Sub Pop's 37-show Heavier Than Heaven tour, which launched on October 23, 1989 at the Riverside club in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, was designed to introduce European audiences to two of the label's most promising new artists, Seattle quartet Tad, and Aberdeen, Washington trio Nirvana.
Though the nine-country tour was set up as a co-headline venture, with the two bands alternating for the opportunity to close the show each night, when UK music music magazine Sounds publicised its British dates with a double-page spread on the two acts on the road in America in its October 21, 1989 issue, the editors opted to put Tad vocalist/guitarist Thomas Andrew 'Tad' Doyle as the main image on the front cover, with a smaller photo of Nirvana (then touring as a four-piece, with Jason Everman on second guitar) inset.
"Tad were much the bigger band," Sub Pop's UK publicist Anton Brookes explained simply to the BBC.
The two bands had much in common. Their frontmen were raised on punk, metal, noise rock and low self esteem in decidedly unglamorous logging towns, both cut their teeth with producer Jack Endino at Seattle's Reciprocal Recording studio, and both had released their debut albums earlier that year - Tad's God's Balls emerging in March '89, three months before Nirvana's Bleach.
“I imagine it was probably something of a coin toss to decide who got the bigger photo on the Sounds cover," Sub Pop co-founder Bruce Pavitt told me in 2014. "But Tad was maybe more of a colourful character."
Pavitt should know, because together with his Sub Pop partner Jonathan Poneman, he helped create, celebrate and amplify Tad Doyle's louder-than-life 'mountain man' persona, playing fast and loose with the facts of his life even before Tad the band existed.
Keen readers of the May 1988 issue of Pavitt's Subterranean Pop fanzine, might have noticed this early sliver of myth-making:
"Tad Doyle, former drummer for the disbanded H-Hour is a big man and has been working as my bodyguard ever since I started receiving death threats from various lame local bands. In addition to his bodyguard duties, Tad has been working on some demos over at Reciprocal Studios. The result is amazing. Tad plays all the instruments and can even sing and write amazing lyrics. Expect a 45 by June."
Pavitt was out by two months - Tad's debut seven inch Daisy / Ritual Device was released by Sub Pop in August '88 - but no-one in the Pacific North-West music community was complaining when they heard it. This was rock music served up as the locals preferred it: riff-heavy, thick, dark, intense, wired and a little weird.
"I got a rock in my hand / I got a spear in my hand," Tad growled on Ritual Device. "I got a bow in my hand / I’ve got fire in my hands."
It was a measure of Doyle's confidence, and Sub Pop's faith in their latest protégé, that neither song featured on Tad's debut album, recorded as a four-piece, with Doyle joined by bassist Kurt Danielson, guitarist Gary Thorstensen and drummer Steve Wied.
Named after a line of dialogue uttered by a horny 'priest' in one of the band's favourite porn movies, the excellent God's Balls repaid that trust in spades: songs such as Cyanide Bath, Satan's Chainsaw and Nipple Belt (inspired, like Slayer's Dead Skin Mask two years later, by Wisconsin-born serial killer Ed Gein), were every bit as as nasty and ugly as their titles suggested. Sounds hailed the album as a "grotesque piece of shit-stained yankee rock", a compliment, apparently.
“God’s Balls was really raw,” Doyle told the Seattle Times. “Our goal at the time was to have a record devoid of melody and harmony. And have it be just bludgeoning and bombastic, thick, rhythmic.”
This approach, typified by the album's killer one-two opening of Behemoth and Pork Chop, played up to the idea of Doyle as a brutish knuckledragger, was seized upon by Sub Pop's smart and knowing masters of hype Pavitt and Poneman, who started pitching the band to Britain's influential weekly music papers as unsophisticated backwoods lumberjacks, an image and concept that malleable English journalists eagerly lapped up when flown to Seattle on the Sub Pop dime.
"If they wanted to portray Tad Doyle as some sort of chainsaw-toting, dope-smoking, backwoods redneck who didn't wash and used to be a butcher that was cool by me, because why the hell not?" Melody Maker writer Everett True told Mark Yarm for his brilliant 'Seattle Sound' oral history Everybody Loves Our Town, adding, "I met him, and he was clearly an incredibly intelligent, witty fellow."
There's a certain frequency which'll make people shit their pants. We're still searching for that frequency
Tad Doyle
Not everyone appreciated the reductive stereotyping however, with Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil telling Yarm, "I was upset in that the way he was presented diminished the talents of a friend of mine."
"The guys at Sub Pop, Jon [Poneman] and Bruce [Pavitt], were experts at taking information and backgrounds and augmenting them, making them bigger than life," Doyle told Vice in 2016. "It was initially a fun thing, and we loved it. But it became rather bothersome after awhile because I think a lot of people coming to see us were coming to see a freak show of whatever that was, as opposed to really digging into the music.
"It helped, and hurt it, at the same time. I mean, we’re all well-educated in the band, so it was funny to have the kind of people that were showing up to shows, that identified with us, because a lot of them were that. And then there’s the people that were showing up that were just entertained by it, and then there’s the voyeurs that would show up. It was a double-edged sword."
In fairness, Tad weren't above playing the game too.
"There's a certain frequency, 27 hertz or something, which'll make people shit their pants," they told Everett True in March '89. "We're still searching for that frequency."
Interviewed in the UK by Boiling Point fanzine, Tad told interviewer Jim Mawdsley, "We spend a lot of time stabbing babies..." with Kurt Danielson adding, "Fornicating with dogs, bombing churches."
Joking aside, the ferocity of God's Balls won over influential UK music journalists, not least Phil Alexander, an early champion of the quartet while at Raw magazine, who continued his support when graduating to become editor of Kerrang! magazine, and Editor-in-Chief of MOJO.
When Alexander interviewed Nirvana in London in 1989, bassist Krist Novoselic pressed him for his thoughts on Bleach.
"I was fairly honest, and I told them that I was far more of a fan of God’s Balls," Alexander recalls. "Krist wasn't overly pleased, and said, 'Everyone’s got an opinion, everyone’s got an asshole!'"
With the gnarly Salt Lick, a six-track EP recorded in Chicago with underground noise legend Steve Albini (Big Black/Shellac), and released by Sub Pop in February 1990, Tad's reputation as one of America's hottest new bands only intensified.
"I knew Nirvana existed, but I wouldn't have considered myself a fan," Albini told me in 2010. "I wasn't a big fan of a lot of the Seattle stuff. But I liked Tad. Tad Doyle was an interesting character, and I thought that band's approach was a little more thuggish and interesting."
"We were fans of a lot of the different things that he'd done, namely Killdozer and Head of David," Doyle told CLRVYNT in 2016. "And also being a fan of his smart redneck type of lyrics and his delivery and the bands he'd been in. So, it was interesting to work with him as a musician. His style was much more, 'Don't fuck around, get it done. If you don’t know what you're doing, there's no time to experiment. You should have this ready coming to the studio.' That was his attitude - no fuckin’ around."
Sub Pop were delighted with the results, and funded a video for the song Wood Goblins. But when the label sent the video to MTV, word filtered back to Seattle that the channel thought the band were "too ugly" to support.
Though no-one could have predicted it at the time, further bad luck lay ahead.
![TAD - Wood Goblins [OFFICIAL VIDEO] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/eObop0waGII/maxresdefault.jpg)
Tad's second album, 8-Way Santa, was recorded at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin by producer Butch Vig. Heavy but melodic, it was way more accessible than anything that the band had ever done. Released by Sub Pop on February 15, 1991, it remains one of the finest albums in the label's catalogue.
"8-Way Santa is a great melodic rock record, and was definitely the record to beat in 1991," Sub Pop's Nils Bernstein told writer Greg Prato for his oral history Grunge Is Dead. "Until that other one came out in the fall."
On July 11, 1990, Nirvana borrowed Tad's gear to record Sliver at Reciprocal for a one-off Sub Pop single. A huge step on from Bleach, it brought the band to the attention of major labels, the trio eventually signing with Geffen. In May 1991, they too recorded their second album with Butch Vig, releasing it into the world on September 24. The album was called Nevermind. You've probably heard it.
Meanwhile, Tad were caught up in a world of shit. The cover of 8-Way Santa featured an old photo of a couple that a friend of the band had found at a local thrift store. Doyle and Danielson liked it so much that they brought it to Sub Pop for the album artwork. Unfortunately for them, one of the people in the photo was horrified by it's emergence, and sued the label, who promptly pulled the record from sale in shops.
My extracurricular drug activities were becoming paramount
"It was in a record review in SPIN," Doyle recalled to Vice, "and the woman saw it and did a double-take and said, 'That's me!That’s my ex, and he’s grabbing my boob, and there I am, looking like a stoner.' For a born-again Christian, that’s not gonna look good at church."
While lawyers sought to reach a settlement over the album artwork, things got much worse for the band and label, when they were sued by Pepsi. Sub Pop had chosen Jack Pepsi - a song about drunk-driving on a frozen lake in a 4x4 pickup while loaded on Jack Daniels and cola - for release as a single, with a cheekily amended Pepsi logo on the cover. The corporation was outraged.
"A lot of bands back then were incorporating corporate logos and making them their own," Doyle told Vice journalist Cat Jones. "I think Melvins used the Mattel logo with Hot Wheels... Urge Overkill from Chicago had the Union 76 orange ball. So it was kind of a fun thing to do. We thought it was harmless. However, it was associating a certain product that is owned by a religious group with bad decisions and drunk driving. So, I mean, in retrospect, probably not a good idea."
The single too was pulled from sale. Now Tad were faced with touring their brilliant new material with neither a single nor album available for purchase. They lost momentum, lost money, and lost their drummer, who'd lost faith in their future. "It was demoralizing," Doyle admitted, in a rare moment of understatement.
"That’s when things started going pretty south for me in my life," he confessed to Vice. "My extracurricular drug activities were becoming paramount instead of the music."
Like so many of their Seattle peers, Tad jumped to a major label after A&R scouts went in search of the mythical 'next Nirvana' in the wake of the success of Nevermind. Once again, luck was not on their side. Though 8-Way Santa single Jinx was featured in Cameron Crowe's Hollywood grunge movie Singles, it did not appear on the soundtrack album, which featured songs by Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden and Mudhoney, among others. And though their third album, 1993's Inhaler was another force of nature, the band were dropped by Giant/Warners after some bright spark at the label decided to promote the album, ahead of a European tour with Soundgarden, with a poster featuring US President Bill Clinton smoking a joint.
Though Inhaler wasn't a hit, the band were snapped up by another major label, East West/Elektra for their fourth album, 1995's Infrared Riding Hood. Then the A&R woman who signed them was sacked, and all her bands were dropped. It's entirely understandable that, having taken beating after beating, Doyle and Danielson decided to break the band up without releasing another studio album.
The music industry isn't always fair, and the best bands aren't always rewarded with success.
"We all thought that Tad was going to be the big band," Sub Pop's US publicist Nils Bernstein told Grunge Is Dead. "They had it all."
But typically, Tad Doyle isn't one to complain about the shitty hand his band were dealt.
"I am very proud of what we accomplished," he told Echoes and Dust in 2023. "A lot of my favourite memories are from the early days when we were touring in the van in the early stage of our career... We are all still really good friends and keep in touch with each other... At every stage in my career, every band and musical project holds its own place on my trophy shelf."
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