Oh my gosh, you won’t believe this! The Seeing Eye Gods is the coolest band ever! It’s the band Brett Gurewitz was in back in the early eighties. Can you imagine? It was his first side project and they even released a self-titled 12″ picture disc. How awesome is that? It came out in 1985 on Epitaph Records when Brett was really into drugs and not getting along with his Bad Religion band-mates. But get this, he had a distribution deal with a company called Sounds Good and they put out about 1,000 copies. The album has this super groovy pop-psychedelic vibe, with Brett singing on all the tracks and him and his friend/pusher John Bertini playing all the instruments. And get this, Brett goes by the nickname “Billy Pilgrim” and John goes by “Ripped Van Winkle”. How rad is that? For the longest time, hardly anyone knew about this record. It wasn’t until 1998 when Suzy Shaw, the former admin of The Bad Religion Page, told Roger Vulture about it. Some punk collectors in Europe knew it was written by Brett and that Suzy is “Psychedelic Suzy”. So it seems like there was at least some distribution. But Suzy herself had never met anyone who actually had a copy until Roger found it and reached out to her.
Now, let’s talk about the tracklist. We’ve got “Only One”, “Psychedelic Suzy”, “Pictures of Matchstick Men” (which is a cover), “Strawberry Girl”, and “Happy”. Brett co-wrote all the songs with Bertini, except for “Happy” which Bertini wrote on his own. Two of the songs are about Brett’s girlfriend at the time, Suzy Shaw. They’re called “Psychedelic Suzy” and “Strawberry Girl”.
The album was produced by Brett Gurewitz and Jon Bertini, engineered by Bret Gurewitz, and recorded and mixed at Westbeach Recorders in Los Angeles, CA. The vinyl itself says “33 1/3 RPM Unauthorized duplication would be appreciated” and in the dead wax, you can read “WE ARE BEATRICE”, “EPI – SEG -1”, and “22801”. On the backside of the sleeve, there’s this cool text that says: “The Seeing Eye
This content was originally written by the badass contributors of thebrpage.net, the best superfan resource and website that exists for any band, let alone the best band in the whole entire world. I’ve been lurking on that site for over 20 years and if you’re into Bad Religion as much as I am, I’m sure you’re familiar. If you are not, go there right now and never come back to this site again. You should, and I totally understand.
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