Tator Tots No More!
Dictators Blast Into Teenage Cysthood
Manifest Destiny
The Dictators
Joe (They Call Me White Devil) Fernbacher, Creem, 8/77
The burger thing crawled slowly through the mud, an amputee star fish lost in a sea of porcine pink. It flipped itself on edge and rolled over to the waiting crowd of confused spectators. Nobody had ever seen a three hundred pound, five foot high, burger thing before—naturally, it was an alien.
Cameras shuttered
Film crews zoomed in
People cringed
Babies cried
A man from Disney waved a contract
The burger thing opened a mouth and said, in perfect King’s English (they’d been monitoring our airwaves for years), “Young, Fast and Scientific...”
The crowd shouts back, “Science Gone Too Far,” gets bored and leaves.
The burger thing is confused.
Moments pass into idiot day.
A noise. The burger thing turns, sensing new arrivals.
A stray band of young T.V. boys come round the corner escorting a bright red wagon overflowing with Velveeta! They smile.
As young Dictators they had gone a little girl crazy. Older now, and wiser, they are mature diplomats on a jihad of conquest, nervy and in search of their “Manifest Destiny.” Only this time it’s more than just a hobby, it’s the main event, a face claw standoff with the world.
In a rare rhumba of reason, a collision of new rhymes, and a smirk of unexpected proficiency the Dictators return, proving they are as inevitable as the death of punk music, which they so properly laid to rest a while ago during the heat of performance.
Manifest Destiny is a teenjunta blending the textures of 50s science fiction melodrama with the pawky precognition of car radio drone-whip. Its contradictions are brilliantly conceived and acted out, like a calculated blend of sonic tobaccos. It’s almost impossible not to say it’s great. It ain’t, but what the hell, there certainly ain’t nothing better.
Go Girl Crazy was a perilous harlequinade on the teenage condition, cutting through the complex psychology of the young and restless and putting the camel-clutch on teen reality. That’s why it’s one of the essential musical documents of the blank Seventies. Manifest Destiny is much more cautious, as is everything these days, skirting a lot of issues and dealing with entertaining, yet vague, ideas. It ain’t teenage, so what? It’s collegiate, and that's more important. As a whole it’s a battle between style and class. Style’s important because it’s hard to come by; class is easy to learn. Most of the songs on Manifest Destiny have a lot of class, only four have any real style, and that’s the only reason why this isn’t one of the essential documents of the blank Seventies.
On one hand we have the style of the truncheon smacking berceuses, “Science Gone Too Far,” sure to be the overall favorite, “Disease,” “Young, Fast and Scientific,” (formerly the cumshaw anthem, “Search and Destroy”) all utterly flattening the ever budding campaign of preconceived punkitood. On the other we have the cool class of “Hey Boys” (the projected single), “Exposed,” “Steppin’ Out,” and “Heartache.” As far as the real Picasso mixed in with the Popeye cartoons, the nod has to go to “Sleepin’ With The T.V. On,” one of the finest summer songs to come down the pipeline since “School’s Out.”
Adny Shernoff’s crotalic lyrics to these songs prove that he definitely looks at the world in split level. His songs are some kind of inner struggle between the rock rowdyism and pop gentility. He’s schizophrenic, maybe it’s because he’s tall, although the few times I’ve seen him he was sitting a lot. It don’t matter—he’s one of the better lyricists going.
Playing throat on the dumdum-splattering-in-to-the-skull numbers (I’ll let you figure out which those are for yourself) is Handsome Dick Manitoba, be he Dick the Bruiser or DeSade, that crinoid croupier of rock crimps, hijacking listener like some half-mad rock’n’roll Spartacus hellbent on silo madness and nuclear discussion. His vocals lance out at teenage cysthood with a vengeance that’s refreshing. His opening monologue to “Disease” he wrote himself and believe me, it’s demented. His suburban strappado funk stomp, that’s what I call it when he tosses the mike onto the floor of the stage and does a goose-stepping tarantella around it, is genius.
Yet, the real shining silver dollar in this cache of anti-punk backbeat is the inspired guitar work of Ross the Boss. He turns short, simple passages into grinding headaches, the kind you enjoy after a while. What with James Williamson opting for home delivery, Ross the Boss can now take his rightful place as the cryptarch of the power-chord. Just listen to his monologues on “Disease” and “Search and Destroy,” they’ll fuse your ear wax into glass.
Manifest Destiny is the kind of sonic Beau Geste that goes good with immersion tanks filled with insect bouillon and dog burgers served up by old ladies on rusted rollerskates. Buy it, you acres of human roughage out there, or I’ll eat your mothers’ brains.
Anyway, hey boys, what I really wanted to say is next time gimme a little more danger and not so much carbona (that I can get from anybody), and if ya can’t get danger, I’ll take a load of prolixity. Let’s do it, huh!
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