Today’s challenge: write over a thousand words about Jimi Hendrix without gushing over his guitar playing! Challenge accepted—with the caveat that I can succumb to that natural urge, briefly, but only in the context of evaluating his songwriting. Why ruminate…

With one notable exception, the original cast of This Is Spinal Tap were wildly successful thespians playing complete fuckups. Arguably the most iconic character of the lot, the exploding drummer “played” by everyman Ric Parnell, was another story altogether. The…

Undiscouraged by cardiac surgery complications, wildfire smoke, or a nation's harrowing turn toward autocracy, the improbable pairing of The Milkmen's Lory Kohn with The Manfreds’ Marcus Cliffe and Simon Currie has dropped a farm-fresh single. “Suits That Fly,” a paean…

One vibey summer evening in 1986, at the opening of R Lee White’s show at McClaren Markowitz Gallery in Boulder, after some brief flirtation, I got lucky and went home with “Phone Call For You, Sweetie.” 

“Phone Call For You,…

Three plastic storage bins worth of passé storage media: reel-to-reel mixdown tapes, analog cassettes, VHS home movies. A runaway mixdown and a disappeared DAT tape. Digital dilemmas and divine intervention. Heart-stopping drama and a comedy of errors. A longstanding-quest and…

Milkmaids and milkmates from Ecuador to Estonia have been getting after me to refocus this blog on the Men of Milk. You were mildly amused when I assumed the role of musicologist, studiously analyzing the merits and warts of more…

The opening scene of Gilmore Girls Season 1 Episode 12 parlays Britpop 'n pop tarts as hot thirtysomething mom Lorelai and teenage babe-spawn Rory ready themselves for work and school. The punchy, psychedelic-tinged soundtrack that practically leapt out of my…

Sixty years later, the goofy "The Mr. Ed Theme," crooned by by a talking horse stabled inside a suburban barn and a song pitcher, remains indelibly etched in the collective unconscious. "A horse is a horse of course of course"…

"Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown" never really flipped me when it came out in 1966. Apparently, it just needed a little time—a mere fifty-five years is all it took—to grow on me.

First Impressions
Here we have a pro shoot of the…

A lot of folks ineligible for Social Security might be astounded to learn just how much "ink" print media lavished on music reviews in the sixties and seventies. Magazine spreads ran two, three, four pages or even longer. Eagerly-anticipated albums…

With other accomplished songsmiths content to regurgitate past glories from their stay-at-home digs, the task of penning an uplifting anthem for our phantasmagoric times fell to the all-but-forgotten Men of Milk. With nothing less than the future of the free…

It all started in the swingin' 60s, at the height of what was being called the folk craze, with "Marijuana Smoke," a burst of juvenalia about the joys of weed that remained stashed away ... until now! Here it is…

Beat poets. Tibetan Buddhists. Free love. Cults. Evocative hotels. Prophecies. Rocky mountain strongholds. Vajra Guards. 80s Saturnalias. Pure unadulterated decadence. Lovely trios. You name it, Naropa's got it all! So why is a band site giving bandwidth to prose?

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As previously threatened, here's a little taste of Naropa, one of my favorite memoirs. Feels like it would be right at home with the other excerpts in Drinking, Smoking and Screwing: Great Writers on Great Times that I…

If you like your lyrics "smart, but not too smart," Milkman Lory Kohn may be your kind of writer. If you also like your prose smart, but not too smart," Lory Kohn may be your kind of writer…

A glowing, shimmering, often dazzling object has been detected nearing the crosshairs centered within the Colorado Music Hall of Fame's radar sweep. Could the mysterious blip be Songlab, the Milkmen's orbiting recording studio? They utilized the space pod to…

I've noticed that our newfound international fans inevitably gravitate toward Songlab (our latest collection from 2016-2018) or Spilt Milk (our earliest collection from 1980-1985). Yet hardly anyone lands on Dairy Aire (our equally vibrant mid-career collection from 1999-2001). 

So…

Imagine if one of your most fervent desires was to collect royalties from the untold thousands of hours you've spent refining the crafts of songwriting and music production—yet you'd spent decades believing you'd never earned a single penny from it. 

…

The Milkmen won the KBCO Best Song in Colorado title for "Lolita" in ... this is not a misprint ... 1981. 

Now they're finalists for Best Song in New Mexico for "Head and Heart" — 37 years later. 

What if the virtually unknown Men of Milk have actually out-written and out-recorded some of the biggest names in rock history? Well, if it's true, that and $5 buys me a triple latté at Starbucks. Crazy as it sounds, it's…