Blue Collar Rats: Lost Archives

19 of the 20 new songs were recorded sometime between 1975 and 1985 by the great musicians that have been in the Good Rats over the years.

Did I say new? New old. Old new. And its about goddamn time. The tapes made after that 1996 chestnut TASTY SECONDS had actually been lost. Or destroyed. No, let's not talk about it. It hurts too much to even think about.

But there were other tapes. Crude ones, made on oudated machines with tracks you could count on the cheesey toes of one foot; old, beat-up cassettes that had sat in Peppi's closet since Newark was a prarie, since grease turned black, since Jimmy Carter was in the White House.

Then one day Peppi came out of the closet. With a handful of mothballs and a moldy pair of PF Fliers, and a few tapes that still hadn't disintigrated. Pre-mixed outtakes, some of them. A crackle here, a hiss there, but what do you want after three decades? We're witnessing history here, Rat fans.