So I have been rocking "From the Darkness to the Light" from the stellar Dead & Gone #2: Totenlieder - Songs of Death comp and this song is seriously fucking awesome.


Looked him up on AMG and found out he was the frontman for the Dicks, whom i know next to nothing about and in Sister Double Happiness, whom I know absolutely nothing about. Fill me in. Obviously it's gonna sound different than his (more) recent solo stuff, but how does it sound?and is any of it worth buying?

nobody, then?

Can't help you. All I know is Sister Double Happiness morphed into Semisonic.

or was that Trip Shakespeare...?

I thought Trip Shakespeare morphed into Semisonic

that scared me a bit.

The Butthole Surfers have a great song called Gary Floyd. The Jesus Lizard did a fantastic Dicks cover that I think was called "Wheelchair Epidemic".

A friend of mine once played me a Dicks album that I remember liking.

That's all i've got.

well, that's plenty to work with. He's from Austin so the surfers thing makes sense.

Yeh, sorry for that. I think I've owned and sold albums by both Sister Double Happiness and Trip Shakespeare. I've got 'em mixed up before as well, and have long forgotten why I remember them as similar entities. I think maybe they both played psychedelic heavy pop in the middle of the grunge invasion.

The Dicks are fantastic. They came out of the Texas punk scene, closely alligned with the Big Boys, another amazing punk band that gets zero attention. The put out a few 7 inch records and maybe 1 or 2 albums before relocating to San Fransisco and putting out one more album I bleiceve and then disbanding, which is when the Sister Double Happiness comes in.

Original Dicks records are anything but common, with about the only one I ever see not either totally trashed or expensive their last one, Kill from the Heart, a solid record but nowhere near as wild as their earlier stuff. Fortunately, however, Alternative Tentacles did release a career spanning compilation that personally, I'd like to have seen be more inclusive, especially considering you could probably get their whole recorded output on 2 CDs max, but it does cover most of the highlights. Their biggest "hit", if you wanna call it that, was Dicks Hate the Police, later covered by Mudhoney as simply Hate the Police.

If you wanna hear 'em, just grab the compilation CD. If you like it, you can hunt further. I'll also take a minute to plug their compatriots the Big Boys, probably the first band to really merge punk and funk, with covers of Kool and the Gang and more tossed into sets that were mostly hardcore punk. They do a killer Hollywood Swinging, complete with horn section. All their stuff is now available on 2 CDs, Skinny Elvis and Fat Elvis, covering their early and later years respectively. They're both great, and I'd be hard pressed to pick between them.

sister double happiness had one of my favorites songs of 1991 (which was a great year) in the song "exposed to you"....i thought the rest of the album was crap though (roddy bottom of faith no more played keys on the album, which is why i picked it up to begin with)

Dicks Hate the Police is on one of those Virus That Would Not Die comps. It has one of the best shitty production punk sounds west of the Misfits. I've always meant to check out more, but never did.