#Gary Floyd

[iamdangerace]

The Dicks

[actdog]

Gary Floyd, RIP #hatethepolice

[spilladabalia]

Randy Biscuit Turner (Big Boys) and Gary Floyd (The Dicks) on the cover of Images, a weekly pullout from University of Texas's Daily Texan newspaper.

[slashdementia7734]

[therivershit]

RIP Gary Floyd, punk's greatest singer

[k-zit-the-oooze]

Gary Floyd of The Dicks

(1953 - 2024)

[dustedmagazine]

RIP Gary Floyd

Gary Floyd was a painter, a photographer, an outspoken activist for the rights of queer people and a musician. Lots of listeners became familiar with his inimitable vocal presence through his work with Sister Double Happiness, a band that put out records on Reprise and Subpop. But his most forceful music and most confrontational performances were with his bluesy punk band, the Dicks; you can find my Dusted colleague Margaret Welsh’s recent review of the Dicks’ Kill from the Heart here. Out as a gay man in the early 1980s in Texas, fronting his band in drag, singing songs like “Dicks Hate the Police,” “I Hope You Get Drafted” and “Shit on Me,” Floyd took enormous risks, lived free and made hugely influential punk rock. His fearlessness won him admirers: Mudhoney and the Jesus Lizard did famous covers of Dicks songs, and the Butthole Surfers closed out Psychic…Powerless…Another Man’s Sac with a tribute to Floyd (I can also report that Bongwater was performing a face-melting cover of “Gary Floyd” in the early 90s…). Floyd also revealed some folks, who liked to chatter about human rights and freedom, for who they really were. He was a giant. At Dusted, we are saddened by his death but so very, very grateful for his music and his life. True to Floyd’s bravery, we post one of his most frank, angry songs today. Play it loud and piss some people off. Floyd would thoroughly approve.

Jonathan Shaw

[mrbopst]

Biscuit and Gary Floyd pause before heading to Austin's Carnaval Brasileiro, 1981, photo possibly by Toby. Their friendship was at the heart of an alliance between the Big Boys and the Dicks—the two bands played 34 gigs together in two years. Their fearlessness opened up so many possibilities, and gave us permission to break through barriers we couldn’t even name.

Pat Blashill

Biscuit and me when he came here for my birthday…it was a wonderful time…I miss him. Many of us do.

Gary Floyd

[sob-dylan]

kutx in austin does a little texas music history thing each week, and this morning in honor of pride they did a piece on gary floyd and the dicks. it’s really interesting and especially nice in light of his recent passing. take a listen if you’re at all interested by the punk scene down south!

[slashdementia7734]

A Eulogy to Gary Floyd by Jeff Smith (Hickoids).

Pour one out for the man I hold up as the greatest American punk vocalist of all time, Gary Floyd of The Dicks.

I first saw The Dicks when I was 16 or 17. They were a ramshackle freight train oozing danger and a dark romance that telegraphed the message  “our love is doomed — but the cops will probably kill us before we can fall apart.” Fatalistic but defiant with some unquantifiable level of simmering violence lurking beneath.

If all the clownish portrayals of punk rock to be seen on television and in movies during the late 70s through the mid-80s had conveyed one fourth of the power of The Dicks on a good night, punk rock might have actually been banned.

To be sure, the original outfit was more than the sum of its parts - a true band. Glen Taylor’s twitchy, dissonant and inimitable guitar playing cast a hollow spread over the relentlessly bouncing frame of Buxf Parrot’s ever-moving groove while Pat Deason’s steadfastly off-kilter drumming reminded one of a twenty-five-cents-for-fifteen-minutes motel bed shaker that occasionally coughs and still chugs when the quarter has run out. All of this propelled Gary to sing at the top of his lungs while laying atop this queasy chemistry, secretly hoping his voice will rattle the plaster off the ceiling and maybe the whole fucking roof will cave in so he can forget about that man, the pigs and every other cruel thing the world has thrown at him. And then maybe the whole seedy motel will collapse and it will all seem random rather than intentional, so he can go to sleep for a long, long time in the comfort that it’s not just him.

It’s the soundtrack of decay and desperation.

Decadence fed by heartache.

I saw some fucking great punk and hardcore bands in the day…but I have rarely if ever seen a punk band (or rock-adjacent band of any genre) who could deliver with the emotional power of The Dicks.

The reason was simple: Gary’s struggle was real. By late ‘70s Texas standards, the notion of an openly gay, morbidly obese, Maoist poor boy from East Texas fronting a band of novice outcasts was the stuff of a pornographic sci-fi novella a la Martin Amis. And, not to short change another group of local heroes fronted by an outsized gay man, the Big Boys, but they had more to do with the good times than the bad. It’s not necessarily a great analogy but they were the light of The Beatles compared to the darkness of our Austin punk rock Stones.

On a musical level Gary and The Dicks found their greatest power (like the Stones on their epiphanic masterpiece Exile On Main Street) with the blues, and were the first punk band, American or otherwise — with the possible exception of The Gun Club — to fold the style into punk in a successful way. In spite of the greatness of the art, one could make the  argument that Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s narrative and musical choices had a studied contrivance not found in The Dicks. “Successful” is used here to mean artistically high-performing rather than financially rewarding, of course.

The world is chock-full of guitar players who can hit the notes and bend the strings while making the ugly sex face. Our planet is also fully stocked  with those who can carry a tune and string together a rhyme of heartbreak and appear emotionally vulnerable while doing so. That doesn’t make it either good to my ears or moving to my heart.

Gary was free of artifice when it came to his singing. Not to say that he couldn’t be a sometimes silly yet riveting frontman, but his poetry was always forceful and direct. Folk music stripped of everything that distracted from the point. As a young man, I failed to fully grasp where he was coming from - it was too far from my realm of experience. But he sang with his whole body and absolute conviction, whether the subject was heartbreak or injustice. I might not have understood where all of his pain came from, but his voice told me it was real. And while a lot of other punk singers of the era spewed opportunistic political diatribes that amounted mostly to complaining, Gary simply belted out his truth. Even though the conflict might not have been mine, his voice made me understand the righteousness of the fight. Gary’s words helped provide me with the empathy starter kit I lacked.

Gary had a couple of other very good and more commercially palatable bands after The Dicks -��Sister Double Happiness and Black Kali Ma. He didn’t get the commercial success he deserved, but he’s not alone there. Still, I believe he died a happier man than he was in the era I remember him most vividly from. We exchanged messages on FB and spoke on the phone occasionally during the past decade.

Rest in power my friend. It’s not just you - it is the world.

You might not have changed the world in the way you once hoped, but you changed mine.

Gary Floyd // 1979 // 📸: Tom McMahon

[rastronomicals]

4:23 AM EDT September 24, 2023:

The Butthole Surfers - "Gary Floyd" From the album   Psychic ... Powerless ... Another Man's Sac (December 1984)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

[k-zit-the-oooze]

Gary Floyd of The Dicks

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

THREE DIFFERENT VOCALISTS, THREE DIFFERENT BANDS -- HARDCORE '81.

PIC INFO: Spotlight on vocalists Gary Floyd of THE DICKS, Henry Rollins of BLACK FLAG (recently joined), & the late, great Randy "Biscuit" Turner of the BIG BOYS, while on tour in Texas, c. 1981. [Is that Tim Kerr with his back towards the camera?]

"BLACK FLAG would pull in to town in some dying van. We would play with the BIG BOYS and sometimes THE DICKS as well. Great gigs in Austin, always. I remember many times sleeping on the floors of assorted Big Boys places. Biscuit was one of the greatest frontmen ever, right up there with Gary Floyd, the singer of The Dicks. The Big Boys were always in good form and the sheer spirit of their live performances would fill the place and everybody would go nuts. They always gave up the funk. What a great band."

-- HENRY ROLLINS, CD liner notes from the "Fat Elvis" compilation by the BIG BOYS

Source: https://fetcherx.com/post/twitter/1597540297751547910?search=dick.