The Dicks

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Sometime during the summer of 1984 (I suspect it was in June) Kate and I were in Cincinnati for a conference of mine. As I recall this  was our first road trip together into the USA, we had rented a car for the trip, and we made it a bit of an adventure exploring the Ohio backroads on the way down and the greater Cincinnati area while at the conference.

One of our fun music adventures was to see "The Dicks" play at a seedy Newport, Kentucky bar just across the river from Cincinnati (we stayed in nearby Covington, KY). We really didn't know much about the band but figured out it was a punk night out and we were up for it. The photo album at left has some pictures of the event.

The pictures show that the "Big Dick" (real name Gary Floyd) really threw himself into the music. He's a big guy, quite intense and by the end of the evening he's soaking wet from sweating.

Wikipedia tells me this was the "San Francisco" and 2nd version of "The Dicks" with this lineup: Gary Floyd (vox), Tim Carroll (gtr), Sebastian Fuchs (bass), and Lynn Perko (drums). Lynn is notable as a female drummer. They had released the LP's Kill From The Heart (1983) and would follow that with These People (1986) which I have. If I were to put a name to their music I'd say, "hardcore".

The band was formed in Austin in 1980, then moved to San Fancisco in 1983 and folded in 1986. In 1988 we were in San Francisco and saw "Sister Double Happiness" (with the Big Dick singing) open for the "Butthole Surfers" (another Austin band). We've been travelling to Austin for many years now with our first visit in 1990. We love the music we find in Austin but no longer follow the punk scene.

There was a local opening act that night, whose name I've forgotten. There's some pictures of them in the photo album. The bass player is a striking young woman in the Joan Jett mold. The notable thing there was the dancing style. The bar had a very large dance floor and the fans were into a style of dancing that involved running around the floor swinging their arms and taking long loping steps. We'd never seen this before, I believe it's called "skanking".

Another tidbit — after the show we discovered that I had locked the keys in the car. Some of the locals at the show helped us break into the car. A police patrol drove by while we were doing that but didn't seem phased by a couple of young men breaking into a car in front of a seedy bar on what would have been "the wrong side of town".

This blog is filed on an arbitrary date in June of 1984. Slides were scanned and these recollections composed during the pandemic lock down of May, 2021.