Squatweiler - One Eyed Woman - 1995from Huel Records CD "All Tempo Hot Pants"
Rittenhouse Square may have fathered an amazing string of pop bands, but a germ of MC5-inspired furor burrowed into the ground of Winston-Salem to emerge in the mid-1990s in the form of Squatweiler.
The band had something of a local college radio hit with "Willie Fight" on their debut album Full Bladder in 1994. I never managed to see Squatweiler play when I was living in Winston, but caught them a couple years later as an opening act playing before a dozen people in Atlanta.
Calling for the one familiar song only got me the belated explanation that it had been dropped from their repertoire. Soon after I stumbled on copy of All Tempo Hot Pants which kinda made up for it. Recorded in Mitch Easter's studio with a guest appearance by him on one track, this record is punk fury as it should be. Oddly, hardcore godfather Henry Rollins, who had fallen in love with the first record, panned this one as too restrained, but later took them out on tour. Their next album, New Motherstamper, may have been more tuned to his liking but lacks subtlety.
Band members:
Haydee Thompson: vocals
Stacey Matarrese: bass, vocals
Trip Costner: guitar, vocals
Fred Mann: drums
Posted by: Zach Coleman
4 comments:
Squatweiler was a great live act. I saw them at the WAKE Radio house, Ziggys as an opening act, and at the short-lived GoodFingers club down on Trade Street.
Unfortunately, Squatweiler never really made much out of the scene they created around themselves. As a band, they (Trip) were much more focused on proving how punk rock they were rather than building the foundation for a real local scene. The band was known to undermine other bands and wound up with some really bad publicity from their core fan base. They spun this ego driven failure as "punk rock" and started playing more distant shows, but without a home fan-base, there was nothing to support them... and they imploded.
These guys kicked total ass. I first saw them in '93 at Ziggy's in W-S. After that I went and saw them at every gig possible in the Triad, including the Somewhere Else Tavern. One of the things that made the original lineup so great was that it seemed to have that love/hate relationship between the members, particularly Haydee and the rest of the group, like the Who or the Sex Pistols. Maybe it just looked that way, but after she left it wasn't the same. I don't know about all the politics, but from '93 to '95 they were amazing.
I never saw them until my band The Meat Joy played with them in DC in 1998. After that they moved to DC and kicked ass here. Stacey actually joined my band when Squatweiler called it quits in 2001. But it didn't last very long, only about a year. They were pretty awesome, though
We recorded this across the gap of the first two drummers, Lauren and Fred. Some of them both here, along with the usual problems that come from changing a line-up in the middle of a record. I think Haydee wasn't even there for some recording, and some vocals were added later, but I could be remembering incorrectly. One song was recorded by Jeff Ayers at his place, and then mixed by yours truly back at Brickhenge, as Mitch's place was briefly called. I was never happy with the mix, as band and I couldn't see eye to eye on the sound, and the mastering didn't help either. Overall, it was sort of a 'breaking up / new date' record.
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