Guest Column: Gary Floyd (1953-2024) by Jeff Smith
The Hickoids’ mainman, who’s a helluva writer, wrote a better memorial at Facebook than I could. So I present Jeff’s post, with his permission.
Unpublished portrait of Gary Floyd, taken by Tom McMahon of early Austin punk band Bodysnatchers: “I shot studio photos of Gary in 1979. Much skinnier looking than I remember. Here’s the frame that was the printer.” (Pic used by permission of Tom McMahon.)
From Jeff Smith’s Facebook page, May 3, 2024 12:42 PM:
Pour one out for the man I hold up as the greatest American punk vocalist of all time, Gary Floyd of The Dicks.
I first saw The Dicks when I was 16 or 17. They were a ramshackle freight train oozing danger and a dark romance that telegraphed the message “our love is doomed — but the cops will probably kill us before we can fall apart.” Fatalistic but defiant with some unquantifiable level of simmering violence lurking beneath.
If all the clownish portrayals of punk rock to be seen on television and in movies during the late 70s through the mid-80s had conveyed one fourth of the power of The Dicks on a good night, punk rock might have actually been banned.
To be sure, the original outfit was more than the sum of its parts - a true band. Glen Taylor’s twitchy, dissonant and inimitable guitar playing cast a hollow spread over the relentlessly bouncing frame of Buxf Parrot’s ever-moving groove while Pat Deason’s steadfastly off-kilter drumming reminded one of a twenty-five-cents-for-fifteen-minutes motel bed shaker that occasionally coughs and still chugs when the quarter has run out. All of this propelled Gary to sing at the top of his lungs while laying atop this queasy chemistry, secretly hoping his voice will rattle the plaster off the ceiling and maybe the whole fucking roof will cave in so he can forget about that man, the pigs and every other cruel thing the world has thrown at him. And then maybe the whole seedy motel will collapse and it will all seem random rather than intentional, so he can go to sleep for a long, long time in the comfort that it’s not just him. It’s the soundtrack of decay and desperation. Decadence fed by heartache.
I saw some fucking great punk and hardcore bands in the day…but I have rarely if ever seen a punk band (or rock-adjacent band of any genre) who could deliver with the emotional power of The Dicks.
The reason was simple: Gary’s struggle was real. By late ‘70s Texas standards, the notion of an openly gay, morbidly obese, Maoist poor boy from East Texas fronting a band of novice outcasts was the stuff of a pornographic sci-fi novella a la Martin Amis. And, not to short change another group of local heroes fronted by an outsized gay man, the Big Boys, but they had more to do with the good times than the bad. It’s not necessarily a great analogy but they were the light of The Beatles compared to the darkness of our Austin punk rock Stones.
On a musical level Gary and The Dicks found their greatest power (like the Stones on their epiphanic masterpiece Exile On Main Street) with the blues, and were the first punk band, American or otherwise — with the possible exception of The Gun Club — to fold the style into punk in a successful way. In spite of the greatness of the art, one could make the argument that Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s narrative and musical choices had a studied contrivance not found in The Dicks. “Successful” is used here to mean artistically high-performing rather than financially rewarding, of course.
The world is chock-full of guitar players who can hit the notes and bend the strings while making the ugly sex face. Our planet is also fully stocked with those who can carry a tune and string together a rhyme of heartbreak and appear emotionally vulnerable while doing so. That doesn’t make it either good to my ears or moving to my heart.
Gary was free of artifice when it came to his singing. Not to say that he couldn’t be a sometimes silly yet riveting frontman, but his poetry was always forceful and direct. Folk music stripped of everything that distracted from the point. As a young man, I failed to fully grasp where he was coming from - it was too far from my realm of experience. But he sang with his whole body and absolute conviction, whether the subject was heartbreak or injustice. I might not have understood where all of his pain came from, but his voice told me it was real. And while a lot of other punk singers of the era spewed opportunistic political diatribes that amounted mostly to complaining, Gary simply belted out his truth. Even though the conflict might not have been mine, his voice made me understand the righteousness of the fight. Gary’s words helped provide me with the empathy starter kit I lacked.
Gary had a couple of other very good and more commercially palatable bands after The Dicks - Sister Double Happiness and Black Kali Ma. He didn’t get the commercial success he deserved, but he’s not alone there. Still, I believe he died a happier man than he was in the era I remember him most vividly from. We exchanged messages on FB and spoke on the phone occasionally during the past decade.
Rest in power my friend. It’s not just you - it is the world. You might not have changed the world in the way you once hoped, but you changed mine.
[And mine, and quite a few of us. Thanks, Jeff. More extensive obituary at The Austin Chronicle.]
The ghosts of The Dicks mysteriously appeared on a guerrilla flyer pasted on Carousel Lounge’s outside wall, the night Gary Floyd broke all our hearts singing Kitty Wells’ “Making Believe” so beautifully with Buxf Parrot’s band, Uncle Pie Hole, 2019. (pic: Tim Stegall)
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"Rich Daddy" by The Dicks is somehow the most perfect synthesis of Texas blues, 80s hardcore punk, and working class grit (and if you know the band's backstory, queer solidarity, too) -- that I am not sure has ever been done before or since. Gary was a national treasure. Roky Erickson, another (proto-)punk hero from Austin, Texas--his death a few years back hurt. But this hurts just as much. In the long run it may hurt more.
I love "Kill from the Heart" and "Hate the Police" by The Dicks. But to me, "Rich Daddy" is quintessential, working class, Texas blues-punk. Love you, Gary Floyd.