Dickies - Dawn of the Dickies (1979)

I find it strange to think that I bought this, one of my all-time favourite albums, almost by accident. Pete had just discovered his new bestest band ever, probably Echo & the Bunnymen or something similarly floppy, and so he was selling his recently purchased Dawn of the Dickies. I wasn't really that much of a fan, but Nights in White Satin was okay and I figured I probably needed some representative Dickies material in my collection, and Pete only wanted three quid which would save having to pay more at some later date. I coughed up the money, took the album home, salivated over the blue vinyl, played it once or twice, and then dutifully added it to the collection between Devo and Fad Gadget. I only truly realised what I'd bought a couple of years later when I played it out of curiosity, having noticed that, excepting the singles, I couldn't remember what it sounded like.

I don't recall seeing the Dickies noted as anything special in any of the four million true history of punk things I've read, and they don't seem to be remembered as anything much more than having existed and briefly flogging a shitload of novelty records to people like me, or at least like Pete. Whenever Kenny Everett or some other late seventies comedian took the piss out of punk, ignoring the bright green comedy mohican and the hilarious safety pin through the head gag, it usually sounded like the Dickies - ninety miles an hour, whiny, and with a shitload of jumping around. In more earnest circles, their stock seemed forever undervalued through being American and having supposedly missed the point - at least according to Gene October - and, well - for all the implied chaos, those records seemed suspiciously well played.

The Dickies formed after a couple of them went to see the Damned on their first American tour - which makes one hell of a lot of sense when you think about it; and the rest of their crimes come down to having failed to hang out with the usual set of New York wankers in the early days, aside from supporting the Ramones - which also makes one hell of a lot of sense when you think about it; but what surely matters is the music, and the music is fucking astonishing, particularly this album.

The singles were funny, better than they probably should have been, and The Incredible Shrinking Dickies was a decent debut, if not necessarily a life-changing one, but here's where it all came together. Essentially they were, or probably are, a more complicated Ramones, at least technically with the middle eights and saxophone solos, but with that same cartoon aspect, albeit a west coast version trying to watch Saturday morning kid's shows but unable to keep still for the corn syrup jitters; and the reason it works is that they never even seemed to acknowledge the gag, powering through their own ninety mile an hour odes to disposable culture with the same ferocity as any of the more obviously ludicrous covers, cheerily embracing everything with the delirious enthusiasm of Zippy the Pinhead. I actually bothered to check the credits for Manny, Moe and Jack just to be sure it isn't a cover of some long lost commercial for Pep Boys automotive supplies, and it isn't, but it really could have been.

The thing which makes Dawn of the Dickies greater than the sum of its parts, and more than just some novelty record, is the expertise with which all of those parts are joined together, so bubble gum melody is never sacrificed to mere velocity or even to volume, and Leonard Graves Philips' absurd nasal vocal starts to sound kind of poignant after a while, even soulful; and so, regardless of subject, cuts like Fan Mail or Attack of the Mole Men have an epic quality, as though some timeless truth is revealed as we learn how they climb up on ground and then attack. Great wisdom is seldom found in the places you would most likely expect to find it, and even if Dawn constitutes great stupidity, it carries itself with enough dignity to fool the best of us.