New book chronicles Philly punk icons The Dead Milkmen’s history
Author of ‘The Dead Milkmen’ Tyler Sonnichsen and the band will be at Siren Records in Doylestown Friday night for a free book release event featuring a question and answer session.
The Dead Milkmen in Clark Park | still from video
The rise of punk rock across the globe is a bit of a double-edged sword: the subculture built by people who rejected the status quo, corporatism, bigotry, and fascism has become an integral part of mainstream pop culture.
And, for better or for worse, Philadelphia’s The Dead Milkmen were a crucial band in turning the world on to punk rock. Their hit “Punk Rock Girl” sent the genre to a new level, getting play on MTV and bringing punk to a much larger audience. The song was No. 6 on The Philly 250, our list of songs by, from, and about Philly.
Their impact on the punk scene and pop culture is explored in the new book from J-Card Press, simply titled The Dead Milkmen.
Author Tyler Sonnichsen and members of the band will be at Siren Records in Doylestown Friday evening for a book release event featuring a Q&A session with Sonnichsen and the band. Register to attend online here.
Sonnichsen, Senior Lecturer in the University of Vermont’s Department of Geography and Geosciences, said as a teen he had “a pretty dogmatic idea of what punk sounded like.”
“Then one day, I remember driving around, so this was probably 25, 26 years ago, and I heard ‘Punk Rock Girl’ played on the radio,” he said. He was hooked, and as he got older, he began to appreciate the band for more than just the punk attitude and sound.
“ I got involved in the world of comedy, and not just performing but also producing,” he said. The Dead Milkmen’s satirical material added a new level of appreciation for Sonnichsen.
A longtime Washington DC resident, Sonnichsen is well versed in the hardcore and punk world. His dissertation for the PhD in geography at The University of Tennessee was titled Capitals of Punk: DC, Paris, and Circulation in the Urban Underground and is available online.
“The values of what I learned from not just the hardcore scene in DC, but just the community and how they fed into one another, made me curious about Philly because Philly was just far enough away that it was a place that I could go occasionally, but it wasn’t a place that I got to know intimately.
To him, the story of The Dead Milkmen is, in many ways, the story of Philadelphia. Like Philadelphia, Sonnichsen argues The Dead Milkmen don’t get the true credit they deserve for contributing so much to culture.
”People might jump on me for this, but they deserve just as much credit as, like, Fugazi does,” he said. “The two bands actually have a lot in common, like a lot more than people assume just because they came from different cities.”
Their influence, the death of bassist David Schulthise, and more are explored in his book, which initially was intended to be a shorter work for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series.
During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, he fleshed out his pitch and hit up J-Card, who bit on his idea.
“There’s a lot that The Dead Milkmen contributed that took me years and years to appreciate and understand,” he said. “Being able to write this book was obviously a very humbling experience. It was a discovery of the city and the environment and community that gave rise to the Dead Milkmen.”
In writing the book, Sonnichsen spent time in Philadelphia and was able to interview members of the band.
“I met with Joe [Genaro] and Dean [Sabatino] to make sure that they knew about the book and that [Dan “Dandrew” Stevens] and Rodney [Linderman] were all aware of the book, who I was, why I was writing it, and to make sure that they didn’t have any questions or concerns.”
Sonnichsen wanted to avoid asking the same questions they’ve fielded for 40 years.
“I purposefully waited to actually go to Philly until I had a pretty good semblance of what the themes that were going to run through the story were and the places that I wanted to make sure to go, other people I wanted to see while I was in town,” he said.
“Punk Rock Girl” is widely viewed as the band’s legacy, but Sonnichsen’s book aims to point out The Dead Milkmen have been “ articulating the anger that a lot of us are feeling about the way the world is now.
“It’s not something that they just started; they were always like that,” he said. ”Those albums in the ’80s were, looking back on them, absolutely a field guide to a rotting empire, and that was 40 years ago. And none of that has really changed.”
For example, in 2023 they released a song titled “Grandpa’s Not A Racist (He Just Voted For One).”
Sonnichsen quoted Travis Morrison of The Dismemberment Plan to highlight The Dead Milkmen’s decades of authenticity:
I think about the Dead Milkmen all the time. In punk rock, a lot of bands called out bullshit, but then they replaced it with a different grade of bullshit. The Dead Milkmen didn’t do that. They didn’t have a single performative bone in their entire collective body.
”That’s one of the things that’s made me appreciate the Milkmen more through writing this book, is how honest everything they’ve done is,” Sonnichsen said.
Siren Records, 25 E. State St. in Doylestown, will host the release event at 7 p.m. Friday.