Mad, TAD And Dangerous To Know

In some ways, TAD were the quintessential grunge band. They were one of the first Seattle rock groups of that generation to be written about in hyperbolic terms by the British journalists who helped publicise the American scene.They followed the typical grunge trajectory of putting out records on the local Sub Pop imprint, taking the leap from that independent label into the clutches of the majors, developing debilitating drug habits and splitting up before the end of the millennium. At the same time, TAD didn’t exactly follow Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Hole into becoming one of the household names that momentarily infiltrated the charts.

If TAD’s career could be summed up by the title of one of their own songs, that song would have to be “Jinx”. The opening track from 1991’s 8-Way Santa boasts bruising riffs and lurching rhythms as frontman Tad Doyle snarls a fate-tempting chorus, identifying himself as a jinx who is followed everywhere he goes by bad luck. Initially considered by critics to be the most exciting frontrunners of the grunge scene and drawing more limelight than Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney and their other touring partners, TAD would end up watching many of their fellow Seattle residents soar to fame and fortune. For their own part, TAD tended to attract misfortune. Over the course of their career, which lasted from 1988 to their split in 1999, the band suffered from a string of unusual mishaps.

After its release, 8-Way Santa had to be removed from the shelves of record stores and reissued with blander alternative artwork. Its original cover had featured a photograph, found in a thrift store, of a trashy and inebriated couple, the male party of the pair cupping the woman’s breasts, which were wrapped in a bandana. In the years since the photograph was taken, the woman in question had become a born-again Christian. When she discovered the image of her pre-conversion self on the front of TAD’s album sleeve, she decided to sue. Another lawsuit was led against Sub Pop when a disgruntled former employee informed a certain fizzy drinks manufacturer that their logo had been modified for the cover of TAD’s “Jack Pepsi” single.

TAD’s luck fared little better after the band left Sub Pop, whose coffers had taken a strain under these legal issues. The band signed to the Warner subsidiary Giant for 1993’s Inhaler, but, while out touring with Soundgarden, they were unceremoniously dropped after a promotional poster emerged that featured a photograph of Bill Clinton with a marijuana joint superimposed between his fingers. “It’s heavy shit,” read the caption. TAD were subsequently dumped by East West just a week after releasing their fourth and final studio album in 1995: Infrared Riding Hood received no promotion and sold poorly.

“My psyche was saying, “Shit is falling apart all the time around me’,” reflected Doyle on those original “Jinx” lyrics in 2018. He’d jotted them down quickly in the studio when everybody else was on a lunch break. “I wasn’t the healthiest person in the world. I was having trouble with a relationship. It seemed like I was only comfortable being with the guys. Even that could be tiring and you’d want a break. I admire people like [self-help guru] Anthony Robbins who can see the positive in everything. I’m not that guy most of the time. I’m cynical. I’m kind to others but at the same time I’m dark. I think that’s basically what that song was about.”

Suitably enough, “Jinx” would remain on TAD’s setlists for years to come, with Doyle wondering if he’d inadvertently tempted fate or cast some kind of hex on himself: “Singing those lyrics, you might actually be attracting further misfortune. I’m aware that the word is powerful and I don’t go there with that shit anymore. I don’t want to pollute the universe. That’s something I learned. I’ve got grey hair. I’m an old dude. I think there’s some wisdom in learning from what works and what doesn’t work in your life, and that’s one of the things that didn’t work. But I’m still glad that song happened.”

As for the Pepsi debacle, Doyle can laugh about it these days. “At the time, we felt cursed with getting sued by a cola company. But how many bands can say that? In retrospect, it’s like, hell yeah! Somebody got mad. We moved somebody.”

As setback followed setback, drug habits and correlating behaviour worsened. The 2018 Record Store Day release Quick And Dirty included previously unreleased studio sessions from 1999. It revealed the band still had the chops to write strong material. However, by that late stage in proceedings, certain band members were regularly showing up late to practice and it was clear that hearts were no longer in it. “It was time to move on, more than anything. We were all at different places in our lives and it wasn’t as fun as it used to be, towards the end. I don’t know why. People grow apart sometimes,” sighed Doyle.

Heavy Is As Heavy Does

Happier times were had in TAD’s early days. The project was conceived by Doyle alone. Like J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr, Doyle had been a drummer in bands at first, before deciding to move over to guitar and vocals. He played every instrument himself on the debut TAD single. Other musicians were enrolled to perform Doyle’s material in concert and from that point onwards the project became more of a typical band. Doyle’s partners-in-grunge were bassist Kurt Danielson, guitarist Gary Thorstensen (until his departure in 1994) and, by their frontman’s own admission, “more drummers than Spinal Tap”.

Doyle had been drawn to the drums as a child because they helped vent his youthful frustrations. His elder brother, whom he adored, was also a drummer. The young Tad used to sit on the floor in front of his brother’s kit, imitating the beats on a collection of coffee cans and tinker toys. The older Doyle sibling was also responsible for another of Tad’s early musical loves. Tad would’ve been about ten years old when he received a life-changing Christmas present from his brother: the first Black Sabbath album. His parents weren’t impressed by the sight of this apparently satanic gift on that day of all days. But Doyle was hooked, and his mother and father’s disapproval only helped solidify his allegiance to Sabbath.

Later, Doyle drummed for the band H-Hour. He steadily grew sick of hauling his kit around and finding he was always the final person left packing equipment away while everybody else in the group was having a great time drinking booze and chatting to girls. “At that point I was really into Butthole Surfers, Big Black and a lot of the Touch And Go label’s stuff. I had a drum machine and decided, at 26 years old, to teach myself guitar,” he remembered. “Why not? So I did. I don’t consider myself a guitar player. I’m a guy who plays guitar in the way that I do it. Eric Clapton is a guitar player. Jimi Hendrix is a guitar player, although he said he didn’t consider himself a guitar player either and certainly not a singer, which is amazing to me... I hadn’t mastered the craft of playing drums but I wanted something different. I loved guitar feedback and the modulation of it. Steve Albini’s feedback on the Big Black records puts chills down my spine. Frank Zappa’s lead on “Inca Roads” makes the hair on my neck stand up. The guitar is a unique instrument in that way. You can’t get feedback out of a synthesizer or piano, unless you mic it up wrong or something.”

When TAD played at the London Astoria in 1989 with Mudhoney headlining and a barely known trio named Nirvana as their opening act, The NME called Doyle a “gone-to-pot Pavarotti”. It was one of the more respectful descriptions of the full-figured frontperson to be printed by a grunge-hyping English press prone to portraying TAD as an exotic bunch of primitive rednecks. This image was also fed by the marketing nous of Sub Pop. The label decorated TAD’s debut 7" “Daisy”/“Ritual Device” with a message beginning with the words “Hi my name is Tad...” printed in scrawled handwriting that made the artist in question look like he was mentally challenged. For promotional videos, TAD were encouraged to behave like forest-dwelling psychopaths who wielded chainsaws and thirstily licked the blades of their pocket knives.

It is true that Doyle had done a stint as a butcher, and his Idaho upbringing had taught him a thing or two about how to chop wood proficiently. But these supposed wild lumberjacks were educated fellows. Danielson had an English degree and aspired to become a professional poet. Doyle had studied music at Boise State University. As if taking cues from the Soviet propaganda machine, Sub Pop were desperate to suppress knowledge that the young Doyle had once performed jazz drums in the presence of Richard Nixon.

The band themselves were complicit in playing up to the sociopathic hillbilly image. It suited their untamed sound and lyrical concerns. “Nipple Belt”, for example, is sung from the perspective of the serial killer Ed Gein. A few years later came “Pansy”, which was about another man on a murder spree, this one luring young girls into his truck with promises of candy. TAD’s debut album, 1989’s God’s Balls, was named after a phrase uttered by an orgasmic priest in a porno film (“God’s balls, that feels good!”). “We were having fun exploring this redneck thing and we grew up around those people, so it was more like a jab at them than anything,” explained Doyle. “A lot of people took it seriously and ran with it. They thought that was who we were. And that delighted us even more.” Having said that, TAD did grow weary of the white-trash albatross hanging around their necks: “We were certainly more multidimensional than people gave us credit for. It became tired to keep hearing us lumped into that small, restraining box when we knew there was so much more to us. People pigeonhole you from the first thing [you do], and that’s human nature.”

While those who knew this self-confessed “big teddy bear” in person considered him to be a gentle, quiet and considerate character, Doyle’s onstage persona tapped into his more fearsome and feral side. He would roar, sweat and headbang while, to his side, Danielson would thrash about with such abandon that over the course of TAD’s career the bassist managed to crush two of his own vertebrae. Between songs, Doyle would engage in fierce patter and attack hecklers with the withering force of a seasoned comedian. Like those honed by many a professional stand-up comic, this exaggerated alter ego had roots in an unhappy childhood, when he learnt
to use humour as a survival skill: “I was a fat kid in school. I got a lot of grief for that. I had to find ways to get through the day and not want to put a gun to my head from the bludgeoning and all the horrible things that kids do to each other... If I could make the jocks laugh, they wouldn’t beat me up that day. I was a nerd, to boot. I had horrible communication skills. I stuttered. I had asthma. I was a mess. Making people laugh was really important to me. That’s how I found common ground with humanity.”

Those skills were transferred from the playground to the stage, where they could be used to win over audiences, or at least intimidate crowds into submission. Failing that, Doyle sometimes employed alternative techniques such as “jumping off the stage, flying at people, and scaring the living shit out of them”.

To capture their brutal sound in the studio, TAD enlisted key producers of the alt rock boom. Their first and final albums were overseen by Jack Endino. Prior to God’s Balls, Endino had recorded early work by Skin Yard, Green River and Soundgarden. Afterwards, he’d produce the debut albums by Nirvana, Mudhoney and many more records besides. TAD also worked with both Butch Vig and Steve Albini before each one weaved his respective magic for Nirvana. Now working as an audio engineer, mixer, producer and mastering engineer himself, Doyle wishes he’d followed those experts’ tricks a little closer. He considers Albini an “audio scientist”, completely immersed in the profession. It sounds as though Endino worked in a more freewheeling fashion: “He was really good at going, ‘OK, let’s mic up that gas can, put a hacksaw to it, and see what happens’.”

“You can’t sing so don’t even try,” Albini told Doyle when working on 1990’s Salt Lick EP. Butch Vig had a different approach for the following year’s 8-Way Santa. He helped to coax out the ‘singer’ that was hiding within Doyle and accentuate the melodic aspects of the group’s still heavy material. “I love Albini’s honesty,” said Doyle, “but he was wrong. Butch had great ideas on how to achieve a vocal that went from just sitting there to being something that came out of the speakers and into your face, in a way that was very musical... I had no idea I was going to become an audio engineer otherwise I would have asked a hell of a lot more questions [with all those guys], probably to the point of being obnoxious.”

Less proactive than Butch Vig was the man behind the recording desk for TAD’s major label debut, Inhaler. This was the notoriously lethargic J Mascis. Mascis brought in some decent equipment and apparently taught Doyle to be less hard on his drummers by cutting them some slack. “I love J and he was helpful,” recalled Doyle. “But I swear to God the guy was asleep 90 per cent of the time! He got a credit for that, got paid, and got a rental car on our dime. It says ‘Produced by J Mascis” but I think J produced more zees than he produced any results.”

Over the years, certain friends of the band as well as their fans and reviewers have expressed surprise that TAD never broke through to the mainstream alongside the other Seattle big-hitters. It wasn’t just the lawsuits, unwise decisions and lack of conventional good looks that denied TAD the keys to the castle. Occasional melodic inroads aside, TAD were harder, scarier, grittier and less fathomable than their plaid-sporting peers. TAD’s slow and cumbersome riffs make even the most ‘metal’ grungers such as Soundgarden and Alice In Chains look poppy and polished by comparison. In 1993, Metallica, Anthrax or Megadeth would probably have killed to
have written riffs as merciless as those offered by Doyle on Inhaler’s “Grease Box”, “Throat Locust” and “Pansy”.

While it has remained a relatively cult concern, TAD’s output feels less dated than other key grunge records. This might be because TAD had drawn on a stranger and more eclectic breadth of sources. “TAD are incredible,” says the journalist and author Harry Sword. “I know they are tied in with that word but I see them more like Melvins or The Jesus Lizard or Eyehategod, [in the] lineage of demented genius rock ’n’ roll. Dark grotesque Americana. I dislike the word grunge because it makes me think ‘earnest’ instead of ‘whhoah bam ba lam’.” Whereas certain grunge acts were influenced in equal parts by The Beatles and Black Sabbath and, let’s face it, not an awful lot besides, TAD were obsessed with the industrial metal band Head Of David and the malevolent and darkly humorous Wisconsin trio Killdozer, whose records Doyle believed to be on a par with Led Zeppelin’s. “Nobody sounded like us, and we weren’t jumping on anything to be noticed or comply with what was a popular norm in underground music,” explained Doyle. “Our initial goal was to be loud, bombastic, obnoxious, and certainly throw in some rhythmic things. We’d always been rhythm-oriented. I would say, hopefully without sounding too racist, that we were not as ‘white” as a lot of our contemporaries. We had more soul and feel, in my mind at least. That’s what gave us the legs.”

Although such influences are not immediately apparent among all the riffs and roaring, TAD were huge fans of Marvin Gaye, Sly & The Family Stone, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Parliament-Funkadelic and Earth, Wind & Fire. “That’s what we listened to a lot of the time when we were in the van going from place to place. We would pick up on those elements that didn’t necessarily translate to song structure but certainly influenced us to a point where we had a heavy bass element. Our first drummer [Steve Wied] would play behind the beat like a jazz guy, like Miles Davis’s drummers... so it’s got a weird feel to it. I don’t know if your normal layman would pick up on that. I grew up around a lot of jazz snobs so I can speak that lingo and actually play that shit. “Behemoth” [the opening track on God’s Balls] was definitely influenced by Sly & The Family Stone: the heavy beats, the huge backbeats, and the joy in that music. To us, “Behemoth” was a joyful song. Although it sounded aggressive, it was fun as shit to play.”

Still Heavy after All These Years

Nowadays Doyle doesn’t seem very jinxed at all. Given the tragic fates of some of his wealthier and more famous Seattle contemporaries, Doyle turned out to be one of the lucky ones. “We had an amazing career and I would not trade any of it for the popular conception of success,” he said. “To me, we destroyed every night. The bands we played with, we gave them a run for their money. I wouldn’t want to follow us, Jesus Christ! That band was insane. There’s my own horn toot.”

After a spell in the wilderness working as a tax and mortgage consultant, Doyle now records other artists at his Witch Ape Studio, oversees the Incineration Ceremony label, and makes music both in a solo capacity and with Brothers Of The Sonic Cloth, who are if anything even bloody heavier than TAD ever were. Formed about ten years before they even got around to releasing an album, Brothers Of The Sonic Cloth released their 2015 debut on Neurot Recordings, the indie label founded by members of the post-metal band Neurosis. It was as if, having once out-heavied the 1990s metal and grunge scenes, Doyle returned once more to do the same thing to the newer post-metal genre. What inspired Doyle’s comeback? Once again, he received a calling from the gods: “One day, when I was driving down Interstate 805 in San Diego, I just happened to turn on the radio and “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath comes on and it brought me to tears. I remembered as soon as that started playing that when I was a kid, the energy and the power of that song just consumed me and I go, Wham! it is what I always wanted to do. I’ve got to play music again. So that became the start of Brothers Of The Sonic Cloth.”


Electric Wizards: A Tapestry Of Heavy Music, 1968 To The Present by JR Moores is reviewed in The Wire 453. Subscribers can read the review online via the digital archive. It is published by Reaktion Books.