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2007-05-12 - 5:30 a.m. I’ve been listening to The Frogs a lot recently. I’m listening to them now. I’m pretty much obsessed with them. Not many people are, but I’m in good company. They’re one of those musical curiosities who other musicians enthuse about but are shunned by a shoulder shrugging public, kinda like Daniel Johnston or Sun Ra. Being jesters at the court of grunge, Kurt, Billy and Eddie were all big fans of the Frogs. Just as Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s foul-mouthed alter egos, Derek and Clive, first came to prominence by being popular listening on the tour buses of the Who and Led Zeppelin, Jimmy and Dennis Flemion became the pet project of the plaid-shirted Seattle fraternity. You know the ‘that was a good drum break’ sample in Beck’s ‘Where It’s At’? That was The Frogs. The Smashing Pumpkins even included a Frogs promo on one of their DVDs, accurately captioned ‘The World’s Greatest Band’ in which you can see fireworks, batwings, underpants, wigs and Dennis talking about ‘bangin’ grandma’ before spitting water at the audience. While grateful for the publicity, Jimmy would later see Mr. Corgan nick a Frogs riff for his best song, 1979. The Frogs have never had documentaries made about them or even possess much of a cult following. Nope, getting ripped off and name checked by some hip band leaders in the mid-90s was about the closest The Frogs got to any mainstream recognition. Pitchfork have given them some semi-favourable reviews but that’s about it. The Flemion brothers have been making music as The Frogs since 1980, have thousands of songs, yet they've only released seven albums, most of which are made up of improvised, home recorded tracks from many years ago. One album – Racially Yours – was considered so controversial that no record company would release it for seven years. Sample lyrics: ‘Have you ever been hit in the face with a snowball?/ You could use a face wash/ Now you know you’re black.’ It provoked not a murmer when it surfaced in 2000. Reading the few interviews with Jimmy and Dennis that are available on the Internet, you can sense the justifiable bitterness they both feel that all their talent never made them any real money. Here’s Dennis letting off some steam in an interview with the Onion: ‘At least the big ones like us. I don't know. And we're good! Why can't we get the throngs? What is with these idiots? Why won't they come? I don't know, you analyze all this stuff after a while. Maybe it's a sex thing; maybe our band has to be more sexual, have more sex appeal. If they like your face... Almost invariably, all the bands that succeed are the ones with a lead singer who's good-looking. It's funny that that's not dumped upon, that people don't say, "You know, that's played out. That's not cool anymore. If you do that, you're an asshole and an idiot. We're going to laugh at you, as if you were in Vegas. You've got a fuzz pedal? Phhht. Blow me. You've got a big amp? Get the fuck out. Ooh! You've got big amps! Ooh! I'm impressed. The lead singer's got his shirt off?" I don't know. Bring a gun. That's got to be the new thing in rock. After the millennium, there has to be a guaranteed one death per show. Not the rock star--it's in his court. You take a chance going to the rock show. Somebody's going to die that night, guaranteed. The lead singer runs out, the band's just starting to jam, and boom! He just shoots, and then starts singing. That'd be perfect for a video.’ Perhaps it’s not such a mystery why The Frogs didn’t become the superstars they should have been. After all, virtually their entire ouvre consists of songs about deviant sexual acts. There’s so much talk of homos, dykes, rape and sodomy that the concept of ‘shocking’ simply becomes a joke. In The Frogs’ Rosy Jack World you will encounter the likes of ‘Baby Greaser George’, a 3 month old baby dressed in leathers who will swallow your left testicle after biting through your scrotum, ‘Oh I got too close to the stroller and put my thing down his mouth/ and he parted his teeth/ baby teeth/ north and south brilliantly’. This song from an album, by the way, called ‘It’s Only Right and Natural’ which has a cherubic young lad on the cover wearing a pink triangle on his shirt. They’re absurdists really, mocking the very idea that people can be shocked by language. Who, really, could become outraged at the song ‘Raped’? ‘Everyone’s makin’ a big deal out of the fact that I raped someone/ what’s the crime? I had fun/ after all she was a nun, and the priest wanted to watch.’ It’s too silly to be offensive and, perversely, The Frogs simply aren’t big enough targets for any wonen’s lib group to go after. If some band like the Smashing Pumpkins had released the song, then there probably would have been a bit of a stink. Nobody, however, has heard of The Frogs, so no innocent children are listening anyway. It’s Catch 22. It’s difficult to know whether Jimmy and Dennis thought they’d be defending their right to sing about their chosen subjects on Letterman, or whether they just hoped people would get the joke and pat them on the back for it in the form of record sales. It amuses me greatly to think that acts like Morrissey and Franz Ferdinand think they’re being so arch and daring by hinting at homosexuality in their lyrics when The Frogs can kick off ‘These Are the Finest Queen Boys (I’ve ever seen)’ with, ‘Start by kissing my ass/ I'll start by rubbing your balls/ we'll have a jammy time together one and all/ what will we do later on when the butter runs out?/ you'll probably scream and shout, "here comes the watermelon seed up my snoot snout", and that's your asshole, your snoot snout.’ You can really hear the haunting anguish about the butter running out. It’s intense. Maybe the whole ‘gay thing’ puts people off. Maybe so many overt lyrics celebrating homosexuality repulses the denser kids who don’t want to be caught listening to ‘fag music’. Maybe the fags themselves find 2 track folk-metal ditties sung in silly voices beneath them. Not dramatic or disco enough to win the pink pound, nor popular enough to earn the pink frown. People – gay or straight – just don’t care about The Frogs. Cunts. I’m not really doing the band justice by just quoting lyrics, though. If The Frogs didn’t have talent lurking behind all the profanity then they really would be the gayping novelty band that they might appear to be on the surface. But, fuck me, these songs are good. Mostly consisting of an impossibly catchy acoustic guitar strum with some light drums and keyboard effects in the background, these are songs that resonate and tickle at your inner monologue. The vocals are something else entirely. Whether it’s Dennis singing in his drunk old man voice or Jimmy’s implausibly gay croon, they make you pay attention. I like David Byrne’s quote that ‘lyrics are a way of tricking people into listening to the music.’ Maybe that’s The Frogs’ ultimate joke – sticking this endless barrage of filth over the top of some beautiful, affecting music so that you’re forced to go back to it and listen again. And again. ‘Homos’ isn’t just a comedy song about pretending to like sports, it’s a fucking brilliant tune. The same goes for ‘Dykes Are We’ – ‘Slipping dildo after dildo out of our mouths and pussies’ – it’s played and sung with enough conviction so that when Jimmy sings ‘ecstasy could be ours in each others arms’ it really does sound sweet and sincere, even with Dennis whispering ‘slit bitch rubber tit mama’ in the background, trying (and succeeding) to make Jimmy corpse. It’s this improvised, private nature of the songs that makes them special. It’s sobering to think that while that other band you like have been fannying about for years on their latest ‘masterpiece’ Jimmy and Dennis are coming up with all these wonderful songs almost by accident. When you listen to an album like ‘Bananimals’ or ‘My Daughter the Broad’ what you’re listening to is a couple of guys from Wisconsin dicking around at home and trying to make each other laugh. That’s it, really. The creative ‘process’ boiled down to a wicked sense of humour and God-given talent. From such acorns do mighty trees grow. There’s more to it than that, though. That old music rag cliché about ‘We make music for ourselves and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus’ can be applied unironically to The Frogs. Like Derek and Clive and the Residents’ ‘theory of obscurity’, this is art made with no audience to cater for and no commercial restrictions. It’s music made privately, for the sheer thrill of expressing stuff that nobody expects to be expressed. Listening to The Frogs is like being allowed to eavesdrop on all the stuff you weren’t told about when you were a kid. It’s a totally joyous, liberating experience – no bullshit, no bluster, no Bono, just raw creativity. And gay jokes. Part of the thrill of improvising is that you never know if it’s going to work or not. On ‘La da da da, La da da dee, La da da dum dum’ you can hear the delight in Jimmy’s voice when he realises his gambit of ‘Holding my daffodil in the snow, ah… wouldn’t you just know it, here comes a bum’ has potential. I love that self-aware ‘wouldn’t you just know it’ – it’s like Jimmy knows it’s impossible for him to sing something that isn’t in some way homoerotic. I’ve no idea how many song fragments they have to choose from to make an album, but I’m guessing it’s a lot. The success rate is extraordinary. The Flemion brothers are up there with Mark E. Smith, Frank Zappa and Bob Pollard in terms of the ‘keeper’ ratio. The Frogs serve it up raw, though. All these songs are essentially demos. Listening to their albums allows you to spy on the song before it’s had a chance to wipe the spunk off its face in time for meeting the in-laws. When you hear the songs performed live it shows what a great melody was there was to begin with, which the boys can then beef up as they see fit. A song like ‘Drugs (Out of the Mist)’ starts off on the album with Dennis warbling, ‘I’ve done drugs that would blow your mind tonight… out of my mind tonight, tonight’ in his drunk old man voice, not really sure where he’s going with it, until Jimmy steps in by whispering, ‘I’ve got a suitcase full of drugs, I can turn you on,’ and from then on the song takes off, getting sillier and sillier with pimps, sleazy prostitutes and priests with yeast infections all getting mentioned until it ends with the lovely, ‘Out of the mist I kissed your drug-filled lips.’ It’s chaotic but it works and it’s about a million times more exciting to listen to than the shit on MTV. Live, though, ‘Drugs’ becomes an extended rock hard motherfucker. It’s tight, it’s scrubbed up and it’s been transformed from an endearing homemade clusterfuck into a michelin-starred rockbomb. You’d better believe these guys can play. The shows aren’t all dead on balls accurate rock, thankfully. Jimmy’s still yelling stuff like ‘Goddamnit Mr. Stipe I’ve got AIDS again!’ at random intervals. They make quite the spectacle on stage, Jimmy standing tall in his huge batwings and sequins, Dennis malevolent behind his tiny drumkit in a yard sale suit, blackfaced and bewigged. Jimmy Flemion is the only man on the planet able to carry off Hulk Hogan style skullet hair with conviction – the long and balding combo that screams, ‘fuck you I don’t care.’ Like I say, maybe they were never destined for fame. Bitter and resentful but never defeated, The Frogs released their last official album to date in 2001. ‘Hopscotch Lollipop Sunday Surprise’ not only has the best title of all time, but features the absolute best of The Frogs. It’s a pure pop album with (just about) all of the obscenity jettisoned. OK, so there’s lemony songs like ‘Fuck Off’, ‘Know It All’, and the ludicrously jaunty ‘Nipple Clamps’ – ‘Wear them like you mean it’ – but it’s as close to the mainstream as the Flemion boys are ever going to dangle. It sits comfortably in the middle of my top 10 favourite records of all time. Hopscotch’ shows that there’s so much more this band had to offer than made up songs about homos and golden showers. It’s almost like them having the last laugh on the music industry that has consistently spurned them: ‘see, I told you we could do it. You don’t deserve us.’ They started this face-spiting trend on the ‘Starjob’ EP that Billy Corgan released for them on his Scratchie label back in 1997. The brothers Flemion took this opportunity to make fun of the scene that idolised them in ‘Lord Grunge’ – ‘sweet greasy hair, and sweet grimy clothes…smashing our instruments à la The Who’. The baiting of grunge icons is continued on Hopscotch’, which I think was recorded at about the same time, with the anti-Courtney Love anthem ‘Bad Mommy’ – ‘I'm gettin' hungry, nanny's on the way/ i'm gettin' angry, nanny soon will play/ daddy, why are you up in the sky?/ why couldn't they have taken mommy?’. Other treats are the straight love song ‘The Longing Goes Away’, the poetic ‘Whisper’, the (obviously) superior Dylan cover, ‘Billy’, the medieval-like ‘Jewels’ and the stunning, climcatic ‘Enter I’. Oh! And the atheistic ‘Better Than God’ – ‘The pleasure is all mine, in Eden I fall… Everyone one of you is better than God.’ Richard Dawkins couldn’t have put it better. Maybe the world just isn’t ready to accept a band as brutally honest as The Frogs. That’s what you get from The Frogs: honesty. You’d think it would be the other way around; The Frogs are taking the piss while ‘serious’ bands like Coldplay mean it, maaan. Well, what could be more phony than Chris Martin simpering, ‘We live in a beautiful world’ or Tom Yorke whining about how he wishes he was, ‘So fucking special’. Fuck off. Pretentious assholes. The Frogs sing about rapists and bears but they make no apologies for it, and have no delusions about what they’re doing. They’re not trying to save the world, bare their souls or pander to their demographic. No, The Frogs, please themselves and pretty much no-one else, making their art and never losing their sense of the ridiculous. Well, someone had to do it. It won’t make you rich, but it will make those let in on the secret cum in completely thankful sincerity. Man, I love The Frogs. Here I am rabbiting on when Wesley Willis did it so much better: This band played at the Empty Bottle The Frogs! The band played it on The Frogs! The rock show was over at last I like them The Frogs!
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