Cleveland Rocks

We have come for your children; the Dead Boys in '77

Its almost embarrassing to admit how long its taken me to get into the Dead Boys.  I’m not even sure why I haven’t really liked them till now—I’ve known about them for 30 years; I’ve been interested in early punk for that entire time; I’ve always liked their peers like the Ramones and the Dictators; I’ve been hugely appreciative of their inspirations, the Stooges, MC5 and the New York Dolls.  Everything is there but for some reason its only been in the past 10 years or so that I’ve really started to enjoy their music, and its only been in the past few months that I’ve become a major fanatic of it.  About 12 years ago I downloaded “Sonic Reducer” because I knew it was considered a punk classic, but it never lit a fire with me.  Then a year or two ago I bought a couple songs off their much-derided second album, We’ve Come For Your Children—specifically, “Ain’t It Fun” and “Son of Sam”, and I like both of them.  But just a few months ago I was going back and “backfilling” my collection and I happened to listen more closely to their first album and it quite honestly BLEW MY FREAKING HEAD OFF.  The chugging guitars, the hoarsely barked vocals, the fantastic rhythm section just finally hit me square between the eyes.  And I can hear their antecedents—the soaring Williamson-esque guitar of Raw Power era Stooges and the bratty attitude of the New York Dolls—and how the Dead Boys put them together into an updated package.  I’m especially blown away by the strutting, sneering, magnificent “Down In Flames”, which is by FAR my favorite song of theirs, and indeed is now one my favorite punk songs of all time.  In fact, if someone were to ask me to give them ONE song that really encapsulates what punk rock is, this might be it.  The chugging, strutting riff, Stiv’s harsh, crude lyrics—everything about this song is, well, young, loud and snotty.  It the type of peg-the-meter blast of strutting punk cock rock that to me just defines the genre.  To me, the Dead Boys are the one group to emerge from the Cleveland/Boston/New York punk axis of the mid/late 70’s that really encapsulated the music and feel of the Stooges and the Dolls into a younger, harder, brasher product.  I think a lot of people, myself included, wrote them off because they were renowned as being a band that pushed even the fairly loose boundaries of acceptability in punk—their music, their image, their wild stage shows were all cruder, wilder, more obnoxious.  But I’ve come to appreciate what they were doing and I actually have done a complete 180 in terms of my own opinion of this group.  Part of why I’ve changed my mind is that as I’ve gotten older I’ve ironically become LESS appreciative of the intellectual things people were trying to do, particularly in New York, within the umbrella of punk.  Television, Patti Smith, the Talking Heads—don’t get me wrong, they all made great music, but more and more I’ve come to appreciate the visceral, emotional punch of punk music more than anything else about it, and to me the Dead Boys are hands down the band that most epitomizes this.  The Ramones’ music was too simple; the Dictators were too goofy.  The Dead Boys are really IT.

Related to this, I’ve come to see the Dead Boys as the perfect missing link between Iggy and the Dolls on one end and the Pistols and Damned on the other.  I know it was the Ramones who are widely credited for lighting the fuse on English punk, but sonically the Dead Boys are really part of the continuum between Iggy/Thunders and everything else that came after to me much more than the Ramones, who to me were coming from a very different vibe, one that incorporated bubblegum and surf music and girl groups.

You know, related to this, and something I only just thought of while writing this post, is that I also see the Dead Boy's first album as the missing link between the Stooges and Motley Crue.  Crue famously claim that they were inspired by Iggy, the Dolls, T. Rex, the Pistols, the Damned, and so forth.  I've never heard them specifically mention the Dead Boys, but listening to "Down In Flames" its hard not to hear this as the missing puzzle piece between Raw Power and Too Fast For Love, most notably similarly strutting, sleazy, aggressive songs like "Piece of Your Action", "Live Wire", and "Too Fast For Love".   Other bands would mine the sonic territory between punk and metal, most notably (to me anyway) were Genocide.  If you haven't heard of Genocide, they were a sleazy punk metal outfit out of New Jersey.  Imagine what it would have been like if Darby Crash, instead of going to London following the breakup of the Germs and getting into New Romantic music, had instead got caught up in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and returned and formed a sleazy metallic punk band with Nikki Sixx and you have some indication of what Genocide were like.  Song titles like "Stillborn", "Blow Job", "Manson Youth", and their magnum opus, "Die Wasted" also give you some indication of what they were like too.  All of these songs, as well as some live cuts, are available on YouTube if you're interested.

The other songs I love off their first album are “Ain’t Nothin’ To Do”, which lyrically is an update of “No Fun” by the Stooges but shares the strutting, chugging beauty of “Down In Flames”.  “Caught With the Meat In Your Mouth” begins with an almost blues/bar band feel but then zips along, almost reminding me of “LA Woman” by the Doors.   Off their second album, I like (In addition to “Ain’t It Fun” and “Son of Sam”) “I Don’t Want To Be No Catholic Boy”, “Dead And Alive” and particularly “Flame Thrower Love”, which come the closest to the burned-to-the-ground scorched earth attack of their first album.  I can only imagine how devastating this song would have been had it been produced by someone who brought out the fiercest aspects of the band like Genya Ravan did on their first album.

You know, I have tried SO hard to get into the other band to emerge from the breakup of Rocket From The Tombs, Pere Ubu, for over 20 years now with no success.  The song titles entice me—“Final Solution”, “30 Seconds over Tokyo”, “Heart of Darkness”—but I just don’t feel anything for this music.  I think its just too conceptual for me; I understand intellectually what they were doing (both lyrically and sonically), but it just has never moved my meter.

Recently, however, I was listening to some of ex-Ubu Peter Laughner’s solo work, and I DO like that.  Its clear he was absorbing the message and intent of bands like the Velvet Underground and reworking it into his own material.  “Amphetamine” is a great, introspective song that both musically and lyrically has a heavy Velvets influence but stands as a unique musical document in its own right.  Laughner tragically died in 1977 so we’ll never know what other things he was capable of.  Hard to imagine such a talented person only living to the way-too-young age of 24.