My Brain Hurts. Wow...what a great album by truly one of the all time great punk bands. Arguably THE greatest album they ever did!!! And that, my friend, is saying something. My Brain Hurts raised the bar as far as songwriting was concerned. I mean sure there was Green Day, a great band also. But when the boys from Chicago oozed across the country and swaggered into the studio to record this CD in the middle of a chaotic - always chaotic - tour, they gave the whole punk scene a huge "FUCK YOU - STUFF THIS IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT." We don't care about the East Bay, we don't care about crusty motherfuckers who don't bathe, we don't care how many albums we sell and we sure as hell don't care what you think about us...that seemed to be the message - and that is truly PUNK!!!

Sure, there may be a couple of off-key vocals, but to me, they never hit a wrong note on this album - it never lets up from the get-go. I rate My Brain Hurts along with The Muffs first album, Our Bodies Our Selves by MTX, Damaged by Black Flag and the first three albums by the Ramones. All classics, in my humble opinion, that influenced untold numbers of punk rockers. The Screeching Weasel of My Brain Hurts is head and shoulders above any other band of its day - bar none.

Many bands have subsequently achieved far more popularity and financial success, but do you really think Blink 182 or Sum 41 would exist without Screeching Weasel? And who cares about how many albums you have sold? The Ramones, Stooges, Velvet Underground, Jesus And Mary Chain...all great, unappreciated and hugely influential bands...and this is where Screeching Weasel is.

Today, punk rock is a career move for rich kids who give music a try before going off to college...the other great thing about bands like SW, Green Day, MTX, Rancid and The Queers is that none of us had a safety net under us. We played music 'cause something deep inside us that said we had to, not 'cause it was a career move. It was either minimum wage ("Paper or plastic Ma'am?"-"Welcome to McDonalds - may I take your order?"), or the good old standby "I'll get a job soon Mom - I swear!!!!!" It lent a certain passion and honesty that today you never see anymore in the punk world. I mean, none of us were going to work computer jobs when the band broke up...maybe a paper route or pumping gas...but certainly no high paying gigs were in the cards for any of us.

I remember listening to an advance copy of My Brain Hurts with B-face and being blown away at how good it was. We went to rehearsal and immediately wrote "Ursula Finally Has Tits" and "Noodlebrain" (We were quick thinkers if not great songwriters...).

This album had a profound influence on me and thousands of others. And even though SW never sold millions of albums - as many lesser bands have done - I know that for one brief space in time they were the greatest band in the world. And My Brain Hurts proves it.
-Joe King

DANNY VAPID: I wanted to be in a band that would combine the styles of bands like the Ramones and the Dickies with new wave. I wanted to do something fun, outrageous and quirky with pop sensibilities. I thought of the backing vocals on songs like "Video Killed the Radio Star" and the vocals of the B-52's. I wasn't a big fan of them, preferring stuff like Devo and Gary Neuman, but I liked the way the backing vocals were sung almost like lead vocals. I wanted to be in a quirky punk rock band with melody. If the band looked stiff and spastic I thought that was a good sign. This was my line of thinking in 1989-90. I had just started to write songs around that time. I learned by watching Ben Weasel whistle a melody around three chords.

In the summer of 1989 I would get together with my friends Adam and Amara and jam every Friday afternoon. We would call in sick to work, pick up some beer and play music. Amara would play the keyboards with a built in drum machine, Adam would play guitar, and I would sing into a recording boom box. I'd sit down, write a song on the spot and teach it to them. Most of the time the songs just served to amuse us but I can remember listening back and being somewhat impressed with some of them. Most of the songs were written within thirty minutes to an hour (the best songs with SW or any other band I've played in have always been written quickly). It was some of the most fun I've ever had. I must have written twenty songs in that period for our (non-existent) band, which was called the Stiff Members. Before we got SW back together I showed some of these songs to Ben and they later became SW songs.

Recording My Brain Hurts out in San Francisco felt pretty cool. Andy Ernst did a good job. We recorded the album for Lookout and an EP for Shred of Dignity titled Pervo-Devo. I always thought we'd end up getting the shit kicked out of us for "I Wanna Be A Homosexual" but nothing ever happened. The thugs and meatheads of the punk scene were staying in the city and suburban shows at McGregors were where it was at. The scene in the early 90s was changing and people were actually enjoying what we were doing.

I liked the way the guitars turned out on the record. I used a Fender strat Squire (plastered with punk stickers) through a 60-watt Crate practice amp. When we played live, the amp would sit on a chair. It looked funny, but I tried my best not to care. For the most part I didn't. This was my set up because I couldn't afford anything else. In some ways I'm glad I didn't have better gear back then. There's something raw and spirited about the recording.

JOHN JUGHEAD: My most vivid memories about My Brain Hurts involve its initial effect on our triple-part-time jobs we were all stuck with during and before the release of this record. This is not to say that the record brought us fame and fortune but it definitely changed our lives in a monetary way. Where I remember this beginning was while we were on tour on the East Coast. The record had been released and we didn't have any sale numbers yet, and our prior record had only sold about 2,000 copies. So if you average that per state, not counting other countries, that is about 40 people per state...maybe two or three individual fans per city. We pulled into a spot along the side of what looked like junkie headquarters in Philadelphia. There were two currency exchanges on the same block - that is always a sign of "bad times."

We walked into what I will generously refer to as the club, and not a single person was there to greet us. We thought, oh great, another two people to perform in front of without a proper P.A. But we never walked away from a small turnout. We may have refused to play without monitors but we never refused a show if at least one or two people were there to see it. The promoter sauntered in about an hour later, and warned us that he didn't have any kind of permission to have the show here - they had just been taking their chances. About a half hour before the show a few punks began to gather outside the door. And then fifteen minutes before the show more and more punks began to show up. Eventually about 200 people piled in - for us, that was huge. There was no stage so we just set up on the floor behind the two very small P.A. speakers and began to play. The room went insane! There were people jumping, diving, and sweating on all sides of us. The speakers were so bad that only the first row of people could hear Ben and Vapid singing, but that didn't matter because everyone began to sing along. This was the first time that had happened to us. It was an amazing feeling. We had never been to this place before and all these people knew our songs and were singing along with us.

We came home from that tour with some money in the band fund. Actually just enough to buy a cheap P.A. for rehearsals from a friend of ours, and enough cash left over to pay our inflated phone bills, which were increased greatly by the many calls to promoters all over the country. I settled back in at my job at Crown Books. Life seemed to have gone back to normal.

When our first Weasel royalty check showed up, I quickly realized that I could no longer use my own bank account for the band fund. I remember being audited by the IRS later that year. They were curious why my annual income shot up so dramatically. We incorporated the band under the name Weasels, Inc., with Ben and me as President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer. New management at Crown Books demanded that all the employees wear these blue smocks that looked more like bibs to me. I had a new confidence from actually being a paid musician, so I refused to wear it. The new manager just looked at me with disbelief and walked away with the bib in her hands. She didn't talk to me for a week. She would just point at me and whisper things to the assistant manager. And then it occurred to me that I didn't need the job anymore, so I quit.

DV: Ben Weasel would bait the audience in his pink tights and oversized button that read "Macho." They would strike back wearing I Hate Ben Weasel t-shirts and even ones that read I Hate Dan Schafer. I actually think some of them did hate us but they came to every show. Weird. Early on, wearing sunglasses and striped T-shirts like Dee Dee Ramone seemed cool. Black Chuck Taylors were carried over from the 80's punk scene as were black t-shirts, black leather jackets and ripped blue jeans. Sometimes I would bleach my hair blonde or Ben would dye his hair blue. We both went through a variety of funny haircuts. This was the look, but it was more about fun and an extension of the way we dressed every day than anything else. Our favorite bands looked funny so we followed.

Early on, we played some stinkers for sure. Everything from soup kitchens, living rooms, even a day care center. One of my first shows with SW was at a club in Pittsburgh called the Electric Banana. Two people showed up. We played many shows like this for a while.

BEN WEASEL: This is one of my favorite Screeching Weasel albums. It represents the moment when the band started getting kind of good, and it always reminds me of how much fun I had writing the songs, in part because they were good enough that I felt very confident about them. I'd always felt a little lost when working on songs prior to My Brain Hurts; I wasn't very good at being able to judge the quality of my stuff. I've struggled with that on and off over the past 19 years, but every once in a while I'll come up with a batch of killer tunes that I just know are terrific, and whenever that happens (not very frequently, I'm afraid) I'm always reminded of how much fun it was coming up with ideas and rushing home to grab the guitar and put them on tape; and what a blast it was showing them to the guys for the first time; and how we felt such a sense of urgency about the stuff and worked on it in rehearsal until my throat just couldn't take any more; and how cool it was to start playing the songs in front of crowds - who immediately picked up on it even though they'd never heard it before - and seeing in their eyes that we'd made some kind of connection; for a brief time, it wasn't hit and miss - it was hit, hit, hit. There aren't many better feelings in the world than when things are clicking like that.

SLOGANS
BW: We had originally recorded "Slogans" for a short run compilation featuring Chicago bands on our first trip to California in 1989 (we recorded an earlier version of "Kamala's Too Nice" during the same session). I despised most of the prior output of the band but I felt like "Slogans" was a good combination of the old and new, and it worked well in the sequence.

GUEST LIST
DV: About a month before we left on the tour to go out to California and record My Brain Hurts I was driving through Roscoe Village when the chorus of "Guest List" popped into my head. I also had a lead for a song in another tune but it just wasn't working. I showed Ben and he combined the two songs into one and we had "Guest List."

BW: Vapid showed me the parts in Olympia, Washington, a few days before we were set to record the album. "Now I get to watch her dance like the other weirdos do" was a line that only could've come from Vapid - the rest of the lyrics were mine, as was the verse. Bringing the lead up an octave at the end was Vapid's idea - a hat tip to local heroes Naked Raygun.

VERONICA HATES ME
DV: This was a play on Material Issue's "Valerie Loves Me." At the time I guess we were harboring ill will towards their singer, Jim Ellison, for ripping us off at a show he promoted at the Exit.

BW: I tried to take the standard chords used in old rock and roll and updated by the Ramones and twist them around a little bit. When I started working on the song I made a rule for myself - no matter what I did to subvert the template, I wouldn't go outside of the standard four chords used in that style of song. After the break, I used a traditional arrangement to give the listener what I assumed what they would want after I'd held out for the majority of the song. Though I didn't write this song with Vapid, I definitely wrote it with him in mind; some of my best songs from this time came solely out of my desire to write songs that would impress him. It was a lot of fun writing songs with the sole intention of impressing your bandmates...

I CAN SEE CLEARLY
BW: I had a blast arranging "I Can See Clearly." It was the first time I'd done a decent arrangement of somebody else's song and I was very happy with the results. Our version didn't really warrant a bridge so I replaced it with the opening guitar lead, which then changed to a melodic lead for the last four bars. We didn't have time to re-record the song right so when we screwed up the ending we decided to fade it out. I eventually re-worked the lead for the middle of the song, it can be heard on the live versions on Kill The Musicians and Thank You Very Little.

CINDY'S ON METHADONE
BW: "Cindy's On Methadone" was another song that I figured Vapid would really appreciate. I like the "needles full of dreams" line quite a lot. I was really annoyed by the sloppiness of the breaks near the end but that's what you get with a low budget.

THE SCIENCE OF MYTH
BW: This song seemed a bit out of place to me for the album; most of the other songs were about girls and relationships. I really wasn't sure if it should be on the record until we actually recorded it. I tried to write and arrange the music in a style favored by the type of punk band that would typically be writing anti-religion songs. The song was partially inspired by the Bill Moyers series "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. Watching the series, I became interested in the practical application of spiritual beliefs. I was also very impressed with what Dr. Frank had done in turning his junior thesis into the ground-breaking Mr. T Experience song, "The History Of the Concept Of The Soul"; I wanted to try to do something similar by writing what would look like the Cliff's Notes version of an essay and making it flow instead of writing it in the manner of a conventional rock lyric.

WHAT WE HATE
DV: This is my favorite song on the record lyrically. It still holds up.

TEENAGE FREAKSHOW
BW: Teenage Freakshow came from a song Vapid had written outside the band called Teenage Peepshow. Musically, the handclaps were Vapid's idea, while the Farfisa organ sound was mine (I ended up playing keyboards on more SW tracks, usually leaving them uncredited or crediting them to fictional people like Jimmy Spectacular or Teakettle Jones [me and Vapid had a whole life history for 'ol Teakettle]). The song was also one of the first where I played around with utilizing traditional pop vocalizing as filtered through my own style of "singing" - stuff like singing "Teenage Freaksho-OW." I'd done this before using conventions of punk and hardcore but hadn't yet really gone into the pop bag of tricks - that was Vapid's influence. The verse and chorus are Vapid's; The recurring bridge and lyrics are mine.

DON'T TURN OUT THE LIGHTS
BW: This was an experiment in something new for me: writing a song from the perspective of a little kid. I have a lot of fondness for this tune musically, and I also like the lyrics quite a lot as it's the first example of me writing well from a fictional first person perspective.

I WANNA BE WITH YOU TONIGHT
DV: The most outrageous backing vocals on the record. It made us laugh so it stayed.

MY BRAIN HURTS:
BW: I'd instructed Dan Panic to play the drums like Aaron Cometbus on the breaks but it didn't work too well because he had too much talent. Really, I mean no disrespect to Aaron, but sometimes talent is a hindrance.