My Daughter the Broad is the second album from indie rock’s behemoths of bad taste, the Frogs. Out of print for decades, the record has been expanded into a double set, including eight bonus tracks. Alternately funny and profoundly disturbing, this might be this demented duo’s best album. The reissue is out now on vinyl from the Foreign Leisure label.
It all started in relative normalcy. In the manner of myriad others before and since, the brothers Dennis and Jimmy Flemion formed a band. The year was 1980, and that band was the Frogs. It took most of the decade for the Milwaukee-based duo to gain traction in the era’s underground scene, and when labels and listeners began taking notice, it was not necessarily in the manner they’d planned.
A self-released eponymous album emerged in 1988 without much fanfare. It’s a perfectly fine, occasionally quite likable, and never uninteresting set of (alternately) art-tinged glam-pop or glammed-out art-pop. Still, it was cut in a studio and only hints at the home-recorded mayhem that emerged on their follow-up, It’s Only Right and Natural, which was issued by Homestead Records the next year.
That album collected what the Frogs have described as “made-up songs,” meaning they were whipped together and quickly taped at home without the intention of being released for wider public consumption. While making the rounds among those close to the Frogs, a cassette reportedly first landed in Steve Albini’s hands and then with Gerard Cosloy at Homestead.
It’s Only Right and Natural corrals a bunch of those made-up songs. The result, depending on the listener’s tolerance, is either an extended satirical provocation delving into the fears of the socially intolerant or a deep dive into bad-taste humor that barrels far beyond button-pushing to the outskirts and inner neighborhoods of the legitimately transgressive. In reality, it’s both satire and irredeemable juvenile smut, and that’s what makes the record so effective. Well, they also had their way with catchy, if admittedly lo-fi tunes.
The 2019 reissue of It’s Only Right and Natural was reviewed extensively on this very site by this very writer, and rather than rehashing the content of that still available piece, it’s better to get right to the gist of My Daughter the Broad, what was released (again in cahoots with Cosloy) by Matador Records in 1996.
This belated follow-up again consisted of those made-up songs, which by this point had apparently grown to a total upwards of 1,000. It’s worth noting that the gap of years was at least in part due to the inability to bring their proposed second full-length, Racially Yours, to market. For reasons that should be obvious, Homestead wouldn’t touch that record, as that label was winding down operations. Neither would Matador, an enterprise that was firmly in the thick of 1990s indie music.
The delirious and often hallucinatory levels of offensiveness that shape My Daughter the Broad were right up Matador’s alley, however. And their cottoning to the record’s contents is easy to understand. For starters, it’s much less thematically concise than It’s Only Right and Natural. To have just delivered another record in that mode would’ve been disappointing. There’s still plenty of gay-themed songs on this follow-up, but it’s only one aspect in a highly fucked up whole.
Indeed, My Daughter the Broad has all sorts of bizarre range as the original LP opens and closes with the ragged two-parter “Reelin’ and Rockin.” Yes, that’s a very loose debasement of the Chuck Berry chestnut with dirty lyrics that sound like some prurient and drug-addled geezer roadie could’ve dished them out during a hard rock band’s soundcheck at the height (or nadir) of 1970s arena concert glory.
Elsewhere, “April Fools (He Had the Change Done at the Shop)” attains a level of surreal smut, connecting like feverish extracts that Maurice Girodias might’ve published in an omnibus of anonymous “erotica” circa 1970 or so, but then it’s pushed so far that the outlandishness teeters over into the ridiculous. “I Had a Second Change Done at the Shop (Now I’ve Added Animal Cocks)” is a much goofier second chapter.
One of the record’s highlights is “I’m Evil, Jack,” which registers like a sprout from the root of Neil Innes, and, for that matter, so does “Banjo Bonnie.” These cuts mingle well with the tracks inspired by Tyrannosaurus Rex, early Bowie, and dusted Brit folk grandeur in general. One of those selections, “Children Run Away (The Man with the Candy)” also fits into My Daughter the Broad’s relentless lampoonery of hysterical societal fears, specifically predatory molesters and drug dealers, as in “Which One of You Gave My Daughter the Dope?”
In summation, did the brothers Flemion (RIP Dennis) occasionally take things too far? Of course they fucking did. That was the point then, and so it remains now. But My Daughter the Broad makes clear that inspired offensiveness was just one ingredient in the Frogs’ discomfitingly worthwhile recipe.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
