2024 BIO - THE DICTATORS
The Dictators didn’t just form, they filled a void. 1973 was a bleak time if you were a fan of real rock and roll. The MC5 were gone, The Stones could only muster a top 10 hit with a ballad, and bands like The Stooges... if you knew, you knew. But most people didn’t. Soft rock, which might be the ultimate musical oxymoron, ruled the airwaves and all was not well. Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were filling stadiums, but if you wanted down and dirty three-minute blasts of riffs and power chords, some double entendres and a smattering of sarcasm, the landscape was pretty barren. The New York Dolls had begun to cause ripples, but crashed and burned before they could really get going. It was almost as if rock and roll had forgotten how to be fun.
Enter Andy Shernoff, erstwhile fanzine publisher and aspiring musician. “The Dolls galvanized something special in me, and dozens of other music fanatics in their audience. Something life changing. Maybe, just maybe, I could do what they were doing - get some friends together and start a band. At the time, I was attending college. Well, attending might be the wrong word. I was registered at a college - but attending the local bars. One day I ran into Ross 'The Boss’ Friedman, who confidentially told me he was considering quitting his current band (called Total Crudd) and getting something new started. I quickly volunteered my services on bass - an instrument I didn’t even own at the time. As the conversation continued, Scott ‘Top Ten’ Kempner’s name came up. Scott was the only guy we knew who liked The Stooges and also played guitar. If you met somebody who liked The Stooges in those days, you immediately bonded. We called Top Ten and he quickly dropped out of the college he wasn’t attending, even faster than I did. Our mutual friend Richard Blum, who I soon renamed Handsome Dick Manitoba, became our roadie and eventually joined us onstage. In the spirit of Spinal Tap, the drummers came and went until we settled on a friend of a friend, Stu-Boy King.”
Keying in on lowbrow humor and junk culture via pro wrestling, fast food, TV, beer, and more, songs began to emerge – all with tongue firmly planted in cheek and middle finger proudly protruding. But there was something else. It was loud, fast and in-your-face in a way no other band was at the time. The Dictators didn’t just thumb their noses at society and loathsome pits into which corporate rock had descended, they actively flicked snot in its collective face and helped define the attitude that would speak for a new generation: Punk Rock. Somehow, without ever playing live, they ended up being managed and produced by Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman (the braintrust behind the first outsider metal band, Blue Öyster Cult). They entered the studio in August, 1974, the same month the Ramones debuted at CBGBs. Early tremors in the seismic shift, and proof other like-minded rock and roll miscreants were getting their shit together too.
By the time The Dictators debut, Go Girl Crazy!, was released in 1975, things were happening at much quicker pace. A scene had begun to coalesce around CBGBs, as well as a few other outposts in Cleveland, Boston and San Francisco. Musical malaise was being forcefully supplanted by sonic reduction and there would be no turning back. The band’s songs were admittedly sophomoric, but there was an underlying power beneath the surface that cemented their rock and roll legitimacy.
Reviews were mixed, with most critics being utterly confused. Gigs were difficult to find, record sales failed to transpire, they were dropped by their record label, and a brief breakup ensued.
Reconvening in mid-1976 with two new members, the band quickly churned out Manifest Destiny. Released in 1977, the record was more polished than Go Girl Crazy!, with bigger riffs and expansive songwriting, but it was just as irreverent as ever. Widely regarded as a transitional album, it’s the sound of a band beginning to find its true voice. At the behest of Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers, they jumped the pond for a run of UK shows as that band’s opening act and were met with something entirely new: acceptance. England GOT IT. They understood, and it helped fuel the fire.
The band was energized by the British scene, and their vision was crystallized with Bloodbrothers. Recorded and released in 1978, The Dictators, as we know them today, had finally arrived. Their most critically acclaimed album, Bloodbrothers upped the punk rock ante with ass-kicking, wall-to-wall, non-hits; every song on the record became a live show staple and it seemed the band was about to turn a corner. Unfortunately that corner was a complete breakup, one that, with the exception of a few scattered shows, lasted over a decade. Although the first of those shows did yield the band’s first live album, Fuck ‘Em If They Can’t Take A Joke.
The front half of the ‘80s was a productive decade on the ‘other bands’ front, with Ross forming Manowar, Kempner creating The Del-Lords, and the pair reuniting with Andy and Manitoba in 1986 to launch Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom. Their lone album, 1989’s …And You?, reads like vintage Dictators, albeit with a punk-metal injection. The band met with quasi-commercial success, gaining MTV airplay and rave reviews. When Kempner rejoined for a 1991 tour they became The Dictators once again.
The band played consistently throughout the ‘90s but it wasn’t until 2001 when their next studio album, DFFD, was released. By now, the band had become not-quite elder statesmen of punk. Acknowledged by countless bands as a crucial influence and by mainstream media as one of the key bands in the evolution of the genre, they toured more in the first decade of the new millennium than they ever had collectively in the past.
2005 saw the release of the live album Viva Dictators, but the end was near. The band parted ways with Manitoba in 2009 and went on what most people assumed was a permanent hiatus.
But time has a funny way of making things happen.
“I’d always stayed in touch with Scott,” Andy recalls, “but I hadn’t spoken to Ross for some time. Once we started talking again, in late 2019, Ross goes, ‘hey, let’s form the old band.’ I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but Scott really wanted to do it. He was going through a lot at the time and he really needed something to do. So, I did it for Scott. We decided to get together after the holidays and start working on it. We needed a drummer, so I reached out to Albert (Bouchard, original drummer for Blue Öyster Cult). So, we started to play with Albert. At the same time, Scott’s health was beginning to fail. (Kempner passed away due to complications from Frontal Lobe Dementia in late 2023.) Then the pandemic hit. Thankfully we had stuff to work on. We worked on a bunch of songs and recorded four of them in June 2020. Scott was only able to contribute on two. To our dismay, he just wasn’t well enough to continue.”
Andy announced The Dictators were officially back in late 2020, and ‘God Damn New York,’ their first new single over 20 years was released in January 2021. Singles kept coming, but there was demand for the band to return to the stage. At Albert’s suggestion, singer/guitarist Keith Roth was brought in to handle lead vocal duties and rhythm guitar. “Keith came in after we recorded those first four songs, and the songs kept coming,” notes Ross. “And at a certain point we realized things were starting to take shape as an album, not just a series of singles.”
This new incarnation of the band was formally introduced to the world with a run of live shows in late 2022, and followed by two EPs, “Crazy Horses” and “Thank You and Have A Nice Day,” mid-2023. They returned to Spain, and embarked on their first West Coast tour in 30 years, all the while writing and recording what would become their first new studio album in 23 years, The Dictators.
Even though the riffs and melodies are brand new, they’re unmistakably Dictators down to the bone. The Dictators is the newest, brightest jewel in the crown of the quintessential American Rock and Roll band. DFFD, motherfuckers.