PHOTOS: JULIA LOFSTRAND | Who is Blag Dahlia? Some may know him from his early days in Chicago fronting ’60s cover band The Suburban Nightmare. Others probably know Blag as frontman for the legendary punk band The Dwarves. He has other aliases that have also been adopted over the years including Blag the Ripper, Julius Seizure, and his latest incarnation, Ralph Champagne. We recently talked with Blag Dahlia to discuss all things music including his recent solo project, latest book tour, and of course music on vinyl.
Blag, how’d you get your start in music?
I played my first show in Chicago at a bar called the Cubby Bear Lounge. I think it was 1983, so I must have been a junior in high school. I’ve been playing rock and roll for a very long time.
Who were your greatest inspirations growing up at that time?
The biggest one was probably Frank Zappa—I was a huge Zappa fan. My brother was into a more “sophisticated” type of music, so I’d hear a lot of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy and a lot of crazy freeform jazz which I didn’t really understand too much at the time. My folks were also really into musicals, so I guess I always just liked the songs and great songwriters.
How did you know you wanted to pursue a career in music?
I come from a slightly musical family where my dad played trumpet and collected sheet music and my brother played trumpet and would play in the jazz bands. So, music was around us. I was also very into comedy like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the early Saturday Night Live, SCTV. They’d always do funny songs. That’s why I like Zappa so much because it was a novelty and there was humor in it. It took an introduction to punk rock for me to finally figure out like, “Oh, okay, this is something I can do.” But I always loved music and I knew that that was what I wanted to do.
Let’s jump right into The Dwarves. That band started back in Chicago in the mid ’80s, correct?
I came from a town called Highland Park, a little suburb outside of Chicago. We started a band called The Suburban Nightmare, and we did mostly very obscure ’60s covers—just weird songs that nobody knew. That band morphed into the Dwarves around 1985.
What was your biggest challenge as a punk rock band during that time?
We didn’t look like a punk rock band. We dressed kind of ’60s garage, and so we’d get a lot of heat because we’re coming up from the suburbs in our parents’ station wagon with some cute chicks and ’60s outfits and the punks hated us. So very early on we were getting into altercations.
So, you just didn’t fit in at the time?
We were always a band that didn’t fit in. And then even when we became a hardcore band, which was after we’d moved to California and put out a kind of ’60s garage record that we weren’t that happy with—at the time I felt it was too soft. Later, we morphed into more of a hardcore band, and just as we did that was when nobody was playing hardcore anymore and punk was dead. Everything was coming in funky—funky white rock bands and hair metal bands and all that shit—and then we were a punk band. So, we always seemed to do the right thing at the wrong time.
