On Saturday, August 10, Milwaukee music vets The Mighty Deerlick will take the stage at Club Garibaldi and do something they’ve never done during their lengthy run as a band: release an LP on vinyl.
Yes, despite being active in the local music scene since coming to Milwaukee in 1988, the Deerlick—which started out as a band called The Slow Pedestrians in La Crosse in the early ’80s before vocalist Dave Reinholdt and guitarist Dan Franke moved to town and changed the band’s name—has somehow only managed to put out a cassette, a 7-inch, and a holiday release during its decades of existence. That all changes this weekend with the loooooooong-awaited release of Happy Hour Ever After, technically a debut album that doubles as a collection of the band’s best material through the years.
“We’re not very prolific,” Reinholdt says. “There’s 14 songs and one of them is a cover. The newest song was probably written seven years ago and some of these songs are 40 years old.”
Beyond the fact it finally exists, Happy Hour Ever After is also significant because it’s a way of honoring and saying goodbye to Franke, who passed away last December. The record was actually mixed by Franke following a few false starts with other engineers and what Reinholdt refers to as “a lot of foot dragging” by the band.
“About a year ago, Dan—who was retired and lived in Madison—was like, ‘I’ll do it, and if you guys don’t like it, tell me,'” Reinholdt says. “He passed away on December 30th. On December 28th, he sent me a text with a picture of the receipt from the pressing plant. He brought it in and got it done, and I love that. Dan didn’t have a big bucket list, but that was probably on it.”
Justin Perkins at Mystery Room Mastering handled mastering duties, and Good Land Records and 3000 Hits collaborated to put out the record.
Franke wasn’t just Reinholdt’s bandmate, they were also great friends ever since they met when they were cast as brothers in a play when they were in high school. The got into new wave and punk music together, moved to Milwaukee together, and they created a lifetime of musical memories—ranging from opening for The Replacements to playing the first SXSW to a crowd of five disinterested people to countless other shows along the way—together.
“It was so bittersweet when I actually got the records and I cut open the box and then he wasn’t there,” Reinholdt says. “We’ve worked on this and some of these songs we did together for 40 years.”
In April, The Mighty Deerlick played a memorial show in honor of Franke. That night, The Cooperage was full of people who came out to pay their respects to their friend and a Deerlick founding member.
“That was incredible. People were up from Austin. People were in from Wyoming and Colorado. People I haven’t seen in 30 years came to pay tribute,” Reinholdt says. “It was overwhelming. I’d have to go take a pee and it was a hug every three feet on my way across the room, which is a beautiful problem to have. It was an amazing event.”
Saturday night’s show at Club Garibaldi marks another bittersweet experience for Reinholdt and his Deerlick counterparts. Franke won’t be there (Chris Tishler will be filling in on guitar), but the show will serve as a means of celebration for a record the departed guitarist played on, mixed, and single-handedly willed to the finish line after years of delays. If people buy a copy and like what they hear, that’s just icing on the cake.
“Dan and I were always just these big music dorks and we always wanted a record,” Reinholdt says. “We just wanted to get it all down, put it all out, and have our record. This is our record, man.”
