Steel Wool Bring the Luck

My first experience seeing Steel Wool live was in the living room of some house in Seattle. I can’t even remember which neighborhood it was. They played with the punk-pop band Sicko, and the sole attempt at soundproofing the room consisted of an old mattress, which someone had leaned in front of the windows on the side of the room. Within 20 minutes, the cops had arrived, and everything went quiet until the police left. Then, the rock continued.

Steel Wool never achieved, even locally, the plaudits heaped on other bands at that time. They formed in the early 90s, just after the national attention on Seattle had reached its fever pitch, playing a style they called “grange” (grunge with a little Hank Williams in the mix). They owe their biggest stylistic debt to Mudhoney—or, to be more accurate, Mark Arm and Steve Turner’s side project, The Monkey Wrench. I don’t mean to imply that they sound derivative. They took those influences sound of their own. Had they formed just a year or two earlier, I suspect that they would have attracted a much larger following.

The vitals: Steel Wool was Jon Wright on guitar and Rhodes, Sean Hollowell on guitar, Dave Pelo on drums, and Steve Dukich on bass. Wright, Hollowell, and Dukich all shared the microphone, and Pelo also sang back-up. From what I can find, they released two LPs (Simple Men Who Like Working with Their Hands and Lucky Boy, both on eMpTy) and two singles (“Ian” on eMpTy [1992] and “Devil’s Night” [1994] on Bag of Hammers).

The mp3s are all from Lucky Boy, which appears to be out of print. (If someone can correct me, we’ll remove ‘em.) The entire record is at least pretty good, and a couple of tracks are completely excellent. The instrumental “60 Pound Wharf Rat” was, I suppose, their “hit”; they played it every time I saw them, and I even witness the aforementioned Sicko cover it once. “Pagan Baby” is a Creedence cover. I consider “Dog That Bites” to be their crowning achievement. It’s an utterly ferocious, garage-y song that would reduce Jon Spencer to a quivering little Kleenex-eater. If you’re only curious enough to download one mp3, well, there it is for ya’.

Jon Wright’s name has popped up on a few other records as a photographer; he also engineered Black Madonna by the Austerity Program. Steve Dukich briefly filled the bass slot in Mudhoney after Matt Lukin retired in 2001. Dukich played on Mudhoney’s Brazilian tour in 2001 and appears on one released song (“Who Will Be the Next in Line” on the Kinks tribute Give The People What They Want [Sub Pop]). I can’t find any information on Hollowell or Pelo, and internet searches haven’t yielded any information regarding current projects for the former members of Steel Wool.

Scratch Your Ass and Bark at the Moon
Combine
Four Winds
Candy Man
I’m Strong
Dog That Bites
I Don’t Want One
Pagan Baby
Flog That Horse
60 Pound Wharf Rat
Lost
Stop Touching Me!
Lucky Boy

. . . all on this handy .zip file.

--Wm