The majority of songs from Too Much Pork For Just One Fork (TMP) were recorded at Lloyd St Studios, a local rehearsal room and recording studio in Carrboro N.C. Caleb Southern was the engineer. Rumor had it that Caleb had the biggest (and the best) microphone in town – he did, and his dad, Dave, did the layout and design for the album. Dave Southern was a trip – an old hipster he lived in a house filled with vintage printing presses and old records. He was the guru of arcane musical knowledge and an encyclopedia on the blues and R&B. The band spent a lot of time at Dave’s place listening to music and his stories about the NC Chittlin' Circuit.

The photos on TMP where taken by D. Kent Thompson. Kent was photo student from Charlotte who I met at the “World Famous Milestone Club”. Now The Milestone Club was really just a dilapidated house in a funky working-class neighborhood in Charlotte. It had a gutted-by-fire look inside. The walls inside were painted black and covered with graffiti. It was run by an older guy, a Vietnam Veteran by the name of Bill Flowers. Bill was something else – he always looked like he just crawled out of a sleeping bag somewhere. I remember him once telling an opening band that their sound check included taking his shopping cart to a nearby grocery store to buy some cheap beer to stock the bar with – it might have been us now that I think about it.

The Milestone was one of a few clubs in NC where bands could get on a stage and play original music and Kent had his lens on the scene. He photographed the bands, the fans, and the glam each week and would have prints for sale on the bar wall the next. We got talking one night after a show and discovered we were both fans of the Fugs. It was pretty hard to find Fug fans in NC so we stayed in touch. Kent started to hang with the band more and more and did road trips with us – shooting film the whole time. Kent had so many great photos of the band that when it came time to pick out some for the TMP booklet we had an editing crisis and ended up putting in way too many. I think Dave Southern gave it the nickname "Too Much Booklet For Just One Jewel Case".

I wrote most of the songs for the album in the Spring and Summer of 1989-1990, living with the band in a vine-covered house in the woods. It was the original Kudzu Ranch. Having no A/C we started rehearsing in the basement where it was cool. The basement had a dirt floor and no electricity so, we ran an extension cord down the stairs and started makin’ noise. We worked in the basement 'til the invasion of the roly poly bugs. It was a very strange event. One night there were thousands of the bugs – they just showed up. They seemed to be mating. Dave could suck up a shop vac full of bugs every couple days and they just kept coming back. There got to be so many of those hard shelled bugs on the ground it sounded like we were walking on potato chips when we practiced. It got so disturbing we had to move rehearsal upstairs to the living room and sweat it out for the rest of the summer.

The last five songs on TMP were recorded at the Kudzu Ranch by our soundman at the time Dave Schmidt. We stuck him down stairs with the bugs, a cassette deck and an old PA mixer that hummed and buzzed louder than the mating insects on the floor. (That is the noise you hear at the start and end of last five songs. We could have tried to fix it when we re-mastered but we wanted the fans to experience all the aural odors of the original.) Recorded live, direct-to-cassette these five songs were the very first real recordings of Dave, Mary and me as a band.

TMP came out on a local label called Moist Records. They released albums by other local bands like the Sex Police and Metal Flake Mother. Moist did a good job promoting the local scene – but they ended up going bust trying to bankroll some bigger bands on a national level. We bought our masters for TMP back for 1,000 bucks when the label folded.

Over the last 19 years many people have asked us when we would reissue Too Much Pork For Just One Fork. Original copies of TMP are very hard to find – folks that have it either bought it new, paid way too much on eBay or got it for less than a dollar at a garage sale. Its scarcity helped establish TMP as a “collectors” item and I have heard a few folks call it our “lost masterpiece”. That it is not – but TMP is important record for few reasons. It was SCOTS' first record featuring the still current line-up of Dave Hartman, Mary Huff and myself and the album charted our musical and stylistic course for years to follow. TMP has the original versions of our most popular songs – songs that we still play today and best of all TMP is fun to listen to. Glad to say it is back on the menu.