My apologies gentle readers, for
the delay between this post and my last. I took a week off work and really went
to ground. I’m feeling recharged as a result and ready to take on the world.
When I’m done here I’m going out
for dinner with a friend who is visiting from out of town – it is like an
extension of my holiday!
Disc 626 is…. Bucky Fellini
Artist: The Dead
Milkmen
Year of Release: 1987
What’s up with the Cover? The art projects of
children, or so we are led to believe. The drawing on the lower left is
apparently by ‘Bucky Fellini’ himself, who at age 8 apparently dreamed of
stabbing his math teacher. I also hated math, but my last math teacher – Mr.
Drage – was actually a pretty cool dude. Hate the math, not the man Bucky
Fellini!
How I Came To Know It: My friend Tony told me about these guys one summer
way back in the late eighties when we were working a summer job together. They
had a song (“Instant Club Hit (You’ll
Dance To Anything)” where the Dead Milkmen made fun of club goers. I was
intrigued and about three years later I was thinking about the song for some
reason and went looking for it. I bought this album on limited knowledge,
entirely because it had that song.
Coincidentally,
Tony is the out of town friend I’m going for dinner with tonight.
Synchronicity!
How It Stacks Up: The Dead Milkmen have nine studio albums, but I’ve
only got this one. I keep meaning to buy a couple more, but never get around to
it.
Rating: 3 stars
“Bucky Fellini” is not just surfer
punk – it is surfer punk with a Dadaist edge, and that isn’t easy to pull off.
The Dead Milkmen sound like a cross between Dick Dale and the Dead Kennedys,
with a dash of Weird Al Yankovic thrown in for good measure. Strangely, the
whole thing works.
I wasn’t terribly into punk when I
bought this record in the early nineties, but fortunately “Bucky Fellini” isn’t
terribly hard core as punk goes. It has the basic song construction of punk
music, with a couple of chords played angry, and like a lot of punk the band is
very talented, despite their efforts to cloak that with reckless playing, but
there are melodies buried in there that are quite engaging.
In particular, I love bass player
Dave “Blood” Schulthise, who drops some very funky bass riffs into the music.
In doing some minimal research about the album I found out Schulthise committed
suicide in 2004 at the age of 47. Despite an early end, his work on this album lives
on, and I really appreciated his skills on multiple tracks.
The vocal duties are shared by Joe
“Jack Talcum” Genaro and Rodney “Anonymous” Linderman. I can’t tell them apart
and have no idea who sings on which tracks. However, they have classic punk
voices that deliberately avoid holding a pretty note in favour of singing with
gusto and energy. They’ll never win a singing contest, but in the context of
the music, it works perfectly.
The lyrics overshadow this album,
simply because they are so fun and wickedly irreverent. They are not for easily
offended. “Take Me To The Specialist”
pokes fun at mental illness, at one point degenerating into someone shouting “I hear weasels!” over and over again. It
is strangely delightful experience.
“Watching Scotty Die” pokes fun at someone being poisoned by a
chemical plant next door to their house:
“I know a kid whose name is Scott
He’s going blind and his blood just will not clot.”
Both these songs are fun if you
don’t think too hard about what they are about, and if you do, then the
experience is that much richer, because it will then make you feel
uncomfortable in your own skin (or in Scotty’s, which later in the song turns
lime green).
If all of that feels a bit heavy,
there are Dadaist forays into crazy parties (“(Theme
From) Blood Orgy of the Atomic Fern”) and car worship (“Nitro Burning Funny Cars”) that are less
socially divisive – although the Milkmen try hard to make them as inappropriate
as possible.
Even twenty five years and scores
of listens later, though, none are as fun as my first love on the record, “Instant Club Hit,” an indictment of all
those people who go clubbing and think they’re cooler than anyone else there with zingers like “80 pounds of makeup on your art school skin/80 points of IQ located
within.”
Later, the Milkmen take aim at a
laundry list of bands they don’t think much of, including the Communards, the
Smiths, Depeche Mode, and Public Image Limited at one point ending in a shriek
of “Choke on this you dance-a-teri types”
and then playing a completely un-danceable cacophony of sound.
I used to always request “Instant Club Hit” in my own clubbing
days because until they reach the aforementioned “choke point” it is actually
quite danceable. The boys draw you in before pulling the rug out from under you
– at which point you can pretty much slam dance, stand confused or just wander
off the floor. I think I even convinced a DJ to do it once or twice, or maybe
that’s just wishful thinking.
As if to remind us they are more
than humorists, the Dead Milkmen give us “Surfin’
Cow” near the end of the album. A mostly instrumental masterpiece, with guitarist
Genaro channeling Dick Dale in some powerful and soulful licks, this song reminds
you that when they’re not mocking the pale, wan and disadvantaged they can also
play pretty damned well.
No comments:
Post a Comment