Radio.com: Your book Hell: My Life in the Squirrel Nut Zippers, about your time in the band and the aftermath of "Hell" just came out. Is there any stone left unturned? Tom Maxwell: Of course there is. There's the stuff that I don't want to tell anybody, and there's the stuff that I don't want to tell anybody and the stuff that I don't remember or wasn't there for, really good stories I have no doubt. Then there's my memory of the stuff and I don't even know if that's�it's like a Fellini film. And then there's all the stuff that happened after I ended the book. So we're in a field of stones, my friend! [laughs]

Have you heard from former bandmates at all? [Zippers guitarist/saxophonist] Ken Mosher called me and said it made him cry. In a good way! He said he really liked it.

You underline several times that you had no idea it would be singled out to be a hit. Was that true even from a novelty standpoint? Oh yeah, that's probably the truest thing I've ever written. For one thing, just given where radio was at that time�.we didn't even think like that. If you looked over the playlist from KROQ at that time, there was no room for us. We weren't really capable of sitting around and calculating, um, the degree to which we'd be able to write a novelty song. I wrote it because we needed a closer. We needed an uptempo songs to close our sets. Crowds really liked it�but crowds really liked us! And I was happy for them to like it.

Other than record people telling you that's the song they were pushing, there was no insight into- Oh no, the record label didn't push it! That was never released as a single. What happened was the label rep in California went to KROQ and wouldn't stop bugging them about it. Tom Osborn was the guy's name. And he was just, "Please play this. Please play this. Please play this." And he just knew it. He knew it. The label tried to work "Put a Lid on It" as a single, and I don't think it did super awesome. But this guy Osborn goes on his own and harangues these people, and they go all right, all right, and they play it as a joke, on like, the lunch show. And then the phones go crazy. And we're like, what? I don't think the label imagined in their most fervent prayers, that we would go top 20.

What did you clear up the most with this book? Oh my god, I have no idea. I don't know if there's anything to clear up. I think it's just, who are these people, how did this whole thing get started, what were the mechanics of it? And how improbable the whole thing was. We recorded the Hot record in New Orleans in six days. And it did pretty well and I think we sold scores of thousands of copies. And for us, that was better than the first record, so everything was groovy were happy. And we were in the middle of recording our third record when "Hell" broke as a single. It got all these great reviews. Pitchfork!