Blag Dahlia is an artist, and his medium is pissing people off.
He’s a virtuoso of the form, and to hear him tell it, his knack for pushing buttons turned his band Dwarves into punk rock legends… and also ensured that their commercial ceiling remained firmly at the level of “punk rock legends.” Dahlia’s big mouth and provocateur instincts have alienated most of the professional industry, offended people across the entire spectrum of political thought and in one particularly fraught incident, almost gotten him killed.
Back in the day, he explained, punk shows were a lot more violent—“skinheads coming to shows and trying to beat people up,” he offers by way of an example, “and we never took any of that shit from anybody.”
There was a 1992 show in Canada that’s burned into Blag’s memory. A guy had turned his back to the stage and was flipping off the Dwarves. “I took my microphone, and I smashed the beer in his hand,” Blag says, “and he just rushed the stage and raked me, probably half an inch from my jugular vein.” The doctor who stitched him up told Dahlia he could have died. So why did he finish the set?
His response: “I was bleeding all over myself, I thought it looked cool.”
Doing what he thinks is cool without regard to any notions of good sense, has been his lifelong M.O. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, a high school senior turned young Dahlia on to the Velvet Underground, the Ramones, Gene Vincent, and The Decline of Western Civilization. His dad was a nice, “even-keeled” guy that worked as a marketing executive for drug companies and his mom was a Quaker and social worker. “A very kind person,” he notes.
But once he discovered punk, he couldn’t help but react against the stifling conformity of Reagan-era suburbia. “Even my brother became a professor of ethics. I think for everybody else in my family, the rules are very important,” he says. “I think I was kind of an outlier, I kind of made my own rules up.”
Blag (real name Paul Cafaro) later met his lifelong primary collaborator, guitarist HeWhoCannotBeNamed (Peter Konicek, so, er, we just named him), while on community service for a drug bust. The pair formed the garage rock group Suburban Nightmare, which later became Dwarves when Dahlia took over as frontman. “I was always very aggressive and full of piss and vinegar. So I ran the band,” he says, simply enough.
Following their 1986 debut Horror Stories, the Dwarves quickly developed a reputation for shenanigans both onstage (fights, public sex acts) and off. “We got to open for The Cramps, which was one of my favorite bands, and they didn’t even give us a dressing room,” he says. “They just threw us in the office. So when the phone rang, I would pick it up and go, ‘Hey, fuck you.’ So they caught me doing that, and then they threw us out of the show.”
Eventually, they relocated to Los Angeles in the late ’80s and began playing shows with rising Seattle groups Nirvana and Mudhoney, which led them to sign with Sub Pop for their magnum opus, 1990’s Blood Guts & Pussy. “A perfect thing,” he says. The under 15-minute album features scuzzball riffs, hotrod tempos, song titles that promise maximum vulgarity (“Let’s Fuck,” “Fuck You Up and Get High”) and lyrics that deliver. It’s the type of album kids pass along to each other like a treasured dirty secret, and that an adult will frequently have to justify.
“I probably wouldn’t write that line ‘old enough to pee/old enough for me’ now, but I’m still glad to sing it because I don’t shirk away from who I was and what I did. That was reading some shit off the bathroom wall that’s disgusting and made to freak out squares,” he says, evenhandedly. “However, years later, you have to live with that, and you have to deal with it. People say, ‘Is that really how you feel? So you’re advocating child molestation?’ and, whoa, I really didn’t think about it that way at the time.”
And then there’s the matter of the album’s infamous cover, which features two nude women and a little person (band friend Bobby Faust), covered in blood. It made Dwarves a lightning rod for controversy, and Dahlia was surprised and saddened when they were repeatedly called out by the burgeoning Riot Grrrl movement, especially by Bikini Kill icon Kathleen Hanna. “It really bothered me because she took it all the wrong way,” he says. “When I look at the cover, I see two very strong, battle-hardened women covered in blood, meaning they’ve been through this difficult thing.”
He sighs and looks perturbed. “She was marginalizing me and not taking me seriously. Never talked about my band. Never talked about the songs on it. Only talked about my album cover.”
But the Dwarves truly topped themselves in the lead-up to their 1993 album Sugarfix, for which they devised a publicity stunt that declared HeWhoCannotBeNamed had been murdered in a bar fight, and the album was dedicated to his memory. (This magazine once called this one of the sleaziest moments in rock history. About right.) To this day, Dahlia insists that Sub Pop knew about the stunt, only to turn course and drop the band amid the ensuing outrage. Sub Pop has long denied this and, although repeatedly asked, refused to comment for this article, literally answering, “no comment.”
This was shortly after the long-unsolved murder of Mia Zapata of the beloved Seattle group The Gits. “Instead of embracing the hoax like they did when we all came up with it, they turned their back on us. And I’ll never forgive that.” He also insists their contract was done and Sub Pop simply declined to renew their deal, and that HeWhoCannotBeNamed’s family was warned in advance about the stunt.
Blag says no label would even look at the band for many years after the blowback. “We were persona non grata. It squandered a lot of our best years when we were young and could have gotten a deal.” Eventually, he wore down his friend Brett Gurewitz, founder of Bad Religion and Epitaph Records, who released 1997’s The Dwarves Are Young and Good Looking, injecting some danger into the bro-tastic skate-punk scene of the late ‘90s. “By that time, I was making records that deserved to be played on the radio. That was really the period when something could have happened commercially for the Dwarves,” he says. “But I always had a way of shooting myself in the foot.
“There was a famous show when we first got on Epitaph, and then they flew us out to New York to do a festival. But they put us on first, which I thought was kind of insulting. And so we played half of one song, jumped into the drum set, trashed everything, laughed, and walked off stage,” he says. “The people from the label got very insulted.”
Blag took it hard when Epitaph failed to break Dwarves commercially, but nonetheless regrouped. When the 2000s came around, Dwarves began releasing albums via small labels or by themselves, often featuring nude women on the cover, throwing power-pop, thrash metal, and hip-hop production all against the wall, confounding critics and finding an appreciative following.
“It’s very interesting how you come back completely around. I spent a lot of time very jealous and angry. It’s hard when one day you’re sitting in a room with Kurt Cobain, and he’s nodding out and doesn’t even know who you are. And then the next day, he’s being hailed as a genius. We played with Green Day at Gilman Street, and then it’s like, oh, now they’re the biggest band in the world. And then Offspring. ‘Oh we know those guys.’ And I was glad that something from our scene was being embraced. I just wanted it to be us for a change.”
Dahlia has started a rap project with Mickey Avalon, released loungey country music under the persona Ralph Champagne, and has written several novels. Nearly 60 now, he puts out records at his own pace, and has recently become a dad. But Dwarves’ latest album Jenkem (sample song titles: “Bad Drugs,” “I Wish You Were Dead”) shows he’s as ornery as ever, if a little more content.
“I want people to fall in love with this band and how great it is, and I want millions of people to enjoy it,” he says. “But I have no real control over that.
“So, the reality of it is, what I do have control over is my feeling about my legacy, and my feeling is the Dwarves are the greatest rock and roll band of all time.”