Mangled Demos from 1983
Mangled Demos from 1983 is a collection of various early recordings, remastered and released on Ipecac in 2005. Until 2005, none of the material had ever been officially released. A few tracks included in this album have previously appeared on bootleg releases.
It is the only record featuring the original lineup (Buzz Osborne/Matt Lukin/Mike Dillard). Tracks 3-13 were recorded at Mud Bay, a suburb of Olympia, Washington, for a possible album release.
- (2005) IPECAC RECORDINGS
- IPC-063 - CD
- Release: May 31, 2005. Tracks: 23. Total time: 43:38
- (2005) ALTERNATIVE TENTACLES RECORDS
- VIRUS 337 2 x 10" LP
- (2013) IPECAC RECORDINGS
- IPC-063 - CD re-released in a numbered edition of 50 with letterpress sleeves by Mackie Osborne for sale on the 30th Anniversary tour.
Track listing
Some song titles were lost over time, they are listed with symbols.
- "Elks Lodge Christmas Broadcast" – 3:52
- "If You Get Bored (Live)" – 2:22
- "Forgotten Principles" – 1:07
- "Snake Appeal" – 1:59
- Untitled (Flower) – 1:08
- "If You Get Bored" – 1:33
- "Set Me Straight" – 2:31
- Untitled (Communist star) – 1:02
- "I'm Dry" – 1:35
- "Forgotten Principles" – 1:19
- "I Don't Know" – 1:35
- "Matt-Alec" – 3:00
- "The Real You" – 1:27
- "Run Around" – 1:44
- "Keep Away From Me" – 1:22
- Untitled (Clover) – 1:00
- "Bibulous Confabulation During Rehearsal" – 4:58
- Untitled (Iron cross) – 1:21
- Untitled (Pencil) – 1:10
- "Matt-Alec" – 3:14
- "Walter" – 3:21
- Untitled (Broken scissors) – 0:24
- Untitled (Airplane) – 0:22
Personnel
- Melvins - Performer, Producer
- Buzz Osborne - Guitar, Vocals
- Matt Lukin - Bass
- Mike Dillard - Drums
- Mackie Osborne - Design
Liner Notes
well… it’s a long time ago now that this here little record was recorded. It NEVER was released. This recording is the only document of the original line up of the Melvins. It’s from 1983 or so. Mangled demos from 1983. It was a long time ago and you really can’t expect me to keep all of this bullshit straight. If you want straight facts, too bad… All of these fish stories and hogwash pour out from somewhere in the back of my brain and believe it or not sometimes it pours out askew.
We recorded in a place called Mud Bay, a backwoods suburbs of Olympia Washington. Mud Bay… not the rectum of the world, but you can see it from there. Hideous! Anyway, these two ex-hippie looking beer jocky characters had a "recording studio". I think it was in a converted chicken coup. Thinking back now, they were real fuckheads. They treated us like clueless rubes, bitching and complaining that our amps were too loud. One of the former flower children wore clogs, I think his name was Carl. Still, somehow we made it through. We spent a few hours recording, then we drove back to Gray’s Harbor and got drunk. Probably. We spent around a couple of hundred bucks on tape and the recording and never did a thing with it. I wonder where the hell we got a couple of hundred bucks? It’s all very vague.
I’m going on and on and on… I find it curious that I can remember in great detail random events and situations of over twenty years ago but from that same time period I can’t remember fine points like HOW we recorded this record. I only have the vaguest memory of how the amps and drums were set up and I remember nothing about the mics. I remember nothing about the goddamn mixing board. I can’t conger up a picture of the recording session but I vividly remember in crystal clear living color smashing out the side window of some asshole’s car right around the same time. It’s weird. I remember Dillard and I spending a whole afternoon tossing molotov cocktails out by the local mothballed nuclear power plant. I remember how we made them, and what the jars looked like, and how hot the flames were as they exploded in a 10 foot fire ball 20 feet from us. I remember running blindly through the woods in the middle of the night with flashlight weilding cops in hot pursuit. I remember almost getting my head caved in by two hillbilly rednecks who thought I’d "said something to them" outside of a local gas station. I remember getting busted by the Renton pigs when Matt "accidentally" drove into a park in the middle of town and we were forced to our knees at gun point as spotlights glared. I vividly remember staring down the barrel of this dyke cops revolver as she screamed at me "what the fuck do you think your doing?" I remember being so drunk in school that I had to run outside so I could puke in the parking lot instead of in the middle of class. It’s a mystery to me how I graduated at all.
OK now remember, this is the ORIGINAL line up, pre Dale Crover. The FIRST Melvins drummer was Mike Dillard. Dillard was a pal from High School. I got wind that he played drums from another classmate named Keith, a real barn yard exhibit. He was rail thin with a huge nose and a strange duckfooted way of walking that gave him a leaned forward hunchback making his whole skeleton look like it was melting in on itself. He smoked pot all day every day and never seemed interested in anything else. He hated drinking. It always mystified me. How could you like smoking fucking pot and not also want to tip a few frosty tall boys? Keith would get ripped to the gills then start talking psychotically about how hot these dizzy unreachable cheerleader types were or about his plans to join the Air Force. As I got more and more involved in music I drifted away from hanging out with Keith, I don’t have any idea what became of him. One of the things I do remember was having the hots for his younger sister... But, I digress, Keith is the fellow who introduced me to Dillard. Dillard was a year younger than me, so was our bass player Matt. When I first met Matt he was a jock, going to football practice and asking dizzy cheerleader types to the prom. I had been jamming with Dillard for a few months but we didn’t do much with it. We couldn’t. Dillard was a pretty good drummer before I met him, but I was a strict stumbler on guitar, I could barely play.
I really liked hanging out with Dillard. We hit it off right away and did our underachiever best to get as loaded as we could as often as we could. He had an older sister who would buy us all the booze we wanted. She was a monstrously good sport and always helped us out by throwing in an extra fifth of cheap whisky along with the 12 pack of "Old English 800’s" we would scrape up our change to buy. It was glorious. She would even let us "house sit" while she and her husband went away for the weekend. House sitting was a fabulous blessing, a place where we could get as loaded as we pleased without fear of being accosted by the local law. Usually when we set out to get drunk we had to locate a place that was semi private, which meant that most of the time we were hurriedly chugging our precious beers in woodsy vacant lots or behind someone’s garage while keeping a furtive lookout. Then we’d walk soused figure eights around town commiting various acts of pointless vandalism. Procuring the alcohol was easier than finding a place to drink it. Once while we were "house sitting" I passed out on the living room floor, to be awakened a few hours later by the sound of someone trying to break in. I could clearly see the outline of the burglar through the curtain as he ripped the screens off the window and tried to jimmy open the latch. I quietly made my way upstairs and woke Dillard to warn him of the potential home invasion. He thought I was fucking around until he saw me grab the shotgun I had noticed in the bedroom earlier and head back down stairs. I fully expected to see Charles Manson crawling through the window with a knife in his teeth. I was getting all geared up to blow the fuckers head off when Mike switched on the porch light and we heard the would be intruder running off through the gravel driveway. I was so amped with adrenaline that I was instantly sober... Aw sweet memories of youth.
Life was weird with no holds barred and absolutely no hope. For Dillard and I, the future looked bleak. We weren’t college material, school was basically a waste of time and even minumum wage manual labor shit jobs were few and far between. My family had moved to Gray’s Harbor when I was in sixth grade, to a town with a population of a little more than two thousand. To these hicks I might just as well have come from Mars. I was a loud mouthed little jerk getting the crap kicked out of me by Seniors. They had their little clicks going where the kids all dated each other while the parents were busy driving four wheel drive trucks and trading wives. Dillard, although he had lived in that town his whole life, seemed somehow out of place. Matt, on the other hand, came from a long line of local small towners. His family knew every other redneck brood in the whole area. During summer break his family connections got him sweet county gigs holding a stop sign for 15 bucks an hour. That was a fortune. It was clear to those of us outside the golden perimeter exactly where we stood. I never even bothered to ask about getting a cush job like that. Meanwhile I worked picking Cascara bark or chopping wood and mowing lawns for pennies. Getting hammered helped a lot. Once you were completely blasted the hopeless nature of the situation didn’t look so unpromising. Life was beautiful and the streets were paved with gold. One of my 7th grade classmates’ father was a Washington State Patrolmen. He always kept a HUGE bag of confiscated weed in his closet which his son would dip into from time to time. It was a godsend, like mana from Heaven. As an added bonus, it was quite a thrill to be smoking pot lifted from a cops private contraband stash. His parents were full time drunks to boot and could always be counted on to have lots of extra beer around for the stealing. We were young so it didn’t take much, if we split four or five beers we were ripped. Along with the weed in the closet were police file photos of car accidents and crime scenes, murder, arson, mayhem and what not - just scattered around. I remember being stoned out of my head, burning my eyes out for hours, staring at grizzly photos of people with their brains splattered all over the highway or guys with their chests blown open. What a strange trip for 7th grade.
So there we were, teenagers interested in punk rock living in Gray’s Harbor Washington. A nasty dull rainy dark hell hole filled with dumb redneck simpletons. My old friend Chris Novoselic still lives there! In truth, he lives in an even more remote and fucked up place than Gray’s Harbor. My only question is, why? Why Chris? Why? Why on earth would anyone with a choice in the matter and that much cash WANT to live amongst the rednecks? I certainly don’t - and I can’t even dream of having that much bread. I lived half of my life with those scary fuckers and that was more than enough. If I’m going to crash and burn it may as well be in sunny Southern California. It would seem that Chris has his sights set on some kind of government job and figures he has a better chance in Washington than anywhere else. But who knows? I can’t imagine what motivates such a forward thinking egghead like that. I could go on and on with my Nirvana observations… But none of that has anything to do with this particular bit of Melvins history because all of this happened BEFORE all of that. I’d known Cobain since he was about eleven, we lived in the same shit town… But, that’s another sad story.
It’s funny how life works. Kids that were crime crazy juvenile delinquent monsters went on to lead pretty square normal lives. I know of at least three of my former pharmaceutically dedicated school mates that became firemen or cops, and one particularly insane fry baby is now a goddamn criminal lawyer! His brother, the hard working teenage nose-to-the-grindstone angel who never got in even the slightest bit of trouble, who everyone thought was headed for a successful future, ended up wacked out of his mind on crystal meth, a washed out deadbeat, maybe his ex-junkie lawyer brother can help him out, pro bono of course. Hey - this shit just comes out as it goes.
Around and through all of this I was discovering punk rock. What an eye opener. I had always been interested in music but this was something far different than the shit that most of my class mates were listening to… REO Speedwaggon, Foreigner, Super Tramp. Jesus, no wonder I despised their shit filled guts. How could I explain The Sex Pistols or Iggy and the Stooges to cretins like that? I mostly didn’t try. Punk rock changed everything. It was a life saving world unto itself, completely outside of the nine circles of hayseed hell that was my daily existance.
The music scene in and around Gray’s Harbor consisted of teenage cover bands playing grange hall beer blasts and not much else. I remember once back then, I saw some bands performing in a local park, they were all playing covers of the song "Cocaine". Even at my young uninformed age I would have to have been blasted out of my mind ON Cocaine to think those bands were anything other than total crap. After miraculously graduating from high school I briefly attended Gray’s Harbor Community College in nearby Aberdeen - A major waste of time. It was there that I met an interesting blonde rocker character named Kurdt Vanderhoof. He was originally from Gray’s Harbor and had recently moved back to the north after spendng some time living in San Francisco. He was a little vague about the whole thing but I eventually figured out he had played in the Seattle punk band The Lewd. I had always really liked that stuff and was perplexed to find that he had nothing but bad things to say about them and about punk rock in general. He informed me that he had moved on to "Heavy Metal". He had a band called "Metal Church" - tight leather pants and all. Well, I was a bit confused because at that point Metal Church consisted of five guys in their mid twenties playing Iron Maiden and Scorpions covers to a handful of local high school rubes. Hmm… I remember thinking to myself - let me get this straight, he went from being in a good band from Seattle that relocated to San Francisco, to returning back to Gray’s Harbor to start up a "heavy metal" cover band. Something seemed fishy about his story but he was not eager to answer a lot of questions. Still, he was infinity more interesting than the rest of the bozos going to that school so I continued to talk to him whenever I got the chance. He had a fairly decent knowledge of punk rock which was rare in those parts and I was bored out of my mind. As it all turned out he ended up being one of the most obnoxious jackasses I’ve ever had the misfortune to bump into. Here’s the best part, I had no idea he was a HOMO! It really cracks me up now, and it also shows just what a half-wit he must have been to move from the gay rights capitol of the world back to a county where homosexuality was practically illegal, and it shows just how oblivious I was to what was going on out there in the real world. I learned later that his return to the Northwest centered around him hooking up with one of his former high school teachers. Well, there you have it. How brilliant! Some years later, that very same teacher was shit-canned for giving alcohol to minors. There you have it again. What really threw me was when Metal Church started to become a "big wheel" band around town. At one point I somehow talked Kurdt into letting us open a show for them in Aberdeen. We had done a few shows in Olympia and Seattle so we weren’t exactly new to playing live and I thought it might be fun, instead, they sasheyed around like prima donna rock stars playing some massive stadium, not a dumpy rat infested abandoned movie theater in a one horse town. It was nauseating. The whole adventure was an enormous fiasco. This erstwhile musical mentor and so called friend revealed himself as the false and dull eyed fool he really was. You live and learn. Meanwhile, years later the Melvins have a career in music and my old friend Kurdt works as a waiter at a Gray’s Harbor Golf course and still talks shit about us.
It’s funny to look back twenty odd years later at the wild mess that spawned the Melvins. I’ve been away from Washington State for over 17 years now with no regrets, these memories are amusing to look back on but that’s about it. It’s certainly not the good old days. It is what it is… or what it WAS. Most of the dopes I knew back then are still there! Or at least I think they are. Some of them are dead. I don’t have much contact with anyone from the area. I keep it touch with Dillard, and of course, Dan Raymond. Let us not forget Raymond.