It’s silly, really. Like I’m banging my head against the wall. All these years I’ve spent trying to convince a dubious public that Madison, Wisconsin’s Killdozer was one of history’s greatest rock bands, utterly wasted. I’ve convinced no one and will continue to convince no one, not one single person, that Killdozer was the ultimate shit. What is so apparent to me, that Killdozer was a simultaneously hilarious and serious protest band that played pile driver rock at volumes designed to explode Ming vases, moves the record-playing public not a jot. They—sob!—just don’t care.
But I’m going to give it one more try. One more try, and then you’ll never have to hear me natter on about the genius of Killdozer ever again. But here, I’ll start you off with just a taste of Michael Gerald—vocalist, bassist, and songwriter extraordinaire—and his amazing talent. It’s a song called “New Pants and Shirt,” and it opens with Gerald shrieking, “Enter the 49 gates of uncleanliness!” and then, after some quiet bass, singing, “Enter the 49 gates of uncleanliness/Said she pushing up her skirt/I held my breath against her fetidness/As I gazed upon the swinish flirt.” You will not find lyrics so despicably hilarious anywhere, except in the work of Anal Cunt.
But Gerald didn’t limit himself to writing about the despicable. He wrote great songs about disaster movie director Irwin Allen, the writer Flannery O’Connor (“She wrote many books/Before death came upon her”), Earl Scheib the car-painting king, a dog named Knuckles who helps people, horrifying train accidents and grain elevator explosions, free love in Amsterdam, Ed Gein, a man with a ¾” drill bit lodged in his brain, you name it. And he sang them all from a Trotskyist perspective, one that I think he was at least semi-serious about. One of the most interesting things about Killdozer is trying to separate the sincerity from the satire, and I remain convinced Killdozer had every bit as much empathy for the common man as Bruce Springsteen. And they were never as smug about it.
Killdozer dedicated 1986’s “Burl” EP to the memory of Burl Ives—prematurely, as it turned out, when the band discovered he was still alive. Oh well. It could happen to anybody. I could have picked any Killdozer record because they’re all sublime works of art, but I’ll be honest: I’ve picked the Butch Vig-produced “Burl” because it includes what may be their finest song, “Hamburger Martyr.” How to describe it? In short, it’s a delicate vignette about a customer unsatisfied with the fare served at a diner, and his homicidal response. Who needs Chekhov when Killdozer has supplied us with so many great short stories?
“Hamburger Martyr” begins with Gerald farting out a “Ffffffffffffffffuck you!!!!” after which he proceeds to tell the story from the customer’s point of view. He sings, “Hey, you/You call this a hamburger?/Well I don’t call this a hamburger/Hell, I could make a better hamburger with my asshole!” He then goes on to critique the quality of the coffee, noting, “And you call this cup of shit coffee?/Well I’d rather drink from the dick of a goat!” before invoking Voltaire by observing that in this best of all possible worlds people have to die, yeah they have to die. So he kills the fry cook and fries himself up his own hamburger, recalling in the meantime that his mother would tell him he was God’s special son, before the tempo takes off and he screams out variations on “I was born to suffer for your pleasure,” then ends the song with a perfunctory “Fuck you.”
Killdozer was internationally renowned for their covers of everything from “Cinnamon Girl” to Black Oak Arkansas’ “Hot n’ Nasty.” Indeed, their 1989 LP For Ladies Only consisted of nothing but covers. But even by their standards the choice of Jessi Colter’s “I’m Not Lisa” is strange. Monster mouth Gerald plows right over the song, backed, or so I’m told, by the Wisconsin Boys Choir. It could be a joke on Gerald’s part, but I do hear something way back there. Meanwhile, “One for the People” is the EPs sole weak link, which I attribute to the fact that Gerald inexplicably left the lyric writing to the mysterious Joe E. Shea, about whom I can discover nothing. The tone opens with bagpipes, then Bill Hobson kicks in on guitar, playing an incredibly cool groove with the help of his brother, drummer Dan Hobson. It appears to concern a working man who drinks and drinks and drinks, but it lacks Gerald’s eye for the telling detail, and I only listen to it for the music, which picks up pace towards the end, leaving Gerald to bellow his heart out.
“Hottentot” is a swaggeringly heavy tune sung from the point of view of a sexual predator, and it’s a nasty little number, with Gerald singing, “She’s making mud pies/I was hypnotized/By her sexy little eyes.” Hobson plays a pair of twisted little solos, while Gerald interjects “Yeehas!” and “Hoo hoo hoo!” and a nice “Hold on!” Musically this one may be the album’s highlight, but it offends just as Gerald intended, and it even makes me a little queasy, despite the lack of any graphic lyrical content.
I’ll admit that I’m not sure where Gerald is going lyrically with the bashing “Cranberries.” Suffice it to say it has something to do with a dented can of cranberries, and that Gerald sets a new record for “Heys” in one song. Generally the most lucid of lyric writers, he goes Butthole Surfers on this one, singing, “And on the seventh day of the uprising/Elvis laid down his head to rest/While the girl drank the blood of a mule/The Pope was fondling Ann Margret’s breasts.” He then concludes the song with the wonderful lines, “The King is dead/But not forgotten/Don’t eat the cranberries/They’ve gotten rotten.”
Which brings us to the tragic “Slackjaw,” on which Hobson plays a fantastic climbing guitar riff and features Gerald at his best. The tune is told from the point of view of a daughter whose father, a railroad worker, gets cut neatly in half after being pinned between two rail cars. She’s beckoned with her mother to say goodbye to her father, who tells her to be a good girl and not marry men who drink before the train cars are separated and he falls, her “stump of a father,” to the earth, his head right beside his legs. She then goes on to tell about how she married a serviceman who went out whoring every night before leaving her homeless and without a job. The song then ends with the woman asking, “Can you spare any change?” It’s a macabre little piece of storytelling with a great ending, and proof that Gerald was working at a level of lyric writing that surpassed virtually all of his contemporaries.
And that last sentence summons up the hold Killdozer has on my imagination. Gerald wrote great stories, and the Hobson brothers backed them with tunes that, while generally on the noise end of the musical spectrum, could and often did surprise you with their subtlety. But it doesn’t matter. Killdozer will never get their fair due, in part because Gerald’s vocals were so… oversized, and in part because a quirky sense of humor is the price of admission. Gerald once told me, apropos the song “The Puppy,” a monstrous tale of castration, that you should always write about what you know, and what he knew about were idiots. So blame it all on the great state of Wisconsin, which must be full of them.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
