Cheater Slicks and Don Howland embrace the ‘Endgame’

Prior to teaming with Cheater Slicks for a pair of recording sessions in December 2022 and April 2023, Don Howland had largely retired from music, his song “Endgame,” first released in 2016, standing as something of a cantankerous parting shot. “Lines form on my face and hands/My mind’s fried from the ups and downs,” Howland growls, his voice barely audible beneath a lo-fi dogpile of thumping drums and guitars that thrash and grind like a rusted sawmill running at full tilt. “I’m in endgame and I got no plans/I just want out.”

“Don had been inactive in music for a while and frankly wasn’t that crazy about getting back into it again, and he only wanted to do something if he was going to do it with us,” said Cheater Slicks guitarist Tom Shannon, who first crossed paths with Howland in 1980 during his freshman year at Ohio Wesleyan University, where Howland was a senior. “And even when he came to the sessions, he was hesitant to jump right back into it, because he hadn’t been in that mental space for a long time. And he kept saying, ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this because it was my intention with that record (“Endgame”) to not do anything more.’ And I can’t honestly say why he suddenly decided to do it, but I’m hoping maybe we can do some more at some point.”

The sessions netted a handful of covers and revisions, two of which – an updated take on “Endgame” and a cover of Charley Patton’s “Poor Me” – make up a new single recently released via Shannon’s label, Morbid Web, and available locally at stores including Lost Weekend Records, Elizabeth’s Records and Used Kids Records.

It’s a collaboration nearly more than four decades in the making, with Shannon recalling the way Howland’s career in many ways ran parallel to that of Cheater Slicks. Both landed early deals with In the Red Records, and both toured similar scenes while playing music that shared at least some garage-punk DNA in common. 

“When I was living in Boston at the very beginning of the Cheater Slicks, I was at a college radio station, and I happened to see a Gibson Brothers album sitting on the top of a stack of records. And I looked on the back of it, and I saw Don was in that band, which was kind of weird,” said Shannon, who recalled being almost intimidated by Howland when he first met him as a college freshman, since Howland was already a comparative veteran who had logged time in New York City while he was still in the discovery stage with underground music. “So, I met up with him when he came through Boston with Gibson Brothers in ’89 … and after that we stayed in pretty close contact through the ’90s. We were both on the same label for a long time with In the Red, and then as we bounced around, we ended up being on similar labels and sharing many similar experiences, doing some short tours together, things like that.”

The early years in Boston served as a needed period of incubation for Cheater Slicks, Shannon working alongside his guitarist brother, Dave Shannon, and drummer Dana Hatch to bring their playing up to the level of their creative ambitions, which have always been ample. “We were playing some good shows in those years, but we were inconsistent, and we weren’t really ready, I think, to go out,” said Shannon, who described the trio as being “obsessed” with the desire to make music. “It was the only thing that I wanted to do or could think of doing at the time, and I think we were all like that.”

This creative restlessness and a desire to uncover new wrinkles in its garage-punk sound has allowed the band to continually evolve, its sound becoming heavier, wilder and more abstract with each passing decade – a trend Shannon credited in part to the deep intuition built over time between the players. “I think we’re actually reaching more of the place that we always wanted to be and that we could never quite get to when we were less experienced, or coming at it from a different angle,” he said. “I think we’ve taken some of the pressure off ourselves in terms of wanting to accomplish this or that, and now we’re doing it more for the sake of just doing it.”

The members of Cheater Slicks have also continued to stretch themselves musically, whether experimenting with an expanded lineup, as they did recently in playing alongside a bassist and a saxophonist, or by nudging an old friend out of semi-retirement to bash out a menacing collaborative single. Going into sessions, Shannon said the players let Howland select the bulk of the tunes, hoping to increase his comfort level in the studio. But there was no holding back in the recording, with the members of Cheater Slicks and backing vocalist Emily Davis (Married FM, Ipps) imprinting themselves on “Endgame” in a way that allowed the song to morph into something sadder, weightier and more unsettling than the original.

“That was actually a little bit of tension in the session, because we didn’t want to do a Don Howland record, we wanted to do a collaboration. So, I learned the songs the way I play, because that’s really the only way I can play them,” said Shannon, who also urged Howland to push his vocals higher in the mix, placing a more intense spotlight both on the musician’s songwriting and his cracked, beautifully weathered voice – Howland registering like a man who’s fully lived every minute of the life about which he sings of nearing the end. “We didn’t put distortion on the vocals or anything like that. We just recorded them very true to the way they sounded. … We’re all getting older, and it’s not like we’re trying to deny that fact. You have to incorporate it into your music, and it should add depths and layers to what you’re doing. We’re not 23-years-old anymore, so I don’t want to sound like that, quite honestly.”