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Burn, Baby, Burn! Career-Spanning Anthology Arrives For The Dictators

April 24, 2014 By Joe Marchese 1 Comment

Dictators - Faster LouderWho will save rock and roll?

The Dictators posed the question on their 2011 reunion album D.F.F.D. (that’s “Dictators Forever, Forever Dictators,” in case you were wondering), but many listening might have felt that The Dictators themselves could have been the saviors. Yet despite recording three well-received albums between 1975 and 1978, and gaining such high-profile fans as Bruce Springsteen and Little Steven Van Zandt, The Dictators’ anarchic, acerbic brand of rock-and-roll never garnered the group mainstream success. But Raven Records believes in The Dictators, and has just celebrated the band with its first-ever career-spanning, multi-label anthology. Faster…Louder: The Dictators’ Best 1975-2001 draws on all four studio albums for a fast and furious introduction to the group Van Zandt asserted was “the missing link between The New York Dolls and punk.”

Vocalist/bassist/chief songwriter Andy Shernoff joined lead guitarist Ross “The Boss” Friedman, rhythm guitarist Scott “Top Ten” Kempner, drummer Stu Boy King and lead vocalist “Handsome” Dick Manitoba in the first lineup of The Dictators. This quintet unleashed The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! on Epic Records in 1976, produced by Murray Krugman and Sandy Pearlman, known for their work with hard rockers Blue Öyster Cult. With its humorously biting lyrics and full-throttle garage-style musical attack, Girl Crazy is often considered one of the building blocks of the punk sound. Six tracks are culled from Girl Crazy for Raven’s anthology, including “California Sun,” one of the original LP’s two covers. (The other was “I Got You, Babe,” nodding to the punks’ affection for – and satire of – sixties pop.) Of Shernoff’s originals included here, “(I Live For) Cars and Girls” was the songwriter’s tribute to Brian Wilson; “Master Race Rock” wasn’t quite as malevolent as the title might indicate, opening with “Hippies are squares with long hair/And they don’t wear no underwear” and going from there!

After a brief breakup, The Dictators reconvened with Manitoba, Friedman and Kempner joined by drummer Richie Teeter and bassist Mark “The Animal” Mendoza. Shernoff stayed on to play keyboards and write most of the group’s 1977 Asylum debut Manifest Destiny. Four tracks, including a live cover of The Stooges’ “Search and Destroy” from CBGB’s, are reprised here. Though the musicianship was as savage as ever, Manifest presented a more diverse hard-rock sound encompassing arena rock, punk, metal, and even power ballads. One more album followed for Asylum, 1978’s Bloodbrothers, from which five songs have been extracted. Shernoff once again handled the lion’s share of songwriting, even enlisting an uncredited Bruce Springsteen for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it vocal cameo on “Faster and Louder,” the track which gives this compilation its title. “Slow Death” was a cover of the Flamin’ Groovies’ anti-drug song from 1972.

Don’t miss a thing – hit the jump to continue reading!

After Bloodbrothers failed to turn the band’s commercial fortunes around, The Dictators broke up. Ross “The Boss” joined Shakin’ Street and later, Manowar; Kempner formed The Del-Lords; Shernoff moved into production. The first steps to a Dictators reunion came when Manitoba, Friedman, Shernoff and drummer J.P. “Thunderbolt” Patterson formed Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom and released what Rolling Stone deemed “the first great punk rock album of the 1990s.” By the end of the decade, a proper Dictators reunion was mooted, resulting in the 2001 album D.F.F.D. produced by Shernoff. With songs like “Moronic Inferno” and “The Savage Beat” (two of its five cuts here), it was clear that time hadn’t tamed The Dictators.

Since then, The Dictators have played on-and-off. Among the “on” occasions was the 2006 closing of the storied New York club CBGB’s, for which the band played the venue’s second- and-third-to-last ever shows. In 2011, Manitoba, Friedman and Patterson formed the group Manitoba with new recruits Dean Rispler and Daniel Rey. It eventually morphed into a band by the name of The Dictators NYC, keeping the spirit of the original group alive.

Faster…Louder: The Dictators’ Best 1975-2011 features a color booklet with copious new liner notes from compilation co-producer Ian McFarlane. Warren Barnett has freshly remastered all tracks. You can order this non-stop rush of punk-infused adrenaline at the links below!

The Dictators, Faster…Louder: The Dictators’ Best 1975-2011 (Raven RVCD-376, 2014) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K.)

  1. The Next Big Thing
  2. Master Race Rock
  3. California Sun
  4. Two Tub Man
  5. Weekend
  6. (I Live For) Cars and Girls
  7. Exposed
  8. Science Gone Too Far!
  9. Young, Fast, Scientific
  10. Search and Destroy
  11. Faster and Louder
  12. Baby, Let’s Twist
  13. The Minnesota Strip
  14. Stay with Me
  15. Slow Death
  16. Who Will Save Rock and Roll?
  17. I Am Right!
  18. Moronic Inferno
  19. The Savage Beat
  20. Burn, Baby, Burn!

Tracks 1-6 from The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, Epic LP KE 33348, 1975
Tracks 7-10 from Manifest Destiny, Asylum LP 7E-1109, 1977
Tracks 11-15 from Bloodbrothers, Asylum LP 6E-147, 1978
Tracks 16-20 from D.F.F.D., Dictators Multimedia, DFFD-02, 2001

Categories: News Tags: The Dictators

Joe Marchese

JOE MARCHESE (Editor) joined The Second Disc shortly after its launch in early 2010, and has since penned daily news and reviews about classic music of all genres. In 2015, Joe formed the Second Disc Records label. Celebrating the great songwriters, producers and artists who created the sound of American popular song, Second Disc Records, in conjunction with Real Gone Music, has released newly-curated collections produced by Joe from iconic artists such as Johnny Mathis, Bobby Darin, Laura Nyro, Melissa Manchester, Chet Atkins, and many others. He has contributed liner notes to reissues from a diverse array of artists, among them Nat "King" Cole, Paul Williams, Lesley Gore, Dusty Springfield, B.J. Thomas, The 5th Dimension, Burt Bacharach, The Mamas and the Papas, Carpenters, Perry Como, Rod McKuen, Doris Day, Jackie DeShannon, and Andy Williams, and has compiled releases for talents including Robert Goulet and Keith Allison of Paul Revere and the Raiders. Over the past two decades, Joe has also worked in a variety of capacities on and off Broadway as well as at some of the premier theatres in the U.S., including Lincoln Center Theater, George Street Playhouse, Paper Mill Playhouse, Long Wharf Theatre, and the York Theatre Company. He has felt privileged to work on productions alongside artists such as the late Jack Klugman, Eli Wallach, Arthur Laurents, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. In 2009, Joe began contributing theatre and music reviews to the print publication The Sondheim Review, and in 2012, he joined the staff of The Digital Bits as a regular contributor writing about film and television on DVD and Blu-ray. Joe currently resides in the suburbs of New York City.

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Comments

  1. Randy Anthony says

    April 24, 2014 at 2:03 pm

    A little while back, I bought the 2-for-1 CD version of “Manifest Destiny” and “Bloodbrothers” on the Floating World label. Very nice overall, but it’s got a really bad edit of some sort at the end of “Baby, Let’s Twist” (from “Bloodbrothers”). I suspect that on the original LP it segues into the next track (“No Tomorrow”), but here it just stops abruptly – and then “No Tomorrow” starts abruptly.

    Since then, I’ve discovered that even the stand-alone online versions (Spotify, etc.) of “Bloodbrothers” (by Rhino, no less) have the same problem.

    Does anyone know if it’s corrected here?

    Reply

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