April 30, 2025

Meeting the Dead Milkmen

Meeting my Heroes is an occasional essay series from Matt Carmichael.

When I think about Almost Matt Almost Famous I often think about the role of the young journalist’s mom in his career and story arc. She dropped him off at concerts and picked him up afterward. And she let him go off on tour into the world generally referred to as a three-headed Cerberus where “rocknroll” is the most virtuous.

At one point in the movie his mom winds up on the phone with one of the band members her 15-year-old is touring with and tells him, “This is not some apron-wearing mother you're speaking with - I know all about your Valhalla of decadence and I shouldn't have let him go. He's not ready for your world of compromised values and diminished brain cells that you throw away like confetti. Am I speaking to you clearly?”

Now, my mom would not have cared for the Dead Milkmen had she listened. She wouldn’t have liked some of the words they said in their songs, nor that her son was listening to them. She was, and is, pretty strict about many things.

Which made it all the more amazing that she pulled me out of school one time to take me to a record-signing at Repeat the Beat in Dearborn. They were doing this in-store event before a show she knew I was disappointed to be too young to go to. (She would not, for the record, have driven me and dropped me off, but it’s plausible my dad would have gone with me, as he did for Billy Joel. And yeah, I wasn’t going to be allowed on tour with them!)

I didn’t miss school much, as a kid. And I don’t miss work much now, as an adult. But Ferris Bueller had it right. Life moves pretty fast, and if you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you might miss it. These days I celebrate that with Day of the Dad. Sometimes I wind up with days off that the rest of my family doesn’t have. Often it’s Veterans Day, which is right near my birthday. I spend the day doing projects around the house, or grabbing a matinee that no one else wants to see. Then and now, there’s a lot to be said for playing hooky.

Obviously I have my parents to thank for helping me meet many childhood heroes. We met Mr. Wizard, the “Supermarket Scientist,” who had a book and did TV appearances doing chemistry experiments with household goods. I got to meet Shuttle astronaut, Brewster Shaw (I had his business card, too, and signed no less, but left it in my breast pocket and it went through the wash. This was far from the only thing I would do that with. Why do I still use breast pockets?). They would take me to baseball card shows, where I met folks like Tigers Catcher Matt Nokes. They did let me go to a concert by myself, now that I think about it, but I drove myself. That was how I met Lou Reed the first time, hanging out by the stage door.

I knew of the Dead Milkmen because when I was in middle-school I would stay up past my bedtime listening to the high school station nearby, WBFH. I could only listen until 10pm because it signed off the air entirely at that hour because, well, the DJs all needed to go to bed. So did I.

I talked about this when I talked about how this is also where I first heard Mojo Nixon. WBFH played a lot of the Dead Milkmen. I immediately fell in love with the crazy, quirky lyrics of songs like Punk Rock Girl and Bitchin’ Camaro. I bought all their records (and tapes). Even my favorite Detroit Tiger, Jim Walewander, loved them. They visited him in the clubhouse before a Tigers game when they were in Detroit. That day, he hit the only home run of his major league career. A reporter asked, “Did the Dead Milkmen give you inspiration?” Walewander replied, “No, they gave me a T-shirt.”

The summer after high school I did get to see the Dead Milkmen live at a memorable show in Pontiac where they had put an amphitheater on top of a parking deck. (It hosted some amazing shows, looking back, Porno for Pyros with the Flaming Lips! The Beastie Boys!). During Bitchin’ Camaro, there was a lot of talk about (Chevy) Camaros and their Pontiac rival, the IROC. The security guys got into it with one of the bouncers pointing to the other dramatically indicating that he owned an IROC. Hilarity ensued. I hung around long enough to meet them again.

By college my fandom was pretty set and became well-known and really one of the first times I would say that musical preferences became at all intertwined with my identity. Friends would have me recite the song Stuart on the way to classes. It was a song about burrow owls, the pitfalls of being a daredevil, and of course it’s about what the queers are doing to our soil.

And then years passed. The Dead Milkmen kind of came and went and came back again. But I got to shoot them at Metro in 2009, and tweeted back and forth with the band and with singer Rodney Anonymous and met Dave Blood’s sister who was also shooting the Metro show. My teenage self was very psyched, and my adult self was pretty geeked, too.

Now, I’ve got my kids listening to all these bands, and singing Stuart too. So much in the world has changed including them listening on bluetooth headphones tied to their Apple Watch instead of corded headphones and boomboxes. But they’re still probably listening past their bedtimes. And conspiracy theories about the queers are raging more now than ever. It’s a good thing the music is a constant.