As the world mourns the loss of Scott Kempner, guitarist with the Dictators and the Del-Lords, I feel an overwhelming need to grab a beer and bash something out. I'm not going to plug in my guitar. This will have to do instead.
An infinite number of tracks can each be THE greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Today, this is THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE!
Who will save rock and roll?
In the early to mid 1970s, it wasn't a question one heard asked much. whether in public or private. "Save" rock and roll? Oh, ya big silly! Rock and roll is just fine, dude, better than ever, BIGGER than ever. So big! It fills stadiums, it comes with amazing light shows, epic solos, magical trips, the ritual blowing of your ever-lovin' mind, man!
We just call it ROCK now, though. Heavier. Intense. The rollin' is what we're smokin', dig?
Yeah. Far out. I guess.
But there were indeed some asking that question: Who will save rock and roll? The voices were few and far between, whispers at the fringe, underground, fanzine material, beneath the notice of the many.
Embraced with passion by the few.
Nor was the question itself rhetorical. It deserved--demanded--an answer. The answer was not whispered, and it gained volume. Faster. Louder. I can play--BOMPBOMPBOMP--faster and louder! Rock was beyond saving, sinking under its own bloated excess. But rock AND roll? The uncomplicated child of Chuck Berry and Little Richard and King Elvis I, the model for three-chord combos in a million garages? Rock and roll could save itself. It just needed to fucking do it.
An oversimplification, you say? Guilty as charged...but unrepentant. I'll grant you the existence of some greatness within the seeming morass of mainstream Me Decade ROCK. Led Zeppelin's okay. Pink Floyd's okay. Emerson, Lake and Palmer are...okay, let's not get crazy. None of 'em--not one--could match the fascinating, exhilarating passion of real rock and roll.
Real rock and roll like the Dictators. Unpretentious. Enthusiastic. Rock AND roll. The Dictators could play--BOMPBOMPBOMP--faster and louder.
Punk rock changed my life. Hearing the Ramones in 1977, when I was a 17-year-old college freshman, pointed me toward a thrilling rockin' pop path that has never given me the merest cause to doubt its righteousness. Like the Monkees before me, I'm a believer. The Ramones couldn't have come into being without specific inspiration: The Beatles, the Who, and the Stooges in the '60s; the New York Dolls and the Dictators in the '70s.
The Dictators rarely get credit for their part in kindling the DIY spark of punk. Neither the Dolls nor the 'Taters are in The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, because...oh yeah, because people are stupid. The Dolls have at least been nominated. The Dictators have not. They never will be. Such are the namby-pamby whims of that glorified Hard Rock [ROCK!] Cafe in Cleveland.
To hell with them.
Even more than the New York Dolls, the Dictators reveled in junk culture, raised on wrasslin', sustained by White Castle, informed by black and white TV sets and four-color comic books, with advanced studies in B-movies and AM Top 40 radio, when AM Top 40 radio was the single most magnificent of Almighty God's creations. The Ramones' own subsequent (and delighted) evocation of the divine purity of everyday trash was built from a creased 'n' tattered copy of the Dictators' original mad genius blueprint.
Were the Dictators a cult act? I...I don't know. Maybe. Maybe they weren't even that, even though they were so, so much more. They were one of many acts I first heard of via Phonograph Record Magazine, but my first taste of the Dictators' music came via the unlikely venue of a film called Jabberwalk in 1977. My only memory of this weird, disjointed documentary (if that's even what it was) is that it was...um, weird and disjointed. That, and it included footage of the Dictators performing a live rendition of "America The Beautiful" at the Miss Nude America beauty pageant. See, that's how you break a band!
At college in Brockport that September, I pestered campus station WBSU to play me some Dictators, and the jocks responded with the pretty ballad "Sleepin' With The TV On," from the group's then-current Manifest Destiny album. Subsequent WBSU requests yielded tracks from the Dictators' first album, Go Girl Crazy! The group bid the pop world farewell after the third album, Bloodbrothers, in 1978.
They'd be back.
For those who recognize the Dictators' legacy, the groundbreaking D-U-M-B smartassery of 1975's Go Girl Crazy! is the Top, the Coliseum, the Louvre Museum. And ya can't argue with an authoritative rockin' and rollin' statement of intent like that album's "(I Live For) Cars And Girls," nor its trendsetting cover of the Rivieras' "California Sun," two years before the Ramones recorded it for their second album. 1977's Manifest Destiny is a bit slicker, and Bloodbrothers still slick but eminently satisfying. The latter album gave us "Faster And Louder," "Baby Let's Twist," and "I Stand Tall." On our first radio show after 9/11, we opened with a spin of "I Stand Tall." REPEAT THESE WORDS!, like the track's lead singer Handsome Dick Manitoba implored, REPEAT THESE WORDS THAT THE DICTATORS ARE SAYING!
I stand tall. I stand proud of what I am.
I won't attempt even a capsule history of the Dictators. I should, but...no. Tonight is a time for feeling, for emotion. For standing tall, faster and louder. Cars and girls. Rock and roll.
I did not really know Dictators guitarist Scott "Top Ten" Kempner. We had mutual friends, we may or may not have exchanged emails, but I didn't try to speak with him the one time I saw him play a solo show in Syracuse in the early '90s. If he was with the Brandos when I saw them in Syracuse in the '80s, well, I really regret I wasn't aware of his involvement at the time.
When I heard that Kempner had passed, one of the first things that occurred to me (after my immediate Aw, man...!) was a memory of the Dictators' song "Who Will Save Rock And Roll?"
"Who Will Save Rock And Roll?" is the lead-off track on D.F.F.D., an album the Dictators released in 2001. The song contains a group of lines I like to quote every now and again:
Scott Kempner saw me cite that passage online in an exchange about Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and he politely chided me for giving the impression that the Dictators didn't dig Pepper. They DID like Pepper, he said, and they certainly loved the Beatles, but they were dismayed by the Fabs' many humorless would-be successors. That is, after all, where ROCK began to separate from ROLL. Man, don't teach the bands to play that.
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Carl's new book Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation With The Ramones is now available, courtesy of the good folks at Rare Bird Books. Gabba Gabba YAY!! https://rarebirdlit.com/gabba-gabba-hey-a-conversation-with-the-ramones-by-carl-cafarelli/
If it's true that one book leads to another, my next book will be The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1). Stay tuned. Your turn is coming.
This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, streaming at SPARK stream and on the Radio Garden app as WESTCOTT RADIO. Recent shows are archived at Westcott Radio. You can read about our history here.
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