The Dicks Hate the Police

Born out of the sweaty, beer-soaked clubs and house parties of Austin in 1980, the Dicks’ lyrics and their rage focused on rejecting the status quo.

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Frontman Gary Floyd ejected himself from a small bible-belt town named Palestine. Landing in Austin, he builds buzz for The Dicks before the band even exists by posting flyers for fake shows they’d headline, with tag lines like: “The first twenty people to show up with a gun get free drinks all night.”

Somehow, someone convinced the legendary Austin venue The Armadillo World Headquarters to book this new band. The band that didn’t exist. Floyd recruited two guys who drew his attention because “they looked like they just got out of jail”.  They had two weeks to put together a show. The persona was almost as important as the lyrics. “I didn’t want to look like the sweet girl next door, I wanted to look like her bad sister that lived in Omaha that nobody ever saw.”

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Floyd would pull chopped liver out of his panties and fling it at the audience. Another trick involved chocolate pudding. In “Off Duty Sailor,” he screams “I’m in a dress, what a mess. I gummed his pistol.” Then they released their first single, “Dicks Hate the Police.”

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“When we played, shit could go bad real quick,” says bass player Buxf Parrot. More than once the band was accused of inciting a riot, and when they drove to Houston the cops always seemed to know they were coming. Parrot recalls stopping at a store as they pulled into town. “They just surrounded us and took us to jail. One said I wish you’d run so I could shoot you in the back.”

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They were comfortable in the crosshairs, and collaborated extensively with Chilean born artist Carlos Lowry to create powerful images around the shows and songs. But almost as soon as everything started, it was over, ending abruptly one August during the Rock Against Reagan tour. “We were supposed to drive across the desert to Los Angeles and we had this old Ford van that was leaking radiator fluid and it was like, I don’t think I want to drive across the desert with a bad radiator.”

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Floyd went anyway; the others stayed in Austin, and a chapter closed. The Dicks lasted three years, although Floyd would re-form for a few more years with different members based out of San Francisco.

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Gary Floyd formed the band Sister Double Happiness in San Francisco in 1986 and later played in Black Kali Ma, while Buxf Parrot and Pat Deason played in the Austin, TX neo-bluegrass band Shootin’ Pains. Lead guitarist Glen Taylor died in 1997. The Dicks played a series of reunion concerts in Austin and beyond in 2004 and 2005 with Brian Magee and later Davy Jones filling in for Taylor. The single “Dicks Hate The Police” is considered a punk classic, and their split album Live at Raul’s Club is credited with launching the hardcore punk genre in Texas.