Here is the official site for the tribute CD, "The Killer in You":
By: Charlie Moran - The Daily Iowan
When Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin died from a lethal mixture of heroin and alcohol in 1996, the band hired friend Dennis Flemion to fill in for the Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness Tour. Nary a passing glance from the media, soon such "MTV News" anchors as Tabitha Soren were regularly dropping mention of Flemion and his brother Jimmy's "joke band," the Frogs, between Tupac and Gin Blossoms videos.

But the buzz-bin band fizzled.

Even with appearances on Pumpkins and Pearl Jam albums, the Milwaukee band never got a chance to share the commercial success that its peers enjoyed in the '90s. Currently on the band's myspace.com page, a photo of the Flemion brothers posing with Kurt Cobain serves as a tragic reminder of the influence they once held with the past icons of alternative rock and the recognition that never followed.

Partly to blame for the Frogs' lack of commercial success, many record labels have been loathe to release many of the group's albums. Racially Yours, with two-dozen folk- and grunge-rock songs bluntly narrating from the perspectives of livid slaves and lurid slaveholders, took eight years before it was finally released in 2000.

Even with this album in limbo, the Frogs gained some fame through the rough, raunchy music it recorded in the late '80s as the "Made-up Songs." With little more than lazy acoustic guitar strumming and the crackling voices of the Flemion brothers singing like senile sexual predators, these songs were rife with sexual innuendo and crude jokes about anal sex and dead goats.

The "Made-up Songs" provided such a glut of material that it fed the band's 1989 album, It's Only Right and Natural and the 1996 My Daughter the Broad.

Now 25 years and six albums after they first began, the Flemion brothers are each pushing 50 but have managed to outlast most of their peers. Without any delusions of "TRL" grandeur, the band members rarely speak to the press; they did not respond to interview requests in time for this story.

The Frogs has never hired a manager and no longer have an official website. Instead, Chris Newman, a 28-year-old computer-systems administrator from Albany, N.Y., has become the band's unofficial press secretary. Newman owns and runs thefrogsarchive.com, an extensive repository of information to which the band regularly contributes corrections to lyrics and gig updates.

"I believe that they have settled down and have private lives now that they don't want to make public," the ad-hoc pressman said by e-mail. "Being a small band as it is, it can achieve this without too much hassle."

To most visitors of the Frogs' unofficial home, they are not a "joke band" that exists only to spit on the delicate sensibilities of the un-hip.

"I don't think there is any shock value to [the brothers'] music," Newman said. "They sing about very complex things in sometimes silly, sometimes serious manners."

In Frogs songs such as "(You're a) Nigger Homosexual" or "Homos," in which taboo words are given an ironic treatment - (the former is a sensual ode to a lover; the latter is a tender admission of homosexuality to one's mother) - there is often a more intricate relationship between forbidden words and the contexts with which they are used.

"The fact that someone out there is using [racial and sexual epithets] without the terrible meaning shows me that the Frogs, as people, are actually pretty sensitive to what it's like to be in someone else's shoes," Newman said.

With the band's most recent album, the 2001 Billy Corgan-produced Hopscotch Lollipop Sunday Surprise, the group toned down the vulgarity to make a solidly produced and performed psych-rock album. Now, the members are reportedly hard at work on a follow-up that will be a sparser, more spiritual affair, à la Neil Young's Harvest Moon.

Newman was mum on details of this venture, but he did admit that the brothers might be softening up these days in an effort to regain some lost credibility.

"They have been viewed as a 'joke' band for so many years," he said. "I just think they are trying to show the fans who they actually are."

E-mail DI reporter Charlie Moran at:
charlie-moran@uiowa.edu