Thoughtless for the Day

By now we've all had a good chuckle at Hillary Clinton's fabricated tale of being fired upon by a sniper while visiting The Land of the Imagination Bosnia. For me, Clinton's tall tale had a particular charm: for it brought back wonderful, enchanted memories of the time I actually was fired upon by a Bosnian sniper.

Back in 1991, during a weeklong ceasefire in Yugoslavia's Civil War, the Dead Milkmen slipped into the rapid fracturing country and played a series of shows...

OK, I can sense that I've lost a few of you already, so let me explain just what we were doing in Yugoslavia (other than hoping to get the fuck out of Yugoslavia). Dave Reckner, our manager, had based his entire management philosophy on one thing (technically two things, if you happen to count "working tirelessly to do whatever was necessary to make Joe happy" as a philosophy): an interview with REM's manager, Jefferson Holt, in which he claimed that the key to REM's early success was that they toured against convention wisdom: which is to say that they played places like Fargo, North Dakota in February or small college towns in the middle of July. The idea being that there would be no competition for the Locals' entertainment dollars.

While my instincts tell me that Jefferson's story had about as much validity as Hillary's sniper tale, I have to concede that our manager was an extremely intelligent guy (after all, he had almost landed Joe a role in a Disney movie) who was pretty quick to figure out that only people who were starved for entertainment would actually pay to see the Dead Milkmen.

So that's what we were doing in Yugoslavia in the winter of 1991: playing for people who, when not actually starving, were starving for entertainment that was, if nothing else, loud enough to drown out the sound of gunfire.

Next time, I'll tell you all about the sniper - promise. In the meantime, here's what you can do to end Morris Dancing in our lifetime: