I just moved. For the last 28 years I've lived within 40 minutes of Boston, Massachusetts, but within the last three months, I've gotten engaged, moved to New York City and, like a lot of people, I don't have a job right now. Unemployment and The Dead Milkmen make perfect bedfellows.

During my move, I stored my recently MP3-ified CD collection in my parents' basement, and while moving old boxes around to accommodate the ten or twelve new ones, I came across my old cassettes, which I'd stored in the early 90s before I left for college. On the top layer, next to R.E.M.'s Chronic Town, sat my destroyed copy of the Dead Milkmen's 1985 debut, Big Lizard in My Backyard. Stained brown and warped from a passenger-side Jack-and-Coke spill during the long hot summer of 1990, it still played fine. I listened to it straight through while driving around those old stomping (and drinking) grounds, and thought, "God, these guys were so Cali," before remembering, in disbelief, that they were from Philadelphia.

Fifteen years after I first heard them, I realized I'd never thought seriously about what The Dead Milkmen really were. Were they punk rock for 12 year-olds? A more juvenile, east coast Camper Van Beethoven? A smarter "Weird" Al? Excepting their hilarious hits ("Bitchin' Camaro", "Instant Club Hit (You'll Dance to Anything)" and "Punk Rock Girl") and a couple of more critically interesting album tracks ("Dean's Dream", "Methodist Coloring Book"), The Dead Milkmen toiled in a retarded world of obstinately geeky, fatuous gags like "Takin' Retards to the Zoo", "My Many Smells" and the seven-minute disaster that got them kicked off Restless/Enigma (and should have ended their career), "Cousin Earl".

But that's retroactive damnation if you only take Big Lizard in My Backyard into consideration, and Now We Are 20-- a reissue of the limited edition 1993 cassette Now We Are 10 with three extra tracks-- wisely limits its scope to their funnier, more enjoyably earnest early days. Formed in 1982, the Milkmen entertained themselves, played around Philadelphia and self-released a few cassettes, the last two winning raves in Maximum Rock 'n' Roll at a time when localized punk rock scenes were first coming together on a national level (thanks mostly to MRR). Seven songs from Funky Farm (recorded at a barn dance in late 1983) and 1984's Death Rides a Pale Cow (not to be confused with the compilation of the same name) lead off Now We Are 20, prefacing its central 18 tracks which were culled from the radio-broadcast Dead Milkmen Take the Airwaves cassette.

Probably owing to singer Rodney Anonymous' borderline irritating degree of self-awareness, the selections from the first two tapes quickly summarize the band's formative days, chucking early versions of "Beach Party Vietnam" and "Fillet of Sole" out with the yogurt. Still, any completist Milkmaids out there must already own Now We Are Ten, so I have to question why the band would even include them as opposed to further unreleased tracks. And since most appear in hugely superior form during the more raucous, hilarious Airwaves tracks, casual and new listeners will probably have trouble understanding the historical import of Death Rides a Pale Cow.

Raging through 17 of their brattiest skaterat anthems (but regrettably not closing with the Meatmen cover "Milkmen Stomp"), Take the Airwaves is an exceedingly rare commodity: a good "Greatest Hits Live" album. Though the band couldn't know naivete would prove their most attractive quality, tunes like "Violent School" and "I'm a Junkie, So What?" (later abbreviated to "Junkie" for Big Lizard) helped deflate the ascendant hardcore severity that was at least limiting if not ruining punk rock in America. Though their lyrics are infamously dopey, there is some palpable small-town angst fueling rants like "V.F.W. (Veterans of a Fucked Up World)" and "Right Wing Pigeons". The Dr. Demento dorkiness that invaded their late-80s material has yet to surface: these first recordings contain the same kind of untouched exuberance that made the Violent Femmes a college success. The Milkmen may have lacked the Femmes' songwriting talent, but they weren't full of shit; it's an even trade.

Of the three new tracks appended to Now We Are 20, the sloppy (or drunken, it's one or the other with the Milkmen) "Ask Me to Dance" is the only really valuable pickup. A lighthearted college rock number, and quite possibly a shot at R.E.M., "Ask Me to Dance" (from the Instant Club Hit EP) ends with cut off in-studio giggling that would have been a perfect close to this collection, but that slot's reserved for the band's off-key, straight cover of "A Message to You Rudi" overheard during the Metaphysical Graffiti sessions. Still, for a glimpse at the innocent beginnings of the band that defined "dumb punk," and the unfettered joy of Take the Airwaves, this compilation earns a place next to the CD copy of Big Lizard I just bought, waiting for a drink spill to lend it some old school authenticity.