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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary
The Dictators were the clearest
link with the Ramones. Their album Go Girl Crazy (1975) was a blaspheme
totem of junk culture. The band recycled
rock'n'roll, surf music, folk-rock and Mersey-beat, but they played it in
fast and loud manner of hard-rock, and added a demented, spastic attitude
that transformed Frank Zappa's or the Fugs' satirical rock into a terrorist
attack.
Full bio
The Dictators completed the arc of rocks perversion, coining the super-fast, deafening, and crazy style that the following year would shake the world: punk rock. Not only did Rob The Boss Funichello (lead guitar), Scott Kempner (rhythm guitar), Mark Mendoza (bass), and Stu Boy King (drums) restore meaning to the classic rock quartetactually increasing its potential for ferocitybut they also hit the mark by shifting the emphasis away from the intellectual themes of progressive rock to the subjects of junk culture (fast food, TV commercials, singles bars, tabloid scandals, soap operas).
Formed in 1972 by journalist Adny Shernoff (initially also the singer, but later only the keyboardist) as a joke for New Yorks hippest clubs, they ended up recording a small classic, the album Go Girl Crazy (Epic, 1975), full of sarcastically obscene sketches (Next Big Thing", Two Tub Man") and rowdy reinterpretations of rock and roll (Master Race Rock"), folk-rock (Weekend"), surf (Cars and Girls"), and Merseybeat (Teengenerate"), all screamed by a madman of a singer like Dick Manitoba (Richard Blum).
On second album Manifest Destiny (Asylum, 1977), with Ritchie Teeter on drums, their gags (Science Gone Too Far", Sleepin With the TV On") became more musical (Exposed", Hey Boys", Heartache", Steppin Out"), so much so that their third album Bloodbrothers (1978), without Mendoza, could have competed with the most commercial power rock (Stay With Me", Baby Lets Twist", What It Is", No Tomorrow") if it hadnt been for heretical anthems like Faster and Louder" and Minnesota Strip".
All of them went on to a brighter future than anyone would have expected at the time: Mendoza became the bassist for Twisted Sister, Kempner formed the Del-Lords, and Funichello founded Manowardemonstrating how prescient the Dictators lively and wild sound had been.
In 1991 Dick Manitoba reunited Andy Shernoff and Ross the Boss to record under the moniker Wild Kingdom the album And You (Popular Metaphysics), which picked up the thread right where it had been left in 1978: biting and crazy power pop.
Fuck Em If They Can't Take A Joke (ROIR),
reissued as New York New York (ROIR, 1999),
documents a 1981 live show.
The Dictators reunited 18 years after disbanding and released the single
I Am Right.
Ritchie Teeter died in 2012.
Scott Kempner died in 2023.
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