Funny you should put that Dictators album up there. Just this morning I was reading a Lester Bangs piece he wrote for NME in 1977 about the Clash, and he mentioned the Dictators.
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"I was thinking about giving up writing about music altogether last year when all of a sudden I started getting phone calls from all these slick magazine journalists who wanted to know about this new phenomenon called, "punk rock." I was a little bit confused at first because as far as I was concerned punk rock was something that first raised its grimy snout in 1966 in groups like the Seeds and the Count Five and was dead and buried after the Stooges broke up and the first Dictators album bombed.
I mean, it's easy to forget that just a little over a year ago there was only one thing: the first Ramones album.
But who could have predicted that that record would have such an impact..."
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Then it goes on for about 10,000 more words like most Lester Bangs stories or "reviews" (NME had to split the article over three issues it was so long).
I bought the Dictators albums, but I could never really latch on to them.
