Four decades after being recorded, Milwaukee’s The Haskels will have an album’s worth of material available to the public on Record Store Day Black Friday.
The Milwaukee quartet began in 1977, as punk-rock and new-wave music were catching the public’s attention. By December 31, 1979, the original lineup of Jerome Brish aka Presley Haskel (guitar-vocal), Richard LaValliere (bass-vocal) Guy Hoffman (drums) and Gerard LaValliere (guitar) would play its last gig.
The story of how this album came about would be merely interesting had the band’s music not been able to back it up. What this album presents, finally, is a collection of songs that don’t sound dated coupled with performances that crackle with energy, 40 years down the line.
The Haskels, and later The Oil Tasters, loom large in the history of Milwaukee’s alternative music scene. Brish and the LaValliere brothers played previously with In A Hot Coma. When the original lineup of The Haskels called it a day, Richard would form the Oil Tasters and Hoffman would play with the BoDeans and the Violent Femmes.
How long is the shadow cast by these four people in terms of Milwaukee music history? Parallels can be drawn to country music’s “big bang,” when Ralph Peer recorded both Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. To swipe another analogy, Gerard and Hoffman’s rhythm section provided an offensive line to Richard and Jerome’s alternating quarterback and wide receiver.
The songwriting personalities of Brish and Richard delivered a balanced yin-yang that, years later, one-time Haskels roadie and future Drivin N Cryin front-man Kevn Kinney would describe as “probably the best live band I’ve ever seen that was a local band. To this day, they practiced more than any band I’ve ever seen.”
Kinney cites Brish’s slogan “Workers’ Rock and Roll” and the singer’s respect for Milwaukee Mayor Frank Zeidler while Richard drew from The Weekly World News. “What struck me was the balance. The differences made the band special. They were better than I can describe,” Kinney says. “I had a front-row seat to their practices, and it was a blueprint for everything I did.”
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So, while the second iteration of The Haskels released an EP, why didn’t the original, legendary version of the band release anything? It seems the night before these recordings were made, the band set up in Glendale’s Solar Recording Studios.
According to one story, the studio was on shaky ground financially but was opened for The Haskel’s sessions. The room was described by Hoffman “as cold as an icebox” when they commenced with the idea to record material for a 45 single. According to Clancy Carroll, who was in attendance, Richard’s amplifier blew up and the night was scrapped. Unbeknownst to Carroll for decades was that the band went back the next night and proceeded to cut 40 takes of songs.
Rock ’n’ roll might eat its young, but it still has a taste for nostalgia. The world is overstocked with half-baked demos, crappy bootleg recordings and general dreck by bands long past their prime looking to make a reissue buck.
This is not the case with The Haskels' album. With Richard and Brish both deceased (1991 and 2012 respectively), the band’s legacy was left to little more than word-of-mouth accounts. Several years ago, an enterprising St. Louis label took up the torch, with the blessing of the surviving members, to release a Haskels project. It never managed to get off the ground, though the lawyer was paid for his advice. They always get paid.
Enter (or more accurately, re-enter) Carroll, a Milwaukee musician (3 on Fire, The Dominos) who became friends with The Haskels and decades later determined his karmic payback would be to release the band’s material on his Splunge Communications label.
The assembled album could be a jukebox in itself, careening back and forth from Brish’s and Richard’s songs.
Brish’s urgent, strangled vocals on “Baby Let’s French” serve up a gyrating opening cut designed to get folks on the dance floor. “Liberace is Coming” is Richard’s stolen riff from the “Peter Gunn Theme,” topped with a dollop of Milwaukee iconography.
“Drop the Bomb (boom ka-boom)” lifts the anthemic opening chords from Elvis Costello’s version of “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding.” The song is sonic residue from Cold War-era American paranoia referencing diplomats and “people on the inside… running away from the factory/foundry… running away from the laundromat/photo mat.”
You wake up one morning and 40 years have gone by. Yet, some musical touchstones are timeless. “Little Dolls” echoes The Stooges’ “Little Doll”—fair enough, but reference points were not so easy to come by in 1979. Remember, The Stooges' debut was only 10 years old back in those DayGlo, pre-internet days.
Likewise, “Chinese Vacation” may be a sideways reference to “Chinese Rocks,” the Johnny Thunders/Dee Dee Ramone/Richard Hell song. Richard’s surrealistic travelogue observations include, “Here we are in China—the ducks in the road must be Chinese ducks,” and they quickly descend into a Western tourist’s comic nightmare of running afoul of an authoritarian police force, “never to be seen again.”
Decades later, from the outside looking in, the band’s music might seem like a double feature. But regardless of which writer was singing, the band was solid and cohesive, plainly in service to the song.
“Richard, most always, brought his songs completely written by way of music, melody and verse, complete with intros and endings. He’d sing his songs much the same way every time,” Hoffman recalls. “He would yell out stuff that made for good humor.”
“Jerome would play us a guitar figure with a verse or two and the chorus he had written, like a rough sketch, which required us as a group to find some kind of finished composition,” Hoffman says. “He didn’t always stick to the same vocal approach. This revealed an unpredictability on his part, and I appreciated this about him. Sometimes, his intense feelings could interfere with his task to simply sing the song.”
Case in point, Brish’s “Body Language” verges on primal perfection; it could be a lost outtake from Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Brish’s yowl at end of the song may very well have been a vocal influence on the emotional singing of former roadie Kinney.
“Stay Up All Nite” is flat out power pop. Had it been released in ’79, it would have long been jangling on compilations alongside underground hits like the Flamin’ Groovies “Shake Some Action” and the Nerves’ “Hanging on the Telephone.” Gerard’s guitar solo easily matches anything of the day.
With Brish’s populist subject matter tethered to terra firma, Richard’s was anything but. He declared “I was born to eat cake,” which is quite a leap for a kid from Keil, Wis. (pop. 3,429). Richard tends to put you inside the movie in his head, recalled Kinney. The roaring dread of his “Walk to the Beach” is a laundry list of folks to keep at arm’s length. Hoffman’s stoic rolls and propulsive rhythm drive the tune. Bear in mind, he was locking with Richard’s rattling bass, which often guided the idiosyncratic songs.
In the current era of meta self-awareness, it is entirely appropriate that the album’s song sequence gives Jerome and Richard the last word. The anthemic “Rock & Roll Hoodlums” opens with a conversational slice of Brish, hilariously ripping on cities who are inferior to Milwaukee—kind of a punk-rock PSA. Richard’s “Haskel Hotel” references the band’s communal crash pad on Arlington Place overlooking Pulaski Park that served as ground zero for so many ideas and work. Maybe an historical marker is in order?
