Gimme Something Better (33 page)

 

Tammy Lundy:
The best show I ever saw in my life was the Punk Prom at Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin. It was the Dicks’ first live show and they blew everybody away. Gary dressed in a nurse’s outfit and pulled liver out from under his dress. They had some friends dressed in skirts who came around with trays of cocktails and served them to the crowd.

Gary Floyd:
Later on, I stopped doing all the drag stuff, and the liver and the shit in the panties. But the reputation was already there. People always say, “I saw you in Cleveland and you were dressed up like a nurse and had a watermelon in your ass.” But I never dressed up on the road. I just nod. It’s hell being a legend.

Dave Dictor:
Gary attracted all kinds of people and he brought the freak out of these people. He was just so out there and liberating and ahead of his time.

X-Con Ron:
Gary Floyd had a strong influence on Dave.

Gary Floyd:
I always thought that being gay, maybe people thought I was prissy or whatever. But I wasn’t very prissy, I was just this fucking loudmouth drunk.

Tammy Lundy:
The Dicks just ruled. They wrote the ultimate anthem of all time, “Dicks Hate the Police.” Back in the days when we all had homemade T-shirts, ours said, “You can kill us but we’ll be back in a couple of days,” a line from “Pigs Run Wild.”
X-Con Ron:
The Dicks are like our mentors. As Al says, our “sister band.” Thank god they were there.

Gary Floyd:
There were two Dicks, the Texas Dicks and the California Dicks. We came out here on the big Rock Against Reagan tour with MDC, and the rest of the band decided to stay in Texas. I wasn’t going to do that, so the band broke up. I really wish I had done things differently. But I came back out here with our manager Debbie Gordon and we reformed the Dicks. The California Dicks did “No Fucking War” and “Hope You Get Drafted.”

When we did our first reunion show, after like 20 years—me and Pat and Buxf—we played at the Eagle here in San Francisco. It was so unbelievable. We hadn’t played since ’86 and it was packed. We were totally shocked that everybody knew the words to the songs. One of the bartenders said, “In my whole life, I’ve never heard a crowd of people screaming, ‘Shit on me!’” It was a really wonderful moment.

X-Con Ron:
I lived about three blocks from Raul’s in Austin. Dave had moved down from New York and had already been in a band called the Solar Pigs. But he had a different idea.

Dave Dictor:
There must have been 30, 40, 50 bands in the scene. I hooked up with Ron, and our first songs were cover songs. Talking Heads, Sex Pistols, Ramones.

X-Con Ron:
At first the band was called the Reejex. Then it became the Stains.

Tammy Lundy:
I was the poster maker and the girl at the door with the cigar box. I looked about 12 years old and Dave was chasing me around Austin. I got into a bunch of shows free. I was also the biggest slut at the time and very, very proud of it.

Dave Dictor:
In the summer of ’79, John Wayne died. Immediately, I wrote “John Wayne Was a Nazi” with my friend Frank Mares. Frank would play bass with us on and off.

We tried to give the song to all the bigger punk bands in Austin. Ty Gavin from the Next said, “It’s a good song but I just don’t think it’s me. You should play it.” I’m thankful to him. Here was one of the big guys from the Austin scene, saying, “Go for it! You should have your own band.” We worked on a single and had it out by early 1981.

Dave Dictor:
I started writing people and sending them my single. We sent “John Wayne” to
Creep
magazine, but Mickey Creep was on holiday. So Jello Biafra opened his mail. ’Cause they were roommates and, of course, Biafra was a record collector.

He put it on and immediately called Tim Yohannan. Next thing you know, Yohannan called me up and said, “I’ve had you number one for eight weeks in a row on the
Maximum RocknRoll
Radio show. We love it! Biafra loves it!” Biafra? Of the Dead Kennedys? Wow. I was in Austin and I didn’t know any of this.

Jello Biafra:
I called Dave and said, “Look, you wanna play with other radical bands? Why don’t you come out here and play with Dead Kennedys?” At first he didn’t believe it was me.

X-Con Ron:
We were number one on KPFA on the West Coast and ranked number 37 or some shit like that in Texas. So we were like, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

What really inspired us to hit the road was seeing Black Flag play Raul’s in Austin, and watching Greg Ginn squeeze into a 16-inch crawlspace in the back of the van as they drove away. I mean, fuck.

Dave Dictor:
We finally went out and played with the Dead Kennedys at the Mabuhay Gardens. And we played with Flipper, and we played with Black Flag at the Cuckoo’s Nest.

X-Con Ron:
We met the Fuck-Ups and the Fuckettes at the soup kitchen.

Dave Dictor:
They took us back to their place and they said, “Stay an extra week. We’re gonna do a show at the Sound of Music.” We started out with three gigs and we ended up playing six. Getting in that van to come home, it was like, “Man, we gotta move out there. There is a whole world going on in California.”

Tammy Lundy:
The Dicks’ bass player Buxf Parrot named them MDC. There was already a band called the Stains in L.A. So Buxf said with his usual laconic drawl, “Well, maybe you oughta call it Millions of Dead Cops.”

We were a little worried that the new name would close doors for us, but it was the opposite. When I started booking for the band, after they moved to California, putting Millions of Dead Cops on the flyer was part of the draw.

Dave Dictor:
Cops would come to shows with our albums and ask us to sign them. Or we’d be on the street after the show and they’d turn the sirens on and come over and go, “Take a picture of me and Dave and three street punks.” In front of the Millions of Dead Cops marquee! Then they’d just get back in the car, turn off the light, and go away. You’d be like, “Did that fucking happen?”

When we arrived it was like the Toiling Midgets scene, the Avengers, the Dils. It was cool meeting them. We went to all these parties, but that first wave of the San Francisco scene—that ’78, ’79, ’80 art-rock scene—was kind of dying.

The Kennedys came out of that early S.F. scene, but they drifted towards Tim Yo’s world. It was much more college educated and politically oriented. They read
The Nation
and could talk about Ralph Nader and what Coca-Cola was doing to this country. They had all that knowledge, but not a lot of street cred. MDC had both. We knew what it was like to stand in a soup kitchen line with the Fuck-Ups and Sick Pleasure.

Tammy Lundy:
They played every place they could. One night, they played the Sound of Music for eight dollars.

Dave Dictor:
We were also at that point 23, 24, 25—or I was. A lot of the other people were 16, 17, 18. So people gave us respect. We weren’t weird or confrontational. But we really felt we were changing the way people were thinking. I had political thoughts about how the world could be less fucked up, less multi-death corporate, less polluted, more Age of Aquarius. It seemed like more and more kids were getting involved with that.

Ian MacKaye:
MDC stood for lots of different things—obviously, Millions of Dead Cops. The second most notable one was Multi-Death Corporations. I remember getting into a tremendous discussion, almost argument, about the narcotics trade with Dave and them. Because they were involved with so many kids in San Francisco who were basically runaways strung out on drugs. I used to think, to what capacity are drugs not a multi-death corporation? I mean, drugs are like the most ruthless profiteering corporation I can think of, practically.

Tammy Lundy:
Everything that I did with the band happened in five years, but every day was just jam-packed. We went on the tour that never ended—it started as three months and ended up being 19—raiding grocery stores along the highway. Frank couldn’t play bass worth a fuck, but he was an amazing shoplifter. We did the U.S. and Canada. Ron is called X-Con Ron for getting arrested in Toronto for half a joint. Which wasn’t even his.

We all went to do Europe with Dead Kennedys on Jello’s invitation, only to find out that the rest of the band didn’t know. In England, Dead Kennedys said they would give us 50 pounds a gig, which wasn’t much even back then. When they hit the main-land, they said they couldn’t afford to pay us anymore.

My mother sent money. Dave’s mother sent money. Ron pulled something out of his ass. And we went with them on our own dime. We were sleeping in people’s basements and eating the cheapest food we could get, which was difficult because all of us were vegan. Then in Nuremberg, we caught sight of Dead Kennedys in this four-star hotel, eating in a really fancy restaurant.

They had been pleading poverty, but I think tension had been building because our styles were really different. We were really fast. MDC would get people so worked up that when Dead Kennedys first came out, it would take a few songs for the crowd to get into it again. Of course they did because it was the fucking Dead Kennedys and everyone was there to see them, but there was still some tension.

So we waited for them to come out of the restaurant and we confronted them. Jello was very uncomfortable because it was his band. He always wanted to ride with us, anyway (the saying in the van was, “There’s always room for Jello”). Ray and Klaus were shouting all kinds of abuse. East Bay Ray said, “You guys are a fart in my living room.” But we could always give as good as we got. We actually got thrown out of the hotel, which was fun.

Dave Dictor:
We played for the Pope in 1987, on the roof of my house. He came right up to the Mission Dolores Chapel and we jumped on our instruments and played “This Blood’s for You” and “Multi-Death Corporation.” We all had Pope hats with eye patches.

The police grabbed us and said, “You wanna fly? You wanna learn to fly?” Then they brought us down to my apartment. Just “Millions of Dead Cops” flyers everywhere. You can imagine. The Secret Service did their whole thing. “You got guns?” I explained, “No, we’re peace punks. I’ve been an angry Catholic since John F. Kennedy was shot.” They turned us over to the San Francisco police, who were like, “Fuck those guys—we’ve been working with those fuckers all week.”

We also went to Russia. We got hooked up with some squatters who had Polish punks coming through via the Saint Petersburg- Helsinki route. And we pulled it off. We played Minsk, we played Leningrad, we played Moscow, Saint Petersburg twice. It was incredible. It was six months after Yeltsin faced off soldiers surrounding the Russian White House with a tank. There was such a headiness. We had 1,000 people at every show, throwing jewelry and little trinkets at us. People wanted to meet me—“You are a big star of the American music.” I’d say, “I’m a soup kitchen celebrity.”

These train rides—it was like
Doctor Zhivago
, seeing those yellow fields of grass and wheat. When we played Minsk, the cars were old, the streetcars—it was still 1950s Khrushchev. It was very eye-opening. We were being fed fear—this build-your-bunker-in-your-backyard thing—while they lived the reality of breadlines.

I took off a few years from the band between ’95 and 2000. I got hooked up with drugs, then I got away from drugs and got my teacher’s degree. Now, for every month I’m on the road I need to take a month or two off. For my personal life.

Tammy Lundy:
Ron grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. He lives there when he is not on tour with MDC. Mikey Donaldson toured with MDC until 2007. His liver just finally gave out.

X-Con Ron:
Our best friend and the best damn bass player ever passed away. Punk rock will never be the same without him.

Dave Dictor:
My son is 23 years old, he does not watch TV at all.

When he was 13, 14, I’d say, “Let’s watch MTV together.” I was trying to fill up time because my son and I didn’t live together for the first 12 years of his life. One day he said, “I hate MTV. MTV is trying to get me to be something I’m not. I’m never gonna be as skinny and pretty as 95 percent of the people they show on MTV.” And it really hit me. That’s our culture: Drive a Volvo. Look like people on MTV where everyone’s pretty and packaged and no one is struggling to pay their gas bill. It took him saying how phony and how vile MTV was, to make it hit home.

That’s what punk rock’s about. Not trying to fit into that disco world or arena rock world, where everything’s about money. Where you buy people, you buy love, you buy Acapulco, you buy everything, and you do it by getting over on the world. I know we’re all monkeys chasing coconuts, but one person’s freedom and liberty is another person’s oppression.

Kurt Brecht:
A lot of people didn’t even acknowledge us as a San Francisco band. We were a really hardworking band and we were on the road a lot. But, for somebody growing up in the suburbs, it was so cool to be in the city. I just fell in love with San Francisco.

Bob Noxious:
When DRI came out, we thought, “These guys are so fucking weird!” They had mange haircuts. Totally weird.

X-Con Ron:
We called it the Chemo Cut. They were the guys who started that.

Dave Dictor:
DRI were from Houston.

Kurt Brecht:
When we had our first gig we didn’t even have a name yet. We were practicing in my parents’ house in my bedroom. Every day, my dad would come home from work and pound on the door, yelling at us to turn it down: “You dirty, rotten imbeciles!” It kinda stuck. He wanted royalties later.