Dead Milkmen: Bucky Fellini
1987
Enigma Records
Format I Own it on: Vinyl and Compact Disc
Track Listing: 1. The Pit 2. Take Me to the Specialist 3. I Am the Walrus 4. Watching Scotty Die 5. Going to Graceland 6. Big Time Operator 7. Instant Club Hit (You’ll Dance to Anything) 8. The Badger Song 9. Tacoland 10. City of Mud 11. Rocketship 12. Nitro Burning Funny Cars 13. Surfin’ Cow 14. (Theme From) Blood Orgy of the Atomic Fern 15. Jellyfish Heaven
This is the only Dead Milkmen album I've been able to find on vinyl...And it's got one of those great plastic sleeves (with the Egyptian motif) that used to come inside the old Enigma records...
I love these! Especially the catalog on the back!
I wish I could still order from it (especially at those prices!). The Enigma roster is kinda awesome...There's a bunch of bands that I can't quite picture occupying the same space...Stryper? Great White? The Pogues? Death Angel? Mojo Nixon?! And I love how they have a lot of great bands but they're just a liiiiiiitle bit past their prime..."Snakedrill" by Wire, Hair-metal era TSOL, "This is the Voice" by Agent Orange, "The Second Coming" by the Dickies....There's even a Montrose album in there! From 1987!!! Along with about 15 different movie soundtracks featuring TSOL...Woah! You can order the "Delta Force" original motion picture soundtrack!
Alright, enough talking about the inner sleeve...It took a verrrrry long time to come to this conclusion, but "Bucky Fellini" has eventually become my favorite album by the band...I'm calling it the Dead Milkmen-iest Dead Milkmen album...The surreal whimsy finally snaps fully into place and just about every song is so consistent that it initially gives the impression that there's no stand-outs...But in reality, it's nothing but...
I'm going to be straight with you...It's Friday Night and I'm a few beers in, so I'm not going to screw around with coherent thoughts...I'm just going to list a few random things I love about "Bucky Fellini"...
1. I love that the text on the cover is written in Play-Dough! I love Play Dough! It smells so overwhelmingly good that I can't help but take a bite of it...Turns out it's not as good as it smells... Why is it so damn salty? Is it because my salty-ass hands are always touching it?
2. I love the song title "Watching Scotty Die." It's such a simple idea to change the word "grow" to "die," but it pays off so well...The song is great too...A nice country melody that manages to be both hilarious and conveys an environmental message regarding nuclear waste or something...
3. I love that "I Am the Walrus" isn't a cover song...
4. I love the southern feel of the album that may or may not be incidental...You get "Tacoland" which has a very distinct southern twang, inspired by the legendary music venue in San Antonio, TX... They also do a brilliant cover of Texas musician Daniel Johnston's "Rocketship" (Daniel Johnston covers are fool-proof, by the way...I've never heard a bad Daniel Johnston cover) ...There's also the matter of "Big Time Operator" which is swampy, up-tempo southern blues, where Rodney shouts:
"Look out Stevie Ray Vaughan
Look out Charlie Sexton
Look out you cheesy Texas motherfuckers!"
Additionally, I was looking at the album credits (a huge hobby of mine) and noticed it was recorded in Austin, Texas..,Which ties into Rodney's shout out to the virtues of Austin on "Six Days" on the previous album (I can attest to the greatness of Austin, by the way...TA-80 played there a few years back while the Austin City Limits Festival was going on and that place was off the chain!!! I still can't quite believe the insane shit I saw there...Why don't I live there?!?! What am I doing in Tempe, Az?!?!). So, I'm calling "Bucky Fellini" one of the finest Texas-punk albums ever made...
5. There's a line in the utopian fantasy "City of Mud" that's absolutely transcendent to me...In the song Rodney builds a perfect city populated by people that are exactly like him ( a theme he would revisit a few years later on "Now Everybody's Me") and after outlining various scenarios where Bruce Springsteen is brutalized in the streets and nobody's allowed in K-Mart because nobody wears shirts or shoes, we're treated to the incredibly evocative lyric:
"And we never paved the roads,
We just bought VCR's..."
These are the magic crossroads where revolution and complacency intersect....
6.
"Goin' to Graceland
It's gonna be great!
I'm so happy I just can't wait!
Gonna see the bucket that Elvis Presley kicked..."
(chuckle)
7. If I had to pick one favorite Dead Milkmen song, "Nitro Burning Funny Cars" just might be the winner...Just a flat-out rocker where Rodney bemoans a world full of people who sit too long when the light turns green...It was one of those songs I'd heard a million times and didn't think much of it, but on night I was sitting in my bedroom with a Rolling Rock (real Rolling Rock...with the gritty paint job that always seemed like they were covered in birdshit) and the song suddenly illuminated something in my soul that I didn't know was there..I finally understood that a lot of people really do look like Gavin MacLeod!
So there...A bunch of random things I like about "Bucky Fellini" (in retrospect I should have mentioned the "Ballroom Blitz" intro on "The Pit"), so let's get to crackin' some beers...
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