THE BAGS

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Track listing: Wail / Steamroller / Brain Masseuse / Sad Minnow / Arm And A Leg / I Can’t Remember My Name / (Howl At) The Moon / Mama Swine / Extra Eye / If You Don’t Leave / Oath

From the LP/CD liner notes:

The Bags never set out to make commercial records, but we were aware of our audience. People who came to our shows were a lot like us; fans of both punk and hard rock, Ramones and The Who. We planted a foot in each camp and blasted away.

But the Swamp Oaf record was different. There was no audience for this music. We made it to entertain ourselves. It was an indulgence, for sure, though a relatively cheap one. Albums cost thousands to produce and all we had were a few twenties in an envelope. So a big part of the fun was to see if we could create an album from start to finish in a single session.

We went to the original Fort Apache Studio in Roxbury, MA on the morning of April 10, 1989. Carl Plaster and Lou Giordano engineered the session. We recorded basic tracks — guitar, bass, drums — in the order they were sequenced on the album, then recorded vocal overdubs and a few other enhancements.

Carl and Lou mixed the songs in the wee hours, in the same order they were recorded. With two mixed master reels for Side One and Side Two in hand, we left the studio early the next morning. We played the tapes for Aram Heller and he quickly released the LP on his Stanton Park label in June 1989.

The album is a warts-and-all romp. The best parts would never have happened without the atmospheric mixture of creative freedom and limited time that filled the studio that day. And the questionable stuff would have been red-flagged and abandoned if not for the breakneck pace.

Swamp Oaf may not have been a great career move, but it came at the right moment for us musically. We had spent enough time together at that point to function intuitively. We were looking to take risks and find new ways around the old rock band norms. If it failed, who would care? No one was listening and it only took a day.

In the end the album had lasting value. Several Swamp Oaf songs became Bags set list staples. And the records that followed were freer and more ambitious than they would have been otherwise. As The Bags’ under-the-radar second album, Swamp Oaf set in motion a productive spell that culminated with Night of the Corn People two years later.