MDC 25 years of dead cops

last week I got to see some old
friends that are
sorta like real punk rock show biz legends ...at least in my book...



it was rank



it was illin'



i was chillin'

They are survivors of a world gone mad, bad and completely whacked...and just because this blog software can't handle some of my tags or something...doesn't mean you won't get the tall tale...



the title of their new 'career' retrospective sez it all



"Now More Than Ever"


I speak of the band
Millions of Dead Cops, or Multi Death Corporations or whatever...



last thursday they played a "club"

squeezed in somewhere between two car dealerships...

clustered on a well worn parquet dancefloor beneath a warped & dusty mirrored ceiling in

some ancient Military disco gone AWOL on the former Naval base town of Alameda...
The last time they'd played this burg was at least 15-18

years earlier, at some joint called the Twilight Zone...seems not much

has changed in Alameda... Rod Serling's ghost was definitely nearby



the kids still run around in circles, even if some of the

kids are pushing 40, and weighing a few hundred pounds heavier since their

needle jabbing days...



a once cute girl with a black eye and a mohawk cruised the

merch tables... and drunken people started yelling for "John Wayne was a Nazi" almost as

soon as the band set up their gear...



Not so fast you impatient punkers...

the guys are gonna wanna pummel you with another 20 or so "new songs" & back
catalog chestnuts before you get to the Rhino records endorsed

"hit"...



So to warm it up, they duted off the cobwebs & opened with the song that started off their first LP, and

as it's lead riff blasted the room, I realized it is still relevant, in fact "NOW MORE THAN EVER"...



"Business Is On Parade

! Corporate Scam Charade !"



with images of Prezidunt W & Warren Buffet

& Wal Mart headlines all dancing in my head , the mutant congregation swarmed

enthusiastically around the band like a hive of stunned killer bees.
Mikey Offender was playing bass low slung , dirty dreadlocks swinging. His first appearance with the band in the SF Bay Area in about two decades. Dave was
holding
down the middle of the

floor, battling feedback and the fans for vocal dominance of the room with it's

substandard punk PA & crowd that looked straight of a 1983 Penelope Spheeris

"Decline" outtake reel...



Meanwhile OG guitarist Ron Posner played

back in the corner away from the fray, keeping a stray eye on drummer Al Shvitz.

Recently releassed from San Quentin, Al seemed distracted, mentally frayed and just physically hanging in there, if not outright dopesick.



Mid set Al's 19 year old son Brian,

now a roadie for the family business, was called upon to move the band's van

when it was discovered leaking gas in the parking lot...



Thankfully they

were selling at least 5 or 6 t-shirts an hour to pay for another repair job

before the band gets to CBGB's in May. That's if CBGB's is still there when they get there. NY's aging punk hideaway is also reportedly on as shaky legs as the bands that play it.

MDC's Drummer Al is apparently tied with Mick Mars, Richard Pryor & Hunter S. Thompson in a desperate run
for the wasting away gracelessly due to a rock n roll lifestyle
award.

I've witnessed upclose the rumours & realities of this
band up close, and I'll always love em. The stray children, drug busts, and
often nefarious means through which they had to survive.

When I first moved to SF, I used to load gear,
put up flyers and mainly just live vicariously
through their antics going on
around me. It was a thrill to help out one of the bands that first helped me
discover punkrock, and how far I'd come from skating around to their
albums on my boombox 3000 miles away, and how small & amazing the world seemed when I was actally living with them a couple years later.

Now here it is decades have come and gone , and
the band is commemorating it's 25th year of existence.

My pal called on his cellphone
when I was in the parking lot of last night's show, and seemed amused when I
told him what band I was seeing...

"MDC... holy shit, weren't those guys ...
homophobic?"

I had

to laugh...

MDC were actually one of the few
bands, punk or otherwise, that

actually spoke up on behalf of gays... Hell they
came out here with fellow
Texan freak Gary Floyd of The Dicks.

It's

beyond well documented that they were
out, and out of their skulls too. Dave
even ran a moving service for a minute
called the Homo Truck Driving Men...
and was even the beer slop & sex
trash cleaning janitor for
the gay disco The End Up ...


In
addition to being on the nutty
forefront of screaming about cops, politicians
& nazis...those boys
battled tons of skinheads around the globe, survived
shootings, the secret
service & many strip searches, drugs, prisons and are
actually
considered homo-punk icons even though they aren't so much gay as they
are
fucking nuts... and man they are getting old.

They also never really

did take themselves too seriously, either about money or politics,
unlike
Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Bad religion or those other three
initial
bands.

MDC was always in it for laughs as much as anything
else. They
have a Chicken Squawk song for Christ sakes. Ever seen Hank
Rollins, Ray
Today or Dave Smalley rile the crowd to do the fucking
Chicken Dance?


They were crazed, often with no concept for
what's cool... They had
more in common with Allen Ginsberg than Danzig and
did an album with a song
about Tofu Spaghetti. It was followed up later with
tunes abot Tofutti &
even a cover of the doo wop hit Love Potion #
9, and then later, an album
with their dog's butt on the cover.

If
they had a manager, maybe he
woulda said "stick with the skulls & shit
guys... dog's butts do not shift
units!"

Dave would play dress up,
appearing as Elvis just to piss
off the retarded die hard punkers in
his audience. In fact if they had stayed
"hard" or whatver like C.O.C or
D.R.I , they probably would have been a big
metal type punk band like Bad
Religion or Circle Jerks.

But they kept
changing their name to shit
like "Millions of Dead Chickens" and would hire some
longhair hippie
guitarist who could play Cream covers.

I used to hang
with Dave while
he got dressed in drag, and he'd invite weird chicks and dudes
over to pee
on him in the bathtub.

One of my favorite shows they ever
did was
right after John Waters favorite leading lady died. It was a packed show
at
the Kennel Club ( i.e now the Justice League) and it was advertised as

MDC ( Mourn Divine Correctly). Dave did the whole show in thick
makeup,
blonde bouffant wig & a big slutty dress that made him look
strikingly like
Divine.

Hell, these guys were unstoppable. Even their
bad reputations
& crappy music couldn't hold back their frequent flyer
miles, all the way to
Russia.

size=2>

They

had cool fans too, like Michelle
Shocked who put them as her backing band
for the unlisted bonus track on her big
breakthrough album.
Ironically her label got a pile of returns from people
who were upset
that some "Heavy Metal" group was mistakenly tacked onto their
fave folky
chanteuse's new cassette.

Even currently ego'd out Lint/Tim
from
Rancid was even their humble roadie for awhile after Op Ivy broke up before
Rancid hit MTV.


anyhow

There's a million stories,

but I think I have thrown enuf to constitute a blog

entry...

fave MDC t-shirts:


Gay Anarchist Skin Head



another said something like:

Fight
Racism, Sexism &
Homophobia!

plus all the usual versions
of various sloganeering


I immediately put a
size=2>"No War! No KKK! No Fascist USA
!" on my gal's
Honda and picked up the 31 track greatest hits
CD...

then I bought
the shirt that said

Vieja Escuela - or for
those of you basic mono
linguists... it means:

"Old School "

they
are in the Bay Area
this weekend on Sat @ Parkside, Sunday @ Burnt Ramen in
Richmond , and
Monday @ Cherry Bar SF


http://www.mdcpunk.com

think they are
hitting Long Beach or something down in
LA & El Cajon next
week

anyhow, if ya dig the punk rock.. then
download em
all...

New MDC MP3 - a lets kill all cops

Old MDC MP3 -
Bye Bye Ronnie


( at the
record release party for the above song off the
Millions of
Damn
Christians LP in 1987 I was harrassed on the roof of
Rathouse on
Landers
@ 16th by Secret Service agents... I videotaped
the
confrontation, tape
was confiscated along with Dave's handguns &
Al's
drums... The Pope
remained in his bulletproof mobile...)

Pope
Dying... but MDC hangs
on!
More New MDC MP3'z -

"Going Nowhere Faster Than You a tune about
their crazy drugging daze


MDC - Ballad of GW Ballad of G.W




Downloads

wow.. yer persistent...here's another bonus
download for
vous:

------------------------------

ICE T

who once refered to MDC as "the original cop
killers" of course made a bit of dough
doing his own Cop
Killer shtick, and later did episodes playing a cop on "Law &

Order"...here's his double take on


Black Flag's Police
Story


To download the Ice T track
you will see a header on
the "rapidshare.de" site that says something like
"Ad-financed 1-Click
Webhosting + Webspace" and a browse/upload
field.

3. Scroll down to the
bottom to "Choose download type" and
select "FREE"

4. Another page will
appear. Scroll down to the bottom.
You will see a
message saying "Download
ticket reserved" and it will ask
you to wait
approximately 30-45
seconds.

5. Wait for download link
to appear. Once it's there, right-hand
click
on the red download link and
save your file - You're done!

final thoughts:

I'm was about off to go catch Michael Franti, Mos

Def , Goapele and a buncha other acts at the party for Al Gore's new
http://www.takebacktv.com/ INDTV tv
network... when i was interrupted to take my lil bro and his Fox Sports crew out for beers in North Beach ...

I ended up catching the rockabilly stylings of The Bachelors at the Saloon instead...andmore MDC @ The Cherry Bar ( aka CW Saloon) .

...anyhow here's some notes about
music I've been listening to lately

As of

late I'm an internet enabled
AudioScrobbler Geek...

I

love the fact that their is some
software keeping track of all the
tuneage that passes through my
speakers on a given night. Considering
that it took me several days of HTML hell battling to put togther
this retarded blog entry... I want to give you a
taste of the soundtrack I've
had on four different computers...

These cuts were heard while I
was starting this blog
entry
Circa 01:19:23 PDT, March 30 2005

1
Jello Biafra with the
Melvins - The Lighter Side of Global Terrorism
2 Butthole Surfers - Gary Floyd
3 Nick Cave - There Is A Light
4 The Neville Brothers - Hey Pocky Way
5 David Bowie - Moonage Daydream
heard 00:59:21 PDT, March 30
2005
6 MitchRyder & The Detroit Wheels
- Little Latin Lupe Lu
7
King Tubby & Augustus Pablo - King
Tubby's Borderline Dub
8. The Mars
Volta - The Widow
9. Loretta Lynn
- Portland Oregon (duet with Jack
White)
10. The Cannonball Adderley
Quintet - Walk Tall

by the time I started
posting it things were
different:

1 Caetano Veloso - Billie Jean & Eleanor Rigby 01:03:28 AM PDT
2 Bo Diddley - You Can't Judge A Book By It's Cover
3 MDC - Going Nowhere Faster Than You
4 The Clash - I'm So Bored With The Usa
5 Fastbacks - Go All The Way
6 The Small Faces - Watcha Gonna Do About It
7 Caetano Veloso - tropicália
8 Frank Zappa -Mom and Dad
9 M.I.A./Diplo - Fire Fire
10 Fastbacks - Gone To The Moon

(45 version)

a couple week s later i was online late at night and realized i never posted the original story

go figger... something about hairy html f-ups but this was my last tracks

1.	Cannon's Jug Stompers - Walk Right In	02:18:31 PDT, April 24 2005
2.	M.I.A./Diplo - LL Cool J/Cavemen - Two Bit Rhythm (M.I.A. Mix)	02:15:41 PDT, April 24 2005
3	Tetine - Ai amor, me so horny	02:14:11 PDT, April 24 2005
4	the mohawks - The Champ	02:12:30 PDT, April 24 2005
5	Rosie Thomas - I Play Music	22:11:55 PDT, April 23 2005
6	Mickey & The Soul Generation - give everybody some - part 1	22:08:14 PDT, April 23 2005
7	Mojo Nixon - Girlfriend in a Coma	22:04:14 PDT, April 23 2005
8	King Crimson - Ladies Of The Road	21:59:13 PDT, April 23 2005
9	Faces - Ooh La La	21:52:42 PDT, April 23 2005
10	Elvis Presley - Burning Love