The
Didjits
The followng article originally appeared in NFH
#17 in the winter of 1989.
Let's just suppose
that you are going to have your spleen removed. Then you want a doctor with a sharp knife
and quick hands...you want a guy that's going to go in there with precision, slice you up,
take out what's ailing you, and get you buttoned up quickly. Well, I can't recommend the
doctor, but I know a rock band that's got that same sharp knife, quick hands, and deft
precision. And god knows they'll cure what's ailing you.
The band is the
Didjits. They specialize in surgical strikes...in with the guitar and the catchy phrase,
out with your spleen, and zip! you're buttoned up and street worthy. They're a three
piece...with Joe Evans on bass, and brothers Rick and Brad Sims on guitar and drums,
respectively. Rick sings, and though he's a tough guy to catch up with (took me seven or
so phone calls) we finally got together so I could find out the Didjits story.
It's got a classic
rock and roll beginning: let's let Rick explain: "The whole thing started when I got
in a wreck after drinking a fifth of vodka and I got kicked out of my dad's house in
Decatur and ended up moving down south with my mom where my brother lived and then me and
my brother decided that...I've always wanted to make a go of it in music, so we both
decided well, we'll go ahead and give it a try, and then after five different bands and my
brother quit once, and after a bunch of real bad sounding new wave conglomeration bands
and bad pop bands we finally got our shit together. I think a lot of it has to do with
listening to bands that were finally cool like Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks as opposed to the
B-52's or something like that. The heavy guitar sound was influenced mainly by heavy
guitar bands such as Big Black and early Sonic Youth and stuff like that. We just wanted
to be rock stars...we wanted to know what it was like to hit the big time."
Well, it's still a
way to the bright lights. The Didjits are based in Champaign-Urbana in the center of
Illinois. It's a college town far from the hustle and bustle of big cities like Chicago.
Rick works in a record store in town and his brother works in a factory that "builds
lawn mowers or something". But it suits Rick just fine: "Oh, well, Champaign has
a really happening bar scene. There's a place called Trito's...it's a
bar-slash-restaurant, and there's a guy in town called Chris who puts on these shows. So
far in one semester we've had the Flaming Lips, Dinosaur Jr, Alice Donut, Pixies, Fugazi.
You'd be very surprised. And it's not just happening like once a month...we've got like
two shows a week, either locally or national acts coming through. It's better than
Chicago. You can walk across town and pay three times less as opposed to Chicago where you
have to drive 45 minutes, fight traffic, find a place to park, pay ten dollars as opposed
to three dollars, stand in a crowded Nazi camp room with all these bouncers looking for
someone to throw down the stairs it seems like, but it's just a more relaxed atmosphere
down here, you can get right up on the band and check what's happening."
The Didjits can be
heard on any of their three records; lps Fizzjob and Hey Judester or the 45
"Lovesickle". Fizzjob was their first and they were unable to get a
suitable label deal for that, so they put it out themselves. When they were ready for
their second lp, they applied a little more work in the studio, doubling up some guitar
parts and doubling vocal tracks, resulting in what Rick claims is a slightly harder sound
(personally I can hardly hear the difference; I think both lps power!). He attributes the
fact that Touch and Go picked them up for the Hey Judester album to this added
toughness. For those who think of Touch and Go in terms of bands like Killdozer, Big Black
and Laughing Hyenas, it might seem a strange contradiction to have a full on high octane
rock and roll band like the Didjits on the roster.
"Well, actually
they got a hold of our first album, the Fizzjob album, and it didn't strike them
very well, and then they got a hold of the Judester tape before it was released as
an album obviously, and they really thought it rocked. I think a lot of it has to do with
the fact that it has more of a ballsy sound. It was just a better production; you can just
tell it sounds so much better. We doubled up the guitars and put in double vocals on some
parts, and I think it was just a better representation of what we were. As far as the
"Touch and Go sound" I think more and more the "Touch and Go sound"
doesn't hold water any more, because now you've got like Die Kreuzen coming out with
really low key almost dreamy acoustic stuff, and you've got Urge Overkill there now, which
doesn't sound like anything Touch and Go's ever put out. But I agree with you, I was
surprised as hell. I was surprised that Ruthless Records which was also based in Chicago
also liked us. I thought we were just too...I didn't think we were at all what they'd
want, but guess who lucked out?
"We have had
absolutely zero problems with the record company. They handle the financial part real
well...they keep track of every penny and tell us where everything's gone, and just being
on Touch and Go affords you a huge amount of exposure, even more so than an oversaturated
label like SST or Homestead, because there's one million bands on SST. It isn't like when
you put out a record for Homestead and then you'll never hear from them again. Bands that
get on Touch and Go seem to stick on Touch and Go, unless they put out a shitty album, I
guess. But there's a lot more of a definite identity to Touch and Go than a lot of other
labels, so I think that helps us a lot as far as being on that label. And we're two and a
half hours away from the record company...we live way far south, well Champaign-Urbana,
which is kind of in the middle of nowhere, where there's no real record companies...it's
not like it's New York or LA."
Both lps are packaged
together now on one Touch and Go CD. They feature a turbo-charged riff based rock and roll
style that's topped with Rick’s wild and smart-assed sounding vocals. Rick sums up
the philosophy of the two lps succinctly: "I was on this kick for a while where...you
know, everybody coming up with these really great antidotes for life, and all this meaning
and all these love songs, and I just wanted to do a little regressing and get back to
where like in the 50s they talked about doing a little drinking and driving the cars and
getting crazy. Really kind of mindless, just like words to the song as opposed to the song
for the words. I kind of like the idea of taking a character and just making a short story
about him, like let's say the "Stingray" guy. He's called Stingray and he goes
around and he's just basically a thug with a girlfriend who threatens to hit this
girlfriend's mom upside the head if she don't quit telling him to hang out with her and
stuff like this. But really not all that deep of a thought process. "Dad" was a
conglomerate of all three of our dads...well, me and my brother have the same dad,
obviously."
So you get songs that
have lyrics that sound totally crazy...there's references to Jerry Lewis on several of the
tracks, and there's lyrics like "This fish is gonna ride you! Praise God the
Christmas fish!" which what in the hell it means I'll never know. The liner notes to Judester
also include this hysterical (or it would be if it wasn't accurate) letter from a father
to his son laying down the rules to the house. I asked if that was a reflection of Rick's
own situation with his Dad.
"Oh, not
necessarily. I think that has more to do with the mentality of people that read Ann
Landers or write in to Ann Landers. That's taken out of an Ann Landers column. He says:
"this is how I raised my son". And he went on to tell how he had passed this
letter on to other people. And I think it did kind of remind me of my dad, but I think it
probably reminds a lot of people of their dad."
NFH: I
happened to read the Ann Landers column this morning and there was a letter where this kid
was complaining that he worked a job to get some spending money, but his dad took all the
money from him and doled it out to him as an allowance, and he thought that was unfair.
And so her response is that he should listen to his father because his father knew what
was best for him. I thought that was pretty sick.
Rick: That
lady is probably responsible for ruining millions of lives. She has no business doing what
she's doing. Some one writes in and says my husband came in fifteen minutes late last
night and I think he might have had liquor on his breath, and we've been married happily
for fifty years and I don't know what to do, and the first thing she'll say is something
like "Well dump that bum, your life is obviously ruined. Don't put up with
this." It's obvious that she's had some kind of bad relationship with men and
she's definitely got it in for them. Don't you think it would have been better for that
kid to keep his money and not pay his bills and let him fuck up on his own, and then he'd
learn a lot better anyway?
NFH: Well, you
gotta learn about life sometime. I have these friends who say they're going to bring their
kids up at home to keep them away from outside influences, and I think what's going to
happen is that they're going to get to be 18 and all of a sudden they're going to find
that there's a world out there, and they're going to go totally nuts.
Rick: I always
noticed that the most rowdy kids were always the preacher's sons or daughters. They always
were wild. I have a cousin whose father is a Pentecostal preacher and she's twice had
illegitimate children, and it's like, well, I guess what you're doing or saying isn't
working under your own roof.
Rick is a guy who
likes to see the music emphasized over the lyrics...his approach is that you get a tune
that grabs you and you figure out some words that sound like they fit. What they say is
less important than what they sound like. And what Didjits words sound like, in concert
with the manic music, is a turbine on the edge of total loss of control. Hey Judester is
especially strong on this account; it opens with a devastating 1-2-3 punch of "Max
Wedge", Stingray", and "Plate In My Head", songs that are single
A-side material par excellance, and by the time you're done there've been three or
four more just as great and several others that deserve at least a label of very good. The
songs are 2 minute blasters that come carving in, cure the disease, and then zip out. But
it's hard to describe music, and the lyrics are so different that people are bound to key
on them. Like what in the hell is this guy talking about?
"Well, it's hard
to say, because I really don't think there's a thought process for coming up with words.
Like "Skull Baby" is about our bass player; he lies about everything all the
time. It was kind of an inside joke actually, but I guess it was more or less true. But
other things, I'll just be saying something and I'll go, well that sounds good, and I'll
write it down. But like on the first album we came up with words right before we went into
the studio on a couple of songs. You'd be surprised, or maybe you wouldn't be surprised,
that happens to a lot of bands. They don't sit and think "well, I'm going to write
the opus of the world, I'm going to really tell the world what it's all about now.
"Ever since I
was really small lyrics have always been second. I don't know what it is, but when I used
to buy 45s when I was a kid it was always the music that was the attractive thing. When I
first started loving music I never dug into the lyrics and tried to figure out what they
meant. You listen to the song and you can't even recite half the lyrics back. And when you
hear the song again, you try to sing to it and you just make noises that fit. The words
are really unimportant to me."
NFH: "So
you tend to come up with tunes, and you have them sitting around, and you go "shit,
I've gotta come up with some words", and then you pull it together?"
Rick: "More
than not, I think. Sometimes we'll come up with one line. Like on "Skull Baby"
we had the one line "Mama had a skull baby and it screamed all night long". We
had that before we had the song and we decided, well it would be cool to have a song like
that. But "Max Wedge" and "Stingray", both of those we had all the
music down before any of the words were done." If the words are the focus and the
music is the background, you've got to make the music fit instead of the other way around
which means that you come up with a song that goes like "C" or it starts
sounding like some pop thing or something."
So it really got
under Rick's skin a little while back when the Didjits went to play in Toronto and they
got blasted in Toronto's main newspaper for being sexist and racist, charges that Rick
says are totally unfair. In his support, I've gotta say that anybody who reads the Didjits
lyric sheet would say that the lyrics are sometimes strange, but that they are clearly
meant to be interpreted as a cynical jab those very forms of behavior. Rick explains:
"This guy called
me up and we were touring Canada, and he was saying "Well, I wanna do an interview
with you over the phone" and everything, and we get into the interview and this guy
starts saying "Yeah, it seems like some of you guy's stuff is sexist", and I
start explaining that no, it's just that in this crazy world and this reality and stuff,
there is, believe it or not, men who beat their wives, for instance, or men that abuse
people, or abuse their kids and stuff like this. So we go into Toronto where this
newspaper was, and this is circulation of 500,000, and he proceeds to lay into us about
how sexist and racist Hey Judester was, and that it had been banned on the radio in
Toronto. So this guy played like "I'm kind of your buddy and I really think your
album's kind of neat and I think you guys are really crazy." and then turns around
and goes "Yeah, I got the shit on them now, boy, I'm going to really lay into
them." It's like, fuck you! He wasn't being straightforward with us. I'd rather he
call up and say "You guys are racist and I don't like you" rather than be
coy."
NFH: (Somewhat
defensively) "Well, I think that with a fanzine interview you have less risk that
way. Newspaper writers are on assignment, and they have to write about whatever they're
told to write about, but fanzine writers write about what they like. I'm not about to
waste my time writing about a band that I don't like a lot."
Rick: "Yeah,
I would figure that if there was something that you didn't like about us that you would
say, unless you were scared. I'm not saying that I think this or anything, but I think
that if anybody would say something like that that they would confront me in the interview
instead of all of a sudden me finding out stuff and saying well fuck, I'm supposed to
defend myself and I can't really put in a rebuttal, you know, and that's the way that
Toronto thing came out. I was savagely attacked as being racist and sexist and not even
letting me speak my piece.
"And that's
another thing, I mean God, man, they must be really short on music. We should be one of
the tamest bands as far as that goes. I mean, hell, Guns'n'Roses is probably more sexist
than we are."
NFH: "You
probably have all the Vietnam veterans really pissed off at you, too." (because of
"Plate In My Head"...)
Rick: "Yeah,
but if you look at the lyrics in "Plate In My Head" there's not one bad word
said about Vietnam veterans in there at all. That was basically a true thing...you can
probably see it in your liner notes...we were at a party and this guy was doing this. He
was talking to a friend of mine and he goes "I'll kill you" and he starts saying
"I got a plate in my head" and he goes "I was in Vietnam" and stuff
like this and everybody was going "Jesus Christ, this crazy drunk". Who knows if
he was in Vietnam or not. It could have been a lie in the first place."
The Didjits have
played most of their shows around the midwest with a couple tours to the east coast and a
few shows down south. Their biggest tour in distance was a trip they took to the San
Francisco bay area after the first album. Rick and Joe drove out in Rick's Buick, but Brad
flew because he couldn't get enough time off from work. They played shows in San Jose,
Alameda, Oakland, and all around that area, and generally had a great time. On the way
back they spent time gambling in Nevada, and Rick got a royal flush on a poker machine,
winning seventy five bucks for a quarter bet. They managed to break even on the trip, so
it was considered a rousing success.
But the band doesn't
get all the time it needs with everybody working. Rick has another job in addition to his
record store thing, and "besides that I have to go out and drink and party and all
that and see other bands. Which is very important." He says this with full
seriousness. I believe him.
The
"Lovesickle" single did really well, and sold enough copies to actually make
some money; a rare thing in this day and age when singles are generally regarded as a
novelty item. Rick attributes this to the fact that they had established themselves with
their lps and had put some solid songs on the single, as opposed to it being a first time
out effort by a new band. The next project is another lp, which they were due to record in
July and hoped to have out by September. "We don't know the title of it yet, but it
will probably be as long as the other ones, and everybody will go "oh your albums are
so short" and we'll say "fuck you" and people will buy it anyway."
People really rag on
them for having short songs and short lps? "We had people saying "what's that
first song on your 45, it's so short?" And we'll say "Well, what the fuck's that
matter, do you like it or not?" It's like would you rather us put some fart noises at
the end for thirty seconds or what?"
People who think that
way should go buy Yes albums or something...that was one of the great things about the
Ramones when they first came along; the fact that they did songs without beating them to
death...they had a cool idea for a song idea, they went through it once or maybe twice,
and the song ended. Their lps were also short as a result. They were also great as a
result. As I see it, it's better to have something short and powerful than something big
and floppy.
As of our
conversation the material for the new lp was nearly done, with just some fine tuning of
words and second guitar parts and backing vocals. They were also trying to come up with
one last song so that they had an even twelve to work with. It seems likely to be about
the length of Hey Judester. But are there any more Jerry Lewis type songs?
"Sort of; we
have this song called "Gold El Dorado". It's about a car. Isn't that strange?
Well, it's not about Jerry Lewis, it's just like that weird rock and roll kind of thing.
We're experimenting with different approaches to beats. We've got a couple of slower
tunes. We've got a tune called "Evil Knevil". It's kind of slow. We made that up
when we were playing in Columbia one time, we just started playing the song. Of course we
didn't play it like we're playing it now, we've arranged it and we've done different
things to it, but it's a neat tune, it's pretty groovy. It's BAD. And there's
"Galen's Wooden Leg". There's a friend of ours who has a wooden leg...fast
rocker tune."
So if your spleen is
bothering you (and whose isn't?) get yourself down to your record shop and start looking
for these weird yellow and black lps with song titles like "Stumpo Knee Grinder"
or "Reflective Brain" that feature this blazing guitar shit and these crazy
words. You'll be glad you did. I know I am.
