Disc 1:
Tracks 1 and 2 from Screeching Weasel's 1986 demo.
Tracks 3-5 previously unreleased demos from 1989.
Track 6 from the "There's A Fungus Among Us" 7" compilation.
Track 7 from the "What Are You Pointing At?" 10" compilation.
Tracks 8 & 9 previously unreleased demos from 1992.
Tracks 10-12 outtakes from the "Wiggle" sessions.
Tracks 13 & 14 outtakes from the "Anthem For A New Tomorrow" sessions.
Track 15 outtake from the "How To Make Enemies And Irritate People" sessions.
Tracks 16 & 17 from the "Suzanne Is Getting Married" 7".
Tracks 18 & 19 outtakes from the "Bark Like A Dog" sessions.
Tracks 20-24 outtakes from the "Television City Dreams" sessions.
Tracks 25-28 outtakes from the "Emo" sessions.
Tracks 20, 21, & 26 from the "Jesus Hates You" 7".

Disc 2:
Track 1 originally released on the (lost?) 1990 reunion show VHS tape.
Tracks 2-5 are from a 1993 rehearsal tape.
Tracks 6-22 recorded live on March 20, 1993 in Philadelphia
Track 23 originally released on the (lost?) 1990 reunion show VHS tape.

In 1995, I compiled a collection of B-sides, outtakes, comp. tracks and live material for an album called Kill The Musicians. At the time, I thought I'd pretty much covered the SW extras to date. It was only in early 1999 that I realized how much good stuff I'd left out. Much of it had simply been forgotten, in many cases deservedly so (particularly the early stuff). But we forgot a few great tunes and, since the release of KTM in 1995, we've accumulated even more odds and ends. I've wanted to put together a more comprehensive SW collection ever since. Here it is.

I'm aware of my tendency to go on and on and on (and I've checked on the costs of printing a ninety page booklet) so I'll jump right in, another trip down memory lane begins....

"I Hate Old Folks" and "Nothing Matters" both come from our first demo tape, recorded in December of 1986, about six months after we formed.

"I Hate Old Folks" was one of the few tunes for which I wrote lyrics before the music. In fact, music for the song didn't even exist when we sent in our band's picture and info to MaximumRockNRoll along with the lyrics for their "new bands" section; I simply needed lyrics that would stick out. Predictably, we received angry letters from several people chiding us for making fun of old people. With that kind of fuel, I had to write a song around the words.

"Nothing Matters" is a slightly saccharine pop song (note the heavy reverb put on my vocals and Steve's drums by the engineer) that almost didn't make the demo because we were worried about coming off as wimpy. I'm not worried anymore.

Those two tunes are the only ones you'll find here from our first demo.
Most of the ones that weren't re-recorded for the first album either flat-out sucked or have been released elsewhere (two of them were included as bonus tracks on the re-release of our first album). The bootleggers have already made the rest of that garbage available and if you're willing to spend the money, have a blast.

About six months after we recorded the demo, we did our first, self-titled album for Underdog Records. About six months after that, we kicked our bassist, Vinnie, out of the band. He was replaced by Fish, who doesn't appear on this record simply because everything we recorded from January 1988 to January 1989 (when Fish left the band) has already been released elsewhere.

Prior to Fish's departure, we'd replaced original drummer Steve Cheese with Bran Vermin. Vermin had been recommended to us by a fan of the band named Dan Schafer, the singer in a local hardcore band called Generation Waste. Fish left soon after our first tour with our new drummer. We needed a bassist. Schafer asked if he could be in the band. After ascertaining that he could kinda, sorta play bass, he joined the ranks and the band immediately changed for the better. We finally had a strong backing vocalist and Schafer (who would soon be given the surname Vapid) would become the only person with whom I felt comfortable writing songs. We both thought the Ramones were the best band to ever walk the earth and we both gave less than half a shit what people thought about us playing a then very unpopular style of music that would eventually get tagged with the long-unused (and currently overused) term "pop-punk". In January 1989, immediately following the release of BoogadaX3, we started working on new tunes and getting ready for a six week summer tour with our new rhythm section.

Northwestern University's radio station, WNUR, was having a contest for unsigned bands; send in a demo and get something like twenty hours of free recording time at some semi-swank local studio. With that studio time, we could afford to record a new album and look for someone to release it. The first step was finding a suitable (read: cheap) studio in which to record our demo. Vapid hooked us up with a guy in Berwyn ("BERWYN????" yells the crowd familiar with the old Son Of Svengoolie show on channel 44) who charged cheap rates. His 8-track studio was in a storefront on, I believe, Roosevelt Road. The studio doubled as his apartment. I don't know if he was a junkie or a diabetic, but the first bad sign was walking into his kitchen and seeing a label on a drawer that read "syringes". The second bad sign was when he asked us if we wanted to go get a vegetarian hotdog across the street. The third bad sign was when we were mixing down one of the better tunes from the session ("Someday") and he managed to erase the bass guitar track about twenty-five seconds into the tune. It remains here virtually bassless, for which I apologize. Blame Berwyn. We also recorded some of the tunes that would end up being re-recorded for the Punkhouse EP (the demo version of "I Need Therapy” appears here) as well as a pretty decent hardcore tune called "Crawl". The recording quality is less than stellar. Again, blame Berwyn.

WNUR ignored our shitty sounding tape which didn't really surprise us all that much. Undaunted, we started working on new tunes.

During a stopover in Berkeley on our 1989 summer tour, we recorded a couple of tunes for David Hayes' Very Small Records. They were the original versions of "I Wanna Be A Homosexual" and "Kamala's Too Nice" (the latter can be found on KTM). We also did an early version of "Slogans" which was released on a now long out of print Chicago compilation. "Homo" was released (and eventually re-released, along with the original version of "Kamala's Too Nice") as part of a comp. that David put together. "Slogans" and "Homo" appear here.

We broke up in late 1989. During that down time, we did a reunion show with Vapid on bass. Vermin on drums, a local musician named Doug Ward on second guitar and of course, me and Jughead. We videotaped the show and briefly sold it through mail-order. One of the songs we played which was never recorded in a studio is included here. It's called "I Love Beer." I apologize in advance for the cruddy sound quality, it's taken directly from an old copy of the video. The video included snippets of me interviewing the other band members and ended with me and Vapid playing a short, simple, improvised duet on Joe Vindictive's piano which is included at the end of this CD. Both of these tunes appear in non-chronological order on the second disc.

When we got back together without Vermin in 1991, Vapid moved to second guitar to make room for our new bassist, Dave Naked (who had briefly been in a short-lived, shitty band with Jughead and I called The Gore-Gore Girls during SW's break-up). Our-new drummer was Dan Sullivan, who was given the nickname of Dan Panic. This line-up recorded My Brain Hurts and the extra tracks from that session, which have been re-released on KTM. So Mr. Naked doesn't appear on this record. Naked lasted about three months in the band before an irate Vapid demanded that he be booted. Johnny Personality (with whom I'd played in The Vindictives) joined the fold for Wiggle Prior to the recording of that album, we did a five song demo with Steve Albini in his home studio. Three of the tunes are in print on other records. Two of them, "Crying In My Beer" and "Jeannie's Got A Problem With Her Uterus" were re-recorded for "Wiggle" This is the first time these demo versions have been released.

The recording of Wiggle was an enormous pain in the ass. I wasn't singing like myself; the sessions seemed to go on and on; we felt pressure from the label to follow up the surprisingly successful My Brain Hurts; and as chronicled on songs from 1991 on, like "Making You Cry," "Veronica Hates Me," and "Celena," (and that's really just naming a few) I was starting to experience serious problems in the relationship with the girl I'd been seeing since the first Screeching Weasel show in December, 1986. By the time Wiggle was being recorded we'd been living together on and off for a year and I was starting to hate her just a little bit. The feeling was mutual. She took it out on me in person. I saved most of my bile for song lyrics. All the aforementioned problems resulted in fucking up my head; I had no idea what should go on the album and what shouldn't. The result was a decent album with a bunch of leftovers that probably should have replaced some of the weaker songs on the record.

Joe King of The Queers had sent me a tape in 1990. It was just him in his bedroom with his guitar, playing bits and pieces of songs. I finished writing many of them, some of which were recorded by SW ("My Friends Are Getting Famous," [originally titled "My Folks Think I'm Retarded"] "Like A Parasite" and "Surf Goddess" are the first three that come to mind) and most of which were recorded by The Queers. Despite the politically incorrect nature of SW and The Queers, we had serious qualms about doing a song called "Amy Saw Me Looking At Her Boobs" (inspired by a comment made by Queers bassist B-Face to Joe regarding Joe's attractive [though ironically rather flat-chested roommate). I wrote new lyrics for the tune, which became The Queers song "Fuck The World." Screeching Weasel did a version of that song, but we also took the same recording and I sang the words (I had to write additional lyrics where Joe had left mumbling on the tape instead of actual words) for "Amy Saw Me Looking At Her Boobs" over it. "Amy" is included here; "Fuck The World" isn't, simply because I wanted this album to run more or less chronologically and I felt it would be boring to have to identical tunes (save for the lyrics) right next to each other. It'll appear somewhere someday.

We recorded two other tunes during that session that didn't make it onto Wiggle. The first was a re-working of "Cindy's On Methadone" which was retitled "Shirley's On Methadone." We'd been approached to do a song for a Canadian filmmaker who was shooting a movie called "Shirley Pimple." He'd promised a substantial amount of money for the cut so we were happy to re-record the song, substituting the name "Shirley" for every "Cindy". The filmmaker, so the story goes, ended up in prison (I have no idea why) so the film was scrapped, we didn't get any money and the tune was canned, until now.

The other song, "27 Things I Wanna Do To You, stayed off the album for the reasons I mentioned earlier; my head was so screwed up that I was convinced the break in the middle of the song was wildly off time (despite being able to sing along with it just fine). The song was another in a long line of not-so-nice tunes about my then-girlfriend, so maybe I subconsciously kept it off. Who knows, who cares. It's a damn good tune and I'm glad we've finally released it.

Johnny Personality left the band due to his commitment to The Vindictives so we put Vapid back on bass while I took over second guitar; I'd never been comfortable just standing on stage with a microphone and I felt I had terrible stage presence. With a guitar in my hands I was able to justifiably stand in one spot and just play and sing. I paid the price of the singer/guitarist constantly getting the mic smashed into my mouth but it was worth it to avoid the feeling of utter nakedness that being only a singer gave me (this despite the fact that I often disrobed at our shows).

It was with this line-up that we began rehearsing in early 1993 for Anthem For A New Tomorrow. Typically, we'd rehearse the new songs, then take a short break and run through the set for our upcoming Spring tour. Prior to that tour, I'd gleefully engaged in the fine art of crowd-baiting, but I was slowly phasing out. Vapid didn't like it (he always felt we were on the verge of being attacked by the crowd. He was right; it's just that I thought it was funny. Vapid didn't see the humor) and ever since I'd stopped drinking before shows, I'd become less prone to verbally assaulting the crowd. The other factor was this: for years, there had been nothing more satisfying to me than playing to a crowd that was totally into our set and at the same time wanted to beat the living shit out of us. That all started to die down as we became more popular; once we weren't the underdog, the crowd-baiting and stage banter became expected; the band wasn't as much fun. When we actually started drawing a reasonable number of people to our shows who wanted to hear the songs from their favorite SW records it deflated me a bit. I'd always enjoyed being on the outside. I decided that the best course of action was to play it straight; we'd do our set Ramones-style - one song after another with few or little breaks in between (it didn't quite work out that way until the end of the tour...).

Even so, we were prepared for hecklers. I wrote an acapella tune for Vapid and I to sing whenever anybody was stupid enough to yell "Shutup and play!" at us. It was called, naturally, "Shutup And Play." I don't remember the lyrics and sadly, I don't have any recordings of it. But in addition to that, I wrote a tune called "You're The Enemy" which expressed my displeasure at paying shows for the new breed of fans. Inexplicably, we never recorded it. The version that is included here (out of chronological order, by the way; I thought it would be of interest to fans to put a few tunes from a rehearsal for a tour on the second CD prior to a show from the tour) was recorded in early 1993 in our practice space. Also included from that same practice tape is a nice version of "Around On You" (which I think may be the best song Vapid and I ever co-wrote as well as an early, different version of "Electroshock Therapy" which was titled "(She Got) Electroshocked" on Bark Like A Dog and a song I co-wrote with Vapid called "Squeaky Clean" (the latter two not making the final cut when we decided what to record for Anthem) (Vapid ended up nixing my parts to "Squeaky Clean" and re-writing them for a short-lived band he did in 1998). The version of "Squeaky Clean" that appears here was still being worked out, which explains the overlong ending.

After mixing Anthem I decided I was unhappy with the way "Every Night" and "Totally" had turned out so on the album we replaced them with the demo versions that had been recorded at Flat Iron in Chicago the previous Spring; I felt the performances were better than the ones from the album session. Included here are the Sonic Iguana Anthem versions of those tunes.

Vapid quit the band in the Spring of 1994. We knew SW was pretty much over (again...) but we wanted to do one more album, just to put down the tunes that we'd been rehearsing since we'd recorded Anthem. We asked Mike Dirnt from Green Day to play bass on How To Make Enemies And Irritate People (the title was a take off on the Dale Carnegie book "How To Win Friends & Influence People," not, as some have suggested, the John Cleese video, "How to Irritate People." I didn't become familiar with the Cleese video until several years later). Mike was short on time - Green Day was just hitting it big with Dookie - but we recorded the album quickly in our new practice space, which was the basement of a two flat in which Panic rented an apartment. Mass Giorgini dragged his ADAT gear up to Chicago, despite a heavy work schedule and the stress of taking care of his terminally ill father.

Mike had to fly to New York for a day to play with Green Day on the Letterman show, so Mass played bass on "Waiting For Susie" which was the flipside to the Lookout single "Suzanne is Getting Married" (both of which are included here). Mike had laid down a bass track for "Nightbreed" (which had originally been a Gore Gore Girls tune from 1990) but after he'd left and I recorded the vocal, we realized that his bass line was stepping all over the lead vocal in the chorus. For this compilation, Mass went back and re-recorded the bass line himself, playing the same notes that he played on the 1997 Major Label Debut version, by which time he was in the band.

After Enemies was recorded, SW broke up for the second time. Jughead concentrated on acting and directing plays and working with a comedy improv group. Vapid, Panic and I ended up doing a band called The Riverdales. Our first album on Lookout was well-received even though it wasn't very good. We did a three month tour opening for Green Day that pretty much destroyed the band and killed any semblance of friendship between the three of us. Despite that, we decided to put the second (and I already knew it would be the last) Riverdales record on hold (and by the way, that record, Storm The Streets [available from Honest Don's for those inclined to drop a few bucks and brighten my day] is an absolute fucking gem if I do say so my damn self and it breaks my heart that it's only sold about one-fourth of what the inferior debut album sold. Marv The Roadie assures me that someday people will recognize the brilliance of Storm The Streets but I have serious doubts) in favor of re-forming SW again. The painful negotiations and legal battles with Lookout that ensued have been documented elsewhere. Suffice it to say, Jughead and I paid for the recording out of our own pockets and ended up with a record that we loved, that was picked up by a large indie label (Fat Wreck Chords), that was adored by critics but which the fans hated. I still don't get it. I still love Bark Like A Dog and I still actually listen to it, which is more than I can say for most of the records I've been involved with. It's a slick, polished album, but in a good way, and I think it represents some of my best pop songwriting. "Lose The Dink" was dumped as we felt it was one of the weaker songs. It's included here. So is "Stuck Out Here," which I felt was a great tune but which didn't seem to fit the format of the album. In retrospect, I would've dumped "Stupid Girl" (man, I hated that tune, it was written and performed as a parody of bands who were copying our style. It was a joke, and not a very funny one...) and replaced it with "Stuck Out Here" Listen to it, and you decide.

Soon after Lookout dropped their lawsuit against me and Jughead, they made amends by helping Jughead and I get Panic Button Records off the ground. Our first release was a SW 12" EP entitled Major Label Debut.
By that time, Vapid and Panic had been replaced by Mass Giorgini and Dan Lumley from Squirtgun. We’d also added ex-Zoinks guitarist Zac Damon on second guitar and backing vocals. He’d always been a distinctive lead singer in his own band, but as a backing vocalist with Screeching Weasel, he sounded so much like Vapid it kind of freaked everybody out.

In January of 1998, we recorded Television City Dream, our second album for Fat Wreck Chords (and our eighth overall) at Sonic Iguana in Lafayette, Indiana. Only I wasn't there. My relationship with my girlfriend had deteriorated over the years, but for some stupid reason we got married in early 1991. Marriage only made the relationship worse. I'd been on tranquilizers since the Spring of 1993 to help combat my chronic panic attacks and I'd kicked them just a few weeks before the recording. On top of that, I'd quit smoking almost a year before. Being medication free, smoke free and feeling trapped in a Basil/Sybil Fawlty-type marriage, I felt too stressed to go down to Indiana to record. Mass taped our rehearsals in Chicago and set a click track for Lumley to play along with. The band recorded the album without me physically there, but my practice vocals were pumped into their headphones. When the music was done, Mass brought his ADAT gear up to my apartment in Schiller Park where I recorded my vocals. The extras from the session included three covers: D.O.A.’s "The Prisoner" (previously unreleased), The Subhumans "Fuck You," and "Suspect Device" by Stiff Little Fingers. The latter two songs made up the A-side of our limited edition picture disc on Probe Records released in the Fall of 1999 (the B-side was a cover of The Stooges’ "Dirt" from the Emo sessions). There were two original tunes left over as well. One, "My Own World," ended up on a benefit compilation. The other one was a good tune but I couldn't write lyrics for it. I finally wrote the words in September of 1999 to complete "Can't Take It." John Personality came in and sang backing vocals on the tune, as well as "27 Things I Wanna Do To You" and I finally laid down vocals on "Stuck Out Here."

With our own record label doing well, we decided to leave Fat Wreck Chords and release our new album, Emo, on Panic Button. Zac had moved to California so once again I took over second guitar duties. We learned the tunes in the studio and recorded them live, using a new producer, Brendan Burke.

We’d worked at Burke’s Uberstudio in the past but we'd never worked with him as a producer. I wanted Mass to be able to concentrate on just being a band member instead of filling the role of producer/engineer as well. And Burke's simple rock and roll sensibilities were exactly what I was looking for production wise for Emo. We recorded at Acme in the city, where I'd recorded with The Vindictives as their original rhythm guitarist eight years earlier. I started writing the songs for Emo in May of 1998 and finished them in December of that same year. In that time period, several things had changed. I'd bought an apartment and moved to an unfamiliar town and my wife - the girl I'd been with for twelve years - had announced she was divorcing me several months after the move. The first half of the album is comprised primarily of songs relating to some major life and worldview changes I'd made in the prior two years. The second half is a little bit darker, concentrating primarily on the end of my relationship, although Last Night which sounds like it was written directly from the experience of my failed marriage had actually been written in 1990 - perhaps a sign of things to come. We went back and forth on whether to include "Linger" by the Cranberries, "Anchor" by Japan's Husking Bee (which was my favorite) or "You Are My Sunshine" as the sole cover tune. We ultimately chose "Linger" because the mechanicals issues were the easiest to deal with. "Anchor” was a problem because I'd written an entirely different bridge - both lyrics and music - than the original, and I'd changed the ending; I'd personalized the song. Trying to get clearance for it would've taken too long. "You Are My Sunshine" just didn't sound right. Mass re-mixed it for this comp. and I like it much better now. Jughead, Mass and Lumley sang backups on "Sunshine," as did Jesse Michaels, who had just arrived in town to record the Common Rider album. Jesse also played the guitar solo on the song, I wrote it but it would've taken me hours to play it properly. I spent twenty-five minutes teaching it to Jesse and several takes later it was done. Simple economics; the band was paying for the recording and we didn't have a lot of money. If you can get somebody to do it quicker, why not?

The final tune - titled "Bark Like A Dog", after one of our biggest-selling yet most-hated albums - was a one-take, mostly-improvised rant done over the same three repeating chords; a shorthand run-down of my life to that point ending with where I felt I ultimately stood: "Yeah, I'm all-right." Its counterpart was our cover of "Dirt," which, like "Bark," was a one-take song that expressed similar, if more subtle, sentiments. It was left off the album solely due to its length. It's a strange choice for a Stooges cover but I think we did a good job with it.

"Tightrope" was left off the album simply because I didn't feel it thematically. It's a sarcastic, accusatory song aimed at the resurgence of tough guy, so-called working class or street punk bands. I still think it's right on lyrically, but it didn't belong on Emo.

Here's where things get different. Though Mass has done an incredible job cleaning up these old tapes, the second CD that comprises this album doesn't sound very good. I've gone back and forth about whether to include it and ultimately decided in favor of it for these three reasons: most of our early stuff sounded like crap anyway, I've seen entirely too many people pay twenty to thirty bucks for SW bootlegs that sound far worse; and most importantly, I wanted this comp, to be a more comprehensive overview of the band than KTM was. Some of you will love it, some of you will hate it and others won't care. All I know is that the practice tape stuff provides a look into our rehearsals that at least some fans will appreciate, and the live show is an accurate representation of what we sounded like at what many people believe was our peak. Since you can't win either way (If it's a shitty sounding bootleg the fans eat it up. If you take the same tape, spend time and money to make it sound better and charge a lower price, the fans complain that it sounds like shit and you're ripping them off), we decided to release it as part of this album.

Mass has attempted to remove the tape hiss and cover up the soundman's errors from the Philly show (recorded on March 20th, 1993) but It's still raw; bootleg quality. We'd only been on tour for a week and a half or so by that point so we weren't as tight as we were when we hit California (a few songs from the Berkeley show on that same tour can be heard on KTM). There are too many pauses between songs, too much chattering. But that was SW in 1993, just before Anthem was recorded, for better or worse. The only other note I feel I should make is that in introducing the then-unrecorded "I'm Gonna Strangle You," I refer to it as a "girl gets revenge against boy" song or some such shit. It wasn't for PC reasons that I did this so much as we were getting a lot of videos of our shows sent to us by fans and I didn't want my girlfriend to see one and realize that I'd written a song about wanting to wring her neck.

That tour was the last one Screeching Weasel ever did. We played three shows in a four day span after Anthem was released; one in Janesville, WI; one on Halloween in a suburb of St. Louis; and the final one on November 2nd, 1993 at a little dive in Forest Park, attended by about 200 people. It was a horrible show. The beefy, biker-type security guys stood in front of us for the whole set, threatening to toss out any audience member who moved. The owner didn't pay us right. It was the perfect scenario for our last show. Sure, we continued as a band, and we probably will still continue to make records, maybe even play some shows. But it won't be the same; it can't ever be the same. And maybe that's okay. Maybe we can go back to doing what we always did best, playing our stupid little punk tunes for kicks when we feel like it, instead of looking at it like a job, which is what it had turned into by ‘93.

No matter what, it seems like our break-ups never take, so I've resigned myself to being in Screeching Weasel until I'm bald and frail. We'll keep doing our thing, as long as it keeps on being fun. 'Cause that's really what it's all about, right?

OK
Ben Weasel
11.12.99