To be sure, the early days of punk spawned a countless number of bands that, despite how good they may have been, are doomed to obscurity by small pressings and limited distribution of their records. Even if the bands have managed to enter the canon, their records are all too often so hard to find (and prohibitively expensive should you find one) that while you may have heard of them, odds are you never heard them.
This was the case with South Florida’s The Eat. They are a band that I’d heard mentioned, but never heard. Their Communist Radio and God Punishes The Eat 7”s were rare from the moment they were released, and hardly anyone outside of Florida were exposed to them.
Until now.
Jello to the Rescue
Once again, Jello Biafra and Alternative Tentacles are performing a public service by releasing It’s Not The Eat, It’s The Humidity, a collection of everything The Eat ever released (and a bunch they never released. And from the first play, you’re going to have one of those “wish you were there to witness them” type of moments.
The Eat were snide yet poetic. Musically, they belt out fast furious punk rock, like a Southern version of the Sex Pistols with a heavy dollop of added musical talent, occasionally delving into disco riffs and other bits of weirdness that sound like a backwater jam session between the Talking Heads and the Minutemen.
Themewise, their songs are as all over as their music, running the gamut – how exactly does one run a gamut anyway? – from politics (“Nixon’s Binoculars”, “Communist Radio” “Kneecappin”) to animal rights (“M-80 Ant Death” “Manatee Smacker”) to what can only be described as a lot of inside jokes and sports references that you may or may not catch, but will sing along to regardless.
And the album is packed. A two-CD set, the first disc compiles 30 tracks, including their two early 7”s, their cassette-only release from 1982, Scattered Wahoo Action, and an out-of-nowhere EP called Hialeah that popped up in 1995, as well as a bunch of outtakes from the Hialeah sessions.
Disc two compiles another 29 live tracks from three shows in the early ‘80s and one from 1996. It does a great job capturing what they were like live, and is filled with crude patter between band and audience and many other notable moments, including sweet covers of “LA Woman” and a raunchy, sweaty version of “Wooly Bully” that would have been incredible to witness. Unlike many band compilations, the live tracks are even better than the studio tracks.
The production isn’t great, fuzzy and lo-fi as is the production of a lot of low-rent punk records from the era, but it suits it very well. I’m glad that AT didn’t decide to slick ‘em up, and simply dropped it on CD exactly as it would have sounded had you been able to get records by The Eat back in the day.
Not only is It’s Not The Eat, It’s The Humidity an essential record to own because simply because it’s good, it’s an essential piece of history to own – even if you didn’t know they existed. Whether or not you’d heard of The Eat before now, the simple fact is that you do know about them, and it’s up to us to buy the record, play it and share it, so this great bit of punk history won’t disappear back into the depths of a few rich kids’ record collections.
