Dwarves Frontman Blag Dahlia Is a Big-Dicked Feminist

The Dwarves. Self-proclaimed rock legends. If you go to a Dwarves show, you are almost guaranteed to be reminded of this, not only by frontman Blag Dahlia while he does his part in making sure the room maintains the amount of energy for him to get his fix, but also from that energy itself. From the first strike of the first chord, there is no letting up. I don’t mean with generic stage moves or “presence,” but the intensity of the collective group and the connection with the audience.

Before I became friends with Mr. Dahlia, I had my curiosities about what kind of guy he was. From the dirtier early records, I would assume he would just want to set the room on fire and steal my girlfriend. The Epitaph years made me feel like he would rather hang out in a strip club and do cocaine in the back room. Following that was when I met him at a house show in San Francisco. He was there not doing any of these things. Just eating Mike and Ikes and telling me we should record with him. He was none of the things I had thought he would be. While incredibly smooth with the ladies, he has never been shitty to them when I have been around. Actually, more admirably confident and complimentary. I had him pegged all wrong. Just when you think you have got this guy figured out, he seems to be able to throw you off his scent.

He talks about staying away from the middle of the road, because comfort is not a part of Dwarvedom. Any time I have needed advice over the years, he picks up the phone. Some people think he isn’t the one to be giving advice to a younger artist, but I disagree. I want to learn from the guy who knows how to rub some people the wrong way, some the right. A guy who doesn’t believe in musical comfort zones. A guy who is completely capable of stirring things up as well as silence an entire room. I want to learn from a lifer. Someone who doesn’t run at the first sign of trouble. If there isn’t any trouble, then I want to learn from the guy who knows when and how to create it. Kids in punk bands, you could definitely learn a thing or two from my man Blag Dahlia and his band of Dwizarves.

Read our interview while listening to "Get Up and Get High," a song from the new album Dwarves Invented Rock and Roll which is out on September 19 from Recess Records. Although it's a short song and a long interview, so read fast.

Noisey: Alright. Let's talk Dwarvedom. You formed in Chicago in the mid 80s. Since then, you have released over a dozen full lengths / collections on various labels. Nothing seems to be able to stop you. I imagine part of that has to do with your revolving lineup. Would you say your "open dwarves" member policy has played a big part in the longevity of the band?
Blag Dahlia: We formed in a suburb of Chicago called Highland Park. When you come from the Midwest and start a rock band you are constantly shat upon by those that surround you. We decided early never to quit and have regretted it many times since. The lineup stayed the same through a move to California, but eventually new folks started to come in as the realities of a life in Rock started to encroach on the original dream. Now we’re like the Wu-Tang Clan of punk bands. We have new guys, but the old guys always reappear with a new song or something. Saltpeter just wrote our new single and he hasn’t been in the band for 20 years. It’s all in the family, Illinois style transplanted to California.

That's rad. I don't know what things were like in punk when you guys first got going, especially in Chicago. I know a bunch of those old Chicago punk dudes. They are pretty "codgerish.” I would imagine back then, they were young codgers. A friend of mine in a band that shall remain unnamed was once so put off by your stage banter that he unplugged you guys (he is now a fan). Did your move to California have anything to do with not finding a place fit for Dwarvage in Chicago?
The Chicago we came from in the early 80s had a real inferiority complex about local bands. Chicago then just wanted to be New York and failed miserably. Way smaller towns all over the country had five dollar punk shows full of local bands, but in Chicago it was nightclubs charging $15 for an out of town headliner and three out of town openers, they just didn’t hire locals for the most part. We knew we had to get out of there so we moved to San Francisco for no real reason other than we thought it was warm. It turned out to be the coldest city in California. Other bands also hated us because we weren’t even from Chicago, but the suburbs. We would come in dressed in paisley ties and with hot girlfriends in our parents’ station wagon. We were easy for other bands to hate. Years later, Chicago started to get a scene and bands we were friends with like Urge Overkill started getting attention, but we were long gone by then. Still, Dwarves will always be a Chicago band to me even though we’ve been in Cali since 1986.

Do you think that your ability to constantly evolve has kept wind in the sails? Few bands can pull off genre jumping, especially on the same record.
We started as a 60s garage band, then we went more noise punk and by the time anyone had heard of us we were kind of Misfits punk. And that was just the first five years. The funniest thing about this band is that heads think they know what we sound like, but unless you have every record you really don’t know the whole story. That’s what keeps me interested. Otherwise, we’d suck as bad as every other punk band in California.

There it is! From what I can tell, you have been active since the mid-80s with a four-year gap from '93 to '97. How much did that break have to do with faking the death of guitarist HeWho and the reaction of Sub Pop, and can I ask what the motivation behind that move was?
HeWho died and has risen. He is an icon of punk rock, untethered by time and space. Sub Pop was a label that, despite their best efforts to do everything wrong, managed to make some money by exploiting a heroin addict. Then, they defined the irrelevance of white college indie rock for 20 agonizing years. During that mid-90s period, we wrote and recorded a Blag solo EP and the Earl Lee Grace Blackgrass record, but it culminated in the Dwarves Are Young & Good Looking, our best-selling record and the one that convinced punkers that we really were the best band ever. Bottom line—record labels can’t stop us, they can’t even conceive of us. And HeWho lives on!

You have full-circled back to Recess Records releasing your stuff. You demand control over everything you do, which to me, is awesome. Let me ask this: Why Recess when in this day and age, you have the ability to release and distribute pretty much directly through your brand? Less busy work and hassle?
Recess is known as a place to get cool punk records and that’s what we make. I like to be affiliated with like-minded freaks. That’s why we gravitated to Sympathy (who were great) Epitaph, Sub Pop and others who were more of a mixed bag. Recess is Todd and Todd is a punk rocker for life. What more could you ask for? I have been trying to get people into the things Todd does, so I couldn’t agree more. You returned with Young and Good Looking. I was curious about the title. In my travels, I met the "You gotta keep ‘em separated" guy. He said he worked for Nitro Records in the 90s. He told me a story about how he was trying to get Nitro to sign the Dwarves, but Dexter said you guys were too old. He wanted younger, good looking bands. Can you confirm or deny that this is the inspiration behind The Dwarves are Young and Good Looking?
Dexter has been a great friend, and even appears on the last couple Dwarves records as a singer. When I brought him YGL, he did say that he had signed a few older bands he really liked and he wanted to get some younger bands instead. I said, “But the Dwarves are young and good looking.” It turned out to be a great title, a great record, and a big wad of cash from Epitaph before they imploded on drugs. Are you starting to see a pattern here?

[Laughs] No comment. For years, you have been a rock and roll hustler. What I mean by that is you seem to have your hands in a few different things at a time. You produce, you write books, you write songs for other people, you sing a song at a cartoon underwater prom. Everyone in the business has felt the hit of declining record sales. Has what happened to the music industry been something that you have been a step ahead of?
I think it was Pharrell who said, ”I’m a hustler, baby, I just want you to know, it ain’t where I been, where I’m about to go.” I’ve always had different interests—writing, music, and broadcast. So I did them all, badly, made a few bucks and just tried to live an interesting life in the process. If you want to get paid, a better way to go is—stick to the middle of the road and do the same thing over and over again forever. It worked for Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen and it can work for you, too. Unless you’re me!

I've read so many interviews with you where it seems like the writer kind of panders to a certain personality, which would be the one we see on stage. Is the Blag we see on stage the same guy at home? How close are the characters we see at a show to the actual people?
I’d like to think that guy Blag is someone who isn’t me. But in a very real sense, he is. For Rex Everything, the real and fake him were almost interchangeable. For HeWho, there was almost no point of contact between the two. (Then at some point, he merged with himself and went supernova.) The real Vadge Moore, he was even worse than the fake Vadge Moore if you can believe that’s possible. The Dwarves are a very strange group of people is what I’m trying to say. In music, “being real” is a construct just like being fake is. Hip-hop guys can only be real if they’ve dealt drugs and killed people, yet they get a pass on living with their mom and being obsessed with bad jewelry. Punkers are supposed to be just like their fans, that’s the appeal sometimes, but it’s a sham. All the punk luminaries I know are rich and don’t really resemble their fans at all. The ones who do are even worse. I would never want to belong to a club that would have me as a member. Sincerity and rock music are mutually exclusive.

HeWho at Punk Rock Bowling, photo by Chase Stevens.

I consider you to be a button-pusher. You have pretty much drawn a line in the sand as far as people who will be able to stomach what you do lyrically. Rock and roll at one point was scary and dangerous for the masses. Is it possible to still achieve this?
I think humans spend most of their time thinking about sex, violence, drug abuse, and bad behavior. But instead of writing about that stuff like I do, most “artists,” especially musicians, censor themselves and create bland derivative shit that they think people will like and might be commercially successful. Who in their right mind writes a song with “Fuck” in the title that can’t be played on the radio? Why would you put a naked woman on a record cover so it can’t be displayed? Who writes a love song to Anne Frank? It’s my job, it’s what I do. I have so many friends from Chicago who used to see you in the late 80s. A couple of them said they were scared of you. Is there still a reason to be afraid of Blag or any other Dwarves in 2014? How have the shows changed over the years? It seems like the energy is more focused on a killer set rather than actually killing people.
I used to be scarier, but I think it’s because I used to be more scared. Now I’m enjoying myself and I just want to move a crowd any way I can. If sex and violence is the only way, we can do that, if bone-shaking music is the key, we’ve got that covered, too.

I know back in the 90s, you crossed paths with Nirvana. It seems almost impossible then to not have crossed paths with Courtney Love. Skipping over all of my curiosities about how awful she must be, I am curious what you think about her finding the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370? In case you didn't know, she basically used Google imaging to find what she thought was the downed plane, and pretty much (very smugly) said "case closed.”
I remember a day around 1987 when Courtney, Kat Jelland [Babes in Toyland], and Jen Finch [L7] all jammed in the basement of the house I lived in. They were all in town stripping and at least some of them were looking for dope. It was a much more wide open scene then, the riot grrrl fear of heterosexuality hadn’t yet entered rock. I had respect for those girls because they did what they wanted to do and didn’t worry about what society thought.

When I went to see Hole at the CW Saloon in San Francisco, I got kicked out of the dressing room, but I think that was my fault. It wasn’t for being chauvinistic so much as breaking things and needing to be restrained. Courtney is one of those rock personalities that I like everything about, except listening to her music.

So did she kill him?
In a metaphorical sense, yes. He was so freaked out that she was fucking around on him that it blew his mind. Rock is no place for the sensitive sometimes.

Currently, there is a pretty massive feminist movement making the rounds online. I am friends with many of them. One self-proclaimed feminist I am friends with is Stacey Dee, who does backup vocals on your brand new record Invented Rock and Roll. My question to you is this: Is it possible for a feminist to also be a fan of the Dwarves?
Stacey Dee is a great singer and a great friend of mine. She’s a Dwarves fan for life, too, and a feminist. What I do know is that I consider myself to be a feminist. I believe in equal pay for equal work, equal rights under the law, equal participation by women in sports, science, business… I ascribe to any reasonable feminist concern. But, many so-called left wing or feminist folks are so PC that they are worse than conservatives at this point. If nudity or profanity or obsession with sex or the making verbal of forbidden thoughts and ideas is bad, than I am a bad, bad person. But I’m still a feminist. Just a feminist with a really big dick!

That is a great way to put it. While I personally have little interest in your dick, I would love to hear you sit down and talk with one of these ladies. I don't think they would do it though.
People need to lighten up and get a sense of humor. Independent music is no place to enforce your tired dogmas—liberal, conservative, or libertarian.

I've spent a decent amount of time with Invented Rock and Roll. I already have my favorites. What does this record bring to the table for longtime Dwarves fans?
This one is pretty live and direct, it was basically done in a weekend. Then I finger-fucked it for a year because I’m like that, but even I couldn’t ruin this one. It also has a lot of great songs from the other guys in the band. Aside from my stuff and the usual array of HeWho and Rex Everything songs, there are tunes from Fresh Prince of Darkness, Josh Freese, Chip Fracture, Gregory Pecker. Even the first single “Trailer Trash” comes from an original Dwarf, Saltpeter. Heads seem to be gobbling this one up already, so we plan to bring our show all over the country and get some panties dropping at a theater near you!

Ryan Young fronts the band Off With Their Heads and also does a killer podcast called Anxious and Angry where he wastes the time of your punk rock heroes. Follow him on Twitter - @owth

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