A band from Houston who played twenty two songs in seventeen minutes, moved to San Francisco, landed in the middle of a thrash scene, and put a word on an album cover that became the name of a genre.
Houston
Formed in 1982 by the Kurtz brothers, and initially one of the fastest and shortest hardcore bands in America. The Dirty Rotten EP in 1983 contains twenty two songs and lasts under seventeen minutes, which was an argument as much as a record: a song stops when it has finished, and if that takes forty seconds then it takes forty seconds.
Dealing with It! in 1985 is the transitional album. The guitars have thickened, the playing has tightened, and the songs have crept up towards two minutes, but it is still recognisably a hardcore record made by a hardcore band.
San Francisco
The move is the whole story. D.R.I. relocated to the Bay Area in the middle of the decade and found themselves playing to audiences who did not care which label anybody was using: the same crowd went to see Exodus on Friday and a hardcore band on Saturday.
That environment did to the band what it did to everybody else in it. The guitars got heavier, the drummer started playing metal fills, and solos appeared.
Crossover
Released on Metal Blade in 1987, and the title is a description rather than a manifesto. A genre acquired a name because a band was honest about what had happened to it.
It is also the record that shows the trade. Something is gained in weight and something is lost in nerve, and the argument about whether D.R.I. gave away the thing that made them worth hearing has run for nearly forty years. The honest answer is that both sides are right: Crossover is a better made record than Dirty Rotten and a less astonishing one.
| Release | Year | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Dirty Rotten EP | 1983 | Twenty two songs, under seventeen minutes |
| Dealing with It! | 1985 | The transition begins |
| Crossover | 1987 | Names the genre, and shows the cost |
| 4 of a Kind | 1988 | Fully metal |
| Thrash Zone | 1989 | The peak of the metal era |
The skate connection
D.R.I.'s dancing man logo is one of the most reproduced images in underground music, and it travelled further than the records did. It appeared on skateboards, on shirts and on walls in towns where nobody had heard the band, which is the same mechanism that carried Suicidal Tendencies into the American interior.
Skate videos were the crucial vector. A VHS tape passed hand to hand with a soundtrack chosen by the film maker put forty seconds of a song in front of a teenager who then went looking for the rest, and no record label was involved at any point.
What happened after
Thrash Zone in 1989 is the high point of the metal era and the band have essentially continued since, with line up changes and long gaps, playing to audiences who want the fast short songs rather than the metal ones.
Kurt Brecht has had significant health problems in recent years, and the band's touring has been intermittent as a result. What they leave is a genre name, a logo, and an argument about what happens when a band gets better at playing.
The other 1985 record that wrote the rulebook, in three days, by four men who were not a band, is S.O.D., and the wider account is in Crossover: Where Thrash Met Hardcore.
The songs
Worth describing, because a band whose early catalogue is twenty second songs is hard to write about in the usual terms.
The Dirty Rotten material has no choruses, no solos and frequently no second riff. A song states an idea, shouts a title, and stops. That is not a limitation being worked around; it is a position about what a song has to contain, and it is the same position hardcore had been taking since 1980.
By Crossover the songs have verses, bridges, solos and endings. Everything a conventional listener would call an improvement has happened, and the band that made Dirty Rotten would have regarded most of it as a failure of nerve. Both bands are on the same discography and both are right about their own record.
The influence
Larger than the sales and easy to trace. Municipal Waste have never been shy about where their whole approach comes from. Iron Reagan, Enforced and most of the modern crossover wave work from this template. And the D.R.I. logo has been reproduced more times than most of the records were pressed.
In the other direction, the band's early material fed into powerviolence and into the fastest end of hardcore, where the twenty second song is still standard practice. Very few bands have influenced two scenes that would not attend each other's shows.
Where to start
With Dealing with It!, which is the point where the two halves of this band are both fully present: still recognisably hardcore, already heavy enough to work on a metal bill.
Then Crossover for the trade itself, and then, if the short end appeals more, back to the Dirty Rotten material, which is twenty two songs and takes less time than a single track on some thrash albums.
What not to do is start with the late catalogue. The 1990s records are competent and beside the point, and they will tell you nothing about why this band mattered.
A last note on the name, which is worth knowing because it explains the band's whole posture. Dirty Rotten Imbeciles was chosen as a self description and used without irony for four decades, and the abbreviation stuck because promoters and shops could not print the full thing on a poster. A band who called themselves imbeciles in 1982 and then spent forty years being cited as founders of a genre has had roughly the career that name deserves.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. Track counts refer to the original release of the Dirty Rotten EP.
