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By Root 648 0

’86, we did a West Coast tour. We went to Seattle, and I remember it was August first and I could wear my leather jacket. So I decided I was going to move there. It was the complete and total opposite of Phoenix, which is what I was looking for. It took a couple of years, but I eventually moved there with my band, the Best Kissers in the World, in ’88. Once we got there, a lot of people followed us up. A lot of friends who would go on to form bands, like Kelly Canary, who became the singer of Dickless, and Kerry Green, who was in Dickless, too. And Supersuckers came up from Tucson.

EDDIE SPAGHETTI (Supersuckers singer/bassist) We didn’t want to be cliché and go to L.A., and Danny, who was a friend of ours, was saying, “You guys should come up here. There’s like three bars to play at here and there’s only one to play at in Tucson, and you can wear your leather jacket well into May.” And we were thinking that sounded pretty dynamite because it’s so hot that it kills cattle in Tucson.

RON HEATHMAN (Supersuckers guitarist) Everything was stronger up there, too: the booze, the pot, the dope. You get enough of anything in you, and it all seems pretty glorious.

EDDIE SPAGHETTI We thought we were totally awesome and that we were going to be the best band that Seattle had ever seen. How wrong we were. This whole Sub Pop scene was just starting up, and we were super-stoked to see the aggressive music that we liked was popular in Seattle.

KURT DANIELSON Tad had read somewhere about the “brown note,” this frequency that supposedly could induce spontaneous voiding of the bowels of anybody standing within close range. So at live shows and in interviews, Tad would refer to this frequency, and claim that one of the goals of the band was to achieve it so that all the audience members would spontaneously shit their pants.

JACK ENDINO TAD were a pretty scary band—I say that as a compliment. TAD went into the studio with me in late ’88, and we started recording the God’s Balls album.

KURT DANIELSON God’s Balls is a cry from the heart. It’s primal, it’s primitive. There’s a lot of screaming. We wanted to manufacture a kind of demented white-trash vision of America. Tad and I were fascinated with Ed Gein. There was the song “Nipple Belt” that was directly inspired by him.

There was also a song “Behemoth” that was about being attacked and beat up. Tad and I and a few other friends had taken acid, and we were walking down a street in the U District in Seattle, and we got jumped and attacked by a bunch of guys. These guys were Samoan, some of them were black, and they were all wearing these weightlifting belts, walking on the street looking for frat boys to beat up. But what they found was just a bunch of drunk punk-rock-type dudes with long hair. They took Dan Peters and threw him through a glass door.

DAN PETERS We were out celebrating my 21st birthday. One of the Samoan guys pulled off his weightlifting belt and hit Tad with it, and I just remember Tad goin’ down. We all ran in different directions, and I ran to the door of Kurt’s apartment building, which was kind of an enclosed area. And the next thing you know, there’s about three of them standing in front of me.

I woke up on the sidewalk with a bunch of paramedics around me asking me my name. Apparently the guys were goin’ to town on me, and a couple cops across the street eating at IHOP came over and pulled these guys off me and arrested them all. It didn’t sound like they were gonna stop beating me. I had a concussion and a separated shoulder. I got my clock cleaned.

KURT DANIELSON The album title? At a bachelor party that was being given for Jamie from Bundle of Hiss, we had some porn films. I think Tad was there, too. In this one particular film, there was a priest. He was wearing his priestly robes and he was getting a blow job. And he kept screaming, “God’s balls, that feels good! God’s balls!” And that phrase stuck with me.

TAD DOYLE I remember my mom, when I showed her the record … She saw the picture and she saw me smiling, and she goes, “Oh, you look so good.