The Dickies: Incredible Shrinking Dickies
1979
A&M Records
Format I Own it on: Vinyl
Track Listing: 1. Give It Back 2. Poodle Party 3. Paranoid 4. She 5. Shadow Man 6. Mental Ward 7. Eve of Destruction 8. You Drive Me Ape (You Big Gorilla) 9. Waterslide 10. Walk Like An Egg 11. Curb Job 12. Shake & Bake 13. Rondo (The Midgets Revenge)
The enduring unavailability of these first couple of Dickies albums really does the band's legacy a disservice...As did their piss-poor attitude when punk finally broke in the US a good decade and a half after the Dickies had their shot (also see Agent Orange)...And I do feel their pain somewhat...These early Dickies albums really are fantastic and it is unfair that they were so overlooked...To get a rough idea of what the band sounds like, imagine the Undertones OD'ing on Saturday morning cartoons, Z-movies, and AM radio...Oh yea, and Heroin...Sometimes the Dickies OD on that, too...
I'm having a difficult time thinking of another pre-Bad Religion punk band that recognized the value of a nice three-part Harmony the way the Dickies did...Leonard Graves Phillips doesn't have a conventionally pleasant voice (he kind of sounds like a hyperventilating puppet with bugged-out eyes), but he sure sounds sweet within the band's buzzsaw context...And man, these guys knew their way around a hook...They come and go with such velocity that it usually takes a listen or two to realize how insanely catchy some of this stuff is, but once the shock wears off you start to realize that songs like "Take it Back" and "Shake & Bake" are power-pop classics...
I think the band's biggest contribution to the subsequent generations of punks has to be their wacky cover songs...Basically the formula consists of taking an unlikely song (let's say, the Monkees, Black Sabbath and whoever it was that wrote "Eve of Destruction") and play it hard and fast until the wheels come off...Although I suspect the main reason they pull it off so well is the nagging suspicion that these weren't necessarily funny songs to the band....They arrange them so lovingly that it feels like these were songs the band actually admired and decided to spruce them up in a way that might make sense to their wired punk audience... And they had the talent to back it up...As Ramones-indebted as a lot of this is, the Dickies weren't your average 3-chord punk-rock players...There's a lot of drama and dynamics in Stan Lee's guitar technique and I'm not 100% sure who's playing keyboards (I suspect Chuck Wagon, since this style disappears from their sound after his untimely demise), but I'm singling this album out as a shining example of punk keyboard playing...
"Incredible Shrinking Dickies" is a landmark California pop-punk record and an all-round blast...I had to search for a long time before I was finally able to score a copy, but it was totally worth the effort...Anybody willing to embrace the lighter side of punk will go crazy for this...4 stars...
Waitaminute...I don't think I've ever established a ratings system...Is four stars good or bad? If our solar system had four stars that would be bad because it would get too hot...But if our solar system was four times bigger, then I guess four stars would be good! But wait, wouldn't that just make it four different solar systems?!?! Plus, some stars are better than others...Sol is pretty awesome on a nice summer day, but on the other hand, that Epsilon Indi A can be a real asshole sometimes...So theoretically, one star could be better than four stars, if it was a really good star....
Yea, this is why I've always avoided a ratings system...They're just too dang confusing...Anyway, here's "Take it Back" by the Dickies...Enjoy...
The Dickies:Dawn of the Dickies
1980
A&M Records
Format I Own it on: Vinyl
Track Listing: 1. Where Did His Eye Go? 2. Fan Mail 3. Manny, Moe & Jack 4. Infidel Zombie 5. I'm a Chollo 6. Nights In White Satin 7. (I'm Stuck In a Pagoda With) Tricia Toyota 8. I've Got a Splitting Hedachi 9. Attack of the Mole Men 10. She Loves Me Not
I sometimes go back and forth, but I think I've come to the conclusion that I like this album a little bit better than their first...They ease up the tempos and extend the song lengths, which is usually a recipe for disaster for most punk bands, but the Dickies were so talented that this approach lets their stellar hooks really sink in...And the lyrics paint an inviting portrait of a cartoon world full of wonder...I want to live in the Dickies' world! I want to ponder the mysterious disappearance of Sammy Davis, Jr's eye ("Where Did His Eye Go?" The answer: "I don't know...")! I want to live in a pagoda with Tritia Toyota! For the longest time I wondered who in the hell Tritia Toyota was...Was
she the heir to the Toyota automobile fortune? Was it just a made-up
name that rhymed with 'pagoda'??
It turns out she was a local Los Angeles news anchor...I guess it'd be the equivalent of me writing a song about Art Neil or Dick Fabian...I still haven't figured out what a headachi is though...A phonetic pronunciation of headache maybe? It's kind of embarrassing admitting I don't know what it is...I bet everyone else knows the meaning and it'll be like 5th grade all over again, with the other kids giggling, "Bleh, heh, heh...You don't know what a clitoris is? Bleh, heh, heh...Wotta square!!"
So yea...I don't know what a headachi is...Or a clitoris...
A couple of the band's best songs are on here..."Fan Mail" shows how far the band's songwriting advanced in less than a year (Oh yea, this album came out the same year "Incredible Shrinking Dickies" did...The band would never be this prolific again, that's for sure!)...They explore the complicated relationship between audience and artist, with a chorus so awe-inspiringly bombastic that I'm tempted to actually write them fan mail about it...There's also the band's cover of "Nights in White Satin" that manages to conjure the grandeur of the original without a single 20-piece Orchestra in sight...
Damn, that cover is ballsy...You could really draw the wrong crowd with this...I can't imagine many Klan members being big Dickies fans, either...I remember back in the late 90's-early 2000's when I delivered pizza in Hale, Michigan, I ended up in a Klansman's lair once... I remember walking up to the door and seeing a yellow flotation device on their porch that showed various diagrams of how to tie nooses and thinking, "Huh...That's weird..." Then this big redneck answered the door and told me to come into his house while he got together his money and as soon as I stepped in I knew I made a big mistake...This guy's house was decked out from floor to ceiling in Ku Klux Klan paraphernalia and there were a bunch of other Klansmen gathered around a table playing Uno or whatever..."Oh, shit!" I shuddered...I relaxed a bit when I remembered I was white, but I started thinking, "This guy just knows I'm not a racist...I bet he can smell it on me!!!"... Luckily I got out of there without an incident...Who knows...Maybe I misunderstood them...Maybe they were just burly, backwoods Dickies fans gathering together for their Saturday Night Re-enactment of the Dickies' "Nights in White Satin" single cover...
Alright, enough hillbillery, let's get back to "Dawn of the Dickies"..."Manny, Moe and Jack" is another favorite of mine...I think Pep Boys made a huge mistake not using this in their advertisements...It's such a catchy jingle and it gives you this nice, warm feeling like everything is going to be alright...
Another highlight is "Attack of the Mole Men"...Sort of a slower paced number that combines power-pop, punk and heavy metal into one giant B-Movie hook-fest...That "Mole Man...Moh-oh-ohle man..." backing vocal has a way of burrowing deep inside of your brain...Their songwriting structures were getting fairly complex at this point...Take "I'm a Chollo" for example... You wouldn't know it from the unassuming title, but it's a multi-part epic that starts as fairly straightforward proto-hardcore before moving onto a power-pop chorus that breaks down into a Bo Diddley jam somewhere around the 2-minute mark...Not my favorite song on the album or anything, but it's another example of the band stretching out past the minute and a half blasts that were the backbone of their debut...
"Dawn of the Dickies" is just a good, fun, infectious power-pop-punk album that grows in stature everytime I play it...I'm always bowled over by their musicality, their oddball humor and their mastery of the pop form...I think even the crustiest, hardest of hard-core punk rockers would have a hard time not cracking a smile while listening to this...
Here's "Fan Mail" by the Dickies...Enjoy...
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