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The Chevron
Cracked Out Squirrel formed in Turlock, California, in the fall of 1981, three months after Del Yaeger watched a ground squirrel run sideways under a cattle truck at the Chevron on Golden State Boulevard. The name predated the band by a season. It also predated most of the decisions.
Del knew Rudy Marroquin from the Chevron. Rudy knew Wanda Pesce from a house party in Ceres. Wanda knew Kenner Slocum from the music program at Stanislaus State, where Slocum had been on partial scholarship and was, at the time, three weeks from dropping out. The four of them agreed to try in Slocum's grandmother's garage in Delhi. They agreed on nothing else for the next six months except that the songs should be short and the amps should be turned up.
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The Method
Where Alternate Squirrel operated on the Policy — never repeat a section — Cracked Out Squirrel operated on the opposite. They called it, when they called it anything, the Method: play the same riff until it dies. Take it faster. Turn the amps up. Do not stop when a member drops out mid-song. Do not stop when the drummer collapses. Songs got shorter, not longer, as the band got tighter — the fastest recorded track on the record is eighty-eight seconds long and speeds up ten BPM across its length.
Live, this meant a set was rarely the same length twice, because it depended on how long Slocum could keep the tempo. On a good night: forty minutes across eighteen songs. On a bad night: sixteen songs, then a stopped drummer, then everyone else finishing the last riff on their own until they noticed. Yaeger regarded this as the point. He was not wrong.
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Sideways at Merced
They released one album (Turlock Runs Sideways, on Overload Tapes, 1982) and one EP (Two Minute Warning, 1984), and toured — if that is the word — a rectangle bounded by Fresno, Sacramento, San Jose, and Bakersfield, over roughly forty weekends. They never played farther east than Merced and never played farther west than the sandbar off Alviso, where a promoter Wanda knew from Ceres arranged a show at low tide that ended when the tide came in.
The band ended on October 12, 1985, in the meeting room of the Merced VFW, four songs into the set, when Slocum collapsed at the kit for the fourth time that year and did not get back up. He was fine; he sat up ten minutes later, drank a Mountain Dew, and said he was done. Nobody argued. The Method, as Yaeger observed on the drive home, had done what it said it would.
Trip and Bug tried to continue as a two-piece for six months and could not. Rudy had the carnicería. That was it. Nothing here died slow.
