Album: Oil Tasters
Year: 1982
Even by the wild and wooly standards of early 1980s indie, Oil Tasters were pretty fucking weird.
Hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Oil Tasters were a three-piece band consisting of bass, drums and saxophone. No guitars. They played a kinda funky, jazzy spin on punk rock. Perhaps the closest analogy was the Minutemen, minus the guitars and virtuosity.
Bassist and lead singer Richard LaValliere sang all of the songs in a strangled, garbled voice that never even remotely came close to a melody line, but somehow fit both the music and the songs, which had titles like “That’s When The Brick Goes Through The Window,” “What’s That In Your Mouth?” “My Girlfriend’s Ghost” and “(I Don’t Want To Be An) Encyclopedia Salesman”.
As you might imagine, this all went down splendidly with the ethos of early KFSR, and Oil Tasters got a pretty decent amount of airplay, and the one that gravitated towards was “Get Out of The Bathroom,” the kind of song that would endure itself to someone who was young enough to enjoy being dubbed “The Boy Wonder: the timeless lament of one roommate to another.
You can do that in your room
Get out of the bathroom!
You can do that in your room
Get out of the bathroom!
Come on
Come on
Come on
Come on
Come on
Come on
Come on
You can do that in your room
Get out of the bathroom
One of the things I like about “Get Out of the Bathroom” outside of the cheap jokes was the way saxophonist Caleb Alexander wound his way around the vocals and LaValliere’s bassline almost like a rhythm guitar.
Part two
Three months later
I still don’t have my sunglasses
Which I forgot on the toilet tank
You can do that in your room
Get out of the bathroom!
The other thing I like about “Get Out of the Bathroom” outside of the cheap jokes is the escalation, matched by the increasing frustration in LaValliere’s vocals — which started close to a ten in the first place — as he imagines a scenario when he’ll never get into the bathroom.
It’s now the year 2000
And it’s the year of the living dead
But don’t let it go to your head
You can do that in your room
Get out of the bathroom!
As we’ve established previously, in the early 1980s, the year 2000 still seemed so far away, but we’re now the same distance away from the year 2000 as we were when this song was written, and yet my guess is that the sentiment remains totally and utterly relatable to the post-millennial kids who will never ever hear it.
“Get Out of the Bathroom”
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