The first in a series of posts featuring buried treasures from the mid ’90s that prove, once and for all, that Bainbridge Island is full of ridiculous people.

Yesterday, after a run to Amoeba, I checked off another entry from my list of records I must own before I die. For a whole $2, I finally purchased the Cleavers’s “Livin For Leisure” 7″, a record I’ve been looking for since it was released in 1995. Oh happy day!

“Who are the Cleavers?” you ask. Well, does the name “Murder City Devils” ring a bell?

While the majority of what-would-become-the-Devils lived in Seattle and played feedback-drenched, double-screamer hardcore in the band Area 51; across the Puget Sound, in a little place called Bainbridge Island, Devils-to-be Nate Manny and Gabe Kerbrat* both played guitar and sang in a band called the Cleavers. (Other dudes that went by the name Joe and Oliver played bass and drums respectively.) Best described as “immature punk,” (though I bet they had a funnier/stupider name for it,) the band sang about the awesomeness of Abe Lincoln, failed attempts at escaping Alcatraz, and, most notably, what they would do if they were robots.

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