Part 2

The Laundry Room Squelchers in Chicago, 2000. Photo by Seth Tisue

INTERVIEW BY LIZ ARMSTRONG

Refresh my memory about your old improvisational band Scraping Teeth.

In the 1980s I was in bands, three or four guys trying to play music together. It wasn’t necessarily good or well practiced, but they were always like, “Hey, let’s try to play that song again. Let’s prove we can actually write this stuff.” I go, “We played it! If we played it once, we can play it. If we play it twice in a row, who gives a shit?” It wasn’t as challenging as playing music right off the top of my head in front of people. So I started stretching it to sound instead of song with Scraping Teeth.

Was Spin calling you the worst band in America in 1993 the confirmation you needed to know you were right? Like, you didn’t need to play the songs again, because no one even liked ’em the first time?

That didn’t have anything to do with anything. I was right on the fact that we were so good because we played everything off the tops of our heads. Some people would swear we practiced that stuff because we were so tight. We would play for hours and hours in front of people and we never practiced. We played twice a week in front of an audience—and only in front of an audience—two hours a night. We would record a lot of the stuff. Those guys wanted to try to remember some of those parts but I didn’t. They got bored with it—it was going nowhere, which I liked, but they wanted to make it more of a “band” thing, more structured. What for? I thought. We’re just going back to the wrong direction. So then I was left alone.
 

Photo by Mindy Hertzon “ He is meticulous on tour. He can sleep while driving. The planning, the cost, the mileage, the time, the contacts. He keeps a log, knows our +/- $ balance at all times. He can pack amps and gear like a Tetris champ. He has rules about who drives and when to pull over. No pot in the car. He folds his socks. His album collection is arranged alphabetically, with dividers.” —BEN WOLCOTT, To Live and Shave in LA “ There’s a list of Squelchers rules: No couples on tour is the number-one rule. No feedback, no pedals onstage (pedals are for pussies), no merch, don’t get off the highway unless you can actually see the place you want to stop at, no drinking water in restaurants because of the bacteria, so we don’t get sick. We can drink Coke, though, because the carbonation and the sugar kill the bacteria.” —VAL MARTINO and LESLIE KEFFER “ On tour, he almost always insisted on sleeping in the most uncomfortable places—someone would offer him a mattress and he would pick the floor instead. I think he said he liked concrete floors, as though it was good for his back. He’d say, ‘I’m good right here!’ and spread out on a single cotton sheet on a kitchen floor. He would use his hat as a pillow and his sunglasses as a blanket. I’ve never seen someone sleep on a chair before—not in a chair, but on it—laying out across and sideways, hanging stiffly over the sides. I saw a picture of him once, sound asleep, using a single tiny couch cushion as a mattress—he was curled up and shivering in a corner with his shoes on.” —ANDREW WK, occasional To Live and Shave in LA contributor “ A few years ago Rat took me out for a joyride on his boat. First he gunned it full-throttle due east, straight toward the deep waters of the Atlantic. Then hard south, down Biscayne Bay, keeping the distant shoreline to our starboard. After several interesting high-speed maneuvers in the open water he took us back to the shore and slowly into a smaller bay, where we trolled along hammocks of thick mangrove trees. He pulled alongside a small pier and we found refreshments at a dockside watering hole. On our way back to the boat we were followed by a teenage waif, who silently stared as we boarded the boat. It hit me then that Rat has this… well, pied-piper quality and that no doubt someday this young woman would become another cog in the Squelcher machine. As we pulled away from the dock she just stood there, dreaming.” —DON FLEMING, producer, occasional To Live and Shave in LA contributor, and longtime friend “Rat is a true enemy of music! He loves to piss all over the mediocre musicians of the world by being king of shit. I think it’s hilarious. I just like that he’s here to ceaselessly drown this pathetic, oversaturated market of crappy, egotistical music with the most unlistenable bullshit. He takes this sad attitude that most musicians have and shoves it right back down their throats tenfold. I think it’s a really great statement, even if very few people realize it. Rat is a well-adjusted, happy, fun guy and I hope to fuck I’m one-eighth as cool as him when I’m his age.” —WEASEL WALTER “My first impression of Rat was that he was the ultimate music-head, he was the Byron Coley or Thurston Moore of our town. He used to DJ with 2 DAT tape players in like 1989. He had this huge book of typewritten pages with thousands of songs rated and marked with timecode numbers and a suitcase full of DAT tapes.” —SYD GARON, film director and longtime friend

For the Scraping Teeth reunion tour you asked the promoters in every town you played in to book you with the worst bands in each city.

Yeah, in their opinion.

Why?

We were considered a really bad rock band. I wanted to see what each city had to offer as a bad rock band. They did a pretty good job. Some had been playing about a week—they wrote a song like last night. For some, it was the first time they’d ever played. It was amazing. There were some really interesting bands.

Some people would think that’s a really cruel joke. Did the bands know why they were being booked?

Some did, I’m sure. One show was canceled because the bands found out about the setup and they were so upset. They didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of their fans because they were serious, so we booked ourselves somewhere else.

But that makes sense. It’s a mean joke.

I know the owners of the bar, we were all laughing. They go, “We’ll just tell ’em to go to hell.” But I didn’t want them to lose money and I didn’t want to ruin the band’s chances. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s chances.

At what point did you realize that you’re a weirdo for life?

I don’t think I’m weird at all. I think the music is weird. I think my techniques are weird. I think a lot of people I hang out with are weird. I do some stuff that is perceived as “this guy is outta his fuckin’ mind,” but if you listen to what’s actually happening there’s a reason for it. After a while don’t you get tired of listening to sound coming from in front of you? When I design a lot of stuff I’m doing now, I want the sound to come from everywhere.

Do you see it as an attack?

It’s more of a compositional interaction with the audience. If anyone’s getting attacked, it’s usually us.

When did the whole thing with music start?

In high school I was in a band called Myrin and the 2 Wotz. We’d take a really goofy song and try to rewrite the lyrics. It was sorta like punk, but prepunk, really bad versions of popular songs like “Cat Scratch Fever.” The great thing about pop music is no matter how bad you play it, it’s recognizable.

I think that’s your main motif: You take something that started off with a pure intent and ended up going mainstream, then you twist that to make it bad, and then you proliferate it.

Someone tapes two contact mics to two concrete blocks and scrapes ’em together and adds amps and it makes this loud noise like “Whsshkkkk!” And then a week later some jackass goes, “Oh, I could make that sound on a laptop.” And you’re like, Well, OK, to hell with this sound if they could do it on a laptop. So let’s do something else that they can’t do on a laptop. Take the cinder block and hit yourself in the head with it. You can’t do that with a laptop!

Sometimes the stuff that you think is good just isn’t. And most people would agree it is not good.

Right. But I know it’s good because I know where it came from, what it took to make it. It’s all about the vibration. When I do my music, there’s a vibration that’s good. It’s not cheap. You can’t do it on a laptop or using a mixing board. We’re not just tuning frequencies; we’re making dents in something. The sound is being pounded out.

How many recordings do you have at this point?

Oh, I don’t know. In hours? Hundreds and hundreds. I don’t waste my time naming or artistically labeling anything. If I wanted to be a poet I’d move to Easthampton. Everything that Laundry Room Squelchers has recorded is on the internet for free. What, I’m going to sell 100 copies if I’m lucky? I’m trying to keep us out of the self-promotional aspect of things.

What about self-promotion chafes you so much?

If you’re good, people will make a point to come see you and listen to you. Nine times out of ten an artist I’ll stumble on will be much more developed and interesting than some jackass Wire magazine stuck in my face on page 26. So I keep trying to stumble on stuff. And I want people to stumble on my stuff too.


“ I remember one time I was complaining about some 45 RPM single being terrible and Rat told me it wasn’t that the record was bad, it’s just that I didn’t ‘know how to listen to it.’ He told me to listen to it again at 33 +8. Maybe that is the secret of Rat Bastard: It’s not a bunch of noise, you’re just listening to it wrong.” —SYD GARON


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