SQUELCHER & All Your Tone Is Wrong

great songs excellent perfomance
Rob Elba
Brian Franklin
Willaim Trev
Russell Mofsky
Andre Serafini
Rat's antics are legendary, and stories about him often involve elements of humor, insubordination, obsession, destruction and violence—though, it must be noted, Rat is more often than not the target of violent intentions rather than the perpetrator of them. For all his provocative musical tendencies, the tall and stocky Rat is something of a pacifist; he would rather raise the volume of his guitar than his fists. In the late 1990s, during a performance with the extreme-noise trio To Live and Shave in L.A. at Fort Lauderdale's Edge nightclub—now Revolution Live—Rat continued to play his instrument while a member of the security detail attempted to cut short the group's set by wringing Rat's neck with his hands. During a solo performance at the same venue, Rat was accosted onstage by several hulking members of the rap-rock outfit L.U.N.G.S., who were incensed that he had recorded a song titled "L.U.N.G.S. Ink Lane Bryant Endorsement Pact," a wry, insulting reference to the plus-size-women's clothing line. Unscathed and undeterred, Rat improvised a song about the band as the bemused rappers stomped offstage and out of the club. After a particularly sonic appearance by Rat's Laundry Room Squelchers at the City Link Music Fest, a downtown Fort Lauderdale bar faxed this magazine's editorial office demanding that "the Rat Bastard" be banned from further festival appearances. And, of course, as writer Tom Bowker recalled in a recent story for The Miami Herald, a self-appointed music critic in 2003 ordered Rat at gunpoint to stop playing during one of his long-running Thursday night "squelches" at Churchill's. Rat dared the man to shoot him and kept on playing. The man lowered the gun from Rat's forehead and fled the pub. (In a recent phone call, Rat confirmed the story, saying the man returned to the bar the following week to apologize, explaining that he is a decent family man who simply snapped during the Squelchers' set. "The music made him nuts," Rat observes.)

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Music

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