Garbage Days Revisited #100: The Dead Boys - "We Have Come For Your Children" (1978)

 

"There ain't no future, there ain't no past, there's just a graveyard and it's comin' up fast..." - The Dead Boys - Third Generation Nation

Well, here we go, Garbage Days Revisited number 100. While I had a few options I was considering for this, I decided to go with one of my favourite groups that still haven't featured in this column to date - ladies and gentlemen, CBGBs' other unjustly forgotten sons (along with the Dictators who we covered on here many moons ago) - the Dead Boys...

We've already encountered Stiv Bators in Garbage Days Revisited's past of course, be that with the awesome Lords of the New Church or his brief stint with the Wanderers but this was where he started out. The Dead Boys were formed in Cleveland in the mid-'70s from the ashes of proto-punks Rocket From The Tombs (the other half of whom, bizarrely, went on to art school post-punk types Pere Ubu - talk about two very different bands!). I said it before in the Wanderers entry a few weeks ago but to me the Dead Boys were the nearest thing that the US punk scene ever really got to its own Sex Pistols - nasty, vitriolic, unrepentant and hellbent on scaring the shit out of the straights.

I think the key thing that you have to remember with punk is that the US and UK versions of it, at least at the beginning, were very different beasts. Although there was a bit of variation in the early UK punk bands thanks to outliers like the Stranglers, a lot of them had the same basic influences - the Stooges, the MC5, the Velvet Underground, Alice Cooper and the New York Dolls. From that central point, it then grew outwards into its various forms from about 1978 onwards. With the States though, the scene was basically formed around the CBGB's club by bands who literally couldn't get booked in anywhere else and thus unwittingly created their own scene of outcasts who, musically, actually didn't have a lot in common. I mean, you had holdovers from the glam days (the New York Dolls and later Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers), groups who were straight-up bubblegum pop (Blondie), bands who'd been sharing bills with the likes of Blue Oyster Cult on the stadium rock circuit (the Dictators) and even the odd pseudo-prog outfit (Television). But the Dead Boys, along with the much poppier Ramones, were arguably the ones who most closely fit the UK punk template.

It's perhaps not a surprise that the Dead Boys would follow Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny and Tommy over to Sire records for their debut album, 1977's Young, Loud And Snotty and it was a fine slice of '77 punk with the likes of What Love Is (later covered by Michael Monroe), Ain't Nothin' To Do (also covered by Monroe with Demolition 23 as well as by the Hellacopters), Sonic Reducer and Down In Flames being brutally brilliant slices of no-future nihilism. But while the Ramones at least shifted enough copies to keep them as a potential prospect for Sire, the Dead Boys didn't. Similar to a lot of the CBGB's crowd who hadn't broken through to instant commercial success a la Debbie Harry, they were also starting to pick up bad addiction habits as well and We Have Come For Your Children, which followed just a year after their debut, really does feel like a bit of a Last Chance Saloon album right from the ferocious opener 3rd Generation Nation (see the lyrics at the beginning of this piece)

 Mind you, it seems like the cards were stacked against the band right from the word go with this one - Sire had basically packed them right off to Florida at the other end of the east coast with a producer who simply didn't "get" the band and it's pretty clear that even at this point they were a long way down the ladder in terms of importance to their label. Nevertheless, I'd argue that We Have Come For Your Children is the equal of their more celebrated debut - I Don't Wanna Be No Catholic Boy is a vicious tirade by Stiv against his upbringing, Flamethrower Love is every bit as incendiary as its title suggests and the two ultra-sinister side closers Son of Sam (about a serial killer running loose in New York at the time) and Ain't It Fun (later covered by Guns 'n' Roses on The Spaghetti Incident which must have had the group's collective bank balances heaving a huge sigh of relief) show the sheer heart of darkness at the centre of the band.

Ain't It Fun really could be the Dead Boys' epitaph (even though it had actually first been demo'd by Rocket From The Tombs a few years earlier) - that sheer howl of despair when your hopes and dreams go up in smoke ("Ain't it fun when your friends despise what you've become...Ain't it fun when you just can't swallow your tongue/'Cos you stuck it too deep into something that really stung"). I mentioned many many years ago when talking about the Wonder Stuff's Construction For The Modern Idiot album about "band breakup" albums, songs you listen to when your musical dreams get dashed against reality or, more often at least in my case, you realise you've torpedoed them yourself through your own arrogance and stupidity. Ain't It Fun is definitely one of the ultimate songs like that to this jaded old hack's ears.

Unsurprisingly, the Dead Boys would split before 1978 was out with Stiv putting out an underappreciated power-pop/garage rock album Disconnected before moving to London and joining the Wanderers and then from there the mighty Lords. Guitarist Cheetah Chrome would remain active on the New York punk scene, playing with his own bands through the '80s and even playing guitar on Ronnie Spector's albums (when she was hanging around with the Ramones) around this time. Chrome still occasionally gets the remaining members of the gang back together for the odd show over in the States although I can't help but think of when the Lords tried to reunite without Stiv in the early noughties and how it wasn't quite the same.

Stiv, of course, would pass away in 1990 from internal injuries after being hit by a car in his new hometown of Paris. I'm still gutted that I was basically about ten years too young to ever see the guy live (same as how I was about three years too late to see the Ramones live) but it's safe to say that he's been an influence on pretty much every band I've been in since my early twenties in one way or another and I still regard him as a huge influence on my songwriting (I just wish I was half as good as him at putting these ideas down in my own way...probably a big factor into why I've pretty much given up on that game in favour of just writing about it nowadays). But yeah, back to the matter in hand, both Dead Boys albums are fully worth a listen if you haven't discovered them already. RIP Stiv and thanks for the inspiration feller.