July 04, 1985 - West Lafayette, IN

Show Day - Sunny

Woke up about 10AM - coffee - I skipped a shower. Went to "See Your Food" for breakfast. Reminds me of "Troy's" in West Philly. Back to Cole's. Wait for Dave B's friend Shelia - she's late. We leave about 2PM for West Lafayette, IN. Arrive at 5:30.

I can't believe I skipped a shower. How unkind! "See Your Food" is a classic place. The "Troy's" I mention was a greasy deli restaurant near the Penn campus in West Philly where we lived. We'd go for "Eggels" - delicious eggs and cheese on a toasted bagel, or late at night you might be able to convince them to sell you an ice cold 40 ouncer' past the legal time. (They had a rare 'deli' license that allowed them to sell beer - Pennsylvania liquor laws are really restrictive and weird...). Sadly they closed up long ago... We were heading to Stuart's trailer park. Stuart was a friend of Dave Blood's from his days of attending Purdue University in West Lafayette for an Economics degree. While Rodney was eventually inspired to write the words for our song 'Stuart', I can assure you that the real deal is nothing like the character in the song. In fact a few years later, we took the real Stuart along on tour as our roadie.

Picnic underway - stage is set up - PA is not good. It's a public address system - no mixer - just a power amp and some horns. Play for about an hour - no vocals - distorted if any. Had fun anyway. Drank a lot - ate a lot. Went to see fireworks in W. Lafayette. Real American stuff. It was a great July 4th. Left party about 12:30AM. Stayed with a friend of Stuart's. She had a cat named 'Black' - Everywhere we've stayed has had at least one cat. To bed at 2AM.

Dead Milkmen - 1985-07-04 - West Lafayette, IN...I love the balloons...very punk rock. Stuart had invited us to play the trailer park picnic for the 4th of July. We appreciated his effort, but his knowledge of public address systems was limited - so we had to make due with something that looked like it belonged on top of a pole next to the football field. I remember going into town to watch the fireworks on top of a parking garage. There was an elevator that took up up maybe 3 or 4 floors and out onto the roof of the garage. There was a family on the elevator with us and I swear we heard the young boy with them exclaim it was the highest building he'd been up in.




Posted by Dean at July 4, 1985 10:23 PM
Comments

Well, to be a nerd about it, Stuart isn't really a character in the song... he's just the invisible character it's addressed to. The song narrator is actually Bill, Sr. If that's his name.

Then there's the eternal mystery of: "Who's really going down to the shore?" in Bitchin' Camaro.

Posted by: M.Ace at December 7, 2003 11:37 AM

Dean fails to mention my little solo adventure. I met a nice young lady and we took off for a bar that featured 75 cent pitchers of beer and lots of local color (by this, I mean that when I walked into the men's room, I was confronted with the site of a guy whizzing into a urinal while holding a pitcher of beer in each hand. How did he undo his fly?)

All of the Milkmen went back to the young lady's place to crash. The other three in the living room and me elsewhere. A one point, the woman turns to me and says "I have to tell you something - I'm married." It was then that I noticed the place was filled with pictures of her husband (In the living room, the other Milkmen were noticing the same thing - in the form of wedding pictures). How had I missed these earlier? Add to all this that you could tell by the photos that the guy was a giant - well over six-and-a-half feet tall. He dwarfed every object in the photos. "Oh, that's us at Hoover Dam"
"Where the hell is the dam?"
"My husband's blocking it."

Posted by: Rodney Anonymous at December 10, 2003 04:34 PM

"See your Food" is also known as the Valois Restaurant, which is still there (recently remodeled and expanded). The Valois has been immortalized in a book called "Slim's Table" by Mitch Duneier.

Posted by: Cole at March 8, 2004 04:23 PM

This was the first time I had ever heard of the Dead Milkmen, let alone experience them... We had a fan-freakin-tastic time that day. I often tell my wife about it having seen you guys at the trailer park, but this is proof that I'm not lying to her again.

BTW: That's me in the lower left corner of the pic, with the grey t-shirt and the long dark wavy 80's hair!

Tim Greene

Posted by: TGreene at March 11, 2004 11:49 PM