Time Capsule: Milk ‘N’ Cookies, Milk ‘N’ Cookies

Every Saturday, Paste will be revisiting albums that came out before the magazine was founded in 2002 and assessing their current cultural relevance. This week, we’re looking at a power pop record lost to the sands of time but resurrected through the styling of numerous rock anthropologists of the modern-day—songs made by a band that shared bills with Talking Heads, Ramones and Blondie, only to be a footnote in CBGB’s heyday.

By Matt Mitchell | October 19, 2024 | 12:00pm

Music Reviews Milk ‘N’ Cookies

Time Capsule: Milk ‘N’ Cookies, Milk ‘N’ Cookies

Power pop is having a moment—not quite a renaissance, as the subgenre never really left in the first place, but a forward-momentum still galvanized by worthy successors. Thinking about contemporary artists—Hurry, 2nd Grade, Ducks Ltd.—making power and jangle pop, it’s hard not to get a bit smitten about the whole ordeal. I mean, hell, Nick Lowe just dropped a new record and it’s really good. Big Star just celebrated the 50th anniversary of Radio City; the band Alvvays exists because Teenage Fanclub paved a way for them; while the Badfingers, Cheap Tricks and Jellyfishes of the world aren’t often counted in the zeitgeist populace, their influence still reverberates. Even a half-a-century ago, as New York City was America’s bustling creative hub, the bands that were going national were acts like Blondie and the Ramones. They had crossover appeal but roots stationed in oldies (or oldies where they came from). In the CBGB era of the city’s rock pantheon, reverence falls onto the New York Dolls or Talking Heads. There is a band that was oft-forgotten in those conversations: Milk ‘N’ Cookies, a rag-tag bunch of suburbanites who coupled together to make the kind of rock music you can play for anyone anywhere—a band that shared bills with those aforementioned NYC greats.

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Milk ‘N’ Cookies formed in 1973 after vocalist and guitarist Ian North met a guitarist by the name of Jay Weiss. Weiss would, out of necessity, pick up a bass and, in due time, he and North became collaborators who made a demo tape on a TEAC four-track. They called themselves Milk ‘N’ Cookies, playing an early gig where Justin Strauss shook a tambourine and sang back-up. Eventually, Strauss would assume lead singer duties from North—because Strauss’s command of the stage, even as a tambourine-playing set piece—captivated crowd-goers. A year later, Milk ‘N’ Cookies became a Long Island favorite, touring bars and school dances in town and, down the line, performing a gig with John Hewitt—the manager of Sparks—in attendance. Hewitt became Milk ‘N’ Cookies’ manager and hooked them up with producer Muff Winwood, who would only work with the band if North fired Weiss and replaced him with Sal Maida, who played in Roxy Music. “The guilt of that has weighed on my conscience ever since,” North later said about dismissing Weiss, his best friend, from the group.

The band eventually signed a deal with Island Records, releasing a single called “Little, Lost and Innocent” that failed to chart. Such a commercial flop left Island in the lurch; they had no clue how to market this band of riffing, melodic nobodies making noodly, crunchy pop rock bliss without a face to sell on the front of it. Island wanted North to stick with them, so they offered him a solo deal—which he took, forming a band called Ian’s Radio and seeing Maida quit Milk ‘N’ Cookies so he could play bass with Sparks. The Sex Pistols’ rise in popularity is said to have informed Island on how to sell Milk ‘N’ Cookies’ records, which meant marketing them everywhere as a “punk band”—and labeling their debut eponymous album as such, too. The glammy parts of Milk ‘N’ Cookies’ sound weren’t opportune enough for the overlording suits, so they ditched the Bowie of it all for a categorization a bit rougher around the edges—even though that categorization never fully fastened into place. It never really fit them.

Listening to Milk ‘N’ Cookies is, by no means, a profound experience. It’s a record about sex, partying, being young and girls, girls, girls—the cover sports a cheerleader standing in the foreground with the band lingering behind her. But, even if North and the guys weren’t making songs that would challenge the curious ear, their schoolboy antics and Sweet-influenced sound is likely why the Feelies and the Apples in Stereo kick so much ass. Milk ‘N’ Cookies’ milieu was enough of a novelty to be worth selling in a somewhat provocative, coltish way. A band like the Lemon Twigs still take immediate influence from North and his peers—and that connection makes sense, as Captured Tracks reissued Milk ‘N’ Cookies eight years ago and, now, the Lemon Twigs are a part of that label’s roster.

In a lot of ways, Milk ‘N’ Cookies were just as derivative of doo-wop and ‘60s soul as the Ramones were around the same time, putting catchiness on a pedestal but remaining entrenched in their own off-the-beaten path and generation-bridging affinity for the very sounds coming out of EastWest Studios 10, 15 years earlier. The feel-good, singalong melodies never let up—even when “Little, Lost and Innocent” knocks a few shades off the tempo and simmers. Strauss is the X-factor in this set-up, singing like an alien on “Tinkertoy Tomorrow,” “(Dee Dee You’re) Stuck On a Star” and “Ready Steady.” If there ever was a style of music that felt as hokey as it did boundary-breaking, perhaps it was what Milk ‘N’ Cookies were doing nearly 50 years ago. The guitar-playing, especially on “Ready Steady,” sounds like a garage lick and tumbles through various imperfections and head-scratching tempos; “Broken Melody” flirts, albeit slightly, with a more polished sound, rife with Rocky Horror-esque moods and punchiness. Sometimes, Strauss’s singing is too much of a whisper to be in greater focus than North’s muscular picking. Sometimes, it sounds like the only voice that can hold work this candy-coated.

The problem is that, while Milk ‘N’ Cookies sounds like it godfathered Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee into existence—there is charm in making music where the vocals and guitars sound like they’re coming from separate rooms—the record is a lyrical disaster, with a bunch of 20-something guys doing underage cosplay so they can sing about teen girls without hesitation. It’s supposed to be sexy, but it’s not—the record doesn’t sound well-made enough to justify any off-color miscues, even if those flaws are purposeful. 1977 wasn’t 1957; the era of doo-wop singers in their 30s singing about sweet sixteens was gone. Real teen idols existed and were massive fixtures of culture, no matter how long or short their celebrity lifespan was. When Strauss sings “She was underage and so was I” at the beginning of “Little, Lost and Innocent,” not even the “well-meaning American kid” shtick has any stick. “But she knew what it meant when I said love,” Strauss muses later, turning innocent, albeit cringe-worthy tokens of sleaze into macabre sensationalism. What else could you have expected from a pop band forced to be punk?

But that isn’t to say that Milk ‘N’ Cookies whiffs on every pitch it sees. The record is no doubt an influential, vital piece of a still-expanding canon. Power pop is not the all-consuming face of rock ‘n’ roll music, but rock ‘n’ roll fans near and far can still appreciate and adore the “sha-la” harmonies in “We Go On Dancing,” which sound terrific 45 years later. The riptide guitar work on “Six Guns,” or the incongruous riffs of “Not Enough Girls (In the World)” sound like something Deerhunter might have tried replicating 15 years ago. Though the context of these songs have grown stale with retrospect, the arrangements—low-fidelity, shiny, pop-injected rock movements—are still being transcribed by young bands like Sharp Pins and, in some cases, Being Dead, if only in small occurrences (and in much more novel ways). The lo-fi recordings, damningly pretentious as they may be, make a collection of tunes like Milk ‘N’ Cookies enjoyable to even the most common listener—even if the heavy-petting of it all feels like a particularly unavoidable hurdle. “Chance to Play” is one of the coolest-sounding songs of its era and audience; “Wok N’ Woll” has a crushing guitar and hand-clap rhythm that rules, too. Distortion, it can make the good stuff really come alive.

In the immediate aftermath of North and Strauss’s band—which, after album release delays, members moving to different cities and different countries, and Maida going on to play in Sparks, faded into obscurity—you could hear those sensibilities in Television Personalities and Guided By Voices in the 1980s and 1990s. You don’t have to search for that style long; there’s Milk ‘N’ Cookies everywhere. Their influence never truly evaporated; their name just became less and less recognizable than it already was (very unrecognizable). The band’s peers came out on top, leaving North, Strauss and co. to exist in the echelons of power pop devotees more than anything else—a type of success designated to how much a rare vinyl pressing might go for on Discogs, or which do-good, well-intentioned enthusiast may have taken the time to rip those tunes into MP3s and store them in a Google Drive.

I’d say it’s a shame to be forgotten like that, but it seems that the right musicians have found the band’s work and are wielding their blueprints wisely in the decades since. Maybe Milk ‘N’ Cookies are where they were always meant to be; maybe stardom in silence can be just as rewarding as a celebrity that becomes dated in the moment. They were never going to make it into 16 Magazine, but those six-bar guitar swirls are emblems of CBGB’s heyday and have been found by different anthropologists ever since, just beyond the well-traveled roads of the music industry’s brightest trends. Sure, they didn’t have the “it-factor” of the Ramones or the New York Dolls, but they did have something. So, is it better to fizzle out early, or live long enough to watch rock ‘n’ roll leave you behind for its next big fad? I’m not so sure Milk ‘N’ Cookies ever had an answer, either.