Illustration: Melissa Lee Johnson
Too many great albums slip through the cracks because they don’t readily sell themselves, or they simply aren’t flashy enough. That shouldn’t be a problem, though, for The Grand Spontanean, the latest album from the Milwaukee pop-punk ensemble Telethon. It’s a mammoth, utterly audacious marathon of a record, a nearly 90-minute rock opera told across five acts and 30 tracks—featuring guest contributions from Laura Stevenson, Chris Farren of Fake Problems, Less Than Jake singer Roger Lima and The Hold Steady keyboardist Franz Nicolay.
It includes interpolations of No Doubt and Carly Simon songs, a recitation of the Franz Kafka short story The Sudden Walk, several straight-up ska numbers and comes packaged with a 23-page playbill. And that’s all you need to know, really. If that all sounds like something that might be up your alley, it will be.
The sheer scope and prodigiousness of the album is all that much more impressive given that it came from a band that hardly any local music fans have ever even heard of. Telethon, which has members spread across three cities but treats Milwaukee as its home base, began in Delavan—the small city in Walworth County that most southeastern Wisconsinites probably only think about when a weatherman warns there may be tornados in the area.
“I think I wanted us to be kind of lo-fi, a little bit like Radiator Hospital or something,” singer-guitarist Kevin Tully says of the band’s beginnings. Some of his bandmates had other ideas. “I think it became a lot more classic rock than I originally planned, which isn’t necessarily what I was going for, but it’s what came about organically,” Tully says. “And we’ve started leaning into that a lot more now. We started embracing the fact that we have dual guitar leads, like Meatloaf.”
There’s some precedent for a band primarily grounded in punk and indie-rock making a rock opera, the most prominent one being Titus Andronicus, a group that Telethon absolutely adores. Telethon had discussed the idea of making their own for years, though Tully admits he never took the idea as seriously as some of his bandmates.
“I was always the one saying, ‘OK, we’ll think about it, but I really I was mentally shelving the idea,” he says. “Then one day we all watched the movie Poltergeist, the original one, and we were just in awe of how cool it was. We got super wrapped up in the idea of doing this crazy, sci-fi horror story. We were like, ‘Why can’t an album do this?’ At that point I was getting tired of writing the same types of songs about the same types of things, so it was like, ‘Alright, I guess we’re making this huge concept album.’”
Tully estimates it took them about a year to write The Grand Spontanean, which tells a tangent-heavy story about therapy, internet addiction and mass hysteria incited by a website prophesizing the end of the world. This might all sound like a little much, but part of the fun of the record is how The Grand Spontanean continually finds new ways to hold the listener’s attention—often by borrowing the unorthodox narrative techniques of expressionist masterworks like Ulysses and Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Some of the album’s story is told through voiceovers and news clips. A chunk of the album, set in a bunker, introduces a fictional Telethon side project called “The Improbable New Sensations,” who punch out three quick ska-punk songs. And, for those who make it to the finish, the record closes with a choose-your-own-adventure twist, offering both a happy ending and a very unhappy one.
Save for Franz Nicolay of The Hold Steady, who flew into the studio to lend additional keyboards and other instruments to the album (he also recites the Kafka story), the album’s marquee guests recorded their contributions remotely—including Laura Stevenson, who delivers a knockout performance on the duet “On Companionship.”
“I think people might assume some of those musicians are on the record because they’re in our circle, but really it’s just because they’re nice people who responded to our email and were kind enough to contribute to our giant rock opera,” Tully says. “I’m still in awe that they did it. They’re heroes, and I don’t say that lightly. They’re on there because we love their music.”
The last Wisconsin punk record with this kind of wow factor was Tenement’s 2015 double LP Predatory Headlights—a record that Tenement’s frontman, Amos Pitsch, spoke of as a bittersweet achievement—having invested three years on it only to see even their more appreciative fans and critics move on to the next thing shortly after they released it.
The streaming era doesn’t necessarily reward these kinds of labors of love, but Tully says that, even if The Grand Spontanean doesn’t move the needle much, they’ll have no regrets. “Just the fact that we made it is amazing to us,” he says. “Not to toot our own horn, but we’re all so proud of it and just stunned that it was created. No matter what the reception is, or if anybody’s listening to it in a year, it’s going to always be a high point for us.”
Telethon share a bill Thursday, Nov. 16 at Sabbatic with Live Tetherball Tonight and Bernie and the Wolf at 8 p.m.
