“It was crazed, almost Charles ­Manson–like.” Before he started Def Jam, and produced everyone from Slayer to Johnny Cash, Rick Rubin played guitar in a noise-rock band called Hose, and recorded one of the worst Led Zeppelin covers ever committed to vinyl

In 1986, the excellent Chicago punk rock record label Touch and Go released a compilation album titled God’s Favorite Dog. The 12-track collection is most notable for featuring two unavailable elsewhere songs – Every Man For Himself and Crack Up – recorded by the late, great Steve Albini’s band Big Black, and also features a brace of tracks by the legendary Butthole Surfers, a gleefully sludgy desecration of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama by Madison, Wisconsin’s favourite communists Killdozer, and a couple of songs from Scratch Acid, the Austin, Texas punks who introduced the world to future The Jesus Lizard members David Yow (vocals) and David Wm. Sims (bass).

Any self-respecting connoisseur of US underground rock will own and treasure albums by at least three of these four bands, making original vinyl copies of God’s Favorite Dog something of a collector’s item. But even the most avid alt. rock fans could be forgiven for being unfamiliar with the other two acts showcased on the compilation, Happy Flowers and Hose. All you really need to know about Charlottesville, Virginia duo Happy Flowers is that their vocalist/guitarist rejoined in the name ‘Mr. Anus’, while drums and backing vocals were handled by ‘Mr. Horribly Charred Infant’. And if you listen to the frankly terrible cover of Led Zeppelin’s How Many More Times recorded by Hose, you’ll understand why the Long Island art-punks were destined never to be as big as Led Zeppelin.

With that said, Hose are a historically notable band for two reasons: 1) their self-titled 1983 EP Hose was the very first record released on the hugely influential hip-hop label Def Jam and 2) their guitarist was Rick Rubin, Def Jam co-founder, and the music industry behemoth who’s produced everyone from the Beastie Boys, Slayer and Metallica to Johnny Cash, AC/DC and Beabadoobee.

“At 15 I started listening to hard rock and heavy metal… Kiss, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and eventually AC/DC,” Rubin recalled in a 2010 interview with Interview magazine, conducted by Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis. “At 20, I was more punk rock… so it was the Ramones, The Clash, Ian MacKaye’s group [Minor Threat], Black Flag. In between 15 and 20 – probably at around 17 – my interests switched from hard rock to punk rock. And then by 20 they were circling out of punk rock back into Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the stuff that I didn’t get to when I was younger.”

Impeccable influences, I’m sure we can all agree. But that didn’t make Rubin’s own band worth listening to.

“They were pretty awful,” fellow underground noise-maker Eric ­Hoffert (Speedies) told New York magazine in 2011. “They would play downstairs in the cafeteria of the [New York University] Weinstein dorm. It was crazed, almost Charles ­Manson–like.”

“I never felt like I was particularly good at any part of it,” Rubin himself admitted to BBC Radio 1’s Zane Lowe in 2014, “but I enjoyed it, and was always passionate about it… and I always appreciated the theatrical nature of things.”