Last Chance to Beat Your Smeat

By Brad Lambert

I got the call around midnight. Steve Worthless had just hit the city limits and wanted to meet me at Wal-Mart for his interview on the piece I was writing for his band Smeat’s CD release party.

“Bring a 40,” he said.

He insisted that we do the interview inside a circular clothing rack at the store while swilling malt liquor. If there is one thing that I’ve learned over the years when dealing with Steve and his band is that you just do what he wants because you’ll just end up doing something more ridiculous if you argue. This is pretty much the formula for his band; they are going to do something to weird you out no matter how unshakable you think you are.

Whether it is the horrendous distortion and feedback pumped through their amps, a display of unwanted nakedness or just being too sloppy drunk to play, Smeat has annoyed just about everyone in town over the last seven or so years and garnered a handful of loyal fans. Now — with Worthless moving to Tokyo in a few weeks and the group’s official disbanding months ago when drummer Danimal moved to San Diego — just seemed like a good time to finally release a record.

“I had to do it sometime,” Worthless said. “This is the first time we actually finished a project we started.”

But a record release party where the featured band doesn’t play?

“Only posers play at their CD release parties. We’re double jocking our cred points by not playing,” Worthless said. “All the greats seem to break up after releasing their CD, so why should we wait until then?”

The band’s masterpiece, One More Time With Feeling, a long awaited follow-up to Smeat’s joke of a demo entitled Fuck Chico has literally been years in the making. There have been five separate attempts to finish up the record and put it out but all have failed.
“We have short attention spans,” Worthless explained.

The advance copy I got (sans backup vocals on one track) truly does represent what Smeat is all about. The record is just plain caustic. It’s like punk rock meets Radio Shack, which is then smashed over the head with a Flying V bass, eaten and shat out through a distortion box. They’re giving it away for free at the release show, which will feature some actual bands that still play such as Botchii, Gruk, Botox, Nogoodnix and, fresh from New York, DJ Toh. The bill is still apparently open to bands with the exception of one.

“We’re not letting The Americas play,” Worthless said. “They keep calling us but we’re not letting them.”

When Smeat finally has its last hurrah, an era in Chico’s underground history will come to a close. They have characterized what it means to be young and punk in this town for better or for worse. I remember all the adventures I had with the band, like that time I watched them clear out the now-defunct DIYRG with a 25-minute rendition of their anti-hit “Cheese,” the $100 or so guitarist J-TOWN spent buying me $1 Pabst pints a couple Marches ago, the mosh pit at the Suburban American II release party that actually lifted all 260 pounds of me off the floor and flung my body into the seats at the Senator, the chicken thong and clown suit jokes Worthless is known for, the “tour” my band did with Smeat, the shows where Danimal played in a jockstrap and J-TOWN fell off the stage, the “instrumental” numbers when the band was too pissed at each other to sing, the Japanese exchange students who came to laugh at the band, the time when J-TOWN tackled me during a set and smacked me with his guitar, all that feedback, and the scariest of all: stories of the good old days before I met this crew of miscreants and they really tore it up.

There aren’t many punk kids around here that Smeat didn’t touch (usually in a bad way). And while they might not exactly be a good band, they were still there and they just didn’t care what people thought of them.

Bookmark: