Snake Out and The Mydols: A Marriage Made in the Garage

This Saturday’s show at the Lager House with Snake Out marks a pretty remarkable two-year anniversary for the opening band. Two years ago the Mydols opened for Snake Out and The Ruiners. Two years ago four ladies, all suburban moms in their mid-late thirties and early forties - with a gaggle of 10 kids between them and jobs, soccer teams, PTA committees, car-pools, piles of laundry and their husbands all vying for their attention - took the stage for the first time in front of a paying audience and thrashed out a set of punky-surfy garage songs they’d written themselves on instruments they'd taught themselves to play just a couple of months before.

Maybe it was the kitschy surreality of the show, our overwhelming enthusiasm in the face of zero stage experience or the sheer gall of a bunch of middle-aged mothers who wanted to be rock stars, but we packed that room, wowed the crowd and it was magic: those 20 minutes will always be the most exhilarating and terrifying of our lives.

Yeah, The Mydols, have the Mommy shtick layered on thick. We sing songs about bad guys and good husbands, letting your kid say a swear word, a run-away baby run amok and a favorite bra. We dress up as soccer moms, TV moms (Lucille Ball, Peg Bundy, Samantha Stephens, Carol Brady) and rockabilly moms and we hand out cookies, condoms and candy. In the intervening two years we’ve played the Blind Pig, The Magic Stick, Dally in the Alley and JAMbalaya. We’ve toured to Cleveland and Chicago and raised thousands of dollars for charities from The American Cancer Society to Farmington Hills Police’s K-9 Unit. We’ve played it straight and we’ve played it campy; coherent and a little blurry - well, that was a Snow Day - and we’ve done all our own driving and humped all our own gear.

We’ve played shows with bands half our age and gone head to head with the best new garage bands from across the US and Canada in Little Steven’s Underground Garage Battle of the Bands. Our songs have been played on WDET and 89X, and included on punk compilation CDs. We’ve made it onto the pages of The Sun, People Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. We’ve been on the CBS Early Morning Show, The Today Show and Inside Edition - and yes, TV does make us look fat. We’ve been invited to sell our life stories to an L.A. film production company, make our own reality TV show and appear on Trading Spouses. We’ve yukked it up with Mitch Albom and Mojo in the Morning. We’re big in Jackson, Mississippi, with the Sweet Potato Queens and Salt Lake City, Utah, with Frankie, Danger Boy and Holly on 97.1 Z Morning Zoo.

What started as a joke, a hobby, an excuse to get out of the house and let off a little steam, has become a major part of our lives and we live it and love it and hate it and love it like family, like a marriage. And guess what - we’ve found other moms out there doing it too. Suddenly, we’re part of a scene, a movement, a Mamalition of women across the country who, until we got connected, were thrashing away in the basements and garages of towns and cities across this country thinking they were pretty much out there on their own. And now we’re going to organize our very own rockin’ mom festival, a Detroit Mamapalooza, with fellow-Detroit moms, The Candy Band and Jill Jack, on May 1st, 2005.

But first, we’ll go down to the Lager House on Saturday and hug Adam the Sound Man and get our free beer tickets from Donny and open up for our favorite band, Snake Out, without whom none of this stuff would ever have happened. Cheers, Len, Anthony and Damian! The beers are on us!