The Milkmen Cometh

From the barely edited journals of Rodney Anonymous

by Rodney Anonymous

By: Nina Sabatino Clockwise from bottom left: Rodney Anonymous, Dean Clean, Joe Jack Talcum and Dandrew Stevens

We're big Dead Milkmen fans here at City Paper — the punk rock legends provided the soundtrack to our awkward adolescence. And we're big fans of their frontman, Rodney Anonymous, too. Rodney cracks us up with his monthly Aid or Invade column (it's supposedly about world music), but we've been looking for an excuse to really turn him loose. When we heard that the Milkmen were officially back in the picture — playing shows, making new music — and blowing it out with a big Halloween bash at the Troc, we gave him a word count and set him free.

WARNING: SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE ...

There are a thousand reasons why I should have declined the offer to pen this piece, foremost being my firm belief that the only place where musicians should be encouraged to write is on bathroom walls. Sure, Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel is wonderfully ambitious, but it's also the exception that proves the following rule: "If there were such a place as hell, the waiting room to its lowest level would be well stocked with the literary efforts of Henry Rollins and Jewel."

I also don't want anyone to think that I'm writing this in order to shamelessly plug the concert. Honestly, I don't give a rodent of unusual size's ass whether you attend the show. The opening bands — The Tough Shits and Live Not on Evil — are truly great and there will be short films from the Secret Cinema, so if you leave right before we play, I'm sure you'll have a good time. But if you should decide to go to Dracula's Ball, or experience Haunted Poe or Terror Behind the Walls, or wander around the Mütter Museum or Laurel Hill Cemetery, I'll understand.

No; I'm writing this piece because I've read dozens of these sorts of "Look at me; I'm such a hard-working sensitive artist" essays and I've always hoped that I could do a better job. As Ben Franklin once said, "Don't knock it till you've tried it." And ol' Ben tried it with nearly every woman in the 13 colonies.

9/25/2009

Only 36 days until Halloween and roughly 50 days until Fox News starts in with the "War on Christmas" bullshit. Practice tonight. We try to get in an average of six practices for each show. If you've ever seen us live, you might find that hard to believe. All of this practicing has nothing to do with any sense of professionalism; it's completely a force of habit. You see, when we first formed in the early '80s, no one would give us a gig, so we practiced a couple times a week for two years straight in the misguided hope that a passing stranger with "industry connections" might hear us playing and offer us a show. While that never worked out, I still advise young people to play their instruments as loudly as possible because you never know who might hear you.

Ostensibly, we're practicing for a pair of shows we'll be playing in Chicago in early October, but I'm obsessed with Halloween (Hide the children! Alert the 700 Club!), so — from my perspective, at least — everything we do is a warm-up for October 31.

By: Nina Sabatino LIFE IS GOOD: Joe Genaro (aka Joe Jack Talcum) at one of the band's many practice sessions.

9/27/2009

Another practice day. Another reason we practice so often is because "practice often" is one of the Unwritten Rules. Like some sort of musical version of Rain Man, we have literally hundreds of Unwritten Rules that govern everything from the optimum time interval between eating a meal and taking the stage (34 minutes) to the content of stage chatter (i.e. I am expressly forbidden from asking the audience how they are feeling or if they're having a good time, on the basis that these questions are stupid because people who are unwell, unhappy or both tend to leave before you ever get to that question).

An additional Unwritten Rule is that each set list — no two of which may be exactly the same (obviously, some songs get repeated, but the sets need to vary as greatly as possible) — must contain a minimum of 23 songs, not including an encore. This means that if we're hired to play for 15 minutes, we still prepare to play a minimum of 23 songs. Why? Fuck if I know. Maybe that's why we've never bothered to write the rules down.

Later in the day, I swing by Crash Bang Boom to let Rob from Live Not on Evil, who's been my friend since shortly after the Earth's crust cooled, know that we have all eagerly agreed to play a free acoustic set in the store on the night of Oct. 30 (Mischief Night!), even though this means that I'll have to clean the ketchup out of my melodica (a breath-powered keyboard made [in]famous by Philly's own Hooters). A few years back, when I was in another band, I poured an entire bottle of Heinz 57 over my melodica in an attempt to emulate blood. Oh, and I never unstopped the spit valve to air it out, so I spend a lovely evening removing a nearly decade-old combo of tomato sauce and lung biscuits.

10/1/2009

I occupy the unique position in music history of being the only member of a "one-hit wonder" band who had absolutely nothing to do with the one hit. Despite having a writing credit (all of the Milkmen equally share the writing credits no matter what combination of us initially wrote a tune), I neither wrote, sang on nor played on our big hit, "Punk Rock Girl." I have also never turned down a royalty check for the song. If I could only just figure out a way to get paid for every song that I neither wrote nor played on — the entire Beatles catalog, for example — I'd be set for life.

A few nights ago I got it into my head that I should actually do something when we play "Punk Rock Girl" other than what I've been doing for the past 20 years: just standing around tapping my foot like Larry Craig in a men's room stall. To this end, I've asked Joe Genaro (aka Joe Jack Talcum, Butterfly Joe, etc.), our guitarist, to stop by today to help me work out a keyboard part for the song since Joe played the accordion on the original and I want to emulate his style as closely as possible. It takes roughly 10 minutes for Joe and me to come up with something, so we use the rest of the time we've allocated for the project watching TV. Green Porno star Isabella Rossellini and convicted felon Martha Stewart make an anchovy costume, a skill we both agree will come in much handier later in life than knowing how to play "Punk Rock Girl." Still, I dedicate roughly 15 hours over the next two days to searching for the right accordion sound before finally finding a perfect (i.e. free) concertina sample.

10/4/2009

Yet another in an endless series of practice days. This one, however, is marked by the debut of my keyboard part for "Punk Rock Girl." Unfortunately, I leave my foot on the sustain pedal a little too long, causing the software on my laptop, which powers my keyboards, to lock up, producing not the intended melody line but a horrifying atonal howling wail. This is followed by a lengthy, serious discussion about whether the high-pitched terrible screeching has actually improved the song.

By: Nina Sabatino NOW WE ARE BACK: The Milkmen play Johnny Brenda�s in October 2008, under the name Les Enfants du Prague.

10/5/2009

Spent a few minutes on the phone tonight with Jay Schwartz, the man behind Secret Cinema. We discussed the short films he's planning on showing at the Troc. Jay will be screening films before and in between the bands, so he'll need to be supplied with set times in advance.

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Since I know Jay is a fan of horror movie innovator William Castle — the guy who used to generate a buzz for his movies by doing things like wiring random theater seats to mildly electrocute viewers — we also discuss a few gimmicks the band has been considering for the Halloween show. We'd been kicking around the idea of offering everyone who attends an insurance policy against being driven insane by the event. Other ideas we'd considered, but abandoned either on the grounds that they were impractical or because I'm too much of a lazy bastard to work on them, were either having the bands Gang or Pissed Jeans come out as us for the encore, or approaching Tim and Eric from Tim and Eric's Awesome Show (Great Job!) to do some sort of routine during the intro to "Bitchin' Camaro." This last idea is dropped when I remember that when I met Tim and Eric, last November in Austin, Texas, I was more than a little drunk, so I definitely came off as a fanboy asshole.

The most recent plan is to dispense hot apple cider to people waiting in line for tickets.

10/6/2009

You guessed it; another practice day.

I woke up this morning wondering if I'm wasting my life. I'm 46 years old and my greatest accomplishment has been fronting a novelty band. OK, that's not quite true: Actually, I woke up this morning wondering if Jon "Bowzer" Bauman from Sha Na Na ever thinks he's wasting his life, and then moved on to applying that question to my situation. After about a half-hour of deep introspection, I concluded that Bowzer, who is currently hosting something called "Bowzer's Rock 'n' Roll Party," is probably quite content to do his best to give the world the greatest "oldies" show he can. I instantly adopt what I now call The Bowzer Philosophy.

Maury Povich, on the other hand, is definitely wasting his life.

By: Nina Sabatino

10/8/2009

Fly to Chicago. The weather here is utter crap: cold, windy and raining. You'd think that with all of her money and connections, Oprah would be able to do something about this.

10/9/2009

We open for the Murder City Devils at Chicago's Congress Theater (an incredible building that looks, on the inside, like a cross between the Sistine Chapel and London's St. Paul's Cathedral). While the Devils put on a fantastic performance, we, tragically, do not. Weeks of practice swirl down the drain as we struggle to hit our stride, and I even manage to screw up the lyrics to "Stuart."

At this point, most performers would blame their stage sound, saying something like "there just wasn't enough 2k in the monitors," but I own my mistakes. (Besides, I'm deaf as a post, so it really doesn't matter to me what's in the monitors. For all I know, there's been a loop of the mating call of the three-toed tree sloth in there for the past year.) If we've failed to give the audience their money's worth, it's because I, as the guy out front most of the time, failed to keep the show going. People paid real cash during shitty economic times to see us, and I let them down.

What would Bowzer do?

I plan on getting up early to go over the set list for tomorrow night's show, to make damn sure that I know all of the lyrics and my keyboard parts.

10/10/2009

We headline Chicago's Metro theater and the show couldn't have gone better. Maybe it's because we felt the need to redeem ourselves? Maybe Bowzer protected us? Who knows? While I do know what can cause a bad show — lack of rehearsal and not giving a shit about the people who paid to see you — I still have no idea what makes a good one.

For me, the best part of the night is hanging out backstage before the show with Joe and Dandrew Stevens, our new bass player, laughing our asses off over a wonderfully crazy six-part report/rant on the WorldNetDaily site that claims homosexuality is caused by drinking too much soy milk. Moments like this, and when I can crack up our drummer, Dean Sabatino (Dean Clean), on stage are the real reasons to be in a band.

10/12/2009

Back home in Philly, and the preparation for the Halloween show kicks in to high gear. This means scheduling more practices and finally agreeing to a set list. One of the songs we're working on is a tune from our Stoney's Extra Stout CD that we've never performed live before. Possibly for a good reason, as I was pretty much phoning it in on that CD, and many of the lyrics I turned in were so subpar that they could make the Jonas Brothers shudder until they shit their pants and their chastity rings fall off. My big fear is that the audience will turn into the Hall of Presidents — standing still and staring mutely ahead — during the tune. But the Dead Milkmen are a democracy and the other three members really want to do the song, so I'll give it my all. Bowzer would.

That said, I was hoping we could perform three or four of our new songs at the Halloween show. Since no one ever buys a ticket hoping to hear new material, I'm thinking about asking the audience to vote on whether they'd like to hear the new tunes or more of the ones they actually came for. The problem with this is that we haven't even tested the new material on prisoners yet, let alone anyone outside of the four band members.

By: Nina Sabatino OUR BELOVED REVOLUTIONARY SWEETHEART: Rodney rocks out in Chicago.

10/17/09

I meet with Rob again, to hammer out some of the details of the Mischief Night show — equipment, crowd control, birth control, etc.

I wonder if I should check in on The Tough Shits to see if they need anything. Then again, they are called The Tough Shits, so it's probably safe to assume that they'll be OK. I am, however, curious about the names they rejected.

Later, while eating free samples at Whole Foods, I find myself engaged in the following conversation:

"Hi. I just wanted to say that I'm coming to your show on Halloween."

"Thanks. Be sure to show up early because Secret Cinema will be showing films."

"OK. Are you going to play 'Take the Skinheads Bowling'?"

"Ummm ... no. That's not really one of our songs; that's by Camper Van Beethoven."

"Oh. [Awkward silence] I'm sorry."

"That's OK. I'd rather be known for a good song that someone else wrote than for a shitty one that I wrote."

(r_anonymous@citypaper.net)

The Dead Milkmen play Sat., Oct. 31, 8:30 p.m., $18.50-$21, with Live Not on Evil and The Tough Shits with films from Secret Cinema, Trocadero, 1003 Arch St., 215-922-LIVE, thetroc.com. They also play an accoustic set Fri., Oct. 30, 8 p.m., free, Crash Bang Boom, 528 S. Fourth St., 215-928-1123, crashbangboom.com.