THE DIZEAZOES #6: COVER BAND

The sloppy truth is that The Dizeazoes were a cover band. And in many ways they were like every other cover band that has ever formed in any garage - they were a bunch of guys fucking around in a basement with guitars and drums, playing songs they liked by bands they worshiped and thinking they were really cool. But the difference between The Dizeazoes and your dad's weekend hobby is The Dizeazoes were covering songs that weren't popular and that they knew no audience would appreciate. Their repertoire consisted of songs by The Stooges, The Troggs, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Balloon Farm, and other outfits weren't exactly topping the charts at the time. Which is why The Dizeazoes were, for lack of a better term, so punk rock.

I mean, at least when a band is creating original music there is the possibility that that band might stumble upon or tap into something a listener might be into. This is, essentially, how punk rock eventually found a way to live on beyond it's original explosion - it wasn't all just guys screaming and spitting, some great music was actually made by some of those spiky haired savants. But The Dizeazoes chose to play music that they knew in advance no one, or at least a very, very, select few, would appreciate, and they simply didn't give a fuck. Which is, well, punk rock.

"There were several routes into the repertoire," says Larry Dardick. "Mainly, we chose music which we appreciated by artists we appreciated. There were some mini trends such as the idea of doing the first released songs by a couple of well know artists like The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Of course, they had to be relatively simple for us to attempt them - again, especially in the early days. One of the main ideas was that we were playing for the enjoyment of it. So, we continued to play songs that we had fun playing."

Says Paul Wheeler:

"If you thought our band sucked, well, we kind of assumed that you would think our band sucked. We didn't think our band sucked. We felt that we were making real rock music, and that it was the stuff on the radio that sucked. We didn't really expect the world to change, and for the music we were making to suddenly become a desirable product. We were just throwing the first stone (though really more like a snowball) against the crappy music industry that was turning out glossy, pop shit, or laid-back, groove music. When The New York Dolls came out, we were excited. They were playing rock music! They didn't mind playing the fool. They realized it was a positive thing to shock your audience, and that it was important to play real rock music. The smoothness of '70s popular music grated on my soul. It had to be challenged. We didn't expect to win this cultural war, but we wanted to do our part to start turning the tide... We were serious about playing rock music, but we didn't mind at all playing the fool. In fact, we thought it was kind of important, because we didn't expect the majority of people to even have a clue what we were doing. Maybe we could make them laugh."