Tracks 1-4 from "Boogadaboogadaboogada!"
Tracks 5-8 from "My Brain Hurts"
Tracks 9-10 from "Kill the Musicians"
Tracks 11-12 from "Wiggle"
Tracks 13-16 from "Anthem For A New Tomorrow"
Tracks 17-19 from "How To Make Enemies And Irritate People"
Tracks 20-23 from "Bark Like A Dog"
Track 24 from "Major Label Debut"
Tracks 25-27 from "Television City Dream"
Track 28 from "Thank You Very Little" - (Television City Dream Outtake)
Track 29 from "Four on the Floor" - (Television City Dream Outtake)
Tracks 30-31 from "Emo"
Tracks 32-34 from "Teen Punks In Heat" 

Like Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees (or maybe more like the bumbling monsters in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein), Screeching Weasel was the band that couldn't die. Until, of course, it did. Frankly, at this point, I wouldn't be the least surprised to see the band rise from the dead one more time, like some horrible low-budget midnight-movie sequel. Screeching Weasel Meets The Toxic Avenger, perhaps?

But I digress. The Screeching Weasel story begins in a middle school gym, somewhere in the suburbs of Chicago, where two misfits found themselves on the same misbegotten junior-high wrestling team. Ben Foster and John Pierson didn't know it then, but they were about to strike up a friendship that would change both their lives - and the shape and sound of hardcore punk rock. 

Skip ahead a few years to the late Eighties: Our heroes, now 17 and working dead-end jobs in the same movie theater, decide to start a punk rock band. In the tradition of the Ramones, Stiv Bators, and their other punk rock heroes, they rechristened themselves with punk rock monikers: Ben Weasel and John Jughead started Screeching Weasel with two high school friends, Steve Cheese and Vinny Bovine. Taking inspiration from New Jersey's Adrenalin O.D. (and perhaps suffering a bit of an inferiority complex over the square-jawed, broad-shouldered, clean-cut Chicago hardcore scene of the time, led by bands like Naked Raygun and the Effigies), these scruffy working-class losers embraced their suburban roots (as well as their love of the Ramones) and eschewed the testosterone-fueled moshcore of the day in favor of catchy, sing-along anthems about pop culture, teen anarchy, mowing lawns, and hanging out at the 7-11. Underdog Records released Screeching Weasel in 1987 to almost universal apathy, and the original lineup soon dissolved.

By the time Screeching Weasel's second LP, Boogadaboogadaboogada, was released, the band had picked up 16-year old drummer Brian Vermin, who had a penchant for running around venues stark naked. For the band's first real tour, Ben and Jughead recruited bassist Warren Ozzfish and played to empty rooms in several major cities, including New York.

Although Boogada represented a major leap in both songwriting and production over the band's debut, the record failed to set the world on fire and a dispirited Screeching Weasel broke up (for the first time) in 1989. Ben and Jughead tried another band (called, variously, Wiggle and The Gore Gore Girls) with little success. Redemption came in 1991 when Lawrence Livermore of Lookout Records (which by that time was finding a growing audience for pop-punk bands like Operation Ivy and Green Day) offered to sign Screeching Weasel if they'd reform. They did, this time bringing together what most people believe was the classic Screeching Weasel lineup, with guitarist/vocalist Danny Vapid (from Chicago's popular punk/funk band Sludgeworth, who had joined the band just prior to their first split), drummer Dan Panic, and bassist Dave Naked.

With straightedge dead and mosh-metal losing much of its luster, 1991's My Brain Hurts - Screeching Weasel's Lookout debut - catapulted the band from unknowns into one of the most popular new bands in the burgeoning pop-punk scene. At around the same time, Ben took his acerbic stage personality into print with a snotty, opinionated, and widely-read column in MaximumRockNRoll, at that time the undisputed sine qua non of punk-rock credibility. By the time Wiggle was released, Screeching Weasel had graduated from outsiders to scene kingpins. Ben was writing songs with The Queers' Joe King, the heavily-touring band had conquered punk rock Meccas on both coasts (playing sold-out shows at both Berkeley's Gilman Street and New York City's ABC No Rio), and kids across the country were happily getting naked and bouncing up and down to songs like "Hey Suburbia" and "I Wanna Be A Homosexual" that gleefully poked a finger in the eye of the violent, homophobic, urban hardcore mythos of the day.

Why Screeching Weasel? Just think back to 1990: The famous CBGB Sunday matinees of the Eighties had melted down inte a muscle-headed nightmare of violence and intimidation; straightedge had more rules than your parents; and hardcore had stagnated into a rigid formula of breakdowns and calculated mosh parts devoid of originality. The meek might not have inherited the Earth, but at least in 1990, kids all over the country finally said, "Enough!" The geek-core scene at ABC No Rio, the DIY punk-rock Renaissance at Berkeley's Gilman Street Project and bands like Screeching Weasel offered a chance to get silly, have fun, fuck the rules, dance like an idiot instead of a linebacker, and get naked if you wanted - in short, to be yourself.

Ah, but nothing lasts forever. By 1993, Screeching Weasel Ver. 2.0 was losing steam. Heavy touring and internal squabbles had taken their toll; by the time the band recorded 1994's How To Make Enemies and Imitate People. Screeching Weasel had stopped touring, Vapid had left the band, and Green Day's Mike Dirnt was recruited to fill the bass slot. With Jughead increasingly involved with his activities in Chicago theater as a performer and playwright. Screeching Weasel officially disbanded for the second time, with Ben and Vapid forming The Riverdales.
 
After touring arenas opening for Green Day, The Riverdales had run their course and Ben's relationship with Lookout's Lawrence Livermore had been stretched to the breaking point. Screeching Weasel wound up back together again, this time recording Bark Like a Dog for Fat Wreck Chords. 

Screeching Weasel remained together for four more years, although the lineup continued to change and the band only performed live a few times in its final incarnation. With Vapid and Panic gone, Ben and Jughead soldiered on with a new lineup featuring Dan Lumley on drums and Squirtgun's Mass Giorgini (the studio guru who had recorded many Screeching Weasel albums at his Sonic Iguana Studio) on bass. The band moved to its own imprint, Panic Button Records, for its final releases: 1999's Emo (which saw a true breakthrough in Ben's songwriting, chucking aside the acerbic irony of the past to deal with his own demons) and 2000's Teen Punks In Heat

It's a new century and with emo and mall-punk dying the same commercialized, overexposed death as straightedge and metalcore before it, Screeching Weasel's music continues to find new listeners. And no wonder Wherever there's a kid who's been de-pantsed in gym class, a girl with a lunkhead boyfriend, a nerd who's sick of being pushed around by jocks dumber than a door post, there's a new Screeching Weasel fan waiting to be born. Jocks, prom queens, frat boys, homophobes, bullies, and divas need not apply. To the rest of you losers, fatheads, and geeks out there, welcome to the club.
- Jim Testa, Jersey Beat fanzine

The first band I ever played in was called Generation Waste. We were a hardcore act in the vein of Minor Threat and 7 Seconds. We had songs about unity and animal rights but I was pretty sure that nobody in the band gave a shit about any of those topics - it was 1987 and the punk scene was full of cliche-ridden hardcore acts. The guitarist of GW wrote all the lyrics and I just sang them. I thought it was fun but deep down I wanted to be in a band more melodic. I had met Ben of Screeching Weasel a few times. We played a handful of shows around Chicago.

One night GW and SW played a show together in St. Louis. I caught a ride home with Ben who lived two towns away from me. We listened to the early punk stuff and talked the whole way home. I kept thinking of a recent GW rehearsal where I showed the band a song idea and was laughed at because it was too simple. We ended up keeping the song but I could tell we only kept it so I felt like a part of the group. That night Ben played me a new Screeching Weasel song. When I heard the song I was blown away. Shocked actually. The song was simple yet effective. Nobody in Chicago wanted to play music like that. Everyone I had encountered played self-indulgent crap. 
It was like their ego couldn't handle playing a song with three chords in it. I was a huge fan of SW from there on out. That night I secretly wanted to be in the band. GW broke up soon after. About year and a half later I got to play in one of my favorite bands. 
- Danny Vapid

How do you sum up fifteen years in a band with only two paragraphs? You highlight, marginalize, categorize, generalize, and create your own succinct reality. You leave out large amounts of time spent sitting in the back of a stinky van, cramped with your mind lost somewhere between boredom and fantastical half dreams passively battling insanity, You skip the large gaps of days, weeks and months while the band was on its many hiatuses, working part time jobs at coffee shops, record stores, movie theaters, gas stations, sanding shards of metal off aluminum pipes at 7 in the morning at a big blue warehouse, book stores, and, oh yeah, that three months you spent working 20 hours a day going from coffee shop to movie theater to midnight job cutting and tacking carpeting down in theater aisles popping caffeine pills until excessive tunnel vision made you freak out. All of these jobs in order to raise money to pay for recording time and gasoline.

To save space you omit the section about being 24 and living in your mom's basement with the singer. You skip the stereotypical endeavors of each band members' bouts with alcoholism. To save face you delete the part about the band spending all its money on a van that breaks down two days later. To avoid confrontation you bypass the segment when your record label tried to sue you, and then you definitely steer clear of that detail many years later when you sued them. You don't mention the life histories of the 
13 or more musicians that have played in the band, and of course you don't talk about how they quit or got kicked out. You gloss over the many shows at which multiple band members got naked, and then only allude to the time when your bass player got punched by a skinhead while playing on stage... buck naked with his willy banging against the back of his guitar. Perhaps you go into, but without particulars, how much time you spend paying royalties, figuring out band taxes, reading contracts, and then quickly mention that short anecdote where a kid told your singer that he respected his DIY ethics and then the kid said that corporations were ruining the world and your singer replied, "Dude, you're talking to the president of two corporations." That was funny. 

And then you start a third paragraph and realize you've gone too far
- John Jughead
 
Ah, it was the best of times and the worst of times, comrades; a dizzying whirlwind of low budget recordings. Quixotic "tours" of the country, bad food, lawsuits, everything going wrong and nothing going right, etc. But there were also those times when everybody in the room seemed to get it, and you'd head off to the next floor to sleep on, but not before one of your hosts thought to pick up a box of spaghetti and a couple of jars of sauce and maybe a six pack or a few bottles of cheap red wine, and those were fine times indeed. You were way out with the in crowd, save for Tim Yo and a few other freaks at MaximumRockNRoll, so you never had things like fanzine interviews taking up your precious time anyway... Nobody could afford lawyers - are you kidding me? - and "managers" were, at best, a friend with a knack for numbers, and there was no money for soundmen and you didn't hire publicists because you didn't have the money and nobody liked three chord punk anyway. Most of the time you were tired, frustrated, pissed off, bitter and trying desperately not to think about what shitty job was waiting around the corner once you'd managed to fuck this up, too. Everything was a hassle, a lot of the fans were pricks and the mood in the van ranged from cartoonish therapy group for mental defectives to crank-fueled hockey fight, but somehow it managed to be pretty fun. It's amazing what you can tolerate with youth on your side.

These songs represent the alleged best of our band, but, for me at least, the list would change again if you asked me tomorrow, and again the next day. Songs are like children, and deep down, I really do love most of my thalidomide babies. We were never the cool kids, you take what you can get. Like Joe King of the mighty Queers always says, "We're just playing stupid punk tunes," and he's right, of course, and let's not pretend we're writing Mozart here. But then again, when it's all you've got, maybe it means a little more when somebody gets a bang out of it, especially when the people who are getting it tend to be outsiders, fuck-ups and social lepers of the sort that greatly resemble you and the guys you played with in your band. Anyway, all the albums are still, miraculously, in print - at least as of this writing - so there's plenty more where this came from. 
- Ben Weasel