Wednesday, August 27, 2008



While I’m in Pittsburgh, I wanted to post something relevant, but sadly no footage of The Cardboards, Dress Up As Natives or The Five has been uncovered. So I decided to go with this old chestnut: The Dickies cover of Black Sabbath's “Paranoid.”

In 1980 on one of my very first trips to Jim’s Records in Bloomfield with Jason Pettigrew and whoever he could talk into to driving us, I picked up a used copy of The Incredible Shrinking Dickies on banana yellow vinyl for $3. Back then, Jim’s was a goddamned treasure trove of used punk records, and if you went with 15 or 20 dollars, you would leave with a whole bag of pure punk rock dynamite that would cost a fortune today... if you could even find them. I’m not sure why The Dickies LP jumped out at me, but when I got it home, I was sure glad I bought it. A few years earlier when I was in 8th grade, Black Sabbath were my favorite band, and I’ll never forget being blown away by the Dickies version of “Paranoid.” How could they play that fast? Of course soon I would be hearing bands like Adrenalin O.D. and The Neos and realizing that this isn’t really all that fast, but it is still one of the all-time greats.

0 comments:

Post a Comment