MDC – Millions of Dead Cops: the never-ending Resistance

Marco Pandin tells us about Millions of Dead Cops, first record by hardcore punk band MDC

Millions of dead cops.

One morning just outside my front door, on my way to the bus stop on my way to school, I thought it strange to find lying on the steps one of the boys who lived in the building opposite my house. He seemed to be asleep. I thought – maybe he had stayed late and had locked himself out of the house.

And just as I stood there looking at him without understanding a fucking thing, the police arrived along with an ambulance. I knew him as Eddy – I don’t know if that was his real name or a nickname, and I don’t even remember his surname. His mum worked as a secretary in some office in the city centre, took the bus early in the morning and returned late at night, and she was very rarely seen in the neighbourhood. People said her dad was an Englishman. Eddy was only three or four years older than me, but he seemed to have been through a lot: he had travelled by train and hitch-hiked halfway across Europe and told a lot of stories, even shady ones with him in them.

Every now and then we’d bump into each other and talk together: he knew I played bass in a band and that we did weird stuff, he played electric guitar and sang with some guys from Marghera – I’d lent him a Gentle Giant album to record, but he gave it back to me almost immediately because he preferred to enjoy different rock, great stuff like Grand Funk Railroad, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton’s Cream. He often told me he was planning to go away again, and maybe in his own way he made it, back on the road. Even the very bad end of Enrico, one of my schoolmates in primary school, had really impressed us all: after a brief hitchhiking escape he had returned home accompanied by the police with strange bruises on his arms and chronic hepatitis, and one night he had hung himself from a beam and ended it all. There seemed to be no escape from the neighbourhood.

I was really scared of heroin: it was a kind of spectre that roamed the city, night and day, made you listen to heavenly music but stabbed you in the back or slit your throat. At school they said that in Padua and Verona it was even worse, girls and boys getting high in the streets sitting on the pavements, not caring about the people passing by. Some of my classmates thought it was roughly the same as getting drunk and were curious about it, the way one gets curious about music one has never heard or food one has never tasted before, a book of poetry, a girl one has seen at an event. Even for a loser like me, it wouldn’t have been that difficult to get into that black hole, even if only to have a look: all you had to do was ask the guys stationed with their souped-up mopeds in front of the bar on the corner, and they would give you a sachet to try without asking for money. But all you had to do was look around and think: it would have been a hopeless adventure.

Gianfranco, the young priest who had recently arrived in our neighbourhood, had confronted the drug dealers head-on and put us on notice, and he worked hard all day every day to keep us away from the mud, the hospital, the carabinieri and the cemetery. I didn’t mind staying to listen to him from time to time, but I still tried to keep a safe distance: I had nothing to confess and repent of, and all those absurd stories about a god who is always watching and controlling us seemed just another way to get me to accept a life of submission and obedience as inevitable. It was unfair to call faith and gratitude what I thought was a collar and muzzle.

Of course I too would have loved to run away – who knows what I would have given to be able to one day climb over the ring road fence and hitchhike to who knows where, or to be able to catch a train to Berlin London Amsterdam and go fuck myself.

My parents were both in bad health and I was convinced they couldn’t make it without me, so I stayed home to keep an eye on them and assist them. I put a short leash on my dreams, gave my expectations a good shake, set my heartbeats at a low level, settled for grey and breathed it in. I appropriated that dark, dull grey until it became my favourite colour, almost as much as black.

Which then was not always grey because even here in Italy a great scene was slowly forming, let’s face it. Saturday afternoons were nice, you could see each other in the squares. It all started that time we met in front of the window of a record shop in the city centre to grab a few scraps of those new sounds coming out of records we could hardly buy. For a while we could, but one day our rebellious appearance stopped bringing folklore. Our colours and laughter began to annoy customers, people who bought disco stuff, or rock-with-balls and bad vinyl with the last gasps of old-fashioned prog. So, to restore decorum, the shopkeepers called in the traffic cops to help: they kicked us out for this – for being the way we are. And that was just the beginning: then it happened all over the place, vile little stories all the same. Stopped and taken to the police station for a check on any pretext – a strange inscription on a T-shirt, an unwelcome pin, for coloured and dishevelled hair, for a forbidden kiss.

Locked up for hours in the Carabinieri barracks under the miserable pretext of a check, for what turned out to be a homonymy, for an anonymous report that later turned out to be flimsy. Dragged into court as malefactors and forced to stand up to clear ourselves before a judge for having cyclostyled and circulated a naive and pacifist leaflet asking only for love. Squares manned and cameras at every corner to look down and spy on and record every movement and file it away, uprooted benches, nails driven into the steps so that no one can sit on them any more, neither our asses nor those of foreign tourists (let them go and spend precious money in cafés and restaurants) nor the skinny asses of the global south. Here we work: those who don’t have shit to do go and do it somewhere else. There is no place for you here.

Scattered piles and a few lone wolves, it happened one day that you caught a train at the drop of a hat and met somewhere for a rally, a concert, or a strike, to protest in the streets – to shout against everything, because when you’re twenty the word resignation doesn’t exist in your vocabulary. With the girls and boys who had come from the other cities, we exchanged a few jokes, shared a bit of food, and a little at a time told each other about ourselves and came to discover that for better or worse we all lived in shitty neighbourhoods and had been to shitty schools – and these are experiences that fortify and orientate thought in a certain way. I remember Patrizia from Verona who wanted to run away from home and her father’s drunken beatings, those two from Treviso who were always together as they called each other and who one day we found them placed upstairs in our own squat on Shakespeare Rd. in Brixton – how much we were laughing about weed in the midst of desperation and empty lager cans. And Paolo and Fabio graduated and unemployed and willing to go to London to be slaves in order to learn to speak English as school had not taught them, and the beautiful Laura with black eyes and curls from near Ferrara who from London poor thing never returned.

Behind the names of the groups and fanzines and collectives, there were all girls and boys roughly my age, also working in the cellars, on the radio, in the occupied rooms of the first small squats and in the self-managed and precarious spaces that were flourishing around the country.

A spring within which we were all different and yet looked alike, each with some secret knot inside our hearts that made us fragile, all in love and searching for a suitable soundtrack for the day.

Not all of us were able to play and sing, but it was no big deal: those who could not do it took pieces from other people’s records and cassettes, stitching them together into a patchwork that resembled them. Many of us did this – we gnawed, cut, tore, stole, took away, made it our own. We tried: sometimes we succeeded, sometimes we didn’t and got lost.

But of one thing I am sure. So many of the girls and boys of that time continue with that music in their hearts, music that still plays loudly: they make their children listen to it, trying to pass on, along with love, that part of themselves that protests, that cannot keep silent, that struggles, that has never resigned.

Making noise, singing, dancing, jumping, playing together was our way of saying no to everything and everyone and saying it loudly, to make ourselves heard and to let everyone know that other voices needed to be heard. To gather together, to shake hands, to embrace each other. Music as protest, yes, but also as sharing, as hope: so that another noise would resound all around, other than that of bombs, sirens, orders, screams, beatings and gunfire.

“…The police are the Klan, they are the mob. And you should choose sides. MDC is against police repression, against brutality. MDC is against the machismo and ignorance that encourages people to do a job by which they can legally stick it up the arse of the poor, minorities, women, homosexuals and use the law to trample on the dignity of others. The policemen are the German shepherds, the strong arm of the power brain, the strong arm of the major political and religious leaders who want to force us to accept their culture – nothing but a set of programmed behaviours, laws and rules to be respected. With repression, fear and the justice system they control society, they turn us into rats in a trap, fighting each other for a piece of cheese, while they stand outside watching us and sneering…’ (from a flyer distributed at concerts, early 1980s).

Ermanno and Gino of the Wops, then the first and only punk group in Venice, had bought some records that had just arrived in the shop in Campo San Barnaba from America, records that we friends borrowed, recorded on cassette and soon learnt by heart.

Among them is the eponymous first record by the Texans MDC, which gets into my head in a really strange way: from the first listen it lights me up and shows me the way like a comet. I think the same thing happened to Kurt Cobain, who one day shoved it into his personal top 50 – just as I did, I still keep it stable at the very top.

In the 1960s Jimi Hendrix had given sound to the Vietnam War and made it reverberate throughout the West. Ten years later, Patti Smith had managed to set small, homegrown fires of revolt that in the farthest provinces of the empire often turned into devastating fires. Today, the 1980s just beginning, the MDCs – Millions of Dead Cops – offer the sound of revolt in the streets. They scream about the suburbs and repression, the misery of the ghettos, the brutality of the beatings, the violence of confrontations with authority and the dead being killed for no particular reason – often just because of the colour of their skin, for not looking down, for speaking/shouting/asking for help in a mestizo language, for looking for something innocent in their pockets, for being confused just for a moment, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I get busy translating their texts, and I end up finding in them almost the same air that we here in Italy had breathed in our most agitated street demonstrations. From 1968 onwards, or rather from the post-war period onwards, in our country too many girls and boys have been murdered in the streets by the police and fascists – you think of this and immediately the suspicion sprouts in your head that peaceful protests, beat masses, songs sung all together holding hands and peace and love sit-ins are of little use, that flowers in the cannons are no longer enough. If that of the Crass was the perfect sound of our despair, that of the MDC was the perfect sound of our rage – and not the rage that goes away after a while, I mean the rage that sticks with you along with the marks of the batons and kicks. The one that makes you cry and takes root inside. The one that makes your face red and your heart black. The one you never forget. In some folds of the stanzas I find the sound of broken cobblestones, when not the physical sensation of the slingshot clutched in your hand, the hissing of the stone as it leaves and the marvellous sound of breaking glass.

My parents were poor, with my father’s meagre factory worker’s salary they could only afford to rent a hole in the wall in a suburban block of flats cheaply. On payday the rent was the first money put aside – a postal order to an address in Dorsoduro was punctually sent out. I had memorised it, so once I took the bus to Venice and went to see what was there. I was a curious kid, of course: we had never seen him. Who knows what the owner of our house looked like, who was also the owner of the houses where the families of many of my school and playmates lived.

I found a huge building a stone’s throw from Ca’ Foscari: no name on the front door, the shutters bolted, silence. It looked as if no one lived there, and maybe it really was – I thought we were sending our money to a dead man.

This one is dedicated to the landlord and, in my opinion, to all the landlords in the world, and is called ‘Greedy and pathetic’:

never tell the truth, so full of lies words so hollow,depth so shallow you lie to us from the 40th floordon’t even know us we’re desperate and sore you jackthe rent can’t save a cent money we’ve earned we alreadyspent sorry to say, we’re gonna blow you away carefulstarting your car today so greedy,so pathetic, you’re a liar a slumlord,a thief, you’re house is on fire we see you throughyour office walls and fancy chairs gonna watch youcrumble you better beware

MDC’s debut album was self-produced for R Radical Records in 1982. From Austin, the band moved to San Francisco, the master got his hands on Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, his then bandmates East Bay Ray and Klaus Fluoride made it sonically more polished and edible, and pressed it in Europe on Alternative Tentacles.

In America, Mr. Boss goes to great lengths to keep the record off the radio and out of the shops, just as on this side of the Atlantic they go to great lengths to keep it submerged and out of reach of the kids – in my opinion, it doesn’t sell for shit because, like Crass and Dead Kennedys records, it’s hard to find.

In the May 1983 issue of Rockgarage we publish translations of the lyrics of MDC and a few other American bands we like such as Bad Brains, Zero Boys and Toxic Reasons. It could just be a coincidence, but some record shops and bookshops that had shown no difficulty with previous issues now refuse to stock our fanzine because, they say, ‘it’s dangerous’ and ‘makes anarchist propaganda’ – with my comrades, we don’t know whether this makes us laugh more, make us sad or piss off. We choose to laugh and go on laughing on our way.

One day I find out from a friend who works in a travel agency that there is a plane ticket to America that someone had booked and then cancelled: she offers it to me at a really bargain price, so I work all summer and ask for a holiday in September to spend three weeks in New York City.

I didn’t sleep much, I hadn’t got used to jet lag and I didn’t want to waste precious time sleeping: in those intense, under-pressured days among many other people one afternoon I meet a close friend of Dave Dictor – the lead singer of MDC – on the street at a Youth International Party banquet.

He tells me extensively about him and the band, and passes me an interview he had done with him for Overthrow magazine, which he authorises me to translate – which I did, Rockerilla then published it in their November issue. I wrote to Dave and sent him a copy along with a couple of issues of our fanzine, he replied immediately and sent me a packet of flyers and records. In February 1984 MDC came to play in Italy for the first time: we met in Bologna, we recognised each other, we hugged.

This is ‘Dead cops’ – an indelible writing on the wall, done with blood with nails with Crisco’s fingernail polish with spit with fire:

Dead cops

Down on the street
Giving poor the heat
With their clubs and guns
Doin’ it all for fun

Dead Cops

Big bad and blue
They’re in the Klan too
Brutality is their sport
We’ll put ’em to the torch

Dead Cops

Rebel, rebel on the street
Makeup on my face
Stockings on my feet
All the straights asking me why
I’m not a normal American guy

What makes America so straight
and me so bent?

Call this the land of the free
Say its the home of the brave
You know they call me a queen
Just another human being

What makes America so straight
and me so bent?

Your authority and power
Has turned us sick and sour
And your justice is a lie
We’re gonna fight until you die

What makes America so straight
and me so bent?

Dead Cops

Watcha gonna do
The Mafia in blue
Huntin’ for queers
Niggers and you

Dead cops

Time for a switch
Army of the rich
Macho fuckin’ slaves
We’ll piss on your graves

As they say in certain buildings these days, the fun is over at some point. Shortly after their concerts, MDC were accused by some local punks of taking themselves too seriously, of exaggerating, of being too radical, too politicised – perhaps our reality seemed softer and quieter to them.

Some are impressed by the photos that the MDCs put on the covers of their records: evidence of massacres, torture, beatings, executions – perhaps they have already removed, along with the memory of the Resistance, that of all the victims of the kindness of the police and fascists. Others find them boring and repetitive – perhaps they no longer recognise themselves in the protest and are tired of it, preferring to listen to pop music to stop thinking. Others even find them too American, they feel they are foreign and distant, just as they find the Crass and other British anarchists too different and distant from how reasoning works here at home, and they take refuge in the soft and reassuring arms of the councils and political parties. The Crass break up and go on trial. The Dead Kennedys go on trial and disband.

Punk begins to stop being the sound of protest: now certain kick-ass electronic stuff and metal are pulling, soon it will be the turn of rap and hip hop to get the claws of the industry. All over the music papers, radio stations and fanzines it is being said that MDC’s second album is not as good as the previous one, it is just as aggressive but less brilliant, less interesting, less well played. They say the same and even worse than the next one. I myself, in A/Rivista Anarchica, write two lines mocking them a little.

But they hang in there and they don’t give a shit about anyone or even me, and they do well, they go through the eighties and nineties and two thousand, they continue to self-produce and they still play and shout around today. They have aged, yes, but they are far from pathetic: I see their songs all as eternally lit graveyard candles day and night, even in thunderstorms and hail. They serve to remember the victims of brutality. They serve as a reminder that Resistance should be written in capital letters and has no passport or borders, never grows old or goes out of fashion, never changes colour, never rusts, and has long roots that reach everywhere.

Marco Pandin
stella_nera@tin.it

Translated by Max

Support us:

We are a DIY project and you can support us, if you like, in the following ways:
– you can take a look at our catalog and order records, CDs, books, pins, and more;
– you can join our open call with a previously unpublished article.