Session Information
Just a few months after their first visit to Laundry Room Studio in their new guise as Mission Impossible, the band were once again back there in April of 1985 to record further new material, working towards their ultimate goal of releasing a full-length LP. With eleven original songs recorded on their previous visit, on this occasion, another nine were put to tape, showcasing if nothing else their ability to write songs at a consistent rate as well as the ability to record them exceptionally quickly.
By the mid-eighties, the hardcore punk scene in and around Washington, D.C was thriving, with dozens of up and coming young punk bands appearing on the circuit alongside more established names such as Fugazi and Minor Threat. One such band was Lünch Meat, which like Mission Impossible was formed by high school friends and the two bands played a handful of shows together in the local area during the spring of 1985. Despite having well over a dozen songs now recorded in a studio the band elected against releasing a full-length LP at this stage and instead contributed just three songs to a split 7” with their new friends in Lünch Meat. Released on the Sammich Records label, a subsidiary of the legendary Dischord Records, the ‘Thanks’ EP was pressed to vinyl with a run of 500, a relatively large number for such unknown bands. The three featured tracks from Mission Impossible were ‘Helpless’, ‘Into Your Shell’ and ‘Now I’m Alone’.
The band also managed to get themselves featured on a compilation LP released jointly by WGNS Recordings and Metrozine, a local punk rock zine. Appearing alongside bands such as Gray Matter and United Mutation the band contributed one track from this recording session, ‘I Can Only Try’. The record was mastered by Don Zientara, owner of the Inner Ear Studios in D.C., with 1,000 copies being pressed.
By 1986 copies of the ‘Thanks’ EP had all been distributed and so a second run was pressed with a new, somewhat less catchy title – ‘Getting Shit for Growing Up Different’. 1,000 copies were pressed this time although again it was not long before all copies had been shifted.
The other five tracks from this recording session were never released although tapes of the entire session were widely circulated by the band in the local area. The session was recorded onto ¼ inch magnetic tape using Laundry Room’s trusty Tascam 38 reel-to-reel tape machine.
