Emerging from Los Angeles, California in the mid-80s, Clawhammer positioned their music at the harsher extremes of hardcore punk, drawing the band name from a Captain Beefheart lyric. An early cassette release delivered a complete track-by-track reinterpretation of Devo’s Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!. Their first appearance came via the 1989 Poor Robert EP, with a self-titled album arriving on Sympathy For The Record Industry the next year. Patti Smith, Pere Ubu, Brian Eno and Devo again supplied source material for the engaging Double Pack Whack Attack EP. Mainstream attention arrived only in the mid-90s for the quartet of Jon Wahl (vocals, guitar, ex-Pontiac Brothers), Chris Bagarozzi (guitar), Rob Walther (bass) and Bob Lee (drums). Epitaph Records put out Pablum in 1983 to strong critical response, prompting an immediate shift to Interscope Records while retaining Epitaph head Brett Gurewitz as producer. Their Interscope debut, Thank The Holder Uppers, unleashed another fierce surge of angst-ridden punk blues anchored by Wahl’s unhinged vocals and irresistibly macabre lyrical images.
