Sorry for the delay of new content for the weekend, bruisers... I was busy battling a cold that left me expelling 18 lbs of green garbage from my face, backing myself off just shy of the lethal dose of Actifed and Ibuprofen, and hand-trucking my 80 lb head around the house on a dolly... but regardless, that's no excuse... so here we are.
I felt the urge to blow the dust off this column since we've only had one entry for it, and cuz I was listening to this album so much over the weekend while shackled to my mattress, bedridden... So anyway, I present: The Dicks... The one band that single-handedly brought the American hardcore sound to the wild-western, oft-conservative state of Texas in 1980. Frequently playing with the Big Boys and Millions of Dead Cops, these three titans held down the Texan side of things while LA, New york, Chicago, San Fran, Boston and the rest of the tribal areas were having their own early-80's hardcore booms. Lineup changes were no stranger to the Dicks, like many other hardcore bands of the era, but the ringmaster always stayed constant. And that man was Gary Floyd, who was one of only a small crop of openly gay musicians in the scene. This little tidbit only added fuel to their politically and socially radical ideals and content... always embracing the controversy within their craft.
But as for this record in particular... It is a complete crowning gem of punk mythos often forgotten. And not only that shit, plain and simple, it's brutal, it's aggressive, it's got heart, it's got soul, it's honest, it's combatative, it's just plain fuckin righteous. This album is a sampling of their entire dicography (sidenote: also a perfect introduction to the band if your music taste is so silly that you haven't stumbled across these guys yet), sure its missing some of the stuff off the "Kill from the Heart" era, but it's an aural dynamo regardless. The thing I love about this damn band is that they meld their anger and hardcore ferocity with a certain blues and swagger comparable to none. It makes for one delicious, vicious, menacing, but sexy time... an urgency of violence spiced with a messy groove bomb. And also another sidenote, when surfing around the 'interweb' peeping a glance at what other people thought of this record, I have to harshly disagree with one thing. As with a lot of bands, if you listen to everything they've made, from first song to last, you should notice a growth -- a maturity of sorts. And the Dicks are no different from this equation. A lot of fan reviews say they can't get down on the later, more bluesy/rootsy vibe of their tunes... the ones that became more three parts blues to one part hardcore, as opposed to the inverse of their earlier jazz... and all I have to them is "fuck off and neckpunch yourself with a shoehorn, you assholes don't know shit about dick" (pun intended). Give it a chance, you're witnessing the evolution of greatness... and a righteous ride.
Just as relevant today..... The Dicks - "Fake Bands" (live @ 710 Club in Austin)
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