The Beaver Meat Cleaver Beat
Side A
1. White Knuckles
2. Red (In My) Head
3. My Monkey
4. Strange Same Dogma
5. Son Of Man
6. Junk The Magic Dragon
7. Jesus Is My Boyfriend (aka The Telephone, Talk Of One
Thought Of None, Bitchy Beginnings Of An Oversexed Twelve Year Old)
8. IV-TV
Side B
9. Interview With Scott David
There has been a lot of speculation over the years regarding this tape, hopefully this will clear up some confusion. Scott Putesky has said on several occasions that Big Black Bus was the first Spooky Kids demo, so where did this tape come from? In early 1990, only a couple of months after founding the Spooky Kids, Scott Putesky (aka Daisy Berkowitz) and Brian Warner (aka Marilyn Manson) entered the studio with producer Frank "Rat Bastard" Falestra to record a batch of demos. Two of the tracks (Strange Same Dogma and White Knuckles) would surface on Falestra's South Florida industrial compilation "Funnel Zone." These two tracks as well as six others would also be put together on a tape (with their first radio interview with DJ Scott David) that would be dubbed "The Beaver Meat Cleaver Beat." Only a handful of copies were made, and they were released only to friends of the band, and to club owners for the purpose of booking shows.
In 2003 several tracks from these sessions would be pressed as the semi-bootleg CD "Birth Of The Anti-Christ." From what I can gather, Falestra sold the tapes to some bootleggers (who thanked him in the liner notes) and the disc was released without the approval of Scott or Manson. It must have been semi-legitimate, though, because it was carried by major retailers like amazon.com and Best Buy, who do not normally stock your usual bootleg fare. BOTAC was missing White Knuckles and Junk The Magic Dragon, but also included an alterate version of Same Strange Dogma and a short intro listed as "Wrong Radio Noise." This was just a distorted sample of the theme song from "Charles In Charge," the lame '80's sitcom. Scott has confirmed that the band did use that as intro music before some early shows, so it is a legitimate Spooky Kids track.
I was recently able to take a listen to a low generation copy of what I believe to have been an original Beaver Meat Cleaver Beat. This was a dub obtained by one collector, who got it from another collector who apparently paid a large amount of money to get an original from Falestra. This was a collector with an extensive collection of Spooky Kids memorabila, and not someone who would be easily duped, so I tend to believe that this is legitimate. That tape did not have cover artwork so above I have used a scan of a supposed cover to BMCB that Spooky Nate has posted on his page, which was provided to him by a fan called Lucifer's Uncle Mike. I'm inclined to believe that this is a fake due to the fact that the text layout appears to be computer generated, where the other early demo tapes and flyers were done by hand. If you look at the other early demos such as Grist-O-Line, or Big Black Bus, the lyrics look as if they were typed up on a typewriter, cut out, and hand-pasted onto the layout. On the fake BMCB cover, the lyrics are a dense, solid block of text with a sans-seriff font, something obviously created on a computer. Seeing as Manson was a writer at a music paper at the time, it is conceivable that he would have had access to the crude Macintosh page layout software available at the time, but it doesn't match the style of the other early demos. This tape also is similar to the apparently fake version of Big Black Bus, with same type-justified blocks of text, meaning they were probably produced by the same person.
I've compared the versions, and the tracks are the same versions that were released as BOTAC, with the exception of White Knuckles, which is the same as on Funnel Zone. The Scott David interview was also something I'd never heard of, which is another reason I'd tend to believe that this is all for real. I haven't heard the entire interview, but the part that I did hear had Manson using a vocal processor to distort his voice for the interview. Apparently later on they play a couple of tracks from the other side, but I haven't heard that part yet.
I also should note that Red (In My Head) is the same recording that can be found in remastered form on Lunchboxes & Chocklit Cows. IV-TV and Junk The Magic Dragon both will be on the second volume of Spooky Kids remasters, to be released some time in the near future. The version of White Knuckles on LB&CC is the same as on BMCB, only the intro has been extended.
Thanks to Spooky Nate for the lyrics!