The Dead Milkmen – Big Lizard in My Backyard Cassette (old crap from my attic)

By Jeff Fulton

In 1988 – 1989 I worked at one of the worst record / tape / CD and video stores in the South Bay. The Wherehouse on Sepulveda was across the street from the famous Video Archives in Manhattan Beach and down the street a few miles from good music stores such as Go Boy and Recycled in Redondo and Hermosa beach respectively. The only worse store for music would be the short lived Sam Goody mall music stores.  What this store lacked in decent Cd and dwindling vinyl it more than made up  with an extensive selection of awesome cassettes up against a wall.  I think for this one year I was there, the company was still trying to figure out what to do with this inventory, so most of the cassettes were pretty cheap and with our 50% employee discount on tapes I built up a huge library (most of it sadly has disappeared).  The store was happy because as I purchased cassettes that no body else came in for they didn’t have to replace them.  Plus, I was happy because it was the one medium in the store almost completely devoted to 80’s flute Jazz (not kidding).

I found a few of  those cassettes recently, and rather than blab on about them, I have taken a series of photos of my favorites, The first is by the Dead Milkmen – Big Lizard in My backyard. This contains the  absolute  classic tune, “Bitchin’ Camaro”, and the totally un-PC “Taking Retards to the Zoo”. If you want to show your kids what one of these looked like, the series of photos below should be enough to start a lot of conversations.

 

 

 

 

 

There you have the detailed images of soemthing your kids will never understand.  I always liked the smell of a freshly un-wrapped cassette and the thrill of putting it  the car stereo for the first time.

Here is are a couple youtube videos from this album.

Bitchin Camaro:

Big Lizard