Tad are the forgotten band of the nascent Seattle scene of the mid-to-late 1980s, the scene that eventually became known around the world as “grunge”, a word intended as a genre but really more a description of a time-place-attitude nexus centered around Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia but with a blast radius that encompassed most of Washington. How important were Tad? Well they were one of three acts on the bill for the famous 1989 Lame Fest at the Moore Theatre, playing second sandwiched between the openers Nirvana and the headliners Mudhoney. Pretty good company.
Tad was also my favorite local band at the time, alongside Soundgarden. Tad was just… different. No one sounded like Tad, and I don’t know than anyone has since. Sure there’s distortion and angst. But Tad Doyle’s vocal delivery is something unique, a combination of speaking, grunting, shouting, and straining, a man trying to purge something awful and spew it forth into the world. Sonically it’s an instrumental assault, the song structure hanging on for dear life as the music swings wildly from side to side like a man trying to hold onto the roof of a moving car. I played God’s Balls and Salt Lick constantly, shouting the words to “Behemoth” in my room when no one was home. The A side of Salt Lick is about as good as it gets, just three crushing monoliths – “Axe To Grind”, “High On the Hog”, and “Wood Goblins” showing Tad at their most potent.
I lost track of Tad after 1991s 8-Way Santa despite being a big fan of that record as well (“Jinx” is arguably the best Tad song, while “Jack Pepsi” is them at their most fun). After getting back into vinyl I picked up some of the later releases, but the my heart wasn’t in the later material as much. I’m not a fan of 7″ singles so I never tried to re-build my old Sub Pop collection, but recently I recalled there were a few Tad singles put out in Europe as 12″s. And so thanks to the magic of the internet, two of them arrived in the mail yesterday.
I was already quite familiar with “Wood Goblins”, but the two B-side tracks on this 1989 record were new to me – “Cooking With Gas” and “Daisy”. “Daisy” was originally the A-side for Tad’s first Sub Pop 7″ the year prior, while “Cooking With Gas” was originally the B-side on the 1990 7″ “Loser” before appearing as a B-side yet again here. These B-sides were the only way to get the song prior to Sub Pop’s re-release of the band’s first three records in 2016.1 “Cooking With Gas” is classic Tad, belligerent, rough, and about cooking with gas. “Daisy” is a little bit of a departure, slower, heavier, sludgier, more psychedelic, the vocals oozing from Tad as if he were in the midst of some kind of trance state.
“Jack Pepsi” is a bit notorious in its own right. Tad ran into not one, but two legal issues with their 1991 album 8-Way Santa. They were sued over the use of the cover photo and also threatened by Pepsi for their use of the Pepsi logo on the 7″ for this single. The album had to be recalled and a new cover created, and the same was true of the single. The 2016 re-press of the album also changed the name of the track “Jack Pepsi” to just “Jack”. The funny part, of course, is that Jack Daniels didn’t seem to have a problem with their part of it.
The song “Jack Pepsi” is classic Tad storytelling, about being out with a buddy in a truck doing donuts on a frozen lake drinking a concoction of Jack Daniels and Pepsi until the ice cracks, sending them plunging into the freezing cold lake. You can feel the claustrophobia in the music as the water rushes in the windows, its coldness threatening to pull the last breath out of your lungs. “Eddie Hook” is something different. There’s still a story here, but it feels more like a heavy Nick Cave song. “Pig Iron” is more aligned with the overall 8-Way Santa sound, driven by the bass and drums, a sort of methodical lurching. The vocals retain their Tad-ness, but the mix moves them a bit further back resulting in a cleaner, more integrated song structure. “Eddie Hook” was also the B-side on some of the 7″ versions of “Jack Pepsi”, while “Pig Iron” showed up on a different B-side later when it was the flipside of the “Jinx” single.
I used to have a Tad sticker on the back window of my silver 1984 Mustang. One day when walking back to my car across the impossibly massive University of Washington parking lot circa 1990 I saw a note under my windshield wiper and my heart sank, assuming someone had backed into or otherwise damaged my ride. But when I opened up the note it only had three words on it: “TAD IS RAD”. It was true then, and it’s still true today. Tad is rad.
- The vinyl re-releases included God’s Balls, Salt Lick, and 8-Way Santa. Those who purchased them as a bundle also had the option of acquiring a fourth record comprised of B-sides, demos, and other extra material. I know this additional record, which came in a plain white jacket, was available for purchase in some retail shops as well, at least in the Seattle area. These various additional tracks were also sprinkled over the CD versions of the albums and included on the digital downloads as well. ↩︎