Kenny Baldwin and Locate Your Lips: Out of Milwaukee’s vaults, into your ears

When I first traced five key bands of the Milwaukee scene from the late ’70s and early ’80s, one act remained a tantalizing enigma: Locate Your Lips.

Locate Your Lips’ drummer was the late Kenny Baldwin, founder of the Milwaukee alternative club The Starship, who passed away in September 2015. (Before his death, Baldwin was interviewed for the forthcoming epic Milwaukee music documentary Taking the City by Storm.)

A contemporary article in the Milwaukee Sentinel describes Locate Your Lips’ sound as “somewhere between the rock of the mid-1960s British Invasion and that of the recent new wave explosion.”

Beyond that fleeting mention, there has been precious little information available to me about LYL — and no public audio record of the band.

Now that gap has been filled with For Kenny, a two-CD release digitally edited and mastered by Otto & the Elevators’ Gary Tanin and slated for release April 5 that includes a live performance recorded in May 1985 for broadcast on WQFM radio as well as 10 tracks recorded in November 1984. Continue reading “Kenny Baldwin and Locate Your Lips: Out of Milwaukee’s vaults, into your ears”

Richard LaValliere with guitar — Richard LaValliere (photo by James Prinz)

More than four years gone, Richard LaValliere makes me angry.

As a kid, I had a brief but intense relationship with Milwaukee (where Richard electrified the underground music scene with bands like In A Hot Coma, the Haskels and Oil Tasters). Years later, we were accidental neighbors again in New York (where he continued his dizzying creative streak with groups like Scorpio Thunderbolt, Polkafinger, and Jones & Karloff). But when he died at 59 on February 8, 2012, I barely knew his name.

Judy Simonds — who actually lived the Milwaukee scene and is working to document it in depth — is helping me learn more about the amazing kaleidoscope of creative projects Richard LaValliere powered over nearly 50 years of his short life. (Check out the Richard LaValliere memorial page she runs on Facebook.) I haven’t asked her about his personal trajectory, or whether he was also frustrated that his work wasn’t heard by more people.

But for my own selfish reasons, I’m angry that I hadn’t heard Richard LaValliere until very recently — and that the audio and video record he left behind is so tantalizingly sparse. You should hear him, too. Here are five of his bands you should know about: Continue reading “Richard LaValliere: Milwaukee’s finest and 5 bands you should know about”