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Freeplay: Dicks
By Billy Schear
wschear@mscd.edu

Photo courtesy of Ink Tank Dicks Kill from the Heart (SST Records, 1983)

A rotund Texan man in a nurse’s outfit flinging chocolate frosting pulled from his panties while melodically expressing the desire to behead policemen’s children is bound to get a strange reaction.

Flamboyant frontman Gary Floyd founded the Dicks in 1980 in a town unlikely to harbor an openly gay, communist singer backed up by “three terrorist thugs.” The Austin punk scene owes its existence to the Dicks and their small confederacy of like-minded bands.

Kill From The Heart, the Dicks’ 1983 debut, is emblematic of the original punk ethos of breaking down all barriers, especially those of musical categorization. Their sound is nothing short of inspirational, with feedback thicker than blood, distortion that could cause brain damage and roots that spread deep into the soil of old-fashioned Southern blues. The Dicks blaze through their songs with a staggering intensity that jangles nerves and ignites passion.

Before the advent of gangsta rap, the Dicks made it their trademark to blatantly threaten the lives of police officers in their music. “Bourgeois Fascist Pig” is a reactionary fantasy relating the methods and emotions behind murdering authority figures in uniform. When Floyd belts the words, “You’re the one that gives me the will to live, you’re the one that gives me the will to kill,” the rumbling is hard to ignore. The song is an intimate peek into the mind of a maniac thrown over the edge by a power that will kill him before he recognizes it.

Violence and politics take a sidebar on tracks like “Little Boys’ Feet,” a tale of debauchery in a shoe store where a lecherous older man “looking for work” seduces a young boy in the back room. The song’s predatory undertone is an explicit example of the Dicks’ unapologetic approach to unconventional subjects. The song is hardly controversy for the sake of controversy; Floyd gives a portrait of depravity few artists would be bold enough to iterate.

Strangereaction.com offers the album in its entirety, taking the “try before you buy” adage seriously, and is a veritable cache of rare underground punk treasures. The site’s archives give an authentic tribute to the chaotic nature of the scene by refusing to list the bands in any semblance of order. It has no mission statement, no explanations for its existence. It just has free music.