Read Milkmen: Tyler Sonnichsen's definitive Dead Milkmen biography | Public Record

Tyler Sonnichsen set out to write the definitive history of The Dead Milkmen. He found out there's still more story to tell.

**By Tyler Sonnichsen,**author of The Dead Milkmen book from J-Card Press.

**The state of my notebook – a haphazard collection of draft paragraphs, quotes jotted during live interviews, and errant notes from the Big Questions YouTube series – owes to HOW, WHEN, and WHY my brain generates sequences of words in the manner it does.**Like it does for many writers, it rarely happened when I was sitting in front my computer, with my hands resting on the keyboard. I had these micro-Eureka moments in the shower (with no voice recorder available), as I was drifting off to sleep (not wanting to wake my wife up), or while I was in the middle of running errands. Not that my handwriting isn’t already shitty by default, but this explains why so many of these early paragraphs are illegible.

It’d be a stretch to say I wrote the entire book by hand, but I did scrawl large portions (many of which ended up in the book, in edited form) in that sturdy journal of mine. The passages I scrawled over the course of 2025 could be thought of as the bones, and the connective tissue/flesh came about over the course of (at least) three full drafts.

More on that in a moment.

Even more messily scrawled in my journal were the scratchy scribbles I took during my interviews with the band.****One piece of advice I always give my students is to always always have a notepad or something to jot things down while doing an interview; even if you record the whole thing in pristine audio, you will regret not having some kind of schematic for what you talked about, and when.****During my phone calls with the Milkmen, most often somebody would drop one of the most profound lines of a conversation – frequently winding up in quotes in the final book – somewhere buried in the middle, and it’s a relief to have it already circled on paperBut the biggest challenge was telling a satisfactory iteration of The Dead Milkmen's greater story in a relatively tight word count.

J-Card Press is an independent publishing company that produces a catalog of compact, 5"x8" trade paperback biographies of the best alternative, indie rock, hip-hop, and riot grrl acts from the past 30 years. While J-Card's mission for each edition is to cover a band's entire arc, they request these short-form biographies to be around 40,000 words.

At the beginning of the writing process, the word count felt somewhat intimidating.

Later, when I was approximately 18,000 words over their limit, it became intimidating in the opposite direction.

Working best off paper, I printed out the full rough first draft, and went through it page by page, hacking and slashing full excerpts with a red pen, ultimately boiling the third draft down to the twelve chapters in the book.

Writing ‘The Dead Milkmen’ was an iterative process (here’s a handy visual representation via Ren & Stimpy):

When I busted my first draft wide open (a la Stimpy with the hammer) and wrote my second draft, only small chunks survived into the final version of the book.

There's still so much to tell.

One could learn a lot about the Dead Milkmen by understanding why they’ve been excluded from so much of the literary canonization of hardcore and punk.

My early drafts mentioned how the singer from Murphy’s Law (allegedly) published a screed about the Dead Milkmen’s lack of hardcore bona-fides, which Rodney Anonymous (allegedly) printed out and put up on a wall of their management's office.

It was one of many, many shards that stayed on the cutting room floor. I recognize that’s a film analogy, and I don’t care.

Most of those ink-stained and dog-eared draft print-outs ended up in the recycling bin. But luckily I have my journal of handwritten notes, and one helluva story still to tell.

Tyler Sonnichsen is the author of Capitals of Punk (2020) and The Dead Milkmen (2026). He lives with his wife and their two cats in Vermont, where he teaches college geography and dreams of being a full-blown professor.
Find more of his work at SonicGeography.com.

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