Noise Noise Noise

The Damned and the Dictators are alive and well in the 2020s

DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—Last night’s remarkable show by the Damned at Concord Music Hall in Chicago began with a joke.

“Good evening,” guitarist Captain Sensible brightly announced. “I’d like to open with ‘Happy Talk.’” A theatrical double take. “Oh, uhm, er..no, I mean…we’re the Damned!” Laughter all around. I’m sure it’s a bit. But it landed.

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Before the Damned hit the stage—they’re touring with their 1980s lineup of Sensible on guitar, Rat Scabies on drums, Paul Gray on bass, Monty Oxymoron on keys, and, of course, the debonair Dave Vanian on vocals and lead drama—I was thinking about the 2015 documentary Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead, which I’d caught up with a few years ago. Director Wes Orshoski (Lemmy) gathered together archival footage and new video shot in the early-2010’s of the Damned lineup that featured only Vanian and Sensible from the original, incendiary iteration of the group, the first punk band to issue a single in the U.K. and to tour the United States. Scabies and original guitarist Brian James are interviewed, and the sometimes uneasy blend of Vanian and Sensible’s careerist drive and James and Scabies’s bitterness makes for riveting viewing.

Then, I found the story kind of depressing, graphically realistic, anyway. Men growing up, and apart. Ideals and commitments changing; pettiness leaking in with age. Near the end of the film, backstage somewhere, Vanian and Sensible’s grumpiness almost visible—they’d been complaining about how the songs of their contemporaries are used in commercials, but never theirs—Sensible mutters that the Damned are bound to have a good year soon, forty years after their debut. Vanian: Yeah, after we die. (Laughter all around.) Battles over lost royalties and the humiliations of onstage bitchiness are a bit tiresome, and utterly familiar to the the Music Documentary Genre, yet these issues ultimately derailed the original lineup in ways that, at the time, anyway, were still causing hurt: James strums alone in a seaside room, gently contemplative, if sore; Scabies prowls an open-air market loudly cursing his former band.

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Much of that rancor, happily, seems to be behind the Damned these days, and if Sunday night’s show was any indication, there’s enough goodwill, camaraderie, and chops left in this band to fuel years more fun. The trim, slim, and fit Damned were remarkable, their patented blend of dark theatrics, drama, and humor staged via a roaring rock and roll assault, potently hook-filled, expertly paced, and loaded up with spectacle. I hadn’t seen the band before, and I was grateful that I got a chance with this lineup. There was very much a “traveling troupe” vibe to the night, the Damned giving the impression of being some other-century European outfit moving from town to town, unloading nightly a van full of scarves, tricks, and spells. That this lineup, that hasn’t played together in decades, pulled it off with flair and style is testament not only to their considerable talents, but to their professionalism.

Vanian is a legend, ageless and spry, with a bit of of Fred Astaire elegance about him as he moved about the stage. His voice was rich and commanding; he barked and hollered, dropped dramatically into his lower range, whatever the songs called for. Hitting the stage (fashionably late) in his trademark black suit, white shirt with black-and-white polka dot tie, black gloves, and black dress shoes, his dark glasses shielding his interior life, Vanian’s part Elvis, part James Bond, part intriguing dinner guest who very well may be The Murderer, and then, at once, the suave Inspector who’s arrived to nab that very murderer.

Onstage, Vanian sometimes gives the impression that he’s acting out a private soliloquy, his (loud) band forgotten momentarily; other times he appears to be inspecting the band members like a stern but kind acting teacher. One moment he’s sitting thoughtfully alone on the drum riser, or to the side of the stage, evoking Rodin’s The Thinker, another moment he’s leaning against and studiously observing Oxymoron’s keyboards during a solo. When Captain Sensible took a lead turn, Vanian drifted off of the stage and enacted a lively, Kabuki-like ritual with a game stagehand, miming dramatic guitar solos. Even offstage, Vanian’s not off.

As for Sensible, well, he’s irrepressible and astonishingly energetic, the grinning drunk uncle (or great uncle) at the party who grabs the kid’s Gibson and says, Lemme show you how to play. Tall and lean, he was bedecked in his own costume, of course: the bright red beret, the Neat Neat Neat t-shirt, the skinny black jeans and red Converse sneakers. His playing was fantastic: his Gibson roared, thick and muscular, commanding in power chords yet subtly surprising with long solos that Sensible himself seemed to marvel at. He slung his guitar low, he played it above his head, always smiling, often tossing physical comedy bits toward Vanian, his foil, who’d offer a mock-surprised double take at his mate’s silliness; in turn, Sensible more than once shook a friendly fist at Vanian when the frontman’s back was turned. Still great stuff, a half a century on.

The Damned played nearly two dozen songs during the two hour set, the majority from the run of Machine Gun Etiquette (1979), The Black Album (1980), and Strawberries (1982), and so many of them killed—the electrifying opener “Ignite,” “Generals,” written and recorded in the Reagan/Thatcher era and no less relevant today, the moody “Stranger on the Town,” “Beware of the Clown,” which offered Sensible and Vanian some red clown nose silliness, the stark “The Invisible Man,” the Goth-era “Shadow of Love” in an arrangement that emphasized the Rockabilly gallop beneath it, and the classics “Noise Noise Noise,” “Love Song,” “Neat Neat Neat,” a giddy “Smash It Up,” and, of course, “New Rose.” (Alas, to my immense disappointment, the band neglected “Hit Or Miss,” my favorite Damned track. How I’ve wanted to hear Vanian sing the desperate bridge in that song!)

For encores, the band played “Curtain Call” from The Black Album and an amazing take on the MC5’s “Looking at You.” Each song was elongated—“Curtain Call” in its seventeen-minute length, full of mood- and pace-shifts, ghostly sound affects, and genuine drama, including Scabies’s galvanizing drum solo, “Looking at You” via a breakdown during which Sensible let his guitar lead him into spectacular, ambient places, where feedback and sustained notes created a shapeless, psychedelic sound space. Before Vanian bought the band back in for the crashing close, the Damned had made the MC5’s song their own. Quite a feat.

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There was an almost visible sense of history hanging over the stage at the Concord. After the evocative “Stranger on the Town,” Sensible took to the mike with an impish grin and remarked, “Let’s see the Sex Pistols do that!”

“Fifty years later, and we’re still doing it!” Andy Shernoff of the Dictators had announced earlier in the evening. Shernoff’s boast isn’t entirely accurate; only guitarist Ross “The Boss” Friedman is still around from the band’s mid-1970s lineup. This isn’t first wave Punk-era Dictators, and it isn’t the 1990s/2000’s Dictators, either. Absent is longtime drummer J.P. Patterson, the sadly departed guitarist and songwriter Scott “Top Ten” Kempner, and, of course, frontman extraordinaire “Handsome Dick” Manitoba, who fell out with Shernoff some years ago over business and personal issues.

It would be foolhardy to suggest that Manitoba isn’t missed. His Bronx-forward bravado and self-styled borough royalty was always a blast to witness, and a crucial ingredient in the Dictators’ blend of cartoony humor, social satire, and blazing rock and roll. But time moves on. Playing rhythm guitar and belting out Shernoff’s songs these days is New York City rock veteran Keith Roth (Cheetah Crome, Frankenstein 3000, Sirius XM radio DJ), and drumming is Albert Bouchard, founding member and original drummer of Blue Öyster Cult. “When [Shernoff and Friedman] were talking about getting back together,” Bouchard remarked recently to Andrew Daly at VWMusic, “they remembered that just before they made Go Girl Crazy! [in 1975], they had asked Sandy Pearlman if I could play drums on their album. Sandy said, ‘No’.” Brouchard added, “So, some of their motivations could be a curiosity to see how it would have been if I was their drummer for the beginning.”

For those curious: Brouchard’s backbeat was sure and steady, and he’s clearly enjoying the hell out of playing with the band. (And they stomped through a version of BÖC’s “Dominance and Submission.”) Roth, equipped with the requisite “Chicago, Illinoise” jokes, is an un-showy frontman with a central-casting Rocker look. He may lack Manitoba’s outsized personality, but he brings a relaxed, durable sense of professionalism to the gig—which is, these days, essentially, to celebrate Andy Shernoff songs. And what great songs they are: “New York, New York,” “The Minnesota Strip,” “Pussy and Money,” “It's Alright,” “Faster and Louder,” “Who Will Save Rock and Roll?,” and “Stay With Me” are standard bearers of loud, droll, righteous New York City punk rock and roll. You cannot hurt songs that good.

In the ironic and hilarious “Let's Get the Band Back Together,” Shernoff sings, “We got a gig at the bar / where they still think that we’re rock and roll stars.” The Dictators appear to be under no illusion that their current iteration will sell many records, let alone vault the members to stardom as the Next Big Thing, and that’s just fine. I did idly wonder what the many twenty-something women around made of these soft-in-the-middle guys in their seventies (minus Roth, who yanked down the band’s collective age considerably) singing about pussy and money and going faster and louder. Eddie Spaghetti of the Supersuckers once observed that “Rock and roll keeps you in a constant state of juvenile delinquency.” The Dictators aren’t breaking any laws, but they are having fun.

Oh, and they’ve got a new album out in August. Viva rock and roll.

All photos ©Joe Bonomo