I rarely write about overtly political rock bands, primarily because I find politics morally lowering but also because, as Bob Geldof once said, “Music can’t change the world.” Political rock bands tend to preach to the choir, which is a complete waste of breath. If you really want to change the world—and I personally believe it can’t be changed, not really—quit said rock band and start a revolution. Form your own Weather Underground. Bomb stuff and shit.
But if political rock is useless, I still have a soft spot for Dicks, the Texas/San Francisco hardcore band fronted by the great Gary Floyd. He’s written reams of protest songs, but I can relate to them because they so frequently come down to wanting to off the pigs or the KKK or rich bourgeois bastards. It’s never going to happen, although the police have become more of a threat to public safety than ever, but I find listening to Floyd singing about hating the police rejuvenating. He’s all rage and vitriol, as anybody who’s been paying attention to the homicidal antics of police forces around the nation should be. Throw in a great band, and catchy melodies, and it’s no wonder Dicks are the considered one of history’s great hardcore bands.
I wish Floyd were a bit funnier, but he obviously takes his subject matter seriously, which is generally an aesthetic mistake in my Oscar Wilde-influenced world. But once again I’ll make Floyd and Dicks an exception, in part because Floyd was one of the first openly gay humans in the hardcore community and I can’t imagine that was a pleasant experience. As for his hatred of the police, it was a universally held notion in the early days of punk and hardcore, because the po-po treated your average punk rockers the same way they treated all defenseless minorities, namely like shit. So small wonder Floyd reached the boiling point, and his only means of expressing himself was through bile and more bile.
Dicks were formed in Austin, Texas in 1980, and 1983’s Kill from the Heart was their first full length. In addition to Floyd, Dicks included Glen Taylor on guitar as well as bass on “No Nazi’s Friend” and “Marilyn Buck”; Buxf Parrot on bass, backing vocals, and guitar on “No Nazi’s Friend” and “Marilyn Buck”; and Pat Deason on drums. They quickly won hearts and minds in the counterculture with their first single, “Dicks Hate the Police.” They certainly won over the Butthole Surfers, who immortalized their lead singer forever with the great “Gary Floyd.”
Other than an interesting song about a guy with a fetish for licking young boys’ feet, a loosy goosey version of J. Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” and a closing cut the deeper meaning of which eludes me, every tune on Kill from the Heart is about revolution and rage. The LP opens with “Anti-Klan (Part One),” a raging hardcore screed about a cop who’s also in the KKK, and when the band isn’t singing “We’ll fight you” on the chorus Floyd is insinuating the cop is wearing a slip beneath his uniform or Taylor is playing a vicious solo, a rather unusual thing for a hardcore guitarist to do. “Rich Daddy” is a hardcore riff on Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” with Floyd snarling “A rich daddy/No, I never had one.” Meanwhile the band pogos behind him, and I guess I missed this one when I said all the band’s songs were revolutionary, because the gun-happy Floyd doesn’t even advocate shooting said rich daddy.
“No Nazi’s Friend” opens like a slow blues, with Floyd spitting out “I ain’t no Naaaaazi!”, then accelerates to hardcore speed, and veers back and forth between the two from there on. Taylor plays a solo that sounds like live nerves being strummed, while Floyd blusters and shouts “I ain’t no Nazi’s friend” and “Oh yeah” before taking special aim at the Houston police. Great song. As for the speedcore anthem “Marilyn Buck,” it’s a paean to the Marxist revolutionary who was sentenced 80 years in prison after committing a cool multitude of crimes, including the infamous 1981 Brink’s robbery, the 1983 bombing of the Senate, and aiding radical Assata Shakur escape prison. In its 58 seconds Floyd calls for the destruction of the U.S.A., and sings, “I support the Weather Underground/It’s not for the hell of it/It’s to tear this fucking nation down.” Unfortunately the Weather Underground remained dormant, and Floyd never got his wish.
The title track opens with some heavy guitar riffs and proceeds at a middling tempo until it kicks up a notch, and centers around Floyd’s lines, “It’s from the heart/You need to be shot.” Floyd asks the pigs to cut him a break but in vain, and it’s a great song, as is follow-up “Little Boys’ Feet,” which kicks along at a healthy pace while Floyd sings, “Young boys’ feet/I’m breathing.” It’s a wonderful ode to a fetish, and is almost as good as the Angry Samoans’ “Eyes Out,” which describes a teen craze involving putting out your own eyes with a fork. “Pig’s Run Wild” is a pulsating song about “an old fucking story,” namely that “they can kill us/And they’ll be free in a couple of days.” He then calls for the red flag to rise, and predicts the day will come when the oppressed will do what they’re doing in Baltimore right now, namely giving a little back.
“Bourgeois Fascist Pig” kicks ass as the band rages on, and not only does Floyd call for the death of such pigs, he takes it one step further and sings, “I wanna see your little kids beheaded.” Which is either a joke or Floyd is even angrier than I thought, because child beheading is a bit extreme, even by the revolutionary standards of Maximilien Robespierre. Dicks follow it with their shambolic take on J. Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” which features one of the longer guitar solos in hardcore history. Meanwhile Floyd remains true to the lyrics, which surprises me; I would have thought he’d replace Hendrix’s words with some slightly more homicidal/radical words of his own.
“Anti-Klan (Part Two)” is a shambling and lurching sing-along version of Part I. The bass is distorted, the guitar sound is great, and the boys sing, “We’ll fight you” on the chorus while Floyd sings, “Now I know that you’d kill me if you could/And you hide your head beneath a hood.” Then the guitarist goes on a rag-tag jag, playing some fucked-up pedal steel while Floyd sings, “Blue today/White at night/I wanna fight,” which I would write off as paranoia if I hadn’t grown up in a town the Klan marched through in the mid-sixties and the bar in the next town over had stickers in the urinals reading “The KKK Is Watching You.” Watching me piss? Really? And they dare to call Floyd a pervert?
“Right Wing/White Wing” is a gallop boasting a very cool guitar riff and Floyd sounding like the Minutemen with his protest against parents sending their kids off to El Salvador to die in a pointless war. “This ain’t television/This ain’t high school” he rants, then, “This ain’t college now, students/This is the Real Life/The Real Life.” And Dicks really head into Minutemen territory with “Dicks Can’t Swim I. Cock Jam II. Razor Blade Dance,” with its long rhythmic groove and scratchy and funked-up guitar. It’s an odd as fuck way to end the LP, with Floyd singing, “I wanna dance dance dance dance dance” and tossing off all kinds of extemporaneous lines—as Taylor plays on and on—some of which seem to express his desire to be whipped. Not that I have any problem with that. I’ve been whipped and it was good clean fun. But I’ve never been a fan of this song, because it goes on for 11-plus minutes and it’s never really clear whether Floyd is (1) making fun of rock’s dance contingent, the way he skewers New Wave in “Fake Bands,” (2) honestly saying he wants to shake his hips or (3) just wants to “slam slam slam.” Nor is he the best funk vocalist I’ve ever run across. And Taylor is no D. Boon on guitar, come to think of it. No, a little bit of the Minutemen’s concision would have done this one some good, and I can never quite make it through it.
Dicks didn’t change a damn thing with their howls of protest and rage, but those howls were both visceral and heartfelt, which is more than you can say about some of their contemporaries. I suspect the Butthole Surfers wrote “Gary Floyd” because they knew he was the real item, with all his talk about guns and knives and offing pigs. The world will never change; cops will always shoot innocents and get away with it, and the Weathermen aren’t coming back anytime soon. But you can’t blame a guy for dreaming, and Floyd’s dreams of offing pigs and Klansmen and bringing down the United States of America will continue to resonate with folks who despise this country’s hypocrisy and two-tiered system of justice. He’ll always have a fan in me, if nobody else, and should a new revolutionary group ever coalesce in this country I hope they’ll do Texas’ angriest lead vocalist the justice of calling themselves the Gary Floyd Army.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
