We know more than one band that’s given listeners tinnitus—one of them, The Adventures of Tin Tinnitus, brags about it in their very name. (Please don’t go see them.) They’re not all willfully cruel, however. We know an act who fractured a fan’s eardrum, and was so remorseful that to this day they give a percentage of all their gig money to deafness charities.

So, ear damage galore. But until last week, we never knew a band whose sonic ferocity actually killed a squirrel. Now that’s some kind of bragging rights.

It happened at Hamilton’s, to the Yellow Pinkies, and could scarcely have been more grisly. The song, funnily enough, was called “Skunk”; it’s the one where singer Penny screams “you stink!” like a billion times. At about the 150,000th refrain, a pal pointed out to us that one of the ceiling tiles above the stage was trembling and cracking. Dust was settling on the stage and getting blown about by the whoosh from the monitors.

Then the sky opened up and a stiff furry figure plummeted onto one of punk percussionist Hy-Spy’s overturned trash cans. Hy-Spy (aka Hyram Gaspiri—his parents were into opera and stuff) says his first impression was that one of his cans had gone over by itself—happens a lot—so he just kept thrashing. The squirrel, clearly seen falling by much of the audience, flipped between Penny’s legs and balanced off the front of the stage, teetering with rictus.

There were calls to stop the show, and just-as-loud demands (which sounded like “Whoo!”) to keep it awesome. The anti-PETA punks won out, mostly because the band had no idea exactly what was going on. They were signaled at the end of the song and a hurried clean-up ensued, featuring buckets of that smelly pine cleaner they use in the Bullfinch bathrooms.

Although the diagnosis was that the poor squirrel was probably dead long before the gig, Hy-Spy says he spent the rest of the night in an emergency room getting a tetanus shot “just in case.” Punk rock! And no busted eardrums.

The Ancient Grains, Nature’s Path and Amaranth at the Bullfinch, some kind of hippie-dippy wingding… The Keen Wahs, jamming the surf at Hamilton’s with fellow West Coast cover act Tree Nuts… Singer-songwriter Kamut Khorasan at D’ollaires—“An Evening With,” as they say, with no opening act and no backing band…