Dictators – "Two Tub Man" (1975)

They all know that I’m the one

Not to let your son become

Sirius/XM has hundreds of channels, but the only two that I listen to regularly are CNBC and “Little Steven’s Underground Garage.”

“Little Steven” Van Zandt – a longtime member of Bruce Springsteen’s band who later became a regular on The Sopranos – has described the “Underground Garage” playlist as featuring mostly “the bands that influenced the Ramones, the bands that were influenced by the Ramones, and the Ramones.”

One of the bands that clearly influenced the Ramones was the Dictators, whose “Two Tub Man” – today’s featured song – I heard on “Underground Garage” earlier tonight.

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In 2016, “Handsome Dick” Manitoba of the Dictators said in an interview that the two bands influenced each other, but it seems to me that the Dictators – whose first album, Go Girl Crazy!, was released a year before the Ramones’ eponymous debut LP – were the influencers and the Ramones the influencees. 

From a 2001 appreciation of the Dictators in the Village Voice:

It’s been over a quarter-century since the band started delivering swift kicks to the groin of overproduced cock rock. . . . Go Girl Crazy! established a blueprint for bad taste, humor, and defiance that would be emulated by the Ramones and live on in acts like the Beastie Boys and Kid Rock. 

Michael Little of the Vinyl District website made the same point but much more emphatically in a 2014 review of Go Girl Crazy!:

[Y]ou can draw a direct line between [Go Girl Crazy!] to the Ramones and straight to the Beastie Boys. . . . If the Ramones (who later did a version of “California Sun” off Go Girl Crazy!) and the Beastie Boys didn’t cop their entire shtick from the Dictators’ debut [album], I’m Michael Bolton, mulleted version.

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Speaking of “California Sun,” click here to listen to the Dictators’ cover of that classic paean to California babes – it could not be more perfect.  

It pones both Ramones’ versions of the song – the one of the 1977 Leave Home album, and the much faster version that was used in the 1979 movie, Rock ’n’ Roll High School.

No one in the world loves Rock ’n’ Roll High School more than I do, but I think it would have been even better if it had featured the Dictators instead of the Ramones.

Unfortunately, the Dictators – frustrated by their three albums’ utter lack of commercial success – had broken up before that movie was filmed.

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Click here to listen to “Two Tub Man.”  In case you didn’t grow up watching “Wrestling from Chicago” when you were a kid – a 1950’s-era syndicated TV show hosted by Russ Davis that featured professional wrestling from Chicago’s International Amphitheatre – you may be confused by Handsome Dick Manitoba’s spoken introduction to the song, which name checks “golden age” wrestlers like Verne Gagne and Dick the Bruiser.

Verne Gagne

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