The Mollusks have become so popular that it is occasionally necessary for us to play under other names in order to book smaller venues in order to avoid the crush of adoring fans.

OK, that's bullshit, but this was our self titled Ralph and the Dry Heaves tape made in 1991.

The big "hit" on this one was Love Is by Todd. The version on my tape is the one we did "live" at Shoreham Beach but there is another version which I think we used on some tapes which was more produced.

Track 05 - Love Is

Most of the other songs on the tape are punk and thrash metal inspired acid rock as might be suggested by titles such as Brain Fry and Vomit Zombie. The very profane Track 08 has one word in it and if I didn't tell you it was in there by providing the title you might not even have known.

Track 08 - Cunt

Three songs were covers: a speed metal instrumental version of Purple Haze and somewhat faithful versions of the Circle Jerks' When the Shit Hits the Fan and the Meat Puppets' Split Myself In Two but all the rest were originals. Most of these were written by Todd with a few by Nate. Ned set aside his fiddle and played drums on most of the tracks, though we did use Todd's drum machine for some tunes, and in fact we used a mix of both on a couple songs because Ned hadn't yet built out the drum kit to include all the pieces he wanted. The last song was really fore-shadowing for a lot of the songs on our next "release" - its an acid rock space jam.

Track 15 - Unprecedented Demographic

Self Titled Remix

The original tape exists and I could have just ripped that to digital as is but since I have the original recordings for at least some of the songs, I always intended to remix them when I dumped them to digital. This "new" digital version of the tape I've titled "Self Titled Remix". The problem was that I only have the original recordings for some of the songs and these were recorded on either a Fostex 18H 4-track or a Fostex X-15 to tape cassette. Since neither of those players work correctly, I ended up playing the cassette at normal speed on a regular 2 track player to digital (one channel at a time), then flipping the tape and recording the other two tracks backwards to digital (again one track at a time), then flipping that to play the right way in Audacity, correcting the speed (in the case of those recorded on the 18H which plays faster - thus losing some quality in this conversion step), and laying them out as individual tracks in Audacity and syncing them up. It was really a lot more work than the tunes really deserved but I did manage to improve the sound quality on the few I could find. The rest are just dumped straight from the only copy of this tape that I have so the mix is what it is. For example, on Vomit Zombie we're missing the first few bars of guitar because we messed up on the original mix.

Cover art by Renzo Vespignani (Italian, 1924-2001)

01 - Purple Haze
02 - It Started Again
03 - When the shit hits the fan
04 - Sue-icide
05 - Love Is
06 - Bandersnatch
07 - Brain Fry
08 - Cunt
09 - Split Myself In Two
10 - Morning of the Living Dead
10A (alternate) instrumental version
11 - Still Not as Fucked Up as You
12 - Vomit Zombie
13 - Grave Robbin'
14 - Scuz-Raw (War Sucks)
15 - Unprecedented Demographic