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Screeching Weasel: Snappy Answers for Stupid Questions 7” (Selfless Records, 1992)
This week I completed a 25-year journey. It was kind of a stupid journey, and I can’t say I’m proud to have completed it, but it’s done. And hence I shall memorialize it here. I have obtained the last Screeching Weasel record on my want list.
Likely the oldest item on my want list, Snappy Answers for Stupid Questions has been on the list as long as I can remember it existing. I loved Screeching Weasel when I was a teenager, and when I got online in the late 90s, I learned they had a bulging discography of 7”s. I knew most of the songs on these 7”s from the Kill the Musicians compilation, but the original artifacts intrigued me. I guess not much has changed.
One of the first purchases I can remember making via the internet is when Ben Weasel auctioned off a bunch of out of print vinyl on the Screeching Weasel website. If I remember correctly, the site was called Weasel Manor, and a fan actually made it, but Ben Weasel—newly online himself, I’m sure—quickly sniffed it out and took an active role. (Eventually and predictably, there was drama.) This is before I’d ever heard of eBay, and I’d never took part in an auction of any sort. I emailed my bids to Ben Weasel himself from my new Virginia Commonwealth University email address, which I accessed via the lab in my dorm because I didn’t own a computer. I was stoked to win dead stock copies of both Punkhouse and Radio Blast, both of which had been out of print for several years. I went to the post office to buy a money order, mailed it out, and some weeks later I got my 7”s, new and crisp and not looking anything like five-plus years old. It was magical.
I can’t remember when I composed my first want list, but there were a bunch of Screeching Weasel records on it. This is many, many years before Discogs, so I’m not even sure how I knew what was out there. Maybe Weasel Manor had a discography section, or maybe I was just trying to get all the original records whose tracks were compiled on Kill the Musicians. Over the years, I learned about other Screeching Weasel records and chose not to add them to my want list. There was the 1987 split 7” with the Ozzfish Experience, which was to be Screeching Weasel’s debut record, but the pressing plant went out of business after making only two test pressings, though sleeves were printed and circulate among fans. There was also a sleeveless, promo-only split 7” with Moving Targets that held little appeal for me. In 2000, the band released the double-disc compilation Thank You Very Little, which rounded up all the compilation tracks, outtakes, and other detritus that didn’t make it onto Kill the Musicians. I remember being really disappointed when I listened to Thank You Very Little, and if Kill the Musicians was an argument that I needed to pay attention to 7”s because they contained many of the band’s best songs, Thank You Very Little indicated that, at a certain depth, it’s best to just stop digging because what you find won’t be that exciting.
I’m not sure why Snappy Answers stuck around on my want list so long. Certainly if I had come across a copy in a store, I would have bought it, but I saw many copies pop up on Discogs over the years and didn’t pull the trigger. While Snappy Answers wasn’t compiled on Kill the Musicians, I knew the songs well because a friend had taped them for me in high school. Said friend told me the songs were recorded at the King’s Head Inn, the long-running punk club in Norfolk that my bus route passed every day on the way to school (which sadly closed before I got to see a show there). In reality, the songs are from a set performed live in the studio at WFMU in New Jersey.
Anyway, the other day a reasonably priced copy of Snappy Answers popped up from a US seller, and they even had another record from my want list in stock for a similarly reasonable price. So I bought it. Honestly, I haven’t even listened to the record yet. It’s just sitting on my coffee table, vexing me. I’m sure I’ll listen to it, but what I really want to do is slide it in next to the other Screeching Weasel 7”s in my collection.
As you can probably tell, my feelings about all this are conflicted. I guess I should feel some sense of satisfaction or accomplishment from crossing a 25-year-old item off my to-do list, but I’m having trouble mustering any feelings that resemble that. Maybe it’s that my feelings on Screeching Weasel are so conflicted. I still listen to their peak-era records from time to time and enjoy them, but it’s difficult to really ride for them given everything that has transpired since the days when I first started listening to them.
Actually, after taking the photo for this staff pick, I realized I might have to do a little more work on my Screeching Weasel collection. I was surprised I have 1999’s Emo, which I think is a pretty crappy album. I guess I have it because I pre-ordered it (I also still have the autographed poster that came with the pre-order), but I remember being so disappointed with that record after how killer Major Label Debut was. And I don’t have a copy of 1998’s Television City Dream. I like that album OK, but it’s not nearly as good as Bark Like a Dog. I should probably own it, though, right? And while I like the fact that my Screeching Weasel collection doesn’t touch the 21st century, I know there are some people who ride for Teen Punks in Heat. After that, though, I'm out.