The Rat Bastards

The Rat Bastards originally got together in fall 1996 to record a Christmas album featuring a bunch of cringy characters we'd created through various prank phone calls the previous summer. We quickly realized that it was much more fun to just write goofy songs about everything imaginable, from cookies to pimps to the supernatural.

We recorded two self-released albums, It's Only Three Dollars and Probably an Insect, the latter of which was picked up by now-defunct Pennsylvania label M8BR Records and retitled Beware the Rat Bastards. I'm not sure what our goals as a band were at the time, but I was just happy to be making music and spreading our tapes around.

In early 1998 I met Connor Bell and there was some talk of him joining the band, but I honestly don't think he was prepared for how dumb we were and it never panned out. He was a great friend though, and helped us set our first show at Primizee's that summer. Up until that point I had handled both guitar and drum duties for the band, so we recruited Matt Bott to play drums mere days before the first show was scheduled to take place. We ended up playing a grand total of three shows, the first and last at Primizee's and the middle show at the Total Eclipse, none of them particularly good. We said so long to Matt and went back to recording dumb songs in our basement.

We had a third album planned and partially finished, but the band sort of fell apart. Ryan dropped off the face of the earth, Robby went on to play drums in the Electric Heimann and Band of Carnies, and I moved to Boston and then San Francisco.

Robby and I revived the band in 2006 and worked on some new material over the new few years, and we contributed to the Royal Buttons Vend-A-Pin compilation in 2011. We recruited Robby's Band of Carnies bandmates J Alister (bass) and Ben (guitar) and began playing shows once or twice a year, usually with little-to-no practice or preparation before. We contributed to a few more comps, released a few EPs, and finally released our third album in 2021.

Hopefully we'll be able to play some shows once Covid simmers the fuck down, and we might even practice for them.

-Joe

Members:

Joe Powers - guitar, drums, vocals
Robby King - drums, bass, vocals
J Alister Webb - bass, vocals (2011 - present)
Ben Fields - guitar, vocals (2011 - 2013)
Nathan Christ - guitar (2015)
Ryan Murphy - bass, vocals (1996 - 2000)
David Buschermohle - drums (1996 - 1997)
Matt Murphy - vocals (1996)
Matt Bott - drums (1998)

Releases: