How Violet Grohl Unearthed A Squirrel Bait Classic

When Violet Grohl and her band covered the obscure but mightily influential ‘80s Louisville punk band Squirrel Bait’s “Sun God” for the first time last night (June 24) at New York’s Pier 17, the significance was likely not apparent to anyone other than the nerdiest of music nerds.

That’s in spite of the fact that Violet’s father Dave has long championed Squirrel Bait as one of his most formative underground rock influences, and even welcomed the band’s vocalist Peter Searcy to sing “Sun God” at a 2017 Foo Fighters show in Birmingham, Al., 30 years after Squirrel Bait disbanded as teenagers. Afterwards, group members went on to form several other hugely meaningful outfits such as Slint, Gastr Del Sol, Bastro, Papa M and the For Carnation, transmuting Squirrel Bait’s Reagan-era aggression into more esoteric, impossible-to-classify sonic explorations.

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Now, Squirrel Bait’s impact has clearly filtered down to the next generation of Grohls, as Violet tells SPIN, “they’re seriously one of my favorite (criminally underrated) bands!” Indeed, Squirrel Bait was part of the reference playlists circulating amongst her band members while making her guitar-heavy Republic debut, Be Sweet to Me, which was also influenced by ‘90s shoegaze and modern industrial metal. Violet and her band are supporting it on an extensive world tour which resumes Aug. 19 in Berlin.

Eager to hear his reaction to last night’s cover, SPIN caught up with Squirrel Bait guitarist David Grubbs, who between releasing dozens of solo and collaborative albums over the past three decades has also found time to carve out a career teaching music technology and composition at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Grubbs will release a duo record with fellow avant-garde guitar hero Loren Connors, Somewhere in the Wind, on July 31, and is also prepping Bright Madness, his third improvised LP with musicians Wendy Eisenberg and Bonner Kramer for a late September release.

Are you aware of any other band covering ‘Sun God’ prior to last night?

The only time I’m aware of is that Foo Fighters played ‘Sun God’ with Peter Searcy, who is Squirrel Bait’s singer. That’s bouncing around online. It was during a Foo Fighters concert and Dave Grohl invited Peter out. Peter sang it and Dave played guitar. Violet’s version was uncannily precise, to the point where before she started singing, at first I thought in my head, am I looking at a video with the original recording of Squirrel Bait? The tempo was so precise and the drums were copied exactly. It seemed like they had studied the song and executed it flawlessly.

To your knowledge, has Peter ever sung that song in other forms in the years since? 

I don’t think so.

And have you ever played these songs since then in any form? 

No, no, not at all. Gastr Del Sol songs are about as far as I reach back.

It has been 40 years since the band played live. Has there ever been any serious discussion about reuniting?

We were invited by the Afghan Whigs to play All Tomorrow’s Parties [in 2012], but declined. You know, I’m never averse to reaching back. In the music I make, I don’t feel like once I’m through a particular gate or across a particular threshold, I’m done with it. But I wrote the music for ‘Sun God’ when I was 16 and a jjunior in high school (laughs). I don’t know. Reaching to perform a version of my teenage self, to me that’s just… no (laughs).

By the same token, it must make the members of Squirrel Bait to feel good that the band’s music is still reaching new ears.

Absolutely. My son is 21 and when he started pre-kindergarten, it seemed like a third of the dad in the class in Brooklyn at some point came up to me and said, you were in Squirrel Bait? That was the demographic (laughs), so I just thought, the audience of people listening to Squirrel Bait is more or less exactly my age. So, it’s a very pleasant surprise seeing younger people get into it. Drag City just reissued the two Squirrel Bait records. They’ve been in print digitally and via streaming, but I think it had been a decade since people could buy new copies that weren’t exorbitantly expensive.

Are the members of the band still in touch?

I remain really close with [bassist] Clark Johnson and [guitarist]/future Slint vocalist] Brian McMahan. I’ve known Clark since I was two years old. He’s my oldest friend, and I was best man at his wedding. I see Peter and [drummer] Ben [Daughtrey] less so, but we do band business, like so many other people, via email. I last saw Brian and Clark a couple months ago.

This is reminding me of watching Slint play a reunion show in 2014 under the I-65 highway at a festival in Louisville, and how simultaneously awesome and cognitively dissonant that experience was.

Yeah, that makes me happy. Slint was this funny band. When they were in their most intense period of practicing or woodshedding, they would frequently volunteer to play at parties in Louisville. They would usually set up in a room in someone’s house that had more or less the same dimensions as their practice space, so that they could play at precisely the same volume without a PA. People got so accustomed to seeing them that I remember asking a friend, oh, how was the party last night? And he was like, it was pretty fun, but Slint played (laughs). It just shows how people really can take these things for granted — like, we were having a great time hanging out until Slint started to play (laughs).

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