The Dickies: My Pop the Cop

That fact that the kiddie-punk veterans the Dickies ended up on Fat Wreck-Chords, the label that got rich on their idea, is most fitting. After all label boss and NOFX mouthpiece Fat Mike's other band Me First and the Gimme-Gimme's are almost a Dickies tribute band. The Dickies' 2001 Fat album, All This and Puppet Stew justifies their album-a-decade policy by eschewing the Fat Wreck-Chords standard strategy of putting out the exact same album once a year and then going out on the Warped Tour. Instead, this album sticks to the rules laid out by their last album, Idjit Savant, of being a clearing house of L.A. pop history, somewhere between the fey-pop of bands like the Quick and the pummeling punk of bands like the Weirdos (each of whom shared a member and a song with the Dickies).



One stand-out is, "My Pop the Cop" which could be an old Allan Sherman novelty number but isn't. For a fevered 2:20 song, it's packed to bursting with sound effects, hummable guitar licks and catchy hooks. Flip the record over and you get the other side of the band, the power-pop wusses that kept "Pretty Please Me" alive, with the, kinda lovely actually, "Marry Me, Anne".


Download My Pop the Cop 7"



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Update: Live Dickies footage at Punk Friction click NOW!

The Dickies: Make It So

The arrival of the Dickies Idjit Savant in 1994 came as a surprise. After all, it had been years since the "Just Say Yes" and "Roadkill" singles, both of which did end up on the album. Another surprise was an increasing hard rockin'-ness, evidenced not just in Stan's Brian May style guitar heroics but in Leonard's almost Freddie Mercury-ish moves as well as the less frenetic tempos. The final surprise was a lack of any goofy covers. Sure the boys do Grapefruit's "Elevator (to the Brain Hotel)", the Left Banke's "Pretty Ballerina" and, most fascinatingly, the final Darby Crash/Pat Smear song "Golden Boys". However, these songs are not triple-time thrashings of overly-familiar standards but are instead seem chosen to place themselves where they feel they belong in pop history. An unusual record that both recalls their early work (and that of many older bands) and yet sounds like nothing else.



Of course the goofiness remains. The final single from the album, after all, was the Star Trek referencing rocker, "Male it So" backed with a live cover of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World."


Download Make It So 7"

The Dickies: Just Say Yes

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The Dickies didn't die. After moving down from A & M to Restless, they stepped further down to XXX Records in 1990 for one of their many re-births.



This single, the precursor to Idjit Savant (available here) contains the first stone-classic Dickies songs in years ("Just Say Yes") as well as an outtake from 1980 called "Ayatollah You So". The latter track resurrects those hyper-loony Dickies of 1980 and juxtaposes them with the Dickies of1990, proving that the spark of life still roared in Leonard, Stan & co.

Download Just Say Yes CD single

The Dickies: Live at Wellingtons

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Yes, the 1982 Dickies show I missed (see here) and lied about seeing has passed into legend as one ass-kicking bootleg. As Winnipeg scenester and scribe Vom Doom reminds us, this bootleg sounds so damn crisp and clear because a certain caustic record store clerk recorded one channel direct from the soundboard and the other channel from a PCM mike hung from the ceiling. (And that's pretty technical description by MRML standards). The Dickies recorded works may become slightly dodgy after their heyday but their live shows always rock like its 1979. Here, the band plays an astonishing set of originals and covers both old and new, including a pile-driving version of "Solitary Confinement" by the Weirdos, whose Nicky Beat was on the drum seat for this tour. Now I'll always know what I missed.



One warning, the nigh-on infallible internet may decree that this show is from 1986 but that's bull and not of the papal variety either. Trust me, I have it on the authority of people who actually got into the fuckin' bar (there's lots of token Winnipeg references in Leonard's well-rehearsed stage-banter) that this is the 1982 show - the only time in the eighties that the Dickies played here.


Download Live at Wellingtons CD

The Dickies Archives 2

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More Dickies!


Download Archives 2 L.P.

The Dickies: Archives 1

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The Dickies (see here) were my first musical lie. When they played a bar show at Wellington's in 1982, I was far too young too go. However, such was my desire to have witnessed this cataclysmic event that I told my grade eight peers (friends would not be the word) that I'd snuck into the show. It wasn't completely implausible, after all one of my peers (a guy named after a city in Texas and an exotic bird) got a note from his mom to leave school school early to see an afternoon show by G.B.H. I spun a convincing tale (based solely on my brother's report) of when Leonard used the squeak toy ("Curb Job") and when he pulled out the penis puppet ("If Stuart Could Talk"). Now I still occasionally fictionalize musical experience but to slightly different ends.


Truthfully, I finally did get to see the Dickies in Vancouver in '91. Leonard still pulled out the penis puppet and the gorilla mask (but not the chew toy) and he kept his left finger stuck in his ear while Stan played flashily as if to compensate for the zaniness. All was still as it should be. The Dickies are almost incorrigibly punk (pop division) and I still love them for it, no word of a lie.

Don't miss the rocking 1991 live footage and the revealing interviews below:




Archives 1 is a Dickies Fan club approved bootleg, which, via live tracks and demos, posits an alternate reality Dickies; rawer cruder and and just as much fun.



Download Archives 1 L.P.



Here's some of your "I saw the Dickies and lived" stories:

My older brother took me to my first concert in 77 or 78 at the Showbox theater in Seattle, It was The DICKIES and 999 !!! Talk about life changing... I'd actually turned him on to Dickies and he turned me on to 999. What a wild show, Chuck Wagon (R.I.P) played the keys with his head, the whole thing was an adrenalin blur, I was 12/13 and this music was IT! I wanted to Play it, eat it, live it everything ! Both bands were at their peak, Dickies touring for the 1st album opened for 999 who were touring for their "Biggest Prize..." album. Never saw 999 again but I've managed to catch the Dickies @ CBGB's in '84 and a few other times, always great ! But that first was life changing and way better than the 1st time I got laid !!! Gigantor ! Gigantor ! Gi - Gaaaanaaann Torrrrr !

Revolutionary Bum

Somewhere around 1986 I saw the Dickies trash and then get thrown out of the "Cloud Nine" ballroom at Knott's Berry Farm amusement park of all places. They only played two songs and the park pussies pulled the plug on the sound and lights in the middle of You Drive Me Ape. The band got the crowd all riled up, and that inspired a near riot in the dark from the punks attending. After that there was nothing left but to get drunk and ride rollercoasters. Thank you Dickies for a memorable night.

Mr. Sauve

The Dickies: Great Dictations

Yes, I confess, the Dickies were my first punk obsession. Sure I'd heard the Pistols and the Clash but in 1982 I was a thirteen year old misfit obsessed with the X-Men and the Doors when these California pop-punk goofballs first knocked me flat.



My older brother, bragging he'd got some "real punk”, brought home two L.P.'s, Dawn of the Dickies and the Incredible Shrinking Dickies (a self-referential lot these boys) and kick-started my problem. Jacked up 4/4 tempos, choppy three-chord riffs, mercilessly simple hooks, relentless back-up vocals, shrewd covers and daft B-movie lyrics: Fucking yeah! It's no wonder the band sold a million singles in late seventies Britain AND managed to inspire everyone in California to start a pop-punk band; forever.



Those early singles (none of which I heard till this CD came out in 1989) defined the term 'kiddie-punk' for all time. Hell, with those cartoon theme covers and the sugar-rush levels of zaniness, they seemed to be pursuing their own Saturday morning show ("Next on ABC, following The New Shmoo, it's those lovable Dickies, a show about band named after the lead singer's obsession with his penis, called Stuart" - okay so the show didn't get the green-light for good reasons.) What confuzzled my brother and I back in '82 was how a band (long centered around Leonard Graves Philips on vocals and Stan Lee on guitar) who wrote lethally infectious songs like, "Manny, Moe and Jack" could not get radio play on our local stations. And now, of course, half the kids shows' themes sound like Dickies' outtakes. Life; she's weird as fuck.



Great Dictations, now out-of-print, was the only Dickies available for a long time, but thanks to Captain Oi! allowing another American band (with solely British chart success) onto his label, you can buy their albums with the singles appended. It's a glorious offer and I held tightly onto this album until those re-issue separated me and my money.

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