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Didjits - Barely Legal

Hello, it’s Wednesday, do you need your mopey ass kicked by a 2:32 rock n roll machine?

Cool. I did too because being in the USA these days is no fun. But being in the USA in 1992, there was a band from Illinois who would appear in your town, and for a very nominal fee they would obliterate your thinking brain with the kind of brilliant, strange and dumb high octane rock n roll that reverts everyone into a mass of smiling, sweaty, flailing lizard brained idiots.

I read the description somewhere that (and I’m paraphrasing) “like The Ramones, they made the same record over and over, but what a great record it was”. The reason I’m paraphrasing is because to even find that I had to wade through a few pages of links that were essentially garbage dumps of the same basic band bio cribbed of their wiki page. This is the last song on their last album, a pummelling swan song blaze of glory like an alcohol funny car burning all its fuel down the track before exploding.

They’re in that margin of late 80s-early 90s bands like The Devil Dogs, who did a great cover of Dictators - Stay With Me, and built their little following off of mail order catalogs and blistering live shows. A little early or a little late for their early rock n roll worshipping moment.

I liked Devil Dogs at the time, but they don’t hold up for me quite as well as an adult who’d rather just listen to The Dolls or The Dictators. Didjits do though, because they were really strange, and funny even in their darkest moments. Bands like The Devil Dogs were macho in a way that suggested if they hadn’t found punk rock, they’d probably all be the gearhead that kicks Adam Goldberg’s ass at the party in Dazed & Confused. But The Didjits were misfit freaks, which is apparent just looking at a a promo pic of them: Rick Sims, guitar god in a suit and tie, John Lennon glasses, feather boa and devilish grin, in front of the no-bullshit, flannel shirted good Midwesterner rhythm section of Doug Evans and Brad Sims (and replaced by Todd Cole) . They brilliantly satirized 1980s white trash middle America by trashing the overbearing punk seriousness of the time with songs about fast cars, getting high and making a pact with Satan for “a piece of pussy and a lot of action”. With Didjits, it seems you had to be in on the joke, but maybe that joke isn’t as funny when it’s the same bullshit that’s been levelled at women forever, and maybe their political incorrectness isn’t as funny when a a portion of their male fans didn’t get it as a joke. I remember Turbonegro being confusing in the same way when they appeared. I’m mentioning them, because you can see / hear the similarities. Just as the cliché goes, you never heard them but your favourite bands did…

Which is how I’ll end this, because nothing does a disservice to what Didjits are all about more than waxing on and on about them.