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FUCK' EM IF THEY CAN'T TAKE A JOKE

The Dictators

Format: Cassette

Year: 1981

Label: ROIR A-102, LP/Danceteria (France), CD/1992/Danceteria DANCD 052 (France), Cassette/Danceteria DANMC 052 (France)
Cassette

 

Producer:  Andy Shernoff

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Track List:

Side one

  1. The Next Big Thing

  2. Science Gone Too Far

  3. Weekend

  4. Rock and Roll Made a Man Out of Me

  5. Two Tub Man

  6. Moon Upstairs

 

Side two

  1. Loyola

  2. What Goes On

  3. New York New York

  4. Search & Destroy

  5. Borneo Jimmy

  6. Minnesota Strip

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NOTES

Reissued in 1998 with extra tracks, different cover art and new liner notes by Andy as "The Dictators Live: New York New York"

LINER NOTES

This CD is not a recording from a reunion show.


The Dictators don't do reunion shows...Never did, never will...We also don't scream "Cleveland, are you ready to rock?", play drum solos, spend time in drug rehab, or cowrite with Desmond Child in a desperate attempt to manufacture hit singles. The Dictators formed as a reaction to the rock formula, and in my mind, rock and roll reunions represent every Spinal Tap music biz cliche we always hated. They are crass and lame; everything the Dictators aren't. Well, maybe we are crass, but we're not lame, damnitt!!
The point is, you can't reunite if you never broke up and The Dictators never broke up. Sure there were occasional gaps of a few years between some shows (we had lives to lead) but deep in our hearts and souls we always knew we were Dictators. We couldn't escape it even when we tried. The label ex-Dictator followed us around every turn. Ex-Dictator Ross the Boss had gold records with Manowar, ex-Dictator Scott Kempner toured the world with The Del-Lords, and every record I ever produced tagged me as an ex-Dictator. I was once arrested and I served time in detention while in high school but check out my permanent record; it says ex-Dictator with a big gold star next to it.


That's because becoming a Dictator was a life decision. It was a tattoo on my legacy. The Dictators was the first band for all of us. Before we ever rehearsed, we moved in together, just like The Beatles in "Help!" or The Monkees on TV. We never thought there was any other way to do it. Joining the band wasn't a whim, it was the light at the end of the tunnel of our lives.


When we were teenagers recording The Dictators Go Girl Crazy in 1974, we were advocating rock and roll as an all encompassing lifestyle. It was something you lived 24 hours a day. Nobody had really dressed it up like that before. Chuck Berry and The Who had suggested it, but we lived it to the hilt and then sang about it, truthfully. We combined all those disparate elements of pop culture that we loved but had never been lumped together. Television, food, sports, wrestling, alcohol and snotty sarcasm all played as important a role in our lyrics as the traditional subjects of cars and girls and teenage rebellion. And the truth is, we would have been phoneys if we wrote and sang about anything else...As phoney as if we played reunion shows.

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