Review Revue: Tad - 8-Way Santa

Welcome to Review Revue, where every Thursday I dig through the KEXP stacks to share DJ reviews and comments written on the covers of LPs (and occasionally CDs) in the ’80s and ’90s, when the station was called KCMU, the DJs were volunteers, and people shared their opinions on little white labels instead of the internet.

I've been doing this series for a looooong time, and I think this is the first banned album cover I've come across! The original cover photo, which we see here, was apparently a thrift-store score on the part of the band. They couldn't resist using it as their album cover, and somehow — in those long-ago days before everything was everywhere on the Internet — the couple in question saw the cover, sued the band (and probably Sub Pop), and the cover was changed. But even though listeners of later years get a lesser piece of artwork to go along with the record, the music could not be diminished.

One interesting thing here is that one DJ (our friend Creed), seems to have had an inkling that the banning was coming. I imagine this was a huge story in the Seattle rock world in the early '90s. A single from this album, "Jack Pepsi," got the band sued by Pepsi. Those crazy kids!

Tad himself — aka Thomas Andrew Doyle — is still going strong. Most recently, he released a solo album titled Experiments of the Spectral Order Vol. 1, "the first in a series of music that is fit for the days we live in." I'm sure it's a light, bubbly listen. Check it out, and hey, maybe you should have him record your next album, too. Just maybe don't take his advice on album covers.