Album Review: The Dickies – The Incredible Shrinking Dickies
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Last month Captain Oi! reissued The Dickies sophomore album, Dawn of the Dickies, and thought it only pertinent to compliment that release with the band’s 1978 debut record, The Incredible Shrinking Dickies, this month, it being a new year and all.
Formed in Los Angeles in 1977, The Dickies’ approach to the musical world was to take the aggression and attitude of punk rock and mix it with catchy melodies, harmonised vocals and poppy structures. They must have found some success with the formula as they are still plying their trade to this day.
Give It Back sets us going with a fast, yet easy riff; simple vocals and the odd addition of a child-like voice and a piano take this one just beyond a Ramones comparison; Poodle Party goes for a more harsh sounding punk vibe, as though Fifties music had been given an abrasive Seventies make-over, whereas She’s driving rhythms let you know what the Beach Boys might have sounded like had they happened along at a different time.
All three come early in the piece and give the listener a sense that they know what The Incredible Shrinking Dickies is all about. Hot on the heels of She, comes Shadow Man, which instantly casts the band in a different light. Gone is the simple, bubble gum pop position, replaced instead with a more complex structure, including saxophone, courtesy of multi-instrumentalist, Chuck Wagon, who would die at the tragically young age of twenty-four in 1981.
That the whole of the rest of the record continues this unexpected path is testament to the creative vision of the young band, with writing credits being spread across all personnel.
Mental Ward features harsh, schizophrenic vocals and messy solo sections; Waterslide is slower and more accomplished, including what sounds like 8-bit computer game music (in 1978?); You Drive Me Ape (You Big Gorilla) again goes for a slower tempo and is all the more interesting for it, with Walk Like an Egg beginning like some crazy torch song, with echoing guitar and a walking bass, before dropping into a full-on Dickies classic, including some of the heaviest guitars featured on the whole album.
While better known for their short, sharp musical assaults, Curb Job shows the band are equally adept at longer compositions, mixing the aggressive subject matter with an irrepressibly jolly jingle.
Shake & Bake is a couple of minutes of early album fun and closing track, Rondo (The Midget’s Revenge) is an instrumental complimenting sweet guitar with a rumbling bass.
As would become a tradition with The Dickies early in their career, The Incredible Shrinking features a couple of cover versions, songs taken and recrafted in the band’s own image. For the debut it’s Black Sabbath’s Paranoid and Barry McGuire’s cover of Flip Sloan’s Eve of Destruction that comes under consideration.
If you remember the Type O Negative version of Paranoid and go to the absolute other extreme it gives you some sense of it; and the folk protest of the 1965 version of Eve… is possible shorn of some of its more trenchant observations.
Only having two bonus tracks on Dawn of the Dickies felt strange for a Captain Oi! reissue, but the ship has been righted here with half a dozen additional tunes to pique your interest.
I’m Ok You’re Ok is typical Dickies fare with an infectious chorus and was released as the B-side to the world-wide version of Paranoid, reaching number 45 in the UK Single Chart at the time; Hideous
is short and to the point, built around a far darker riff than usually associated with the band and, along with You Drive Me Ape (You Big Gorilla), formed the US version of Paranoid’s release.
The Dickies version of the Banana Splits theme tune, also known as The Tra La La Song, broke the UK Top Ten, peaking at seven, and its B-side, Got It At the Store, a simple, pogo-inducing ditty, is included for good measure.
Leaving only the 1978 single Silent Night – yes, the Christmas carol – backed with Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence, some thirty-seven years before Disturbed popularised covering it, and reaching number 47 on release.
The Incredible Shrinking Dickies peaked at number 18 on the UK Album Chart, spending five-months in total on that particular list.
Singer and keys-man Leonard Graves Phillips and guitarist Stan Lee still fly the flag as The Dickies to this day and many of the songs from the debut are permanent fixtures in the band’s live set.
Cited as influential to Bad Brains, Bad Religion, Green Day and The Offspring, and ranked as one of the ten greatest Punk bands of all time by Johnny Ramone, there is now no reason to be a stranger to The Dickies and their mad-cap capering.
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