Sir Millard Mulch: Who?
From 1992-2006, Sir Millard Mulch was a surreal, alternate-universe identity for me, Carl King.
The three words in the name came from three things:
1 – My nickname in elementary school, Sir Guppy,
2 – My middle name, Millard,
3 – and a lyric from the first real full-length song I wrote, Lawn Surgery: “This could be ground into mulch, you say?”
I likely started calling myself that name when I was 16, when my friend Jesse and I made up fake musician names for ourselves. We wanted to be like Jello Biafra.
When I was 17, I officially started going by Millard in everyday life instead of Carl.
Local Band #1
The first time the name Sir Millard Mulch was printed on anything was probably the second cassette by my high school kinda-punk band with Jesse, Voice of Nothing. I played guitar and sang. We made noises in and around our hometown of Venice, Florida a dozen times. And we had an unusual sound.
We made 3 recordings and 2 of them were sold on cassettes:
Boring PP Demo (1992)
Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc (1993)
A Self-Supporting Squirrel Cage (Unreleased, 1994)
Our final show was on July 6, 1994. We opened for Victims Family (!) at Stone Lounge, in Tampa, Florida. Since VF was the first band I saw in concert, it was a pretty big deal to me.
Nice, Nice, Very Nice… (1995)
After Voice of Nothing broke up, I put my guitar in the closet and immediately began work on my own cassette album with my Atari 1040 Ste computer. It was mostly MIDI elevator muzak. Several of the tracks were jazzy piano songs Harold and I wrote together in our high school “beginner piano” class.
Local Band #2
In late 1995, the drummer of Voice of Nothing and I got back together and called ourselves Tepado! Another kinda-punk band. I switched to playing bass, trying to be Rob Wright of NoMeansNo. We made two more cassette tapes:
B.O.F.U.S. (1996)
In Search of Dr. Ruth’s Bowling Shoes (1997)
After about a year, Tepado stopped functioning. I returned to making Sir Millard Mulch sounds:
7 Pot-Boiling Delusions (1997)
This one was re-mixed, severely overdubbed, and re-released as Dr. Zoltan’s “Emily Dickinson Kindly Stops For Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors.” Most of the tracks also appear on the 50 Intellectually CD below…
50 Intellectually Themes From A Cheap Amusement Park For Robots And Aliens, Vol. 1 (1998)
My first CD on the “Ed Furniture Entertainment” label I started. If you’d like to find out a heck of a lot more about this specific “50” album and the years surrounding it, I wrote an entire book about it called “Robots & Aliens: Deep Liner Notes” and it is available only through my Patreon.
To Hell With All Of You, I Just Wanna Grow My Vegetables (1999)
Since I was broke and couldn’t afford to go to a studio again, this one was recorded on a digital 8-track in Harold’s bedroom at his mom & dad’s house in Nokomis, FL. He and I traded off playing the instruments and programmed the rest on his drum machine or my Atari 1040 STe. Since the material was so short we filled the remaining space on the CD with 45 minutes of frog noises. It was fun to make, at least!
Species III (Unreleased, 2000)
This was an impromptu jam in my mom’s living room with Harold and a cellist. I actually found it recently and might make it available!
The De-Evolution of Yasmine Bleeth (2001)
This was my attempt at writing more commercial music, and it was my first collaboration with Morgan Agren on drums. I actually spent thousands of dollars on radio promo for it, and it charted pretty well on college stations. I briefly quit music after this.
Steve Vai & Favored Nations
When I changed my mind about quitting music, I moved out to San Francisco in late 2002. I got in touch with Steve Vai, and in early 2003 he started selling Sir Millard Mulch CDs through a new division of his record label, Favored Nations. I shit you not.
Back To Florida, How To Sell…
In summer 2003, I moved back to Florida so I could afford to finish my new triple-record…
How To Sell The Whole F#@!ing Universe To Everybody, Once For All! (2005)
During that time, I used the fake “real name” Paul K. Mavanu. It was an effort to hide my “REAL” real name.
How To Sell… Release
The How To Sell album was co-released on Mimicry Records owned by Trey Spruance of Mr. Bungle. And I recruited a long list of kinda-famous musicians to play on it. Virgil Donati, Morgan Agren, Nick D’Virgilio, Nils Frykdahl, Dave Meros, and a bunch more.
That led to appearing in real glossy magazines, like Kerrang, Decibel, Modern Drummer, DRUM!, etc.
Documentary and Dr. Zoltan
In 2006, after the success of How To Sell, my friend Chewbode and I produced a 90-minute documentary about Sir Millard Mulch. For real. It’s still sort of in production, 21 years later.
For reasons that will possibly be explained (or at least mentioned) in that documentary, Sir Millard Mulch transformed into a being called Dr. Zoltan Øbelisk.
When I moved out to Los Angeles in September 2006, I went back to going by Carl again in real life.
Extensive Touring!
Even with all that, Sir Millard Mulch rarely had an actual “band” to play his music. It only happened a total of FIVE times in all those years:
6/20/99 – Light Painter Gallery, Sarasota, FL
7/2/99 – Dragon*Con, Atlanta, GA
8/20/99 – Johnny’s Rockin Bistro, Casselberry, FL
Those three shows were with my friend Harold playing guitar, and a drummer named Left-Handed Mike.
Two more shows happened with drummer John E. Citrone:
9/1/01 – Dragon*Con, Atlanta, GA
4/6/02 – Troll Music Clinic, Venice, FL
There was also a single “Unplugged” show:
11/29/00 – Brownstone Sandwich Shop in Sarasota, FL
Beyond that, any other appearances booked as “Sir Millard Mulch” were Andy Kaufman-esque performance-art stunts or experimental lectures.
L.I.V. (Tyler) In The Universe?
“Sir Millard Mulch” also played drums in a post-modern alternative “concept” band called L.I.V. (Tyler) In The Universe from 1997-2006. We even did a little tour of the southeast, several shows in upstate NY (we got an encore), and played our last show in Hollywood. I honestly never had as much fun as I did playing in that band. I couldn’t stop laughing.
