Review Summary: No glamour here, just the free association of the id.
I only play for money
I don’t give a fuck about the fans
…so go the first two lines of the chorus to one of the Frogs’ few songs that is actually decently well-known, “I Only Play for Money,” featuring Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. Only one half of the statement is true, however. The Frogs certainly don’t give a f
uck about their fans – the few and far between, those that remain. To say that they only play for money, on the other hand, would be a bit misleading. For since their first appearance on the music scene in the early 1980s, the brothers Flemion (Jimmy and Dennis) have deliberately sabotaged any chance they might have had at mainstream success, settling instead for word-of-mouth notoriety. They even seem to have shunned the Internet age, where self-promotion is easier than ever. After rising to relative prominence through their association with Steve Albini and the grunge scene in the early-to-mid-1990s, the Frogs more or less fell back into obscurity. Their last record,
Hopscotch Lollipop Sunday Surprise, was released in 2001 to little fanfare, and even less critical reaction. The Frogs now seem all but forgotten, their memory kept alive only by a few staunch supporters scattered across cyberspace, who have posted the band’s lyrics and uploaded their videos to YouTube.
Several factors prevented the Frogs from ever achieving mainstream success, even in their heyday. Not that they were really looking for it, of course. For one there was the quality of their songs, both in terms of their composition/execution as well as their recording process. Most of their songs seem to have been improvised on the spot, starting with perhaps a few basic structural variations but then leaving the rest to chance: to chaos, sheer aleatory. Nearly all of them were recorded either on a four-track or in a single take, using only one microphone without redubbing. But even more so than their poor quality, it was the songs’ lyrical content that kept the Frogs off the radio. Beyond just their use of expletives, which would have been censored in any case, the themes of the songs were extremely disturbing. Glorifying homosexuality, pedophilia, cripple-sex, and c
ocksucking grandmas, as well as a litany of other culturally taboo topics, the Frogs pretty much guaranteed from the start that their songs wouldn’t receive any air time. This didn’t seem to bother them, however, and they pressed on nevertheless, with hilarious results.
My Daughter the Broad, compiled and released in 1996, epitomizes these characteristics of the Frogs’ musical œuvre, and stands as the band’s masterpiece. Comprised of twenty-two home recordings, all but one of which are under four minutes, the album follows the concept of the lo-fi approach to its logical conclusion – wretched and complete absurdity. Most of these tracks were left over from the late 1980s, and reflect the general trajectory the Frogs pursued on their previous album, 1989’s
It’s Only Right and Natural. The songs are manic and nonsensical, loosely connected by a series of characters (represented by different voices) that reappear haphazardly throughout the album’s length. The “curmudgeon” voice shows up on a number of tracks: first, in the brilliant opener “Reelin’ and Rockin’,” but then also on “Where’s Jerry Lewis?”, “I’m Sad Because the Goat Just Died Today,” and “I’m Hungry.” A psychopathic murderer is introduced on the track “I’m Evil, Jack,” signified by a string of high-pitched threats and warnings. “Lifeguard of Love” is sung from the perspective of a sun-bleached gay lifeguard, enthusiastically sucking out the wounds of shark-bitten swimmers. On one of the album’s more unsettling tunes, “Which One of You Gave My Daughter the Dope?”, a grief-stricken father pleads (in the first person) with a bunch of “coke addicts” to tell him which one of them left him with “a closed casket of doped-up daughter dope.”
Other songs follow a more or less narrative format. “Children Run Away From the Man with the Candy” tells the tale of the stereotypical older pedophile who lures children at the schoolyard into his van by offering them some candy. “Drive to a secluded location, down with the pants.” With a cheerful, blissfully naïve piano line sparkling in the background, the narrator explains how the man with the candy, the story’s protagonist, plays with the children back at the schoolyard. The song “Grandma in the Corner with a Penis in Her Hand” assumes a position of limited omniscience, detailing an exchange between a grandma and a penis, in which the firemen are called to put a stop to the incident. Other songs possess even less coherence.
All things said,
My Daughter the Broad is a gem of comic recording, genuine bit of madness and anarchy set against the scores of pretenders. It captured a moment of lo-fi recording back before lo-fi was repopularized in the early 2000s as part of the indie chic, carrying it to untold heights of ugliness and monstrosity. No glamour here, just the free association of the id.
