Books Written By
Dave
Dictor
"1982's Millions of Dead Cops album represented a milestone in radical politics and music."
— Steven Blush, American Hardcore
“Memoir from a Damaged Civilization: Stories of Punk, Fear, and Redemption."
Nominated for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award
by Manic D Press
“... a must-read.” – Jello Biafra
“1982’s Millions of Dead Cops album represented a milestone in radical politics and music.”
—Steven Blush, American Hardcore
MDC always has been in the vanguard of the struggle for social justice in the punk movement. Dictor’s narrative is a raw portrait of an American underground folk-hero who stood on the barricades advocating social justice and spreading punk’s promise to a global audience. Part poet, renegade, satirist, and lover, he is an authentic homegrown character carrying the progressive punk fight into the twenty-first century.
From the time Dave Dictor was young, he knew he was a little different than the all-American kids around him. Radicalized politically while in high school, inspired to seize opportunities by his hard-working parents, and intrigued with gender fluidity, Dictor moved to Austin, and connected with local misfits and anti-establishment rock'n'rollers. He began penning songs that influenced American punk rock for decades.
MDC always has been in the vanguard of social struggles, confronting homophobia in punk rock during the early 1980s; invading America's heartland at sweltering Rock Against Reagan shows; protesting the Pope's visit to San Francisco in 1987; in 1993 they were the first touring US punk band to reach a volatile Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Dictor's narrative is a raw portrait of an American underground folk-hero who stood on the barricades advocating social justice and spreading punk's promise to a global audience. Part poet, renegade, satirist, and lover, he is an authentic, homegrown character carrying the progressive punk fight into the twenty-first century.
Dave Dictor is singer, lyricist, and founding member of legendary American punk band MDC (Millions of Dead Cops). Since 1979, Dictor has toured throughout the world with MDC, releasing more than nine albums with MDC that sold more than 125,000 copies. MDC continues to tour, playing over sixty concerts each year. Dictor's MDC song, "John Wayne Was a Nazi," was featured in the best-selling video game Grand Theft Auto 5. He appeared in the film American Hardcore and resides in Portland, Oregon.
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"This book is excellent, and left me wanting more!"
It is especially interesting to folks who grew up listening to music in the early and mid-80s, that was at that time, very much NOT of the mainstream. It is without question a testament to how things were at one time, and the book fills me with a sense of nostalgia that only Dave Dictor can supply or understand. I hope one-day things can move in the direction they were moving when Dave's MDC was hitting the streets and clubs, to attempt to educate the masses in regards to the dangers of right-wing acceptance, which during the Reagan years, could be a dangerous angle to approach. I had the cassettes, and I formed a band, and MDC were one of the groups that we listened to and talked about. Dave Dictor's book is filled with tragedy, romance, excitement, and also contains the wisdom that only a man who has lived like Dave has, can properly convey."
Raging against the machine since the cradle
By BobdG on May 10, 2016 Via Amazon.com
Full disclosure first: I've known Dave casually since ca. 1969 when he showed up among my cohort of friends in high school. And since I've never seen or heard the guy do or say a mean-spirited thing to anyone -in my experience he has always been cool- I'm completely biased in his favor.
That said, I loved reading this. The quality of the prose is erratic and often turbid with cliches (like a lot of my own writing) but not so much that it gets in the way of the content which if you are like me and don't know much about the history of punk, is likely to leave you alternately gasping for air and doing whatever you do when you are bewildered. And there are just as many moments where the story is so lucid it feels like a living thing bouncing around in your hands.
Passages about touring in cold-war era Eastern Europe with their images of behind-the-iron-curtain punks are full of vibrant noise and images.
At times I found myself laughing out loud when Dave writes about his relationships to other bands and their members. I mean, who with any sense of humor could resist a line like "We recommended The Dicks, DRI and the Crucifucks?"
But the best that Dave's book gave to me, was the story of his personal journey as it paralleled the birth and development of the idea of punk. It seems to me that at some point in the early days of their ontogeny Dave and a lot of punks realize that they are super-pissed off at everything that seems to be "imposed" on them i.e pop-cultural and sometimes family cultural stuff that they believe that they had no role in constructing. Why they chose to create the idiom of punk to tell the world how they feel is pretty obvious and frankly, retrospectively it seems like the most logical choice given that its antecedent (rock) had by then largely given up complaining about anything other than personal crap like sexual infidelity or having done too much or too little of one or another drug.
That Dave and his cohort of Stains (and later, MDC) and Dead Kennedys, The Clash aw that "rock" was dead as form of protest, walked away from it, made up something if not entirely new (I mean, punk is a form of rock) then new enough to have a unique identity is more than inspiring to me, it's humbling. I wish I could say whether or not the political agenda of Dave's brand of punk has been effective. I'd like to believe it has, but I can only begin to imagine how to prove it. Ah, screw it. I believe it.