The project was conceived by Doyle alone. Happier times were had in TAD’s early days. People grow apart sometimes,” sighed Doyle. We were all at different places in our lives and it wasn’t as fun as it used to be, towards the end.
“It was time to move on, more than anything. However, by that late stage in proceedings, certain band members were regularly showing up late to practice and it was clear that hearts were no longer in it. It revealed the band still had the chops to write strong material. The 2018 Record Store Day release Quick And Dirty included previously unreleased studio sessions from 1999. We moved somebody.”Īs setback followed setback, drug habits and correlating behaviour worsened. But how many bands can say that? In retrospect, it’s like, hell yeah! Somebody got mad. “At the time, we felt cursed with getting sued by a cola company. But I’m still glad that song happened.”Īs for the Pepsi debacle, Doyle can laugh about it these days. I think there’s some wisdom in learning from what works and what doesn’t work in your life, and that’s one of the things that didn’t work. I’m aware that the word is powerful and I don’t go there with that shit anymore. Suitably enough, “Jinx” would remain on TAD’s setlists for years to come, with Doyle wondering if he’d inadvertently tempted fate or cast some kind of hex on himself: “Singing those lyrics, you might actually be attracting further misfortune. I think that’s basically what that song was about.” I’m kind to others but at the same time I’m dark. I admire people like Anthony Robbins who can see the positive in everything. Even that could be tiring and you’d want a break. It seemed like I was only comfortable being with the guys. I was having trouble with a relationship. “I wasn’t the healthiest person in the world. He’d jotted them down quickly in the studio when everybody else was on a lunch break. “My psyche was saying, “Shit is falling apart all the time around me’,” reflected Doyle on those original “Jinx” lyrics in 2018. TAD were subsequently dumped by East West just a week after releasing their fourth and final studio album in 1995: Infrared Riding Hood received no promotion and sold poorly. The band signed to the Warner subsidiary Giant for 1993’s Inhaler, but, while out touring with Soundgarden, they were unceremoniously dropped after a promotional poster emerged that featured a photograph of Bill Clinton with a marijuana joint superimposed between his fingers.
TAD’s luck fared little better after the band left Sub Pop, whose coffers had taken a strain under these legal issues. Another lawsuit was led against Sub Pop when a disgruntled former employee informed a certain fizzy drinks manufacturer that their logo had been modified for the cover of TAD’s “Jack Pepsi” single. When she discovered the image of her pre-conversion self on the front of TAD’s album sleeve, she decided to sue. In the years since the photograph was taken, the woman in question had become a born-again Christian. Its original cover had featured a photograph, found in a thrift store, of a trashy and inebriated couple, the male party of the pair cupping the woman’s breasts, which were wrapped in a bandana. Over the course of their career, which lasted from 1988 to their split in 1999, the band suffered from a string of unusual mishaps.Īfter its release, 8-Way Santa had to be removed from the shelves of record stores and reissued with blander alternative artwork.
For their own part, TAD tended to attract misfortune. Initially considered by critics to be the most exciting frontrunners of the grunge scene and drawing more limelight than Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney and their other touring partners, TAD would end up watching many of their fellow Seattle residents soar to fame and fortune. The opening track from 1991’s 8-Way Santa boasts bruising riffs and lurching rhythms as frontman Tad Doyle snarls a fate-tempting chorus, identifying himself as a jinx who is followed everywhere he goes by bad luck. If TAD’s career could be summed up by the title of one of their own songs, that song would have to be “Jinx”. At the same time, TAD didn’t exactly follow Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Hole into becoming one of the household names that momentarily infiltrated the charts.
They were one of the first Seattle rock groups of that generation to be written about in hyperbolic terms by the British journalists who helped publicise the American scene. They followed the typical grunge trajectory of putting out records on the local Sub Pop imprint, taking the leap from that independent label into the clutches of the majors, developing debilitating drug habits and splitting up before the end of the millennium. In some ways, TAD were the quintessential grunge band.
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