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Dave Blood Biography

dave-blood
  • Born:
  • Years Active: 1980s-1990s
  • Member of: The Dead Milkmen
  • Genre: Rock & Alternative

Considering the type of black humor his former band was enthusiastic about, the following obituary for the bassist known as Dave Blood wouldn't be that offensive: Blood, former Dead Milkmen, is now just plain dead. Any rules of decorum considering comments about those who choose to take their own life might be suspended, after all, when it comes to a band whose very name was a joke about being dead. Appropriate or unjustified, it doesn't tell the full story of Dave Schulthise, who created the stage name of Dave Blood in the '80s when the Dead Milkmen initially formed in Philadelphia. The city's small and dirty underground scene provided fan support for the group in the early days. By the mid-'80s, the group had released the popular Big Lizard in My Backyard album and three years later led an assault on MTV with a single entitled, inspired by, and dedicated to the "Punk Rock Girl" (not that there's only one of them). The heights of the music business, and the depths as represented by the band's label Enigma doing a belly flop, would become distant landscape views for Blood when he began suffering from severe tendonitis in his hands. Unable to continue as a bassist, he quit the group and returned to school, developing an interest in Serbian culture. Following a period of study at Indiana University in what was once known as Serbo-Croatian culture, prior to the division of the two ethnic groups during the Yugoslavian civil war, Blood actually moved to Serbia in 1998 to teach English. His plans of staying there and writing historical fiction novels were literally blown to bits when the NATO bombing campaign began under President Bill Clinton. He was forced to return home to Westchester, New York, where he was apparently organizing plans to return to Serbia at the time of his death. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, Rovi

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