Jen Interviews Stan Lee from The Dickies about their upcoming Australian tour

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I had the chance today to have a chat with Stan Lee, the lead guitarist from The Dickies.

Thanks for your time Stan…. (I hear some dogs and Stan shooing them out the door)
STAN: Sorry about that Jen.
(Laughing) Are they the dogs from your Facebook page?
Yes, have you seen them?
Yeah I have very cute!
Yeah my minikins, it is going to be hard to leave them!
Yeah that is true, you have a lot of touring coming up.
Yeah sure do!

I can remember as a kid the theme song for Banana Split, that was pretty cool. I also remember my brother and I singing “You Drive Me Ape (You Big Gorilla)” to each other. Which is a miracle as my memory is pretty bad! I was pleased to hear that The Dickies were finally coming Down Under to do a Aussie Tour, was there a reason that you have not come down here sooner?
It has been talked about, it has just never come through, it is something on our bucketlist and it looks like it’s finally going to happen.

Yeah that is awesome, we are glad that you guys are coming! It is a pretty quick tour, are you taking time before or after to see some of the great sights we have to offer?
Yeah I think it’s like 6 dates. Will people show up for this?

Yeah they definitely will! I will be coming with quite a few friends to the Melbourne show. That is a really good venue to play it will be a great show.
So it is not a secret, people know that we are coming?
They sure do! Even more so when they read this interview. I will get the word as much as I can!

Can fans here expect crazy clown costumes and puppets and insane moshpits that you are famous for in your live shows? What people are saying on facebook is pretty positive!
Yeah! As I was and they don’t get stolen between now and then! (Laughing) You will have to talk to the singer Leonard about the puppet show. I’ll give you his details and give him a call.
Thanks.

You guys have never really broken up like bands do these days, did you? You certainly have more than your fair share of tragedy.
We have had some hiatus’s. And yeah we have. I don’t think anyone gets through life without a bit of that.
Yeah that’s true.

On a more positive note, you were the first West Coast punk pop band to be signed to a major label as well as appearing on Network TV playing “You’re So Hideous”. Do you believe that you paved the way for many pop punk bands today to become successful?
Yeah I guess, but you would probably have to ask them. We just did what we did for kicks. We started our band after somebody. I would say probably The Ramones and The Wierdos.

I love the Ramones, I interviewed CJ Ramone about a month ago, a nice guy, I remembered that you supported The Ramones a long time ago, any funny stories that you can share with us?
They were a real military band. They stayed at the sound check and did not leave till after the show. They ran it a lot different from us, they are pretty serious about it, they timed their sets, Johnny was like a general and he wanted to go like exactly to the minute. One night he said “We saved two minutes off our set” he timed it to the minute. That was interesting but they were really cool guys to tour with. Joey was a sweetheart.

You released “1977: A Night That Will Live in Infamy/1982: Live When They Were Five” (2014) Was that digitally remastered? The sound quality is great.
Yeah it wasn’t re-released by like bootlegs so we have these great pictures that my brother took from 1977, and no one’s ever seen them so it was the perfect time to put out. It has our original demo from 1977 and that is probably the coolest thing on it.
I have been looking through some of your live videos on your YouTube channel.  We take for granted now the high quality videos we see, I enjoyed watching songs that I remembered when I was a kid.

You play a fair few covers, do you do that because you love the songs?
With “Nights in White Satin”, we kind of did a re-work of it. But “Paranoid” I just want to hear a little faster.
Yeah that was a good one.
I guess we just want to do some by The Monkeys, I really like The Monkeys.

You have been doing a fair bit of touring lately – could this mean that it may lead you back into the studio?
I don’t know, we have a few songs on the show, maybe we could find a way, I don’t really know. These days it’s just such a different world, it is such a do-it-yourself world now. So I still have to wrapped my head around ways to quote on iTunes, I don’t know. Let’s just say there will be one more. There are some songs in the can right now, we just need to figure out how to put them out.
Have you heard of PledgeMusic?
No.
Okay I will tell you about it later.

Anything you would like to tell our readers about what they can expect from The Dickies Aussie Tour?
Expect some zippy tunes sung pitch perfect by Leonard, some smooth guitar lines from me and Dave, and our new drummer Allen Gomez will be dropping some sick beats while Eddie will tighten it altogether on the bass. The current lineup is ripping. We have had some good musicians play throughout the years, this lineup is sick.
That sounds great, I can’t wait.

Are you going to be doing the same set list that that you are playing in America?
Currently we are putting together a few set lists for the east coast of America next week. We’re going to play a few different ones. We are playing with Pennywise on Friday. For Australia we are thinking of adding Free Willy and maybe Attack of the Moment.

I would like to thank you for paving the way and being the inspiration for some of my favourite bands like Blink and The Offspring.
The Offspring are friends of mine, Noodles just got a Gigantor tattoo, did you see that?
Yeah I did that is so sick!
Yeah that was pretty cool. When the Ramones and The Offspring took us on tour with them it was like them tipping their hat to us.

If you want to end the interview I guess we will just see you in the pit!
Yeah!
It has been an honour to interview a punk legend. Thanks Stan.
If you did not get enough info call me back in an hour.
(I did but he was engaged so maybe there will be a part two of this interview later)

 For all the tour info see my previous post here. Hope to see you in the pit!