In 1985, guitarist Joe Genaro and the rest of the Dead Milkmen – bassist Dave Schulthise, drummer Dean Sabatino, and vocalist Rodney Linderman – were young and, let’s just say, not always incredibly serious.
After all, the artwork for their debut album, 1985’s Big Lizard in My Backyardgloriously depicts a giant reptile on the verge of crushing a lawn chair. Comedy rock, indeed – but that doesn’t mean the Milkmen were rudderless.
“The main songwriting objective was to come up with catchy, funny songs that engaged and entertained audiences,” says Genaro, aka Joe Jack Talcum. “I was a relatively new guitar player, so from that perspective, it was a matter of keeping things rudimentary.”
Unsurprisingly, since we’re talking about the mid-Eighties, Genaro gravitated toward what he calls “super-distorted, chorused guitar sounds.” But, if you listen to Big Lizardsometimes it seems Gernaro went in the opposite direction.
“I didn’t have any distortion pedals – or any pedals (at all) for that matter back then,” he says. “I tried out a borrowed pedal once in practice, but it wasn’t working with the band. My sound was just my Gibson SG plugged into a Yamaha G100-112. Any distortion came from the amp itself. It was considered a rather clean sound compared to other punk bands.”
Genaro says Plum Dumb and Spit Sink were “written before (the Dead Milkmen) existed as a real performing band.”
As for Bitchin’ CamaroGenaro says, “That was inspired by a conversation we overheard in line at a 7-Eleven in Philly. Rodney wrote down the lyrics for the fast part, and I put them to music. Then, in band practice, we ad-libbed the conversation part.”
Genaro says the Milkmen had zero studio experience at the time, which led to “recording everything live and then replacing scratch vocals with new vocals. Maybe we’d double-track guitars. It was very basic and quick.”
As for “producer” John Wicks, Genaro says, “John was hands-off. We accidentally gave him a co-producer credit, but he was the studio owner and engineer. He had some subtle suggestions for how to strum some of the songs, as I recall.”
With Genaro being a relatively new guitarist, it’s easy to see where the raw nature of Big Lizard comes from. But there was still some magic there, even if Genaro says there was no secret sauce in the recipe.
“A nuance I added was to try to bring subtle melody out in my strumming by emphasizing specific notes in the particular chord inversion since we didn’t have a lead guitar player to play melodic riffs.”
Considered a cult favorite of college rock radio, Big Lizard in My Backyard granted the Dead Milkmen residency within the punk and college-rock scenes. As for Genaro, he felt it was a winner out of the gate.
“I thought it was memorable,” he says. “I had higher sales expectations for it than the record company seemed to have. It helped bring our quirky Philly punk scene more national attention.
“Getting a lot of college airplay across the country, especially Bitchin’ Camarohelped a lot. It meant we’d be able to make another album, though we were required to make another since the contract we signed for Big Lizard was for four albums – unless the record company opted to let us go, which they did not!”
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