The Damned and the Dictators Deliver on Boston Double Bill
Inside one of the year’s hottest punk rock tours
It was 1989, and I was backstage after a Damned show in Boston at a club called the Channel.
I was talking with singer Dave Vanian about what the songs – the old songs, the classic punk songs – meant at this point. “Obviously, they don’t mean what they once did,” he said, “because things have changed, but they still seem fresh and exciting.”
Just to do the math for you, that was 35 years ago. Where are we now?
Same place, in a weird way. The Damned played another Boston club, Big Night Live, nestled next to TD Garden, Wednesday night, May 29th part of a four-date mini-tour with their pals, the Dictators. Vanian was right then and his thoughts resonate now: The songs don’t mean what they once did – when they were bursting out of the punk rock maelstrom or later, a rebound during the goth wave – but they somehow seemed fresh and exciting. Or fresh and exciting-ish, at least.
It didn’t hurt the vibe to notice that it wasn’t just a crop of aging punks ‘n’ goths in the crowd, but a number of younger fans who clearly knew the lyrics and music, a few of the males starting up that circular mosh pit dance that started around the hardcore days of 1980. Mercy! These Mohawked kids could be the the grandkids of the original moshers.
This may be the last trip around the block for the Damned, the first English punk band to release a single (“New Rose” / “Neat Neat Neat”) and album Damned, Damned, Damned, back in ’76. Or so said one-time bassist, long-time guitarist Captain Sensible in a pre-show e-mail. “You can never really say never again,” he said, “but this may be our last trip so we’re out to enjoy it.”
He added, “Hope you like the set list. It’s a very Black Album lineup!”
That’s the kind of tease I like because a) it was true and b) their fourth album, originally released in 1980, is one of the Damned’s best and he was really talking about the 2005 Black Album, a double-album re-packaging. Meaning: There were 10 songs played Wednesday from that double, adding “Love Song,” “Second Time Around,” “Smash It Up (Parts 1 and 2),” “Plan 9, Channel 7,” “Curtain Calls,” “I Just Can’t Be Happy Today” and “New Rose” to the originals.
OK, it’s a bit of a cheat, those songs being plucked from other sources, but still, they’re on one version of the Black Album, right? It also made especially eminent sense on this tour because co-founding drummer extraordinaire Rat Scabies – yes, the best name in punk still – was back in the chair, joining bassist Paul Gray and keyboardist Monty the Oxymoron, nee Moron.
Scabies played the most verboten thing you could have done in first wave punk, a drum solo, near the night’s end. It was very Keith Moon-y and after a mad rush all over the kit, he went tap-tap-tap light on the cymbals, bringing it way down and thus setting the stage for the manic panic rush of “New Rose,” prompting the crowd to go nuts. As they should.
But back to the beginning. “Ignite” kicked it off and then “Wait for the Blackout,” a hook-backed rocker which boasts some of my favorite lyrics of the era, with vampiric Vanian repeatedly ushering you into the darkness of his basement flat, explaining “At first you may find it strange, but do not go away / Darkness holds a power you won’t find in the day.” This is so true in a general stuff – all the really good (and for that matter really bad) stuff tends to happen at night (hadn’t dawned on me ‘til I first heard that song). Then, the kicker: “Nothing to corrupt the eyes / There is no vision here.” The second half of that gets repeated and sung to the rafters. You can apply that sentiment to the particulars of the song or maybe to the self-deprecation of the band itself. Don’t worry, you’re not going to learn anything with us! No vision!
The sun-glassed Vanian started the night dressed in a black and white suit (with vest and black gloves), shedding the jacket and tie at some point, as always using that old school. Shoreline mic. And Sensible, as always, sported a red beret, shades and a big striped top. Sensible – who did not drop trou as he once did in his youthful days – was, however, his usual cheeky self, taking a swipe at Paul Weller and then figuring he should get more modern in his disses and poking Ed Sheeran.
Some history of the Damned (Part 1): The Damned – more malevolent jokers than political agitators back in the “No future” and “White Riot” days — was one of the first band to suffer the slings and arrows of critical backlash in its homeland. By 1980, the British music press had dismissed the group as a cartoon, as a punk rock cabaret.
Back in ’89, Vanian shrugged off the old vitriolic screeds as “rubbish” and of the cabaret tag: “I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I saw a Gene Pitney concert recently and it was cabaret, but it wasn’t sickly-sweet.” Vanian admitted to a love of glitz, and of the film Blue Velvet and he viewed the Damned as “cabaret down the dark alley you wouldn’t want to go down.”
And the Damned had mutated from pure punk into psychedelia and goth realms, though I think the goth thing was more due to Vanian’s penchant for Dracula garb than any latent woe-is-us doom and gloom. Or maybe that he was once a grave-digger and drove a hearse.
I suppose I should also note that tour was billed as a farewell tour, the Damned joining David Bowie, The Who and Cher in making these end-of-the-line declarations, however sincerely intended at one point, nothing but a feint. This time, Sensible’s saying goodbye. Uh, maybe.
It was a long-ish, 100-minute set, not without a few middling patches, but absolutely A-level as they hit the final third, led by “Noise Noise Noise” – “We say noise is for heroes / Leave the music for zeroes” – and the blaring-yet-blase “Love Song,” half toss-off, half heartfelt paean. Then, a mad rush of “Machine Gun Etiquette,” “I Just Can’t Be Happy Today,” “Neat Neat Neat” and “Smash It Up,” before encoring with “Curtain Call” (of course), “New Rose” (double of course) and the final salvo, the MC5’s “Looking at You.”
The Dictators are co-founding songwriter-bassist-singer Andy Shernoff and co-founding guitarist Ross the Boss. Former Blue Oyster Cult drummer, Albert Bouchard, is now a Dictator. (The Dics and the Cult shared a producer/mentor in the late Sandy Pearlman, so the segue of Bouchard into the band makes perfect synchronic sense.) And the guy on lead vocals (and guitar)? That’s Keith Roth, who’s played with David Johansen among others, and is filling the shoes once filled by Handsome Dick Manitoba.
I’ve long said the Dictators – a proto-punk hard rock band from New York later adopted by the punks – succeeded because of Shernoff’s witty, hook-laden songs and Manitoba’s over-the-top strutting stage presence and gruff vocalizing. Shernoff brought the band the songs, Manitoba delivered most of them and Ross the Boss added the lickety-split heavy metal-ish guitar licks. Shernoff and Manitoba have been locked in a battle for a long time – when Shernoff put the band to bed Manitoba (with Ross the Boss in tow) fronted Dictators NYC, not to Shernoff’s pleasure. When Shernoff re-formed the Dics, Ross shifted course – he felt Manitoba was heading downhill – and it is under the Manitoba-less the Dictators banner now flies.
How was it? Well, it’s a different kind of band. Roth capably fills the lead vocal role and the band still kicks ass, but he’s not the frontman Manitoba was and, as he plays rhythm guitar, too, he doesn’t lay out the bold claims and have outsized stage charisma of Manitoba. Maybe he couldn’t and shouldn’t. You don’t really want to try and replicate the style of the guy who’s not there, right?
The band sounded good, starting with the proclamation of “New York, New York” – Shernoff’s version of a tawdry, but rockin’ city, not Sinatra’s – and stayed with material from their second and third album, plus three new-ish ones, “My Imaginary Friend” “It’s Alright” and “Let’s Get the Band Back Together,” from an album coming late summer/early fall called – wait for it – The Dictators.
Their debut was called The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! so, Shernoff explained post-set, they’ve never really had an eponymous album. And since this was something of a re-set … Fair enough, but The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! – which sold little upon its release – is kind of a foundational effort for the band and entry point for many fans old and new. It makes more than a few of those “best punk albums” list, and songs like “Teengenerate,” “Weekend” and “Master Race Rock” are classic hard rockers extolling (and critiquing) the bad behavior endemic to many of us when we were young. It was smart/dumb fun and an influence to the Ramones – Shernoff and the late Joey Ramone were good friends – and about any band since that’s incorporated humor into the mix. But the Dictators of 2024 played nothing from it at Big Night Live and it felt like they were omitting or erasing a key part of their past.
That said, what they played – “Faster and Louder,” “Savage Beat,” “Pussy and Money” (what makes the world go around) and the closest thing they haver to a pop hit, “Stay with Me” – rocked. And they asked the big existential question of “Who Will Save Rock and Roll?” (Answer: Not them. “My generation is not the salvation.”)
Unexpected bonus: The Dictators played one of Blue Oyster Cult’s best, a song Bouchard co-wrote with Eric Bloom back in 1974 for the Secret Treaties album, “Dominance & Submission.” Bouchard took over the lead vocals and clearly was having a blast, the call and response of “Dominance!”/ “Submission” resounding through the packed club.
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I was at the show at the Channel in ’89. Great show!