MDC's Dave Dictor takes his life story on the road

MDC has been an acronym for many things over the past 35 years: Millions of Dead Cops, Multi-Death Corporations, Millions of Dead Children, Millions of Damn Christians, and Magnus Dominus Corpus. These plays on words never signaled a complete shift in socio-political priorities for singer Dave Dictor. His lyrics about police violence and civil rights violations were constants in American hardcore throughout the 1980s and still resonate today.

A contentious election year is the ideal time for Dictor’s life story to reach the masses. Memoirs of A Dead Civilization: Stories of Punk Fear and Redemption (Manic D) isn't out until May, but it'll be on MDC’s merch table when the band plays the Drunken Unicorn on Mon., April 18. Dictor took a few minutes to chat about the book and punk’s place in America’s current political climate.

I gather this tour is in part to promote your book.

It truly is. It’s called Memoirs for A Damaged Civilization and it's out May 1. I’ll have it on sale already for the tour.

So coming to the show is the only way to get the book in advance?

Yeah, you know, they announced the date a while ago. I looked at my editor and said, ‘I have a chance to sell these.’ She said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to do this the right way.’ I told her I’m going to sell 20 or 30 a gig. So she said, ‘You know what? You should have your books!’ It all comes down to what you’ll sell. She’s a little publisher from San Francisco — a really talented woman named Jenn Joseph (Manic D Press). She helped me as well with editing it. I’m really happy to be working with her on it. I told her this year I’ve booked around 94 shows up through November 1. If we can sell 20 a gig, that’s 1,800 books. If I start doing record stores and book stores and sell 5, 10, or 15 there and start doing it wholesale, hopefully we’ll get up to 3, 4, or 5,000 sales in the next four months.

It’s a D.I.Y. book tour then.

A lot of times, writers will write their book then go back in their cave. I’m the opposite of that. I’m in the record business. You don’t sell your record by sitting at home. You sell it by going out and playing.

What prompted you to chronicle your life and career?

I tried to put this all together with my guitar player, but we had visions for a different book. He wanted to do a very comprehensive overview of punk rock that’s very involved with the Austin, Tex. punk scene of ’77, ’78, and ’79 that we came out of. My story is more of my personal journey. I talk about how things affected me instead of trying to chronicle and document a certain scene or certain era. He sees it more as a coffee table book with lots of big pictures and lots of big flyers. It’s pretty comprehensive. You get a feel for the era, the artwork, and what the people looked like. It’s a different kind of book, though. A big picture book like that costs $50-$60 apiece. Mine is going to be more your standard 108 written pages with 20 pictures of flyers. It’s trying to capture my journey, what got me involved, how I bumped into punk rock, how I was already punk rock before that even happened, plus personal stories from people like Jello Biafra, Exene Cervenka, Keith Morris, and different people from the scene. There's stories about Dave (Rubinstein) from Reagan Youth who has passed. I tried to favor a lot of people who have passed since no one is going to tell their story. People like Randy “Biscuit” Turner of the Big Boys. Just incredible people that were very generous and beautiful people. I really miss them A., but B. I want people not to forget who they are. People over 35 generally do (remember), but you know there’s a whole new generation every three years. They have no idea the difference between Green Day and the Ramones. Age gives you that perspective. Youth, not so much.

It’s more of a first person narrative, then, but there’s history in it because you lived it? You’ve been on Crass Records and you’ve been on Alternative Tentacles.

I talk about going to the Crass farm. I talk about going on tour with the Dead Kennedys. I talk about the scene in San Francisco. I talk about growing up in Glen Cove, outside the suburbs of New York City. And the role my parents played in getting me a guitar and encouraging my creative nature.

Does your social awareness reflect your childhood and your family’s social and political views, or was that something you learned as a young adult?

My family was very progressive. My mom was a writer for the Daily News. I started talking to her about vegetarianism, so she bought be a guitar and said, ‘Why don’t you write a song about it?’ So there I was, 11 or 12 years old with a guitar in my hand. I wrote some songs that later ended up in my punk rock work. When she bought me this guitar it was in the early 1970s before punk rock. I wrote a song called "I Hate Work" and I wrote a song called "Dick for Brains." I had a very supportive mom, but I felt like an outsider in a lot of ways so I fell in with the punk crowd. I went into the music thinking I was new wave. I was into Talking Heads, Devo, and Elvis Costello. But when I started hanging out, I thought the more interesting people and the people who had more heart were a lot of the street gutter punks.

Did hanging out with gutter punks, for a lack of better words, soften your heart further toward the poor and police violence? Did that sort of feed your need to write songs about these things even more?

I didn’t see much of this in Austin, Tex., but when I moved to San Francisco there were hundreds and hundreds of kids who were like, 16, 18, or 20 who had just moved there from Lansing, Mi. or Boise, Id. Everyone had a story. We all ate at soup kitchens and hung out in the streets. I wouldn’t call them gutter punks. They were more like street punks. There were two levels of punks, you know. There were more educated punks like Tim Yohannan (of Maximum Rocknroll) and Biafra and the Kennedys. They had more of an artistic vision. I had a background with that too, taking art and music in school. Then there were real kids living out in the street who could relate to the Exploited and Crass. Everyone could, really, because the music was about political things and wanting to live without nuclear war.

Some of your songs that deal with things like animal rights and homophobia still resonate, as if they were written yesterday. They are especially poignant in an election year.

There’s all these draconian things against the poor, against African-Americans, against gay people, against Mexicans… You know, the whole Trump thing. We’re singing, “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.” Actually that’s a lyric from a song I wrote called “Born to Die” about standing up to the Klan in 1981 when they marched in Austin, Tex. It’s been used (by protestors) at KKK rallies. Spontaneously people started using it at Trump rallies. It’s pretty cool to be part of the culture that is demonstrating and protesting against Trump deciding to build a wall or Trump deciding no Muslims can come into the country.

MDC, Deathwish, the Swingin' Dicks, and NAG play the Drunken Unicorn on Mon., April 18. $10-12. 21+. $10-12. 9 p.m. 736 Ponce De Leon Ave. www.thedrunkenunicorn.net.