It’s almost impossible to believe that the Dwarves began their perverted Punk march more than 20 years ago in a Chicago garage as a psychedelic Paisley Underground band called Suburban Nightmare. Within three years, the Dwarves true colors bled through like head trauma through cheap gauze with their glorious 1989 Punk debut for Sub Pop, Blood Guts & Pussy. The Dwarves’ tenure with Sub Pop was productive — Thank Heaven for Little Girls in 1991, Sugarfix in 1993 — but the label was incensed at a 1993 prank where the band announced that guitarist HeWhoMustNotBeNamed had been stabbed to death, and it consequently dropped the group from the roster.
The Dwarves regrouped in 1997 and signed with Epitaph for The Dwarves Are Young and Good Looking and 2000’s frenetic and oddly melodic The Dwarves Come Clean (which featured the song “River City Rapist,” which the band offered to George Bush’s presidential campaign strategists on the basis of its chorus, “I want to rape the U.S.A.”), and 2004 saw a new contract with Sympathy for the Record Industry and a new album, The Dwarves Must Die.
The band’s recent activities have been more visual in nature, with two DVDs, the live Fuck You Up and Get Live in 2004 and the live/video doc FEFU in 2006. In between, the Dwarves self-released Greedy Boot 1 exclusively through their Web site (www.thedwarves.com), and frontman Blag Dahlia has since written and published his second novel, Nina.
What can we expect of the Dwarves in 2008? HeWhoMustNotBeNamed will be naked, Dahlia will shriek, the band will be skull-shatteringly loud. And there will be blood. And probably guts and pussy to boot.
