WARNING: Explicit language.

Treacherous Jaywalkers
Fourth Demo (AKA “Solar Landing”)

Recorded to Four-Track Cassette
August 23, 1986 at Outhouse (James’ garage), Mar Vista, CA.
Final mix the following week.

1. Solar Landing
2. Broken Rainbow
3. Relationships
4. Smashing Clocks
5. Crucial Truth Pt. 3
6. Reggae Song

In the summer of 1986, when this demo was recorded, I was eighteen years old. It was almost a year before we went into Radio Tokyo to record our debut SST EP Sunrise, which means this was one of the last demos I gave to Mike Watt around the time he said, “I like it, you’re almost ready to record”.

The “fourth demo” was recorded in our practice space, a small, cluttered, converted two-car garage in Mar Vista behind James’ parents’ house. We tried to soundproof it the best we could. Producer Steve Tounsand was a close friend and musical compatriot - see mustardmusic.bandcamp.com/album/re-mustard and the liner notes to treacherousjaywalkers.bandcamp.com/album/treacherous-jaywalkers-malibu-yacht-club-malibu-ca-16-november-1985 - who oversaw all of our early four-track recordings. There may have been plans to release some of these songs officially, but that never happened. This is the first time these recordings have seen the light of day.

This demo is unique in that I think it’s the only recorded collaboration between ourselves and our friend John “Lynn” Seagrave-Smith, a transplanted L.A.-Brit-back-to-L.A. (I actually was never sure where he was from) in the tradition of the classic English political punk bands Discharge and Crass. He had a leather jacket that said “Subhumans” on the back and an English accent. Digging up this tape, listening to the songs for the first time in thirty-five years and hearing his voice was a complete surprise, and reminds me of the importance of going through the old boxes of Treacherous cassettes, if not for myself and my bandmates, at the very least to preserve our little slice of music history.