TAD were fucking loud.
That's probably the first thing anybody should know about them.
I first heard them back in Queens in '91, when a customer at the record store brought in 8-Way Santa. I knew the Sub Pop name by then, so I put it on.
"Jinx" came blasting out of the speakers and I remember thinking, what the hell is this?
Then "Giant Killer." "Stumblin' Man." "Jack Pepsi."
The whole record sounded enormous. Tad Doyle had this guitar sound that felt like somebody starting a truck inside the store, and Kurt Danielson's bass wasn't sitting underneath anything. It was right there in the middle of the fucking road.
Naturally, I loved it.
The funny thing about 8-Way Santa is that it's actually one of TAD's more approachable records. I didn't know that yet. Butch Vig recorded it at Smart Studios, and compared with the stuff that came before it, the songs hit harder and cleaner. There are hooks in there. Really ugly hooks, sometimes, but hooks.
Once I moved to Seattle in '92, I started seriously working backward through their records and found out how much nastier they'd been.
TAD had started in 1988 with Tad Doyle on guitar and vocals, Kurt Danielson on bass, Gary Thorstensen on guitar and Steve Wied on drums. Doyle had played drums before that, in H-Hour and around the Bundle of Hiss orbit, but with TAD he moved out front with a guitar and apparently decided subtlety had had a good run.
Their first single was "Daisy" backed with "Ritual Device" on Sub Pop in '88. Then came God's Balls in '89, recorded with Jack Endino at Reciprocal.
Now there's a friendly record title.
God's Balls sounds fucking filthy. "Behemoth," "Sex God Missy," "Satan's Chainsaw," "Pork Chop," "Nipple Belt." Even the song titles sound like somebody emptied a junk drawer onto the floor. It's slower and uglier than 8-Way Santa, and when I finally heard it I understood that the cleaner punch of the record I'd started with hadn't come out of nowhere. There was this big ugly machine underneath it already.
And TAD were a real Sub Pop road band before Seattle became everybody's favorite word. They toured with Nirvana in 1989, including Europe, back when the useful thing to remember is that nobody knew how that story was going to end. TAD weren't some obscure band lucky enough to be standing next to future celebrities. They were one of the established Sub Pop bands on the fucking tour.
That's one of the things hindsight screws up.
You look at an old bill now and your eye automatically jumps to the name that became gigantic later. People standing in the room didn't have a crystal ball.
Then TAD went and recorded Salt Lick with Steve Albini.
Of course they did.
If Jack Endino had helped document the sludge, Albini made the machinery sound even more exposed. "Axe to Grind," "High on the Hog," "Wood Goblins," "Hibernation," "Glue Machine," "Potlatch." Six songs that sound like they were stored somewhere damp.
Steve Wied left around that period and Josh Sinder came in on drums. That's the lineup that made 8-Way Santa with Vig.
Which brings me back to the record that got me.
It's still heavy as hell, but there's more movement in it. "Jinx" doesn't lumber so much as come charging through the wall. "Giant Killer" is ridiculous. "Stumblin' Man" has that great TAD combination where the riff sounds dangerous and the whole thing is just catchy enough that you realize you've been walking around with it stuck in your head.
And then there's "Jack Pepsi."
TAD had an almost supernatural ability to step on legal land mines.
The original cover of 8-Way Santa used an old photograph that had been found secondhand, a man and woman posing together with his hand on her breast. Turns out putting strangers on your album cover without asking them can create certain complications.
They sued.
Sub Pop replaced the cover.
Separate mess: "Jack Pepsi."
The single artwork played with the Pepsi logo. Pepsi objected.
Because apparently one legal headache wasn't enough.
These stories are funny now because they're so perfectly TAD, but they also have a bad habit of taking over the band's history. Mention TAD to somebody who knows a little about them and there's a decent chance you'll get the album-cover lawsuit, Pepsi, Bill Clinton and the general idea that these guys were cursed.
All true enough as stories.
But the records were the reason anybody cared in the first place.
After Seattle went completely fucking nuts, the majors came calling and TAD ended up with Giant.
Then they made Inhaler.
That's probably my favorite TAD record now.
J Mascis produced it, and the thing sounds massive without sanding off what made them ugly in the first place. The guitars are clearer. The bass has room. Josh Sinder hits like he knows exactly where all that weight is supposed to land.
"Grease Box" is a monster.
"Throat Locust" too.
"Leafy Incline." "Luminol." "Pansy."
It's probably the best they ever sounded on record.
And for a little while there, TAD were getting the kind of exposure that should've helped. They were opening big shows. They did dates with Nirvana during the In Utero period and later went to Europe with Soundgarden. They were standing on stages in front of a hell of a lot more people than they had been a few years earlier.
Then came Bill Clinton.
This story gets told like a cartoon, so it's worth getting it straight.
During the 1994 European run with Soundgarden there was a black-and-white Clinton promo image with a joint added to the photograph and the words "IT'S HEAVY SHIT."
Very classy.
Giant dropped TAD during that European tour.
It's tempting to say the poster did it, because that's the perfect TAD story: band makes stupid joke, president gets involved, major label panics, career explodes.
Real life is usually messier.
The poster seems to have been a convenient excuse or final headache, depending on whose version you're hearing. Inhaler hadn't sold what a major label wanted, there were management problems, and the relationship with Giant was already in trouble. I wouldn't hang the whole thing on one picture of Bill Clinton pretending to smoke a joint.
Still.
Only TAD.
And the frustrating part is that Inhaler deserved better than becoming another paragraph in a story about label bullshit. Put it on now and forget everything else. It holds up.
Somehow they got another major-label deal after that, this time with EastWest.
Gary Thorstensen was gone by then, leaving Tad to handle the guitars, with Kurt Danielson and Josh Sinder still underneath him. They went back to Jack Endino and made Infrared Riding Hood, which came out in 1995.
That's another record I think got buried under its own circumstances.
It isn't God's Balls again and it isn't Inhaler again. TAD had gotten tighter over the years, but there was still that same ugly center. They hadn't suddenly learned how to make polite alternative rock because somebody handed them another major-label contract.
Then the label situation fell apart again.
The story I've always heard is that the A&R person who brought them in got fired and the bands she'd signed got dumped almost immediately afterward. Whatever the exact corporate mechanics were, Infrared Riding Hood didn't get much of a life. The record came out, the support disappeared, and TAD found themselves on the wrong side of another major-label door.
At a certain point you start wondering if Tad Doyle broke a mirror while walking under a ladder on Friday the 13th.
But again, I don't want to make their whole history into a fucking curse story.
Because they kept going.
That's important.
If the cartoon version of TAD history were true, they'd disappear the minute the majors stopped answering the phone. They didn't. Gary was gone. Josh eventually left too. Mike Mongrain came in on drums. The audience got smaller, the records got smaller, and they went back to the kind of labels and singles where you had to actually be paying attention.
There's something I like about that.
Obscene Hand came out on Up in '97. There was another Up single in '98, "Oppenheimer's Pretty Nightmare" backed with "Accident on the Way to Church."
Those titles alone tell you TAD had not undergone a dramatic maturity phase.
By then Seattle wasn't the center of the record industry's universe anymore, which was probably a relief to everybody except the people trying to pay rent by selling records. TAD had gone from Sub Pop to two major deals and back to 7-inches without ever becoming the band somebody in an office apparently thought they were supposed to become.
They more or less wound down around '99. No giant farewell that I remember. They just stopped.
Tad put together Hog Molly afterward, and Kung-Fu Cocktail Grip came out earlier this year. Jack Endino's involved again, which feels appropriate, and it's heavy as hell.
Obviously.
Tad Doyle was never suddenly going to make a Belle and Sebastian record.
I still see him around town every once in a while. Not in any dramatic rock-star way. Seattle is just like that. People who exist on record sleeves also need groceries.
I probably play Inhaler more than anything else these days, although 8-Way Santa will always be the one that got me into them.
And I think that's why TAD still bother me a little.
Not the music.
The gap between how good the band was and how their story usually gets told.
They had Jack Endino, Steve Albini, Butch Vig and J Mascis behind the board at different points. They toured with bands that ended up playing arenas. They made the jump from Sub Pop to a major, got knocked back down, somehow made the jump again, got knocked down again, and still kept making records.
But if you reduce all that to bad luck, you miss the band.
They could be ugly without being shapeless. They could be funny without being a joke. They could play riffs slow enough to feel like construction equipment and still sneak a hook into your head. Kurt Danielson and whichever drummer was behind him gave Tad's guitar something solid enough to push against, which is why the records don't just turn into one giant pile of distortion.
And they were fucking funny.
That's important too.
"God's Balls."
"Nipple Belt."
"Wood Goblins."
"Jack Pepsi."
A fake joint hanging out of Bill Clinton's mouth.
This was not a band demanding to be carved into a stone monument.
They got saddled with that whole lumberjack-monster image early on, and too much writing about TAD eventually became writing about what Tad Doyle looked like instead of what his band sounded like. Fuck that.
Put on "Jinx."
Put on "Grease Box."
Put on "Throat Locust."
Then go backward and put on "Behemoth."
That's the story.
TAD should have been bigger.
Maybe they were just too damn heavy.
