No band, here or abroad, captured the acrid seizure of post-60s death rattle fallout like Steel Pole Bath Tub. The fact that they made their noise a good 20 years after the decade had slumped to a halt doesn’t really seem all that odd once you let their particular demented tonk soak into you. Matter of fact, this is a band that probably would seem out of place in any rock movement. In their world, every rock concert was an Altamont; every movie was Fuller’s “Shock Corridor” mixed with Bava’s “Black Sabbath”. Marsha Brady went through the windshield of the family’s station wagon and landed in the confines of Spahn Ranch. In their best songs, something truly ominous and horrible is happening, or is about to happen, and we’re powerless to do anything but listen, fascinated, transfixed, morbid, believing.

SPBT formed in Missoula, MT in 1986, and spent most of their career in San Francisco, disbanding ten years later. Michael Morasky played guitar, Dale Flattum worked the bass and tape box, and Darren Mor‑X banged the drums. Flattum’s visual art career and side projects Milk Cult and Novex (with Mor‑X) are the most visible identities to aggregate from the band; their web site (www​.steelpolebathtub​.com) is a blur of cycling, monochromatic images with very little text to back it all up.

It’s probably best we can’t dig up too much more information, because they were an absolute horror show; a greasy, caustic slick of blown-out noise and bad vibes. They weren’t the slowest rock band, nor the heaviest, but the combination of what they did and how they did it made for one of the most convincing sounds in the history of noise. Their pedigree extends back to early 70s post-hippie feel-bad rock a la Black Sabbath, Dust, Bloodrock and Bang. It was tempered along the way by Flipper, that hypnotically frenetic bass-fuzz punk band that hung over San Francisco in the early 80s like germ spores in the fog, and through the Melvins, with their slower-than-slow, louder-than-loud approach to metal.

There is a methodical feel to their best work, a drone without the characteristics of a drone. Which is to call it more than repetition, because even though the grooves repeat themselves, their effect is cumulative. Instrumentation is specific and pronounced. There is a bite to the guitars that was missing from their contemporaries’ works. The bass is absolutely punishing, with a low end giving way to a muscular, trebly coating. The drums crush hard, mostly adhering to singular patterns, carried out with just a little swing to temper the wallop. But the band’s use of tape loops drove their material into the depths. Culled from TV and movies, and manipulated to suit their needs, these sound bites punctuate each song with a narrative, imagistic feel. Whatever feeling they were trying to evoke in a track, it was almost certain that they’d find samples to match it. The haunting distant moan of a train whistle, the tortured screams of an actress shot through with the sinister laugh of Vincent Price, car accidents, rallies and chants, feedback loops and harsh noise cycles … these pushed songs over the top when things got intense, added undercurrents of mood and texture in quieter moments, and established mood with sound other than music or words.

First one I’m gonna review here is a five-song affair from 1990 entitled Lurch. It’s most just under album-length; you wouldn’t want it to be any longer. Scraping this gunk outta your pores might require a day or two off from work. Ostensibly, this record is about death by unnatural causes and the chilling sense of loss around those that must experience it. Fittingly, these guys sound weary as hell throughout the record and the game face they don to play these songs barely fits. 

Lurch opens with the epic, “Christina,” and a very haunting sample: a young woman, sounding shaken and troubled, says “I just … went back and got the razor blade and closed my eyes and … sliced.” What follows sounds like a dinosaur trying to claw its way out of a tar pit as the song, indeed, lurches forward. The titular subject of this song is in a lot of trouble; she’s fourteen years old, adults are questioning her … she’s got a gun, a “chrome-plated suicide.” What has she done? What is she about to do? Who is this narrator and what is he to her? Could be a young suitor, an older sibling, a concerned friend. More likely a guru of sorts. Flattum belts out “Christina’s burning!” in the chorus in the kind of way that’ll put nodes on your vocal chords. The main riff of the song rolls in stuttering filth, coming back to itself outside of the bridge, hammering on just a moment too long, then snapping back into its place. It’s the driving force of this track, and the rhythm section is carried by it alone. Around four minutes in, everything in our song breaks down and the remainder of the track plays out as an industrial noisescape, its only rhythm provided by the tape loops of jungle drums and temple chants, horses bolting and whinnying in terror, and a tortured, almost cartoon-like man screaming. Guitar and bass feedback pours over these sounds as the loops speed up, slow down, and grind to a stop. To be sure, this coda is banded as an untitled track on the vinyl version of Lurch; it’s a bold statement for a band just coming up as the bulk of American industrial noise (think Boy Dirt Car or Controlled Bleeding) and Japanese power electronics were starting to gain notice.

Next up: “Lime-Away”. Our narrator is alone in his dwelling. “I could fire six shots into four walls, the ceiling and then the floor,” he yells. Something is not sitting well in a once-peaceful domestic setting. He can “feel the wedding ring” on his wife’s hand, and remarks on her skin as if she’s no longer there, as the bass and drums brood, awaiting the entrance of the guitar to bring it through. It’s difficult to tell what’s going on here … someone may be dead, someone is leaving the house in the wife’s car, perhaps with her body in the trunk. Cleaning products soak up the remains. This one is slower than “Christina” and even more menacing. “When she left me, all she left was an envelope/And a case of the dry heaves,” Flattum snarls. What the hell? Tapes burst forth with an unholy, buzzing, rhino-sized burst of feedback near the end as the drums roll out in a tribal beat that rides to a quiet finale. This is death rock Midwestern style, a thoughtless, uneasy paranoia of poor decisions and hasty retreats.

Beginning side two, the album’s gravity pulls us into “Hey You,” its slowest and most deliberate track. Flattum seems to want someone’s attention in this track, and can’t get it; it plods along at a deathly slow rate and pounds you over the head with its slow, thousand-yard-stare intensity. It is a road leading nowhere but down … down to “The River”. The band’s last original on the record, the tape loops play a pivotal role in this track, as we are told of “a place that we can go … a place that we can stay/meet me at the bottom of the river/cast your cares away.” Starting in quietly with the bleating of a lamb and the sound of rushing water, this track is the most pop this album has to offer, evoking Creedence Clearwater Revival. Flattum’s vocals are the most restrained here, and Morasky and Mor‑X don’t rage as hard as they could, but what they lack in dexterity, the tape loops carry in dreary spades. Each verse is punctuated by a blare of noise sounding like an animal trying to free itself from a snare. And its ending is a collage of children reading prayers and a frightened little girl talking about life after death. When the moment comes that this girl loses her life, Lurch lurches forward one last time, into a double-time cover of Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” complete with loops of Ozzy screaming from the song “Black Sabbath” and their usual arsenal of ghastly noises. Adding levity to a truly dark and misanthropic album, this cover also illustrates the Tub’s allegiance to its roots, and sets a precedent for walking the fine line between drama and horror, between rock and experiments, for the remainder of their career.