An MP3 has surfaced of Michael Chabon on vocals in a 1980s Pittsburgh punk band called The Bats.

Sam Matthews, who played guitar for the band, posted the MP3 on his MySpace page earlier this week. The song, “Yesterday Does Not Rule,” was recorded in June 1984.

“Yes, it is me, I’m sorry to say,” Chabon said in an e-mail. “Oy, vey, I sound AWFUL! The other Bats all sound pretty good, but I totally ruin the track. How embarrassing! Thank God I never pursued that line of work any further!”

Other band members included Lee Skirboll on bass, Mark Magee Miller on drums, and Ruth Ann Schmidt on guitar.

Chabon previously discussed The Bats in a 2001 interview with Rolling Stone.

“I was with them very briefly,” Chabon said. “I was the singer, so-called, because I can’t play any instrument. I can’t sing, either, but that was OK. This was in college. It wasn’t a punk band. We didn’t have the purity of punk, where we felt like we had to reject everything. It was just a conscious ‘Let’s just play a kind of music we like that’s loud.'”

The reporter asked Chabon if they were uniting the lyrics also.

“Yeah,” Chabon replied. “And I think they were kind of lame now, looking back. I was very self-conscious. I probably thought I had a mission or agenda. And I was heavily into this J.G. Ballard influence in fiction at that point, so I know I did weirdly Ballardian lyrics about car accidents and plane crashes.”

Asked what songs titles he remembered, Chabon recalled “Yesterday Does Not Rule.”

“That was kind of lame,” Chabon said.