The satirical punk band began life as the home recording project of singer and guitarist Joe Genaro, and a friend of his from school called Garth. The pair came up with a fictional punk band called The Dead Milkmen, and began writing and recording cassette tapes of songs that were said to be written by this conceptual rock band. The project never really left Genaro’s bedroom but the duo wrote and recorded constantly until they reached college age, giving the budding guitarist an abundance of experience in writing tongue in cheek lyrics and jangly, three chord punk rock. However while Genaro left home to attend Philadelphia’s Temple University, Garth joined the United States Air Force. For the time being, The Dead Milkmen were, for lack of a better word, dead.
However, as many young musicians will tell you, there’s nowhere quite like university to find other young musicians, and through mutual friends Genaro met the future rhythm section of the band. Genaro started rehearsing with Dave Schulthise on the bass guitar and Dean Sabatino on the drums in 1981, and it took the trio a while to commit to it. They couldn’t get the band’s singer Rodney Linderman to commit to fronting the band until mere weeks before their first show in 1983, and after that the band immediately started making up for lost time. They played live all over the Philadelphia punk scene, were soon touring nationally and by 1985 they had signed to Restless Records, where they released their first album “Big Lizard In My Backyard”, the same year.
Since then the band have become one of the most beloved cult acts in punk rock, and for a genre that’s basically made up of them, that’s saying a lot. The group saw an influx of attention in 1987 when Jim Walewander, a Major League Baseball player, started talking the band up as his favourite band. The group followed this up with 1988’s “Beezlebubba” and its lead single “Punk Rock Girl”, one of the most deathless hits in American punk rock. Hilariously enough, the band secured a record deal that wasn’t just with a major label; it was with Hollywood Records, a label owned by the Walt Disney Company. Any crossover appeal that the label thought the band might have went to waste and they were soon dropped from it.
Not so hilariously, the band broke up in 1994 due to their frustration with music industry machinations and Dave Schulthise’s tendinitis, an affliction that made performing unbearably painful for him. Tragically, he committed suicide a decade after the band originally split in 2004, just as reunion talks were emerging. The rest of the group reconvened for a couple of benefit concerts in his memory and got back together full time in 2008, releasing two of their most acclaimed records 2008’s “The King In Yellow”, and 2014’s “Pretty Music For Pretty People”. Clearly The Dead Milkmen are a band that are far more vital and important than their parody-punk exterior suggests, look a little deeper and you’ll find a band truly worth following. Highly recommended.
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