Garbage Days Revisited #19 - The Dictators - "Go Girl Crazy!" (1975)

 

"Set me free, I might know better when I'm older but till then..." - The Dictators - Weekend

By some distance the oldest album we've featured in this column so far, I very nearly went for the Dictators' 2001 comeback album DFFD for this feature similar to what I did with the New York Dolls GDR article a couple of weeks back but after a bit of umming and ahhing, I decided it really had to be the group's 1975 debut Go Girl Crazy! just because it's arguably the great trailblazing US punk album that everyone's forgotten about.

I guess that you could almost say that if the Ramones were the Sex Pistols of US punk then the Dictators were kind of like the Eddie & The Hot Rods in that they crashlanded just that one year too early to really reap the punk whirlwind when it took off in 1976-77 but if you listen to Go Girl Crazy!, it's got the fingerprints of a lot of bands who'd come along soon afterwards on it, especially da Bruddas. The big "LET'S GO!" chant on Master Race Rock (ignore the title, it very much doesn't have any sort of sinister right wing connotations about it, I mean the lyrics include the lines "First we check to see what you eat/Then we bend down and sniff your feet" on it!) was a full year before Blitzkrieg Bop and they also covered California Sun the same as the Ramones did (and, controversial but, I honestly prefer the Dictators version. Then again, I prefer the Ramones version of Chinese Rocks to the Johnny Thunders version so make of that what you will).

Elsewhere, the thrills come thick and fast from a joyfully goofy cover of Sonny & Cher's I Got You Babe through the pure pop of Weekend and (I Live For) Cars And Girls to the chantalong proto-punk aggro of Two Tub Man ("I can go anywhere, people look and people stare! They don't know that I'm the one not to let your son become!"). This album should have been the one to kickstart the whole US punk scene. So why wasn't it?

Well I think it's yer classic case of lousy timing as much as anything. A year or two earlier (1972-73) and the Dictators would've been in prime position to be peers of the Stooges, the MC5, the New York Dolls, the Flamin' Groovies etc. A year or two later, they'd have slotted right in with the Ramones and the Dead Boys at CBGB's. As it was, Go Girl Crazy! came out in 1975 and just didn't have a scene to latch on to. CBGB's still wasn't quite a thing yet, the Stooges and the MC5 had both broken up very messily, the Dolls were pretty much on their last legs at this point and the Groovies were on an extended hiatus and would return sounding much less garage rock and more power-pop with the excellent Shake Some Action. So they ended up being packed off on tours with the excellent but very different Blue Oyster Cult (who they actually reference in Two Tub Man) and it kind of left them without a scene to really latch on to.

The group would hang on long enough to be able to become part of the CBGB's scene a year or two later and would put out two further albums (1977's Manifest Destiny and 1978's ferocious Blood Brothers) but the fact that they'd already been around the block, put out an underselling album and lost a record deal on the back of it meant that they didn't have the whole shiny new feel to them that a lot of their peers like the Ramones, Blondie et al did and it led to them arguably not getting as big a bounce from the whole scene as they probably should've. They'd keep pressing on into the '80s but the mega-selling success so many of their peers enjoyed just never quite fell their way.

The group would resurface in 2001 with a new album DFFD which was really much better than it had any right to be and very nearly ended up being their GDR entry the same way One Day It Will Please Us... was for the Dolls or Twelve Shots On The Rocks was for Hanoi Rocks. I got into the band about a year or so after this when I properly started to get into punk and it was an album that was on my playlist a lot at the time - Who Will Save Rock 'n' Roll? was a storming call to arms against how safe and homogenised the whole 21st century Strokes take on this sort of music was and the gleefully confrontational likes of I Am Right! and Burn Baby Burn! showed that they hadn't lost their ability to get up the noses of gammons and snowflakes alike. Great stuff.

Sadly the current state of this seminal band is that old favourite of there being two incarnations about following a fallout between bassist Andy Shernoff and frontman Dick Manitoba (the two main songwriters in the group) a decade or so ago. Shernoff initially left the group with Manitoba keeping the name alive as the Dictators NYC only for Shernoff to then start up his own version of the group (which to be fair does include most of the original members) and reclaim the name for himself. Both line-ups are currently hawking new material (Manitoba has a new solo album, Born In The Bronx out which I've yet to hunt down a copy of - hoping to change that soon) while Shernoff's version are apparently in the studio recording new material as we speak. We await all that with interest but for now, you could do a lot worse than track down the four albums so far by New York punk's great forgotten sons. Viva la Dictators!