The Dickies

 

 

No one is really doing first-wave punk rock anymore, but the scene survives in the background with the energy and vitality that punk brought back to rock and roll which has never really gone away.  And a few of the early punk bands are still making music.  I recently picked up an album by the Dickies called Dogs from the Hare that Bit Us (1998) having a wonderfully wacky cover.  The line-up features two of the original bandmembers from their 1977 formation, Stan Lee (guitar) and Leonard Graves Phillips (lead vocals). 

 

Allmusic says about this bunch (courtesy of Steve Huey):  “The Dickies were the clown princes of punk, not to mention surprisingly longstanding veterans of the L.A. scene.  In fact, by the new millennium, they’d become the oldest surviving punk band still recording new material.  In contrast to the snotty, intentionally offensive humor of many comedically inclined punk bands, the Dickies were winningly goofy, inspired mostly by trashy movies and other pop culture camp.  Their covers were just as ridiculous as their originals, transforming arena rock anthems and bubblegum pop chestnuts alike into the loud, speed-blur punk-pop – basically the Ramones crossed with L.A. hardcore – that was their musical stock in trade.  As the band got older, their music slowed down little by little; but their sound and their sense of humor stayed largely the same, and they were an avowed influence on new-school punkers like Green Day and the Offspring.” 

 

 

Of their own origins, the Dickies (Leonard Graves Phillips specifically) talk about that in the liner notes to Dogs from the Hare that Bit Us:  “Back in the summer of 1977, Stan Lee took me to see what was then L.A.’s premier punk rock band, the Weirdos. . . .  The Weirdos had a wonderfully inane sense of disposable fashion that was undeniably West Coast; on the other hand, their musically minimalistic sense of implied velocity, which was to become the hallmark of late ’70’s – Hey, I’m starting to sound like a freakin’ music critic – suffice it to say, I was impressed; so when doing this record, it was only natural to tip our hats to punk rock, hence the Weirdos, and in particular John Denney, the Don Van Vliet [Captain Beefheart] of Punk.” 

 

Dogs from the Hare that Bit Us opens with a cover of a song by the Weirdos called “Solitary Confinement”, and follows that with inimitable covers by the Dickies of a variety of other numbers:  “Easy Livin’” (Uriah Heep), “There’s a Place” (the Beatles), “Nobody but Me” (the Human Beinz), “Can’t Let Go” (the Hollies, and also Linda Ronstadt), “Epistle to Dippy” (Donovan), and others.