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.
It sounds to me that’s what made your band special in a time where honestly everyone thought they were special. Is that what I’m hearing?
I think that’s a fair way to put it. We were never a scene band. We were always a weird vibes kind of band, and most didn’t know where to put us. A lot of punks didn’t like us because we were supposed to be ’60s. ’60s bands didn’t like us because we were a little too turbocharged and we didn’t just sit there politely and do cover songs and dress the part all the time. We transversed different things. And for me, that’s what punk rock always was—it was a way of doing things rather than a specific genre that you had to sound like. It was more like, “We do it this way.” We never had management, nobody ever came up and said, “Hey, I see some potential in you. We’re going to help you and you’re going to do something.” We did it our way.
Tell me a little bit about Blag as a solo artist?
It’s pretty crazy actually. In the ’90s, I made a bluegrass record. I always loved country records and stuff like that, but again, always wrong place, wrong time. It was five years before O Brother, Where Art Thou? and bluegrass could not have been more dead. But I finally found my footing with that over the pandemic, right before it started. I hooked up with my friend Andy Carpenter, who’s a great producer from down south and I just said, “Look man, I got 25 songs here that don’t work with The Dwarves and they’re kind of retro in various ways. Some of them almost sound kind of novelty Broadway, and some of them song kind of country, and some are kind of rockabilly, and some of them are kind of loungey—and I just don’t know what to do with this stuff.”
What happened next?
Andy sat down with me, and we just sang every song and mapped out what tempo and what key they should be in. And that was January 2020. And then all of a sudden the pandemic hits and we were like, “Wow, what do we do with this now? And then I said, “Why don’t I sing it first? How about before there’s music, I’ll just sing this over some basic guitar and let’s just get the best vocal we possibly can because that’s all we can do right now. We can’t hook up with a bunch of people and play music.” And it turned out to be a really great way into the record. Once I sang all those songs, I started to figure out, okay, maybe we should make a record and it’ll have a more country-ish feel because that seems to be one block of songs from this.
And then there were a few that are a little more loungey or yacht rock and I was like, “Okay, let’s include these.” And when all the vocals were done and tuned and perfect and great, then it was a few months later and I called on my friend Josh Freese and I said, “Josh, will you put drums on this stuff? All it has is a vocal.” But as soon as he plays on it, then it starts to sound pro and it’s like wow, okay, maybe we can build this record backwards. So, then we just added and added and added to it all in overdub mode and it winds up sounding like this great cohesive record where everybody was in the room just rocking it out. And we wound up with this record, Introducing Ralph Champagne.
So that was the birth of Ralph Champagne?
By the time it was over, I figured out this was a whole new character. So, I still called it Blag Dahlia so some people would know about it, but the record’s called Introducing Ralph Champagne. It’s pretty late in my career, so I just came up with a whole new thing and it’s a total 180 from The Dwarves, but it’s still just based on songwriting and playing around with American musical forms. But now it’s just those softer forms of country and lounge and different things. Super cool.
You had mentioned earlier that you’ve been touring around for your book. Tell us more about Highland Falls.
I wrote a book that came out in 2007 called Nina. It was basically about a teenage trickster from suburban Illinois. It was a similar place to where I grew up, but the character—instead of me as a teenager—was a female as a teenager. I thought that would force me to think in some different ways and take on some different roles. I thought it was a very funny book, but a bit two dimensional. So, Highland Falls was the follow-up. I made Nina the main character again, but this time introduced some other people to an already killer story.
But basically, I write humor. I want to get some laughs; I want people to enjoy it. And at the same time, I’m just pretentious enough to have it be literary and more like a novel, the type that I enjoy as opposed to just something that’s just all talking about bullets and death and whatever. It’s both of those elements. It’s like there’s a lot of action and a lot of sex and violence and stuff, but then it’s pretentious enough to actually be a novel. And again, just feeling my way through.
What do you think about the resurgence of vinyl today
Yeah, I love it. I mean, it gives me hope. When I was a kid, I’d get really excited about a new record. A record would come out and one of your friends would buy it and you’d call each other up, “Come on over, we’re going to listen to that new record.” And I remember hearing things like that second B-52’s record with “Strobe Light,” or when Joe’s Garage came out by Zappa, or somebody got Damaged by Black Flag. You’d hear these records and it would just blow your mind. But I think it was an experience that you had together with people. You’d throw that vinyl down and listen to it out of speakers and people would make cassettes. It was just another part of the experience.
There was something about the physical product that was important to have. And when it went to streaming, you lost all of that. It was like you lost the album—you lost the high fidelity quality of it sometimes. And I think the worst part of that too was just people listening on earbuds and it was like music really became something you do the dishes by or “Hey, I’m getting a tattoo,” so we threw some music on, or we’re at dinner, we’ll put on music. And for me, it was like, no, man. Music is the main course. And if you listen to it out of speakers with people around, then you talk about it and you think about it. And I think that was largely lost in earbud world. So, I’m so glad that vinyl made a comeback and people can look at the art and collect something and hopefully play it through some speakers with some friends.
Best pizza in Chicago?
I was always partial to Lou Malnati’s. They do a nice kind of butter crust thing. I got to give honorable mention to Medici if you’re on the south side.
What was the last major concert you attended?
The last major concert I attended—I just saw Gogol Bordello the other night and really had a fun time there. A spectacle group with a really interesting take on how to play stuff. It was a blast.
Favorite ’80s band, regardless of a genre.
The Butthole Surfers. They were the greatest live band and the most interesting combination of punk and metal. They did some incredible covers and experimental stuff—just a fascinating, amazing band.
If you could collaborate with anybody, and this is either dead or alive, who would it be?
Wow, what a great question. I consider myself to be a lyricist, so I’d like to hook up with some great musical titan. Wow. Who would it be? I’d want to hook up with a songwriter, maybe Irving Berlin or Cole Porter, one of those guys, somebody who wrote a hundred perfect songs and I’d just go, “Man, can I throw some lyrics on your shit?”
Favorite comedian?
I would probably split it between Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock. Those are the two greatest. There’s so many that I love, but I think those two guys are so effortless. They are consistently funny whether it be today, whatever happened in the news yesterday, or if you look back 20 years ago—they’re funny.
So as a Chicagoan, Cubs or White Sox?
Cubs absolutely forever, and we are the ultimate losers always. And we not only lost through my entire lifetime, we lost through an additional entire lifetime of mine. I mean, we lost over a hundred years. When we finally won the Series, I cried. That’s the one sporting event that really meant something to me. When the Cubs won, it told you, wow, maybe we can win. Maybe the loser…what did Tom Petty say? “Even the losers get lucky sometimes.”
Blag, thanks for joining us today. Do you have any final words?
Thanks for having me. I had a blast speaking with you today. First, check out thedwarves.com for all the latest. We have Dwarves reissues coming, as well as a brand new Dwarves album in the not so distant future—we have recorded a whole double album worth of stuff. And I’m very proud of this solo thing, Introducing Ralph Champagne.
But I guess what I’d say to your readers if they make music is own your own records. Don’t get sucked into record labels like people from my generation did. Make your own shit. Own your own shit. Keep your publishing, keep your master tapes, and if people are really come correct and have some money for you, then license it to them.
