ALBUM: The Dictators, ‘The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!’
What became of rock ‘n’ roll? It was once the cultural dividing line that helped define the teenager as a new social class; yet, like many of its original fans, it had grown flabby and overly serious by the mid ’70s. One could argue that, like any art form, it was maturing, and certainly, the expansion of boundaries led a lot of terrific rock music being made. Nevertheless, the very idea of maturity seems anathema to a genre built on youth and immediacy and raw power.
This is where a bunch of leather jacket-wearing, fast food-eating, metal-loving TV junkies from Queens stepped in. Inspired by the glory days of rock ‘n’ roll radio, as well as newer acts who carried a similar electric buzz, like Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls, and the Stooges, the Dictators assembled in 1973 to bring back the youthful, trashy spirit of rock ‘n’ roll from the pre-Beatles era. The group’s debut album, 1975’s The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! (titled in the style of a trashy teensploitation flick) announced a teenage takeover of the rock ‘n’ roll scene. The front cover, starring band “mascot” Handsome Dick Manitoba, looked like a photo from a wrestling magazine; the back cover featured shots of the band members lounging in their own poster-bedecked bedrooms, surrounded by yearbook-style quotes (“I don’t make no mistakes, Buddy Boy”) and shout outs to random friends and associates. And that was before you even got a listen into what was in the grooves.
The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! has been recently re-released by Real Gone Music in honor of the album’s 40th anniversary, supplemented with alternate versions, instrumentals, outtakes, and a pair of remixes by party rocker Andrew W.K. Yet the essence of the Dictators’ sound remains in the nine tracks of the original album, which, despite its brevity, vividly lays out a cartoonish idyll of sex, drugs, and juvenile delinquency. If rock ‘n’ roll had lost its teenage edge, the Dictators seem determined to return it in spades, alongside a heaping helping of sarcasm, twisted humor, and heavy metal guitar riffs. The title of “Master Race Rock” is designed to shock, yet the lyrics reveal it’s actually a tribute to the Dictators’ own gleefully immature superiority complex; the fist-pumping “The Next Big Thing” is another celebration of the band’s own greatness (“knocked ’em dead in Dallas / they didn’t know we were Jews”). Even on a sweetly melodic, la-la-la-bedecked pop tune like “Weekend,” the band cheerfully transgresses the bounds of good taste, like a kid getting a kick out of repeating a dirty joke. Most anthemic of all is “Two Tub Man,” which throws mud at the rock ‘n’ roll tradition of the cool, dangerous outsider (“I drink Coca-Cola for breakfast / I’ve got Jackie Onassis in my pants”).
Despite the deliberate crassness and sloppy vocals (traded between songwriter/bassist Andy “Adny” Shernoff and Handsome Dick Manitoba), however, lurks a pretty clever ear for pop. “(I Live for) Cars and Girls” is a tongue-in-cheek riff on the Beach Boys’ early singles (“cars, girls, surfin’, beer / nothin’ else matters here”), complete with surging harmonies. “Teengenerate,” meanwhile, is essentially a girl group ode to a bad boy, but with the moony-eyed romance swapped for a more realistic view of how the rebel spends his time (“eatin’ eggs all day long / sleepin’ with the TV on”). In addition to these pastiches, the Dictators rewrite a pair of ’60s pop classics, transforming Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” into Shernoff and Manitoba’s declaration of bromance, and the Rivieras’ “California Sun” (two years before the Ramones’ more famous cover) into an absurdist excuse to rattle off as many dance crazes as possible.
As ’70s rock was trying to prove itself a bona fide art form, not just a fad for kids, The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! revels in adolescence and disposability. The band’s appreciation of the gloriously stupid teenage lifestyle can be paralleled with their love of professional wrestling: they know everything about it is absurd, and yet not only embrace it despite its absurdity, but precisely because of it. Similarly, the Dictators mock rock ‘n’ roll tradition because they love it. The decade-old pop songs they covered might have had a whiff of cheese about them, but that just makes them the antidote to a contemporary rock scene that was taking itself too seriously.
So adeptly does The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! inhabit a specific lifestyle — even its grossness has its own glamour — that it baffles that the Dictators didn’t become the Bay City Rollers of the detention hall set. The trouble with being different, however, is that you’re usually alone. The Dictators proved too acerbic and unpolished to cross into the mainstream, yet they were also a little too early and not quite arty enough for the CBGB punks (and ultimately superseded by the similar, but more tightly focused Ramones). The Dictators released only two more albums in the ‘70s before the band members dispersed to other projects. Nevertheless, the group managed to gather a sizable cult, and has steadily reformed and reassembled through the years. Somehow, the Dictators’ inherently disposable music has endured for decades, and that teenage attitude never got old.
The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! is currently sold out at Real Gone Music’s online shop.
