Dicks
Kill From the Heart

Gary Floyd - cross-dresser as a hobby, gay for sport, and Marxist for fun - must not have been very comfortable in the cheerful state of Texas which - no! - is definitely not a nice place. Just for that hateful accent, those disgusting hats, and those indecent horns hanging on the hoods of some unfortunate Lincoln, someone awake and sensible (if there is one) hopes not to be born there in the next life. And if we add, to complete the picture, some friendly little man with the urge to conquer the world and the thought of having buried underfoot the corpse of some lemon-green alien who arrived on a flying donut, it's even easier to do the math.

I have no trouble believing that in the most extreme years of Rock, the most extreme realities emerged from here, where the most crass and stupid conservatism of the galaxy can even be breathed, from cheerful Texas. If the Dicks were the uncensored version of the Dead Kennedys, the MDC were politicized and even angrier D.R.I., the Big Boys were brakelss Minutemen led by that other chubby sissy Biscuit, they completed it all with the Butthole Surfers and Scratch Acid, of madmen without a peer. Well. After releasing the single "Hate the Police" (one of the most incendiary 7-inch records ever) and the split with the jugglers and aforementioned Big Boys with whom they shared "Live at Raoul's Club" documenting a performance at one of Austin's most famous dives, the Dicks (it's rather intuitive to trace the origin of the name) delivered for SST (a moment of silence) their first true LP, "Kill From The Heart".

The formula is the usual - and welcome - axiom: super-fast and sharp guitars, an unruly and noisy rhythm section, and a yelling vocal that takes issue with just about everything and everyone. It's the usual sickle with trusty friend hammer that dominates the cover, while it's the usual harangues of Floyd that dominate the record. On the lurching grooves à la Dead Kennedys of "Rich Daddy", our big man (as fat as his rant) takes on stupid American materialism, and on the deadly accelerations of "No Nazi's Friend" with the almost scientific racism of the police, and with the same - naive and moving - lack of zeal and rhetoric, he proclaims the death of the United States of America in "Marilyn Buck" (dedicated to the namesake activist). Other, and even sharper, dialectical blows from the legendary frontman (active to this day) are found in "Bourgeois Fascist Pig" and "Kill From the Heart" in their explicit declarations of death to the conservative bourgeois, attacks that today might seem ridiculous and harmless but not in Texas of those days, a stronghold of the well-meaning, racist (not two oxymorons) and censoring middle class. But the Dicks from Austin aren't just dialectical violence and they are here to prove it with "Anti Klan (Part 2)", a bizarre blues driven by the crashing bottleneck of special guest Tim Kerr (Big Boys), or the very noisy and confused cover of "Purple Haze", reinterpreted by them in a dissonant bass and clanging guitar game. On the other hand, don't roll your eyes at the concluding "Dicks Can't Swim", a jam with a pronounced free-form attitude of the admirable duration of eleven minutes (if divided by eleven, some fragments could even be placed on "Double Nickels on the Dime" which at that time was only in its early stages, and I might have said it all), with an irresistibly stumbling rhythm on which Floyd would have been even more delighted to acclaim, declaim, and proclaim.

Gary Floyd once covered his penis in chocolate and invited the audience to lick his treat. John Joseph Lydon a few years earlier scandalized the Texas audience when he showed a t-shirt depicting two cowboys touching each other’s testicles. Everything adds up in the end.

Texas is definitely not a nice place.