I’ve lived in three different U.S. states and I’ve felt attached to each of them in different ways. While I currently call North Carolina home, my first thirty one years on this planet (to they day, in fact) were spent in Wisconsin, and part of the proof that America’s Dairyland still has a unique hold on me is that nothing piques my curiosity about a band like finding out that’s the place they’re from. This is true of current artists, but it’s even more pronounced when it’s a band from the past, a band I feel I should have heard about years earlier. I’m always fascinated by the “secret history” of rock’n’roll, those bands and performers that fade into obscurity, relegated there less by a measure of their talent and more due to the vagaries of lucky breaks required to ascend the ladder of music stardom.

That’s what grabbed my initial interest when I first read about The Baroques. They were a band from Milwaukee that released a grungy guitar bomb record on the Chess Records label in the late 1960s with a sound not remarkably different from any number of bands that got played with exhaustive consistency on the various classic rock radio stations that made up more of my high school soundtrack than I’d care to admit. How was there not a little more residual affection for the band from the city that Schlitz made famous?

If nothing else, I’d think some radio programmer with a good memory or any interest whatsoever in digging deeper into the station stacks might have been amused by the novelty of a song entitled “Musical Tribute to the Oscar Meyer Weiner Wagon.” That paragon of vehicular innovation was enough of a presence around southern Wisconsin during the various stages of my youth that I’d think some intrepid DJ should have found room on the playlist for a song that offered up a tonal testimonial to its charms, even if it was misspelled, perhaps in an effort to evade litigation from the company, perhaps because it was recorded before the famed, ubiquitous commercial taught consumers the proper procession of letters. Luckily, in the Interweb age, no worthy song goes undiscovered, so even if radio let me down, I still know the grand sounds of The Baroques.

The Baroques, “Musical Tribute to the Oscar Meyer Weiner Wagon”

(Disclaimer: Purple Day, the sole album by The Baroques, isn’t easily available for purchase, but there is at least one digital outpost that seems to have a CD reissue available. So if you’re so inclined, you can actually purchase the song about the Wienermobile. Unfortunately, your opportunity to bid on the Wienermobile itself has passed, but that may be for the best because, as stylin’ as it may be, it doesn’t seem to handle all that well. Anyway, I should note that if anyone with due authority to do so asks me to remove this song from the Interweb, I will gladly and promptly comply.)