I’m going to take a stab that for more than half of you reading this, the band Steel Pole Bath Tub was before your time. They belonged to an era where a band couldn’t share its music with a limitless number of people without leaving the house. They lived in a music scene that was documented largely by zines, college radio airplay, and crosstalk in between fans. Naturally, they are all but forgotten today except by those who were there and whoever those people talked to about it.
But anonymity can be a wonderful thing, especially when one is committed to making evil music. And Steel Pole Bath Tub was certainly all about that. It seems so unlikely that the group’s dirge-like stew of minor chord aggression, shit-eating grins, Hawaiian shirts, traumatic heaviness, and a primary reliance on TV and movie samples in their songs could find release in the current marketplace. Intellectual property being what it is today, it could cost millions to clear much of the material that was part of the Tub’s sonic foundations. Punk rock and the non-instantaneous spread of information meant that if you wanted to find these guys while they existed–roughly 1986 to 1996–you’d have to do the legwork yourself. Most copyright holders didn’t even bother, and for the longest time, the group’s work carried on unimpeded. This is how we kept it together back then, when the whole of human experience hadn’t been placed at our feet for us to gloss over. But by participating in this endeavor, none of us knew that we’d join what would amount to the last generation that would need to go about it this way.
Originally hailing from Montana, the group traveled west, settling first in Seattle, and then in San Francisco, where they spent the bulk of their career. SF and its surrounding areas have been a hotbed for weirdness in popular culture since the ‘60s, and guitarist Mike Morasky, bassist/tape operator Dale Flattum, and drummer Darren Mor-X seemed to consume as much as it spat out in that regard. True crime novel adaptations, steam whistles, ominous soundtrack music, clips from “The Brady Bunch” and “Speed Racer,” Vincent Price’s sinister laugh, the bubbling of some random elixir in a make-believe laboratory, a woman’s scream, and the ever-present burbling of a Galaga machine were just a few of the sonic artifacts that peppered their nail-biting, isolationist smears of syrupy nightmare put to punk rock’s rotten-apple core.
Their former label-mates the Melvins showed us, through deed and action, how to make music sound evil. Steel Pole Bath Tub, however, decided to show us why, and this is the reason their music endures with a small but dedicated following to this day. You don’t need to look much further than your local news broadcast to understand how a medium like television makes the most out of trying to scare you senseless. Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, before cable and in the heyday of independently-owned TV and radio stations, it was as if the entire TV experience was designed to give you nightmares. Mr. Yuk commercials, “Chiller Theater” rebroadcasts of pulp trash, decrepit old cartoons and dramatic re-enactments of actual events. Lester Bangs even wrote about the gleeful recklessness of how these operators carried themselves, barely serving the public interest and loading us up with the subcultural wares we secretly all wanted. I think the Tub understood this better than most, and this is why their main body of work–the LPs Butterfly Love (1989), Tulip (1991), and The Miracle of Sound in Motion (1993), as well as major EPs Lurch (1990) and Some Cocktail Suggestions (1994), not to mention the dozens of 7” singles they released–have held up so well. Not only do they serve as a tent pole for the times, but also for those before it. The group’s riotous use of imagery in their cover art, posters and apparel also carry on the same traditions, lampooning and fetishizing past crazes like Tiki bar culture and attacking the mainstream in dripping handfuls (witness a sweatshirt with a gun on the front and the words “JUST DO IT” printed down each sleeve, or a T-shirt featuring Colonel Sanders with skulls in his eye sockets, artifacts to which only a less litigious society could commit).
Alas, the suburban media blitz and cultural paranoia that saturated Steel Pole Bath Tub’s fundamental ideas have changed enough to be considered passé in terms of how they affect us. Horror isn’t what it used to be. Our misfits no longer have the outlets of matinees and horror conventions to treat as their own. Now everyone’s every move is scrutinized, often at the will of the individual searching for recognition and a connection with others. Those who don’t fit in can no longer disappear. Spend some time with the music of Steel Pole Bath Tub and all of the unseen horrors and wildly sexualized afterthoughts that come with them will rush back to the fore. It’s time.