I met John Rickman in a math lab at college; we bonded over common hatred for the teaching assistants and later discovered we both liked the Smiths. We made an appointment to get together and jam in the basement of my house on Vine Street and proceeded to bash out arrangements of the songs. John's style of playing was unlike any I'd heard before—jazzy without being trained, flurrying without being too busy. I don't remember how we ended up getting booked for a show at Twisters, nor do I remember who we opened for, but we enlisted my jazz-musician summer roommate Steve Sachse to join us and asked another friend, Marianne McGee, to play french horn. During the show I broke a string, and realized I didn't exactly know how to change one. Steve played "Autumn Leaves" while I figured it out.

Stability arrived in the form of former Unrest bass player Dave Park, who was a real musician and whipped us into somewhat presentable shape. Our second show was opening for Yo La Tengo, who were very friendly and said they'd try to get us a show in New York. Meanwhile, we managed to book one or two shows in Washington, D.C. My high school buddy Mark Robinson encouraged us to record a single, so we went to Barrett Jones' basement and did three songs: "Skyscraper," "Ocelot" and "It's Hard to Be an Egg." Teenage Gang Debs split the session with us and recorded a version of a Pooh Sticks song, "On Tape." I was very impressed that John ordered pigs in blankets at IHOP after the session.

"Skyscraper"/"Ocelot" was our first single, Teenbeat 66 if I'm not mistaken (all my Teenbeat numbers are loose factors of 10 and 3 as I was born on October 3). It reflected my interest in minimal packaging spurred by a Factory single I'd found in a used record store: a John Dowie single on white vinyl in a simple clear sleeve. I threw in a business card-size "cover," and we were off. We had enough material for an album, so we booked time with Wharton Tiers, who'd done the most recent Unrest record. The day before we drove up to New York to do it, we couldn't find Marianne. She disappeared for a couple weeks in the end, and we recorded Bruiser without her. I wonder what those songs sounded like with that plaintive single-note drone she did so well—I don't remember anymore.

Not long after we recorded Bruiser (for $600, incidentally, and in six hours—three recording, three mixing), John moved to Washington, D.C. to go to American University. I followed and went in on renting a house with Mark on Wakefield Street in Arlington. I remember when Bruiser came out, I didn't have a CD player and had to go over to my Mom's house (Mom being the cover star) to listen to it. By this time John and I had started playing with Evan Shurak, a fellow student of John's at American, and eventually a rather strange fellow from John's hall named Rob Christiansen, a floppy-haired ska fan from Boston who used to come to our practices and perch on the back of a chair, smiling and waving his head and tapping his enormous feet on the seat. When I found out he played trombone I asked him if he wanted to try playing along; he bolted out the door, leaving the chair spinning as if in a cartoon, and returned so out of breath he must have been blowing pure adrenaline to play at all.

Our first show with this lineup was at D.C. Space, at the second night of the "Lotsa Pop Losers" festival at D.C. Space (the first was somewhere in Maryland). I remember us as being pretty horrible, but Chip Porter, who drove a zillion hours from Michigan for the show, liked it. We met a couple other bands that day that we'd see a lot more of in the future, especially Versus and Small Factory.

The next sequence of events is kind of muddled to me. We started playing a lot more, especially in New York, and we started recording a lot of seven-inch singles for different labels. Right now, I'm even shuddering at the thought of doing a discography. With the exception of "Erin Go Bragh," which we recorded at home, and the single we did for Jade Tree, which we recorded at WGNS, we recorded all the singles at American University, where Rob and Evan were in the audio engineering program and which had a serviceable 24-track studio that we could use for free. We had to go in late at night, but we could make as much noise as we wanted and frequently left there at 4 in the morning. I don't know if we'd decided to make an album at that point, but a lot of those recordings wound up on Exploder eventually.

One time when we were playing with Sexual Milkshake and Unrest at D.C. Space, we met an Englishwoman in wildly colored stockings named Justine Wolfenden, who worked for the Wedding Present, who were playing at the 9:30 club the following evening. She liked us and put us on the list for the Wedding Present show, which made us feel tremendously important, and eventually offered to put out a single for us on her label, Hemiola. The song we gave her, "The Government Administrator," struck a chord with British people, probably because it was about not wanting to work. John Peel played the single quite a bit, and he placed it in the Top 10 of his Festive 50. When we finally played in Britain the next year, we were all stunned by people singing along to the song—we were used to seeing audiences glance at their wristwatches and glare at us.

Mark made a deal with London's Southern Studios to "p and d" our new record, whatever that means. All we had to do next was finish it. We pulled countless all-nighters at American, trying to get the job done in time for a pre-Christmas release in 1993, but we missed it and had to settle for Valentine's Day the following year. We had a fair bit of press before the album's release and our first taste of being a band that people cared about. It was a fun time. We played a lot of shows and made a lot of friends. But we lost John, who'd decided the band was taking too much of his time. Thus began a long period of playing with different drummers. Some were great. Some were very nice to help us out. But no one really took John's place until the very end, when a Teenbeat fan named Ben Currier stepped in.

By that time, we'd been dithering for so long on whether to sign with a major label that we basically outlasted all interest in us. I can't remember exactly when Evan quit but I can't say I don't understand why he did it. Jane Buscher was a great replacement and accompanied us on what proved to be our final tours of the U.S. in 1995. By that time I'd fixed on moving to New York, and Rob was getting busy with his Viva Satellite project. A break seemed in order. We played one last short tour with the Wedding Present and Spell, who opened but asked us to open the New York show so their label people could see them. It was a typical Eggs travesty brought on by politeness—most of our fans came later and missed us. It wasn't supposed to be our final show, but that's the way the cookie crumbled. Until now....
—Andrew Beaujon, 2005

Where are we now?