Posted: 02/14/07

An album you should own:

The Dead Milkmen
Big Lizard in My Backyard. Restless, 1985

Mike Morris | managing editor
mmorris2@smcvt.edu

With politically incorrect songs satirizing AIDS, the mentally challenged, rural townspeople, Evangelical religions and the political right, the Dead Milkmen left no stone un-offended with their debut album, Big Lizard in My Backyard. Featuring hilarious lyrics paired with dextrous musicianship, Big Lizard is a treat to listen to, assuming you can take the black humor.

The first track, Tiny Town, opens with major chords played at breakneck speed and one of the funniest stanzas ever set to an LP.

Hello, my name is Billy Bob and I don't give a damn
I got myself some white sheets straight from the Ku Klux Klan
I got myself a daughter and she's a Mongoloid
Because I married my sister and our gene pool's been destroyed.

From these first few lines, listeners can tell that they are in for an experience unlike that of any other band. Too intelligently funny to be written off as one-joke comedians, and too skilled musically to be written off as only a joke band, the Dead Milkmen’s iconoclastic early punk may be without a large audience, but not for any good reason.

This early record is the most stylistically whole, with later releases finding them exploring new musical genres and experimenting with song and lyric structures. This lack of genre-hopping on Big Lizard is a plus, though, and adds to the musical value of the album. The Dead Milkmen play their music like you would expect a band that writes songs about things like filet of sole and the laundromat to play—loose and fun, but skilled. On Big Lizard, they play an accessible brand of early punk that’s in line with the first Dead Kennedys album, though less edgy, and with more surf and folk influences mixed in (these influences surface more on later releases, beginning with 1986’s Eat Your Paisley).

After Tiny Town, Big Lizard moves on to slower songs, including Beach Song, Plumb Dumb and Swordfish, which, though all funny and well-crafted, are distant and hard to appreciate, and seem to circle around rather than go anywhere (Beach Song, with its crescendo of a final verse, breaks this trend only a bit, and is the best song of the three).

V.F.W. is a standout track with a title too explicit (and offensive to members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars) to be printed on the album jacket, or in this review. The track pushes ahead with a ferocity lacking from most non-funny punk bands and seems to be on the verge of collapsing onto itself by the end. It’s not quite two minutes of raw energy pushed into four chords and a lot of cursing.

After V.F.W. comes a few satires of rednecks and televangelists, before reaching the title track, about an unusually large pet lizard the narrator keeps in his backyard that becomes a symbol for U.S. military involvement around the world:

I was knocked outta bed late last night
I was woken up by the sound of dynamite
I ran downstairs to find an army man
He said "We gotta blow up those things we don't understand!"

This whiff of political leanings evaporates quickly, with the next few tracks being about a girlfriend that’s also a gorilla, a “bitchin’ Camaro” and the above-mentioned filet of sole. This trend continues for a while, with songs being equal parts unimportant and offensive, until politics resurges on Right Wing Pigeons, a song that details the Reagan Revolution as the results of some avian aliens “sent here to destroy the human race.” For my bet, they weren’t that far off.

While all the tracks may not have the intellectual value of Right Wing Pigeons they all are quite enjoyable on their own, with melodies and lyrics that will get stuck in your head faster than you can say Big Lizard in My Backyard.

The best tracks are the three that closed the album proper, following Right Wing Pigeons, but are now succeeded by the noise jam Togena. Dean’s Dream, Laundromat Song and Nutrition represent the heights of the album, both in terms of lyrical hilariousness and musical catchiness. Dean’s Dream is about an actual dream had by drummer Dean Clean (though its sung by lead vocalist Rodney Anonymous) and manages to work a great verse guitar riff out of two chords. In the course of one minute and 47 seconds, the listener is taken to a high school parade, movie theater, industrial meat freezer and a parking lot with Steve McGarret from Hawaii Five-0, where the narrator is stabbed (but he’s alright). Laundromat Song is one of the most original concepts for a song I’ve ever heard, and to this day makes me chuckle without even hearing it.

There's a girl washing her clothes
I'm in love but nobody knows
She looks sixteen or seventeen
My mind grows dirty when my clothes get clean

Pure genius.

Nutrition is the absolute best track on the album, opening with a funky bass line played at least ten times faster than it should be, before crashing guitar chords come into the mix, just as fast, and carry the track away. It tells the story of an idly rich child who is very concerned with his food consumption.

I've got nowhere to go
Just movin' on my feet
People say I've got no ambition
At least I give a shit
About the stuff I eat
Yeah, I care about nutrition

At two minutes and 14 seconds, it's the second longest track on the album, and it fills its time well, including a bridge mentioning staving people around the world and homemade turkey. Nutrition is the kind of song most bands wish they could write and Big Lizard the kind of satisfying album most wish they could record. The Dead Milkmen did both, and must have had an incredible amount of fun doing so.