Updated 2026
No Apologies
Left Nut began in Boston in 1988 with Norman Jabar on vocals, Gary Gardiner on drums, Barry Edwards and Don Gardiner on guitars, and Mike “Mikey” Welsh on bass. The group’s two-guitar attack pulled punk urgency, hard rock and Southern boogie into the same room. One Way’s original description called it a “no-wimps blend” and promised that the band always gave an audience its money’s worth.
The momentum carried Left Nut into the semifinals of WBCN’s 1990 Rock & Roll Rumble. Surviving performance footage of “Sex Toy” and “Inside My Shoes” shows why: the humor in the titles never softened the physical force of the band. Left Nut could be unruly and exact at once.
For Mikey Welsh, Left Nut was the beginning. Motherlode’s eyewitness history places him in the all-ages world around Bunratty’s: Welsh and his friend Micky Mo helped operate the club’s juice bar and became regulars at the Zen Palace in Cleveland Circle. When Martin Doyle called to say that Left Nut had suddenly lost bassist Tom Canalli, Chuck White handed the bassless teenager an instrument that had been left behind at Green Street Station. Welsh aced the audition.
These recordings preserve Welsh before his later work with Heretix, Jocobono, Juliana Hatfield, Weezer and The Kickovers brought him to a much larger audience. He played on Weezer’s 2001 self-titled “Green Album” and later devoted himself to painting. Welsh died in 2011, making the Left Nut catalog an especially important document of where his musical life started.
One Way returned two bodies of Left Nut material to circulation in 1999: Bad Attitude, No Apologies and Everything It Takes to Be an Asshole. Both appeared in WMBR’s rock reports that year. The chronology inside the surviving pages is imperfect as the music reaches back to the band’s earlier period but the One Way editions preserved the songs, artwork and sequence when the original commercial moment had passed.
