I’ve written about The Dictators before, and how they failed to live up to the promise of their first album, on which they proved themselves to be nothing less than snotty, proto-punk precursors to The Beastie Boys. 1975’s Go Girl Crazy! was a hilarious and punch-drunk revelation, with its great songs about being a teengenerate and doing your homework in the bar. Unfortunately, on subsequent releases the jokes disappeared along with the snotty attitude, in favor of a heavier, more metallic sound.
That said, it’s not like their later albums sucked or anything. Take 1977’s Manifest Destiny. It has its fair share of excellent tunes, but it has its stinkers too, something that couldn’t be said about Go Girl Crazy!, which was hot shit from start to finish. Manifest Destiny is an odd bird, both more commercial and more metallic. Just check out the smooth harmony vocals and retro sound of opener “Exposed,” which is a good song but certainly subpar in the humor department.
Follow-up “Heartaches” is just downright boring, and a betrayal of everything the Dictators stood for. The guitars are big, and the vocals are again smoother than smooth, but it sounds like they cut this one with radio play in mind, which of course never happened. It could be second-rate Cheap Trick with its backing vocals and power pop chords, but it’s a joyless thing, and if there was one thing their debut LP had in superabundance it was joy.
“Sleepin’ With the TV On” is a total surprise, a lovely ballad with a great chorus: “Sleeping with the TV on/Dreaming William Powell dies.” Meanwhile the verses are sung (I have no idea why) by drummer Ritchie Teeter, a duty generally handled by legendary roadie turned vocalist Handsome Dick Manitoba or Andy (Adny) Shernoff, the band’s keyboardist, other chief vocalist, and songwriter. This one’s great but I’d never know it’s by the Dictators; it isn’t just not funny, it’s heartbreaking, and Shernoff’s keyboards and the pop guitars are a million miles away from the great “Two Tub Man.”
As for “Disease,” it opens with a long monologue by Manitoba—accompanied by science fiction movie organ—whose sexual antics with a “sick broad” have left him with “sick and disgusting scales” all over his body. He gets more excited as he goes on until the band finally breaks into a less-than-stellar tune that highlights Ross “The Boss” Friedman’s very Blue Oyster Cult-influenced guitar sound. What it is in effect is a novelty tune, but unlike Shernoff and Manitoba’s duet of “I Got You Babe” on the first LP it’s too long and leaves me cold, except for the guitar and organ mayhem that take the song out.
Teeter handles lead vocals again on “Hey Boys,” a saccharine but wonderful power ballad that I find hard to resist. “She don’t care/No she don’t care,” sings Teeter about a girl who’s blind to his charms, and he “needs his friends tonight” to make it through. Teeter ends the song by swearing, “I just won’t fall in love again,” but you know he will, just as the big-ass opening guitar chords of “Steppin’ Out” let you know you’re heading into Mott the Hoople territory. The band kicks keister, but the song just isn’t very catchy, although its fast-paced choruses do their best to liven the damn thing up. I do like the way the song picks up speed at the end, thanks to Friedman—with assistance from ace rhythm guitarist “Top Ten” Kempner.
The album doesn’t really turn my head until “Science Gone Too Far,” another sci-fi number that isn’t really very funny but doesn’t have to be because the goddamn song rocks balls. For once they throw everything they have into a number, and between Friedman’s great solo and the happening chorus this one stands up to the songs on their debut. The same goes for “Young, Fast, Scientific”—I suspect somebody, namely Shernoff, was watching lots of horror movies when writing the lyrics for Manifest Destiny–which is even flasher than “Science Gone Too Far.” “Young, Fast, Scientific” is lost punk classic that should be playing on every radio in our great land. Friedman’s guitar slashes and burns, Manitoba howls, and the backing vocals are top-notch. Friedman in particular turns the song on its head; “rock’n’roll made a man out of me” sings the band, and this song will make a man out of you, guaranfuckingteed. The LP closes with a surprise live cover of The Stooges’ “Search & Destroy,” on which Manitoba barks out the lyrics and Friedman proves he can savage a song just as well as James Williamson. “I am the world’s forgotten boy,” sings Manitoba, and he has more right to the title than Iggy Pop, because unlike Pop, Manitoba—whose shouting at the end is supernatural—never got his due.
The critic Robert Christgau, whose opinion I normally trust, wrote that on this one the Dictators are funnier than ever. All I can think is that he must have been doing a lot of nitrous oxide. Because to quote Iggy Pop, “I’m looking for the joke with a microscope.” On their debut they captured the devil-may-care spirit of youth better than anybody I can think of except for The Beastie Boys. On this one they’ve grown up some, and nobody should grow up over the course of one album, not when their juvenile selves are so funny.
And it’s not like the not-funny tunes are so great either. I count five good songs out of nine on Manifest Destiny, and one of them is a live cover. Compare that to the nine for nine on Go Girl Crazy!, and you don’t have to be a math genius to know that whatever spirit it was that fueled their debut had dissipated by the time they did Manifest Destiny. Not a single line in Manifest Destiny even comes close to Shernoff’s “Hippies are squares with long hair/And they don’t wear no underwear” off “Master Race Rock” on their first one, and I picked that line from hundreds just as good. No, they lost something, left the cake out in the rain. And they never found the recipe again, and it’s a damned shame.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B-
