Dave Dictor is an American musician, founder and singer of the punk rock bandMDC and the band's label, R Radical Records. Dictor is known for his political lyrics, involvement in the Rock Against Reagan campaign in the 1980s and being vegan.
Biography
Dictor was raised in Long Island, New York and attended Boston University and the University of Texas in the 1970s. In 1979, Dictor formed the Reejex, which morphed into a band called the Stains, with long-term musical partner Ron Posner. This later evolved into MDC in the fall of 1981. Dictor and MDC later relocated to San Francisco, California in 1982 and finally to Portland, Oregon in 1995. The band gave various projects different names with the MDC moniker, including Millions Of Dead Cops, Multi Death Corporation, Millions Of Dead Children, and Millions Of Damn Christians. In Portland, Dictor teamed up with Tom Roberts in 1997 and put out The Submissives' "An Anvil Will Wear Out Many A Hammer". Dictor also appeared in the 2006 filmAmerican Hardcore, the film based upon the book of the same name. The song "I Remember" also appears in the film and on the soundtrack.
Career
Dave Dictor is the front man for the bandMDC, a punk rock formed in 1979 in Austin, Texas. Among the first wave of bands to define the sound and style of American hardcore punk, MDC originally formed as The Stains and periodically changed the meaning of "MDC" - the most frequent being Millions of Dead Cops. The band's lyrical content expresses radical leftpolitical views and has proven influential within the punk subculture. MDC released material through ex-Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra's independent labelAlternative Tentacles. In the 1990s, vocalist Dave Dictor published editorials for the internationally distributed fanzine Maximumrocknroll. MDC's initial run ended in 1995, and the band spent five years on hiatus, before returning in 2000 with some new band members. In 2016, Dave Dictors' band MDC released a video for the forthcoming release of a new recording of "Born to Die", made to protest the Donald Trump presidential campaign. The song's slogan "No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA" was reported to be heard at anti-Trump demonstrations in Chicago. At the 2016 American Music Awards on November 20, the band Green Day adopted the anti-Trump slogan for a controversial impromptu chant during their live on-air performance, which Dictor applauded and encouraged. The media spotlight Green Day's action put on MDC inspired the band to create new material based around the current political climate. The album, entitled Mein Trumpf, was released in 2017.
Books
In 2016, Dave Dictor wrote his punk memoir on Dave's life rebelling against conformity, complacency, and conservatism with his iconic band, MDC. Dictor's narrative is a raw portrait of an American underground folk-hero who stood on the barricades advocating social justice and spreading punk's promise to a global audience. Part poet, renegade, satirist, and lover, he is an authentic, homegrown character carrying the progressive punk fight into the twenty-first century.
