Ok, now some cheeseball who writes copy for Lookut! Records coined the term to describe Sweet Baby as "The World's FirstEast Bay Pop-Punk Band". The title is apt though. SweetBaby spawned from an era where the music scen of the East Bay was polarized... and Sweet Baby broke it up.
The band Sweet Baby started in 1986 when Matt Buenrostro and Dallas Denery started writing songs for the band. The origional line up included Dr. Frank on drums and Cripsy Jim on bass. This line up only lasted for a few months though, and by 1987 Dr. Frank and Crispy Jim were replaced by Sergie Loobkoff (from Soup and Buggerall) and Richie Bucher ( of Unskilled Labor, Soup, and Buggerallfame) respectively. Soon the outfit, known as Sweet Baby Jesus, was playing Gilman.
It was from their frequency at Gilman that Sweet Baby Jesus, along with Buggerall, landed a place on the Gilman Street Project compilation Turn it Around which was released by Maximum Rock And Roll in October 1987. They had just two tracks, "Pathetic"and "She's From Salinas", which were used from a 8-track demo recorded by Kevin army that year. The demo, known as NevermindThe Bassets, was recorded in one weekend for about $200. By the end of 1987 Sweet Baby Jesus called it quits.
Meanwhile, Kevin Army sent the Sweet Baby demo, along with Operation Ivy and some other bands, to a friend at Slash Records. Slash was interested in the group, so in eary 1988 Sweet Baby Jesus reformed with a new lease on life. When they signed to Slash they dropped the Jesus from their name (Matt and Sergiedidn't much care for it)-- now they were just Sweet Baby. Slash was slightly dissapointed because the "Jesus" bit was controvesial. (Controversy=Cheap Publicity). But before their major lable debut, Sweet Baby appeared on Lookout! Record's compilationThe Things That Ate Floyd with the song "Andorra"in 1988.
January of 1989 saw the release of Sweet Baby's full lenght LP on Slash. It was titled It's a Girl! Some say it sold 10,000 copies (as said by Lawrence Livermore who's journalistic motto is "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.")but others say it only sold 1,000 copies (Dallas sites some dubious strategy by Slash/Ruby to let Sweet Baby maintain their punk edgeby storing 9,000 copies of the record in some underground vaultnear La Brea in LA.) All in all, Slash didn't have much conifdence in Sweet Baby, and had a poor marketing scheme to show it. (They tried to market is at "mindless retro pop"). It was only released on vinyl and had no publicity what so ever. So Sweet Baby decided to promote the record themselves.
Sweet Baby embarked on a national tour that was wrought with disaster. The booking agent was extremely secrative, so Sweet Baby often was in the dark as to where the shows were. The booking agent was also lazy, so many of the shows were cancelled because the venue had been closed for three months. After the third show Sergie stopped playing the drums, opting for the didjeridoo instead. Eventually, about half way through the tour, Richie and Sergie left the band and were replaced by Ivy Dubios of Kamala and the Karnivores and Aaron Cometbus of Crimpshrine respectively. The tour was finished in grand style and upon returning home, the summer of 1989, they began recording their second album for Slash,Submarine Races. Slash didn't feel it was polished enough though, and lost interest in the band. After a show at Gilman on 29 September 1989, Sweet Baby called it quits.