MDC's Dictor remains pissed at the world, but is happy with his life / Interview

Dave Dictor of MDC live at Darrell's Tavern in Shoreline, WA, on April 15. (Cat Rose photo)

By Andy

Dave Dictor can still unleash the fire of a thousand punk singers. 

Like most of us, the march of time may have left some wear and tear on the body of the 67-year-old growling and ultra-outspoken MDC leader, but he's still toughing it out with vibrancy in the trenches of the hardcore scene.

While Dictor admits that he doesn't recollect everything that has transpired throughout his bustling lifetime, he possesses sharpness and resiliency while candidly delving into his past days and shining hope on the present and for what's waiting on the horizon.

He may enjoy sitting by the fire, spending time with his girlfriend and hanging out with friends, but he's still super pissed off at the world. Someday, Dictor said he may visit with elephants at a sanctuary in Thailand or bond with orangutans in Indonesia, but he has no time whatsoever for people like Trump or Putin.

Dictor looks up to older fellas like Willie Nelson and Charlie Harper of the UK Subs as role models. He wants to remain creative like them, and enjoy his life.

On the evening of April 15 at Darrell's Tavern in Shoreline, WA, that meant raging in front of a room full of punk rockers. Some of the attendees appeared to be 40-plus years his junior, and they were fucking thrilled to be singing along with Dictor as his tight five-piece unit bombarded us with MDC anthems from past to present at breakneck speed and packed with heaps of anger, sweat and energy.

"We sound freaking awesome. It might be the best lineup with the best sound that I can remember in a long time. We have two guitars. It's just thick, full," Dictor said prior to the gig. Presently, he's joined in MDC by axemen Russ Kalita and Barry Ward, bassist Mike Smith and drummer Adam Rusch.

"It's hard to compare 40 years ago, but we're in a groove right now," added Dictor, who noted that MDC will embark on an 18-gig cross-country sojourn with GBH on May 6. "Life is beautiful. I'm very happy with my life."

I fired a bunch of questions Dictor's way before Atomic Rust kicked off the gig, which also featured Proud Failures and Potbelly:

** The first time I saw you was at that show in '82 (at Alpine Village in Torrance, CA, along with the Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Zero Boys and the Detonators). You guys were killing it. You're still just as excited, just still as amped about it as you've always been?

It's hard to say that. You get a little jaded. I'm 2,500 gigs down the line from where I was there. If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't do it. I love the time on stage -- the schlepping is harder and harder. Traveling in the rain into this and in the car -- two, four, six, eight hours, sleeping in strange places, blah, blah, blah. I'm a 67-year-old guy. It's not going to be as exciting as being 24 and 26 and going to Europe for the first time and playing with the DKs. And that Alpine bill show that you're talking about was a great show. I'm still alive and well and I got enough whatever -- I haven't thrown in the towel yet.

** Where do you live now?

I live in Portland, Oregon. I got a house and I practice there. I have a girlfriend Sophie, and she co-sings with me in MDC. She's not here on these couple of gigs that we're doing. She'll be on the GBH tour and she lives in Austin, Texas, and I live there with her most of the time. So I live in two places. And on the road a lot. 

** Which you're used to. So how'd that GBH tour come about? You guys are probably old friends with those guys.

Someone in that GBH family liked MDC. We played with them a long time ago. I didn't speak to anyone in the band, but one of the guys that, I don't know if he's a tour manager, he does something with them. I saw him in Philadelphia a couple of years ago and he goes, 'Oh, I work with GBH.' I go, 'I want to tour with GBH. I think we're a good mix: GBH, MDC.' We played together in '83 in Montreal. We play a lot of these festivals together. We've been at six, seven, eight Rebellions together. They put us together quite often, so I'm always seeing those guys. And the guy said, 'Would you want to do it?'... 'Yes, I'd like to do it.' And cool, man. Thank you.

** You guys have toured all over the world, obviously. What do you get out of touring? What do you hope to achieve each time out?

I love performance. I love what I'm saying. I've been driven these last five, seven, eight years with 'No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.' Just putting my two cents in to get the message (out), as well as do my art. And we were doing a Punk the Vote, and we were registering people to vote, encourage people. I don't know if you follow me on Facebook, but I got 34,000 people on Millions of Dead Cops on Facebook, another 5,000 on my personal thing. And I was just like, 'Vote against Trump. Get up, stand up, don't sit back.' I got a little flak from my anarchist following, but I said, 'You can stay home and be anarchist, and I'm going to encourage people to vote against Trump.' And happy to say, he lost the last election. My little drop in the bucket with many other people's drops in the bucket, defeated him by a very narrow margin. And this country's gone crazy. Fox News, corruption, the lies that the right wing and Republicans are all about. They went from being the party of Lincoln to the party of stealing elections and trying to overthrow the Capitol and bad mouthing and spreading hatred and mistruths.

And that's part of why I'm in punk rock. I mean, I like to also communicate about my own thing, share my own thing. I hate work, chicken squawk... I'm a vegetarian, but a lot of it's to share my political consciousness and: business on parade, dead cops, corporate deathburger. All the lines through there. We have a new album that's coming out.

** What issues are you tackling this time out?

Well, we have 'Demagogue,' which is about all the demagogues, whether it be Putin or Trump or many others, Orbán from Hungary. And the name of the album is 'A War is a Racket.' This war is a racket. How much money the last 20 years? You want all that war in the Middle East, ISIS being created, and there's a lot of problems, and it's not necessarily easy answers. The amount of human family spending on war in the United States government every year is criminal in my little opinion. That's what we do. We sing about it and communicate. A lot of people getting rich off war, and that's my schtick.

** Do you find that with MDC listeners, these messages resonate with them?

Obviously it does. If you wanted a joke band, you could follow a joke band. People vote with what they care about, with the shows they come to, and hopefully we'll have 100-150 people here in Seattle at this tavern. And obviously someone in GBH thinks what we're singing about is a cool thing, and it complements being with GBH. We just went on tour with Napalm Death -- 16 gigs, big shows, nice time, and yeah, I think it does resonate. We're part of the consciousness, and to me, punk has a political edge, and I think it's important. We're doing this thing, we have CDs inside, 'Punk for Ukraine,' and we put four CDs out and put it on Spotify and the other things. And we raise about $200 and change a month that we've given to the World Central Kitchen, which operates in Kiev. And famous chefs are doing it. And our heart goes out to the people. I think Putin is a rat. He's a demagogue, killing people. He's obviously a war criminal, and we want to be that little drop of hope and change.

Am I being successful? Does anyone really give a darn shit? I don't know. I mean, I like to think they do. And have we changed the world? I've been doing this stuff for 40-plus years. Still a lot of war, still a lot of hunger, still a lot of global warming, a lot of pollution. 

** There's no shortage of things to sing about, unfortunately.

Things I wrote about, songs I wrote in the '70s and early '80s (ed. are still relevant), still resonate. 'No war, no KKK, no fascist USA'... is 'No Trump, no KKK, No fascist USA'; the police state, abuse of rights.

** Even worse in a lot of ways.

I believe in the fact that we are minstrels, traveling, telling people the weather report, what we feel. So whether we're from the 1200s, 1600s, we're part of that evolutionary thing. I love music, and I knew right away it was one of the things I wanted to do with my life and I've done it. I don't know if we changed anyone's mind, but I've had the life I wanted to live. I wish more had changed. I thought, really 20% of the world would be vegetarians by now. I'm sad to say it's almost the same 6-8-10% percent that it always has been. Little gains. People like their meat. I think it's connected to the abuse of animals. It's connected to the abuse of other humans. That's how I feel.

MDC setlist from Darrell's. (From the TSHIT collection)

** I know we're dealing with a lot of negatives in the world still, and we're always going to, is there anything positive that you feel that you've gotten out of your journey?

I think things are in some ways getting better. Now, are we going to fix the planet before the planet fixes up us? Whether the global warming is going to destroy human life or animal life? That I can't say. 

** Would you say, and this could be from you in all your years and all the people that you've played for or spoken with, (there's) more social consciousness that you've seen come from people, perhaps from your music and other bands' music?

I think there's a certain amount of social consciousness, yeah. People are more ecologically aware. People are more aware of what's going on. I grew up during the Vietnam War, and it was, 'Oh, we got to stop communism.' And nobody thought beyond that, whether they had to napalm people in Vietnam, whether they had to send 50,000 American boys off to die in Vietnam, they did it. They're not doing that now. People kind of realize we're chasing a boogeyman. And it was a lot of waste. Still a lot of waste. But I want to believe there's evolution occurring.

** Is there anything that you've done in your life that you kind of cringe at? How have you improved upon that?

I had a certain amount of, I did too many drugs and I was trying to escape. I was like part of that hippie thing -- and then just punk and the nihilism involved. And there's no hope. If there's no hope, let me do another line of coke, let me smoke some more speed, let me blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's one of my regrets, that I was a little more nihilistic than hopeful. I still (think) people get hopefulness out of my music, but on a personal level. I mean, knock on wood, that I'm alive, but for the grace of God. And many of the people that I did drugs with and did risky behavior with are no longer on the planet. That's one of the things, I mean, I'm lucky and I kind of quit drugs a bunch of years ago, but there were whole periods of my life where I just said, 'There's no hope. I'm tired of everything, blah, blah, blah.'

** What got you moving on a more positive path?

I just realized I didn't want to die. I didn't want to do drugs till all my teeth fell out. I didn't want to die of fentanyl in some bathroom. And I started realizing I wanted to preserve my life. So part of my schtick was, 'Oh, I want to party like hell and there's no future... so there's no future for you,' like the Sex Pistols would sing.

** Did the music keep you going, do you think?

Sure. Music makes me feel vital, and the music was always a great thing, my own personal thing. (Before, it was) 'Oh, my girlfriend broke up with me. Oh, my sexuality is so confusing.' And that made me take part in risky behavior and, 'Oh, I want to get high. I want to feel like Jimi Hendrix... Excuse me while I kiss the sky.' And it took me a while to realize I want life and I don't need drugs. So, here I am.

** What do you hope to achieve from this point on? 67 years old. What's left in the tank? What do you want to do?

I'm in love. I just want to be enjoying my life. I want the world to come together. I want to give my energy towards that. How much longer I'm going to be in the game? I don't know. Two years, five years, 12 years?

** What's a band that really blew you away back in the day?

Crass, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Conflict, Subhumans.

** Who blows you away now? Are there some new hot bands that you like?

I like some of the kid bands. They're good. Who blows me away? I like what Leftover Crack was doing. I like Days N' Daze. I like Noogy. I like No Consent. I like Boxcutter. I like Potbelly. I like people that are trying, giving their good energy.