Red Rockers Roll

 

For their 2007 Special Collector’s Edition DVD release of Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, Paramount recorded a commentary track with director Lou Adler and star Cheech Marin. This is a tricky proposition with any movie. A good commentary track can be gripping, but lousy commentary tracks hurt me. Badly. Why squander an opportunity to bring some history to the masses? Damned if I know. Here, though, the opportunity is not squandered. Adler's and Marin's track isn't the best commentary track in the world, but what the crap, it’s a long way from the worst. (See Top Secret or any Star Trek DVD for good examples of how not to do a commentary track.) It’s a lot like the movie itself, actually – spontaneous, meandering, pointless, and frequently hilarious. Very entertaining stuff. Adler and Marin don’t even bother introducing themselves to kick the whole thing off. They just start talking.

The two men’s memories acquit themselves admirably, considering they’re recalling events two decades old at the time of taping. They remember what parts of L.A. they filmed in. Adler points out that backstage scenes in the club at movie’s end were split between The Roxy and The Whiskey on L.A’s Sunset Strip. They point out Ellen Barkin’s uncredited appearance as a guitar-playing girl prior to Cheech and Chong’s set.

For the discerning viewer, however, the most telling moment – the moment that elevates this particular commentary from amusing-on-a-Saturday-afternoon-whilst-drinking-domestic-beer/swill to cultural signifier – comes at the one hour twelve minute mark. While Zane Buzby walks Tommy Chong around and through the Roxy in a feeble attempt to wake him up (Buzby accidentally gave the hapless Chong Quaaludes before Cheech & Chong’s crucial set at Battle of the Bands), we cut to a shot of a three-piece punk band. The band appears on screen for only 33 seconds, and are clearly not lip synching (as Cheech & Chong are during their performance); the drummer doesn’t seem to be following the bassist and guitarist. He looks very confused. Something is terribly wrong. The playing is sloppy and all over the place. Twice the guitarist glances at the drummer, clearly wondering what the hell he’s doing back there.

For the first time, Adler’s and Marin’s memories fail them.

“What band was this?” Marin asks. “Do you remember, Lou?”

“No,” Adler answers, “but I’m trying – The Puke? Or The Heebie Jeebies? Or…”

Grasping at straws, Adler throws out the name of the one punk band he remembers.

“You know – but The Germs are in here – ”

“This might be The Germs,” Marin answers. “…Is it…?”

“No,” Adler says, baffled. “The guy with the flag… Uh, Darby… Pretty… really responsible for a lot of L.A. punk.”

            The drummer stops playing. “I can’t hear shit,” he tells the guitarist and bassist. The shot ends, and the badly misidentified band are never mentioned again.

***

            And there, my friends, you have it.

            Lou Adler’s and Cheech Marin’s befuddled inability to remember the name of this band in a movie they themselves wrote and filmed – while almost effortlessly remembering everyone else in the picture – sums up, in just a few seconds, the legacy of The Dils.

            The Dils should be the one band you know. Their entire recorded output consists only of two singles and an EP, none of which anyone even owns, yet their tiny oeuvre shames the catalogs of the vast majority of bands that hung around for years, even decades. Their fusion of pop melody and punk chaos can only be described as cathartic, and should be the yardstick by which all other bands are measured, but finding anyone that can name even one of their songs is nearly impossible. They should be mentioned in the same breath as The Stooges, The Ramones, The Damned, and The ‘Mats, but instead are recalled only by stodgy historians, or elder statesmen and women who were actually in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the late 70s.

            Maybe it was the band’s lack of a bona-fide home base that made them impossible to peg? James Hicks and David Ferguson, in their liner notes for the CD release of Rat Music for Rat People, Vol. 1, write: “(The Dils) came out of the little known but vibrant San Diego punk scene…” This is more or less accurate, but less, really. Brothers Chip (guitar) and Tony (bass) Kinman, with a revolving-door cast of drummers, grew up in Carlsbad, a suburb north of San Diego, but quickly went north to San Francisco, wound up back in Carlsbad, then moved for real to San Francisco, playing tons in the Bay City and Los Angeles. I’ve found that people familiar with The Dils often can’t tell you where they were from. They were west coast, sure, but from what city? L.A? San Francisco? Both, somehow?

            Beyond their three official releases, there were even more songs – two that were demo’d and never released, others that were played live but never demo’d. And all of them are so sublimely transcending, somehow simultaneously musically gorgeous and primal, violent, that you walk the streets, at night, in the winter with no jacket, freezing but not caring, wondering over and over: how did one of the world’s greatest bands never get their due? Sure, Ed Wood died broke and forgotten, but at least in death he was reborn, achieving an immortality of sorts. The circle was closed.

Whither The Dils…?

***

            Rat Music for Rat People Volume 1 was originally released in 1982 by CD Presents as a sort of Punk Rock primer. Kurt Cobain later cited it as a major influence: “…I was completely blown away,” he recalled to Guitar Magazine. “I’d finally found my calling.”

            There were fourteen songs, mostly live, by all the current punk rock heavyweights: Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Flipper, The Circle Jerks and TSOL, among others. Three of the songs were studio recordings: Steel Case Enclosure by Crucifix, Cheap Tragedies by The Avengers, and the last song on side two, tucked away almost like a bonus track, maybe even an afterthought: Blow Up, by The Dils.

At that point, in 1982, if you were sitting in your room, bored shitless, and Blow Up’s descending guitar line and sloppy segue into the song proper (was this for real, you wondered? It sounded like someone surreptitiously taped these guys working the bugs out at a rehearsal) grabbed your attention; if you listened intently as Chip Kinman sang Blow Up’s delirious melody and realized then and there you had to go see them lay it down live, had to get to know them because they understood perfectly your frustration with your current state of affairs, what with all your pent-up energy and emotions, but no proper avenue to manifest them (“There’s something on my mind,” Chip sang to you, “words are coming fast”); if Blow Up’s final 48 seconds, where the repetitive two-chord progression playing behind Chip and Brother Tony singing repeatedly “In this world of mine, nothing ever lasts…” finally – inevitably – erupts with the drummer zealously bashing his crappy drumkit in Satisfaction-like mockery, and Tony’s crazy, hyperactive descending bass line (was he using an effect? Could anyone really play that fast?) transported you to a better place as the band sprinted all-out for the finish line – if all of this made you grab the local weekly and scan the club listings for The Dils, you were out of luck. In 1980, fully two years before Rat Music, and to zero notice in the music press, The Dils broke up.

Their appearance on Rat Music was probably the most exposure they ever got, more than any of their three seven inchers got while they were still playing and touring, and it was all for naught. Sundown, the first album by Rank and File, Chip and Tony’s new country outfit (featuring former Nun Alejandro Escoveda) came out the same year. The Dils were already ancient history. Chip Kinman, for one, had washed his hands of punk at that point, saying that by 1980, “punk rock was dead. The local California scene devolved into hard core and mall punk.”

No jury would convict you for taking issue with this point of view. By 1980, there were still plenty of forthcoming highlights proving that rumors of punk’s death were greatly exaggerated: Flag’s Damaged, The Replacements’ Stink, The Hüsker’s Zen Arcade and New Day Rising, DK’s Plastic Surgery Disasters, The Dickies’ Stukas Over Disneyland, Fear’s The Record, and Ramones’ Subterranean Jungle, to name but a few.

But Chip Kinman is allowed to say whatever the fuck he wants about punk. Because at the end of the day, he and The Dils recorded and released – in a short span of just three years, with no money or major label support – nine of the greatest punk songs ever written. And you don’t even fucking know about them.

#s 2 & 3: I Hate the Rich/You’re Not Blank (What? Records, 1977)

            “The first ten seconds or so of ‘You’re Not Blank’ are like total war, and the first image you have is of the flames and fire and blood from Apocalypse Now,” writes Nicholas Rombes. And that’s just the first ten seconds. Behold, the apotheosis of punk rock: One minute and 37 seconds of unbridled, fevered musical chaos where every second sounds like the very last second the band can possibly hold it together before collapsing in a puddle of sweat and beer. But instead, the flailing drums, tidal-wave guitars and careening bass keep going, like some huge-ass snowball rolling faster and bigger down a 20% grade, staying within close enough range of each other to allow Chip Kinman to lambast the hippies (give ‘em a break; it was 1977) and throw down a frenzied, wholly unexpected lead at the 1:08 mark which is deliciously melodic, but it’s over in a heartbeat, and 20 seconds later You’re Not Blank crashes to an exuberant halt.

            So consider this: that’s the b-side. The main attraction is I Hate the Rich, pre-dating Motörhead’s Eat the Rich by ten years. Unlike You’re Not Blank, I Hate the Rich starts nice and easy, chords descending pleasantly enough, until second twelve when Tony Kinman’s bass teases its way in, and the whole thing explodes all around you, out of your speakers, into your room, all over your cranium. To compliment the basic, primal chord progressions, we have basic, borderline simplistic lyrics – an affirmation that there would be no incongruously mucking up the song’s (or even the band’s) aesthetic in the name of appeasing those who turned their noses up at anything that didn’t meet their incredibly high standards. “I hate the rich, they should dig the ditch,” Chip sings over two simple chords that for a moment appear to be changing keys before settling down again. “I hate the rich – gotta life without a hitch.” Perhaps anticipating criticism of his simple philosophy, Chip preemptively addresses music snobs writing The Dils off as a joke during the chorus, wherein Andre Algover doesn’t play the drums so much as he recklessly beats the shit out of them as fast as his arms allow: “I hate the rich, I don’t want their money; I hate the rich and it ain’t so funny.” And then right on cue, right when we need it, Chip lets loose with another perfectly laid out lead. He's got an uncanny knack, Chip does, for playing leads that conflate with the lyrics, that convey in notes what he or Tony have been on about during the rest of the song. This particular lead is the aural equivalent of being bombed by napalm. And then one more frantically explosive chorus before a breakneck cut-off at the 1.39 mark.

            One of the great punk rock singles, from any era, any country. And The Dils were just warming up.

#s 4 & 5: Class War/Mr. Big (198 Seconds of The Dils, Dangerhouse Records, 1977)

            Class War is The Dils’ best-known song by virtue of its being covered by DOA on their 1982 War on 45 EP. Whereas Chip Kinman was happy to vent his spleen about society’s well-to-do on I Hate the Rich, brother Tony ups the ante on their one and only Dangerhouse release, calling for all out war: “I wanna war, between the rich and the poor,” Tony sings, and his bass is LOUD in the mix this time, sounding almost John Entwistle-esque; “I wanna fight & know what I’m fighting for.” It’s two chords repeated over and over again, pummeling you, nay, bludgeoning you into submission until a typically short-but-sublime Chip solo, a siren announcing a call to arms, rips across the chords, and then the song unexpectedly – and completely brilliantly, you might say – changes key, setting up the final warning: “If I’m told to kill a Cuban or African, there’ll be a class war right here in America.” Without warning the song lurches back to its original key, the brothers yell the final chorus in unison, and everything ends abruptly under Chip’s feedback.

You’re saying it sounds trite. Until it’s filling your ears and brain, it’s hard, if not impossible, to convey how powerful something so seemingly crude became in the The Dils’ hands. Class War is musical war too; remove the vocals from the mix, and there’s still no mistaking The Dils’ intent. The brothers Kinman really believed what they were singing – Chip even wore a hammer & sickle shirt. For a time, anyway. “At the time, it was something we believed in…” Chip recalled. “After a couple years went by and we started reading more and more about this whole Communist and left-wing strata… then we realized really just kind of how awful Communists really were, what a terrible system it is, how many millions have died under that system and all that kind of stuff. And we decided, well, perhaps that's not such a good idea after all.”

            With 198 Seconds of The Dils’ B-side, however, the band pulls resolutely away from the rest of the pack. If you haven’t heard Mr. Big, Chip Kinman’s dig at society’s well-to-do, then I envy you. Truly. You have waiting for you one of those experiences in life, one of those grand, grand times when you’re hearing for the first time something so miraculous that everything stands still, life’s problems fade into irrelevance, and you’re finally in the moment, endorphins flowing, happy and loving life. Like the first time you heard The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows, or Hendrix’s Bold As Love. One of the Great Lost 70s Punk Songs, Mr. Big doesn’t start so much as it erupts, but by this second single the brothers Kinman were truly flexing their chops, and Chip’s guitar holds the tempo in check, and instead of the barely-controlled mayhem of I Hate the Rich or You’re Not Blank, an astonishingly beautiful chorus anchors a song that veers more towards mid-tempo than blazing fast. But as much as I love hearing Chip sing “when you go downtown, driving in your car, while I take the bus – twice as long to get half as far,” it’s the music here that betrays a hunger on the Kinman’s part for something beyond tried-and-true punk rock. Mr. Big is endlessly tuneful, probably one of the main reasons the tag “punk rock Everly Brothers” was affixed (lovingly and disparagingly) to the band by this point. Whether that label was pejorative or not, Mr. Big was amazingly catchy without being weak or inauthentic. These boys were the real deal, and this still wasn’t their best work.

#6: Century

            Century first emerged from the vaults on the 2009 Rat Music reissue, along with a slower, almost Beatles-esque version of You’re Not Blank. There is, not surprisingly, no drop-off in quality here; even though Century never made it onto any of The Dils’ three official releases, it would’ve made perfect sense on any of them. Maybe this is a bona-fide collaboration for the Kinman brothers? For the first time in a Dils song, Chip sings the verses, and Tony sings the chorus. Wish I were good at deciphering lyrics, but I ain’t, mates, and there is a distinct paucity of Dils lyrics pages online. So you’ll just have to be happy with what we’ve got here: a dazzling melody, another fab Tony bass line, a guitar solo that starts sounding like an engine breaking down, but quickly recovers, transmogrifying before your very ears into something altogether tuneful, and charmingly inept drumming. Hard to believe this was in the can for so long.

#s 7, 8 & 9: Sound of the Rain/Not Worth It/Red Rockers (Made in Canada, Rogelletti Records, 1980)

            A full length LP was not in the offing for The Dils at the dawn of the Reagan era. Perhaps Chip and Tony already realized it was pointless, as their muse was leading them off in a wholly different direction than that of the newer wave of punk bands. As the faceless, generic noise of Hardcore reared up at the decade’s inception (MDC’s 1982 debut album being the best – and only necessary – example), The Dils were looking ahead to a Country/Cow Punk sound, a good ten years ahead of Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression debut.

            Typically the arrival of acoustic guitars and slower tempos incites the wailing of close-minded, orthodox punk rock ideologues, bringing the vague but oft-used (even clichéd) #1 weapon of their arsenal exploding from their slobbering, simplistic mouths: sellout. Happily, this kind of one-dimensional, ignorant drivel resides strictly in the purview of bitter, unhappy pinheads, fearful of what is implied by accepting any modicum of variety or diversity in their lives.

And The Dils were neither bitter nor unhappy. So it is here, on their final official release, that acoustic guitars are heard very clearly in each song. And it is also here, giving the bird to punk rock SOP, that The Dils make it clear in no uncertain terms that they were one of the best bands of that era.

The first thing you notice, slipping the vinyl out of the very odd sleeve (Made in Canada? What were these blokes getting at, anyways?) is the length of each song – far and away longer than anything the band recorded up to this point. For the first time, shockingly, two songs cross the three-minute threshold. Only Mr. Big came anywhere even close to this honor previously, clocking in at 2:17. With three songs totaling a stunning nine minutes, Rogelletti Records, perhaps unsure themselves of what all this meant, helpfully packaged Made in Canada as two 7” singles. The second single boasts only Red Rockers on it’s A-side. There is no B-side.

Chip Kinman sings The Sound of the Rain, the first song on the Made in Canada EP. On the other hand, here’s something about New Mexico if you’ve never been:

Probably fifteen years ago I drove south on highway 285, going to Roswell from Santa Fe to visit family. It was mid-afternoon in July, a lovely time of year to make the drive – cholla blooms dot the landscape with purple magenta, slowly rolling plains draw your eyes out into miles and miles of miles and miles until you see ancient, dilapidated farm houses, or a herd of antelope. I got through Vaughn and gradually an enormous thunderhead filled my line of vision directly ahead. Gray and black, blue and white, it stretched out horizontally and vertically, sending huge lightning bolts down on the horizon, out towards Capitan Mountain, even upwards into the rain. The rain was warm and fierce for about ten minutes, and then it stopped. The sun, low in the sky, crashed through the gray clouds and turned the entire landscape an otherworldly pink and red; the very air itself seemed saturated with it, painting the grass, the mountains, the road, and the cows peacefully eating grass, bemusedly watching me speed by. I cracked the window and that incredible smell you get after it rains filled the car. I sailed along without a care in the world, engulfed by this startling beauty all around me, in a place most people would never expect to find it. The gods smiled on me that day, and I was the only one to see it. I felt like the one truly blessed person on a planet of six billion.

That's The Sound of the Rain.

Not Worth It is, on some levels, The Dils’ finest three minutes. If you listen to all their singles in one sitting, it’s striking how the band makes writing exceptional songs seem like such an ordinary thing, something one simply does as a matter of course every weekday for an hour before dinner. From the opening chorus – the song begins with the chorus, not a verse, in a nice bit of unorthodoxy – the humming tunefulness of the acoustic guitar is dichotomized by Tony Kinman’s gallows-humor lyrics, reminding everyone that, yes indeedy, it really is all a waste of time, and we’re all better off dead. He reminds pretty girls of this ultimate truth, he reminds himself, and even you, the listener. “You’re so stupid,” Tony sings without getting worked up in the slightest – “you put your head through the wall.” Or is he simply addressing himself in the 2^nd person? Part of the beauty of the ambiguous lyrics. The ironically lovely thing about the song is you never sense for a moment that Tony really believes any of it. The song drips with life and the verve of someone who knows he’s actually got something to offer in this otherwise random existence, and Tony even pays a brief homage to Roy Orbison after Chip’s lead. Death never sounded so heavenly.

Red Rockers is wholly amazing. You’ve never heard it? I will suppress the urge to punch you in the face as punishment for your inexcusable ignorance; the truth is, most haven’t heard it. This is one of the sorrier facets of our existence in this little backwater of the Milky Way: the vast majority of damned fools you see walking around out there, making bank deposits, buying shaving cream, fueling their cars, planning pointless vacations with the family, have not heard The Dils’ Red Rockers. Previously, I’ve used words like “dazzling,” “brilliant,” “frenzied,” “melodic,” and even “great” to describe The Dils’ music. These are all perfectly appropriate words to deploy when talking about this band. But Red Rockers is probably better than all of that. I know – I said that about Not Worth It. But Red Rockers is more than just one more fantastically rollicking Dils punk rock song – it’s a celebration of everything that made rock’n’roll such a catharsis in the first place. It moves. It’s got a bluesy walking bass line with just enough funk to get the girls dancing, Chuck Berry-esque guitar licks soaring hither and thither making you grin broadly in the midst of even the shittiest day, and the chorus, wherein Chip hammers away at the open root chord while Tony plays a simple but luring progression, is pure joy, the thing ninety-nine percent of the bands out there desperately wish they could think of, but can’t, because they simply aren’t that good.

The overall effect actually falls somewhere in the neighborhood of anthemic. It is to The Dils what We Are the Champions is to Queen, what Won’t Get Fooled Again is to The Who, but without the cynical chuckleheads behind those songs who were more than happy to offer their work up as a commodity to be sold and bought, instead of bona-fide art. Like the best rock’n’roll, Red Rockers has that intangible quality of pure illumination, imparting the feeling to the listener, if even for just a couple of brief minutes, that, just maybe, life is a gift from the gods and that everything just might be alright.

            There’s an unusual sense of closure here, possibly unintentional: the song’s beautiful outro, commencing at 2:10, almost sounds like The Dils waving goodbye – as though Chip and Tony knew this was the end. The final chorus ends and the Kinman brothers switch it up – Tony now holds the root note with Chip playing the bass line on guitar. Then back to guitar on the root note, bass playing the notes. Four more times they alternate, a beautiful string melody that you think will fade out, you’re waiting for it, but suddenly both guitar and bass play the progression together, abandoning the root note, with a final four punctuating chords on the fifth. Song over.

            No one anywhere ever went out on a higher note: the last song on the last single the band ever released. A more glorious noise I’ve never heard.

            Ladies and gentlemen, The Dils.

***

There were other songs, of course. Many would’ve been right at home on 198 Seconds or Made in Canada, but for varying reasons never got recorded, and exist now only on badly recorded live bootlegs. Citizen, National Guard, and Love House are all A-list songs that deserved their day in a proper studio. But by 1980 the Brothers Kinman were done with it. They’d spoken their piece in the service of punk rock, and sought out what might be looked upon as a higher calling, immersing themselves in the music of their youth, the outlaw country of Cash and Haggard, among others. Unlike the legions of bands that broke up and reformed a decade later to cash in on their legends, now somehow comfortable in their role as de-clawed, harmless relics of a bygone age (The Stooges, The Buzzcocks, The Damned, Dead Kennedys, et al), Chip and Tony never looked back. The Dils were over, and exhuming that corpse years after the fact would be the logical move for mere mortals – flawed, insecure human beings needing the approval of the faceless public at large. Thankfully, Chip and Tony never needed that kind of approval. Jeebus love ‘em for being stronger than everyone else. Citizen, National Guard, and Love House remain lost songs of a lost band.

It doesn’t reflect badly on The Dils that barely anyone knows about them in 2013. They did their part. Now you need to do your part. Their music is still out there. Whaddya' waiting for, simpletons? Go get it, for fuck all's sake.