Hunting The Frogs with 5 famous bands that loved them

Portrait of The Frogs
Dennis and Jimmy Flemion of The Frogs.

Nearly 40 years after The Frogs decided to take their wild musical collaboration out of the garage and onto Milwaukee stages, the team of Dennis and Jimmy Flemion has been largely forgotten by all but the most dedicated fans. But 2019 might be the year that the Flemions get the kind of attention that they (and superfans like Billy Corgan and Eddie Vedder) always knew they deserved.

We’re coming up on the 30th anniversary of their landmark album It’s Only Right And Natural. There’s one final, transcendent Frogs album being prepared for release. And a documentary crew has been painstakingly putting together a history of the band, capturing interviews with the folks who were there as well as fans and friends like Andy Richter, Sebastian Bach, Kelley Deal, Steve Albini, Butch Vig and many more. That doc, also titled It’s Only Right And Natural, will supposedly see the light of day in 2019 as well.

The Frogs were always prolific, completist and controversial. From their earliest days at the fringes of the Milwaukee scene, The Frogs meticulously documented their own history — from studio recordings to performance videos to comical films featuring pervy puppets of their own devising. They were satirists of the highest degree who rarely broke that facade, but also unrepentant goofballs and musical geniuses who could move you with a from-the-heart love song. It couldn’t make sense to most people, but for those it touched, the music — and everything else — made a lifelong impression.

But very little of the band’s vast catalog made sense for the mainstream. They created some lovely pop songs, but also produced provocative, sideways takes on homosexuality and race. Their work was never destined for the charts, though many Frogs songs were actually more thoughtful and forward-thinking than they were given credit for.

Above all, The Frogs refused to be edited or packaged. With older brother Dennis as spokesman, the Flemions consistently pushed back against the shorthand of marketing: denying genre, decrying articles edited for length and legibility, disavowing any move to cut their aesthetic down to size.

Mass appeal may have eluded The Frogs, but they had outsize influence on other musicians. The middle period of their epic journey intersects some of the most renowned musicians of the ’90s, who willingly contributed their cachet to the Frogs’ career. Pearl Jam and The Smashing Pumpkins are the biggest acts that befriended the Flemion brothers, but the list stretches much further.

With Dennis’ shocking death in 2012, the saga of The Frogs may have come to an end, but 2019 feels like the year it will be told. Here are 5 bands that played roles in that story.

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Milwaukee rising: “Taking the City by Storm”

Kenny Baldwin at bar
Filmed before his death in September 2015, Kenny Baldwin was a musician in the Milwaukee punk scene and proprietor of the Starship, home of many formative gigs.

Milwaukee is among the smallest cities I’ve covered so far on FiveBands, but the passion and creativity of its rock-‘n’-roll scene has long rivaled the biggest towns on the musical map.

Sites like Milwaukee Rock Posters and social media groups like Lest We Forget: Deceased Milwaukee Scene are magnets for local lore, and scene veterans have been tireless in their efforts to make their history known.

Case in point: Taking the City By Storm, an epic documentary of the Milwaukee underground. Currently slated for release in 2018, the film is directed by Doug LaValliere (one of Milwaukee’s accomplished LaValliere brothers and a co-founder of the Prosecutors with Kevn Kinney, later of Atlanta underground sensations Drivin’ N Cryin’).

The producers are Judy Simonds and Clancy Carroll of the Dominoes and Clancy Carroll Band. (Carroll is also co-author of a new and improved book, Brick Through the Window: An Oral History of Punk Rock, New Wave, and Noise in Milwaukee, 1964-1984. Buy it via the Boswell Book Company site!)

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