Tuesday, February 26, 2013

The Great Unheard: The Dick Nixons - "Paint the White House Black"

Dick Nixons Paint the White House Black

Welcome to the first installment in a sporadic series of posts about some of my personal favorite albums that somehow never caught on with the public at large. I'm writing about them because hey, somebody oughta. First up: The Dick Nixons' 1992 LP Paint the White House Black.





The Dick Nixons may be my favorite politically conscious punk band ever, inasmuch as fanatical dedication to Richard Nixon counts as political consciousness. How a Louisiana-based garage punk quartet with a singer who sounded like a more manic Bobcat Goldthwait and a lyric book devoted almost exclusively to the 37th president failed to conquer the early 1990s music scene is beyond me, but those were different times.

 

On paper, The Dick Nixons sure sound like a novelty act, but in practice… well, they were pretty much the definition of a novelty act, but a damn good one. I was a dorky teenager when I discovered a cassette copy of 1992’s Paint the White House Black (their only full-length album, so far as I can tell, and one whose title predates the George Clinton song of the same name) in a cut-out bin at Sam Goody in the Mall of America, of all places. As a kid who counted The Dead Milkmen and They Might Be Giants among the five greatest bands on Earth, 15-year-old me was pretty much obligated to gamble three bucks on a funny-named band with song titles like “Do the Dick Nixon” and “Ping Pong Ball Head.”

 

What little fame the Dick Nixons attained was largely due to the promotional efforts of Mr. Mojo Nixon (no relation), who took an understandable liking to the band. There’s definitely something of the Mojo touch to the Nixons’ style, but with less country/rockabilly influence. They also owe a lot to the goofy punk sounds of The Ramones, the trash-rock clatter of Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs, the smart-ass pop knock-offs of John Fred and his Playboy Band and the sardonic sociology of Frank Zappa. That’s a pretty lofty pedigree, but I think The Dick Nixons are worthy of it.

 

Over the course of half and hour or so, the Nixons wax joyfully nostalgic about Richard M. Nixon, painting him as an eternally hip, unfairly maligned victim of a shadowy political conspiracy. In the universe of Paint the White House Black, Nixon stands tall as “an honest man who brought the boys home from Vietnam” and “the one true, pure American.” It’s all tongue-in-cheek, obviously, but it’s delivered with such conviction that you almost believe they believe it. Singer and lyricist Kirk “The Jerk” Springstone (who died in 2009, sadly) squawks every line in that aforementioned Bobcat Goldthwait voice, tinged with a swampbilly accent that sometimes sounds like a foreign language. The homemade trashiness of their sound was no accident – multi-instrumentalist Johnny Radical incorporated a wide range of found objects, and drummer “Professor” McCormick’s kit included a literal trash can. It’s no surprise that most of the mentions of the Dick Nixons that I’ve found online are fans gushing about the band’s ‘80s live sets.

 

Even a single-issue political cult can’t be all-Nixon, all the time, and so Paint the White House Black is padded out with some apolitical material. The Nixonless originals are a little too jokey for my taste (although “MTV” has its charm as the band’s blatant attempt to “Cover of the Rolling Stone” themselves onto 120 Minutes), but the covers are pretty fun. I’m partial to any band that fills out an album with loony punk renditions of “Red Red Wine,” “Knock Three Times,” Kenny Rogers’ “Lucille” and an old Chef Boyardee jingle, especially in the pre-Me First and the Gimme Gimmes era.

 

Paint the White House Black is long since out of print, but it can be found online pretty cheap and it’s streamable on Grooveshark. One more special note of personal resonance before I sign off: my first kiss was set to The Dick Nixons’ “Tricky Dick (Was a Rock-N-Rolla)” squalling out of the speakers of my 1986 Chevy Caprice Classic. I didn’t plan it that way, but I’ll be damned if I could have picked a better soundtrack.

  Tricky Dick (Was a Rock-n-Rolla) by The Dick Nixons on Grooveshark

24 comments:

  1. As a longtime fan of the Nixons (and a friend of Kirk), I'm proud to say that I own the guitar he trashed at their farewell concert, as well as the ORIGINAL photo of Nixon that you see throughout "Patriot Song" - I remember when Kirk handed me a copy of the CD on the pre-production cassette, and I honestly thought they were finally going to break it big-time. What the hell went wrong, I'll never know... but at least we have Paint the White House Black!

    Mark (mark@mlcbooks.com)

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    1. Thanks for posting, Mark! It's been amazing hearing from first-hand Nixons fans since I posted this. Makes me wish all the more that I'd gotten to see them play.

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  2. Awesome post and pretty much spot-on description of the music. That fun fact at the end is hilarious. I'm a relative of the bass player, Chuck "The Prez" Leftwing, and The Dick Nixons were the first concert I saw when I was 4 years old around 1987, outside of the First & Last Chance in Donaldsonville, LA. The sound of that mic'd up trash can definitely played a part in inspiring me to play the drums. I saw them at least two more times after that, the last being around the time 'Paint the White House Black' came out. I wore out my dad's tape and years later bought the CD. I let someone not related to me hear this music recently and he demanded a copy, so this music still has an audience.

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    1. Thanks for posting! I've been delighted with how many Nixons fans and affiliates have found this post. I so badly wish I could've seen them play live, but it's cool to at least have these experiences by proxy.

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  3. I just stumbled on this concert from 1987 on Soundcloud. https://soundcloud.com/dashbille/sets/dick-nixons-live-at-the
    What a trip!

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    1. Wow, the capsule description for that show is a work of art in itself.

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  4. This is great!! I bought a Tele off Kirk after interviewing him in Donaldsonville.... Still playing it to this day. Long live the Nixons!!

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    1. Thanks for reading! Everything I've been told about Kirk makes me wish to heck I'd gotten to meet the guy myself.

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  5. I saw them in Austin, Texas in 1991. I believe they were playing the Sound Exchange (a record store on the Drag across from UT) during the SXSW festival but not an official south-by venue. I think I stopped to watch because I felt bad that almost nobody was listening and it looked pretty funny to see a grown man sitting on a stool playing what appeared to be a washboard bolted to an overturned galvanized tub. I stayed as long as I could and bought a CD of Paint the White House Black. I listened to it a bunch but never managed to get anyone else interested. The name "Richard Nixon" was basically profanity in Austin in those days.

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  6. Thanks for bringing back such great memories. It was a great time in original music.

    Chuck "The Prez" Leftwing

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    1. It's an honor to be read by a Nixon. Thanks for a classic album and a ton of memories.

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  7. I AM A DICK NIXON!!!
    Cowboy Johnny Radical

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    1. You sure as hell are. Thanks for reading, and for soundtracking my first kiss.

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  8. I'll never forget The Dick Nixons and the big dick dancers!

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    1. I wish to heck I could've seen 'em live.

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  9. Brilliant piece!
    Prof. McCormick

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    1. Man, how'd all you Nixons find this post today? Big love to all of you, and thanks for reading.

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  10. i'll give you another southern band to research - because they have one song that reminds me of the dick nixons.

    the band is/was the sex clark five and the song is "ballad of the sex clark five"

    we're ALL the dick nixons.

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  11. Spam kabobs..on stage during the show..

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  12. Saw them open for the Meat Puppets in Nashville in the late 80's, I believe it was.

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  13. One of the best live shows I ever saw was The Dick Nixons at the Varsity in Baton Rouge. Brought a hippy girl on date with me that had never heard of them before. Before the show was halfway over, she had forgotten about all her granola and patchouli, started shaving her legs and was ready to register as a republican.

    Good times.

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  14. Thank you! I remembered their cover of Knock Three Times song college radio back in the 90s. My memory of it was a bit more manic (maybe it was a live version, or maybe I'm just mixing parts of it up with Mojo Nixon/Jello Biafra's Achy Rakey Heart)

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