D.O.A., MDC fight back in Bend

Published 12:00 am Thursday, November 15, 2018

In 2016, right before the U.S. presidential election, Canadian hardcore trio D.O.A. released the vinyl single “F—– Up Donald.”

At the time, frontman and sole original member Joe Keithley told GO! Magazine he hoped there would only be one pressing of the song, a re-imagining of the famously outspoken, progressive band’s ’80s classic “F—ed Up Ronnie” that redirects its vitriol from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. But then Trump won the election.

“It’s actually into the third pressing,” Keithley said from Vancouver, Canada. D.O.A.’s 40th anniversary tour, which has been going on-and-off all year, hits the Domino Room on Friday. “I hate to say it, but Donald Trump gave a lot of new life to punk rock. That was pretty interesting. I wish we hadn’t repressed (the single), but of course, we did; people wanted it.”

Keithley and the rest of the band, which since 2014 has featured drummer Paddy Duddy and bassist Mike Hodsall, have spent the last two years touring the world, including Europe and Asia last year and the U.S. and Canada this year. Between tours, the band released a new album, this year’s “Fight Back,” a collection that marries Keithley’s love of folk protest singers such as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie to the rapid-fire punk that ushered in the hardcore genre (alongside groups such as Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys) in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

Though the band hasn’t witnessed violence to the level of the Unite the Right rally in Virginia last year, it has seen plenty of social and political divisions on the road.

“I see changes, but I see — you see hope in there, too. It’s not all negative,” he added. “It’s like a pendulum; it goes to the right. Back in the ’80s, it was way to the right. … These things do swing back and forth, and people have just gotta batten down the hatches a little bit. The fortunate thing is that you and I both still live in democracies, and that’s a super important thing to protect.”

Keithley is doing that not just as a punk rocker, but as a public official. In October, he was elected to the city council in his hometown of Burnaby, British Columbia, running as a Burnaby Green Party candidate. This was Keithley’s sixth bid for office, including runs in 1996, 1997, 2001, 2013 and 2017.

“The big issue we fought on really was people were being ‘demovicted’ out of small, affordable apartments, like two- or three-story walk-ups,” Keithley said, “and they were being replaced by 50-, 60-, 70-story towers. We have more towers going up in Burnaby, which is a town of a quarter-million, than the rest of metro (Vancouver) put together, which is 2½ million. Our council had completely lost track of what was important; they were just collecting money and kicking people out of their homes. We knew that was wrong, and we knew that was the issue that people really cared about.”

During his 2013 run for office, Keithley pulled the plug on D.O.A. for a second time, having broken up the band in 1990. When he spoke to GO! Magazine, he was four days into his position as city councilor and looking forward to the first official council meeting Nov. 19. But D.O.A. will continue in some form beyond this 40th-anniversary tour, Keithley said.

“Music’s in my blood; I’ve been doing it all my life,” he said. “I wanted to be a drummer (when) I was 10 years old, and I saved up, bought a drum set, and it kind of all went from there. So, let’s say I’ve been playing music for 50 years in one way or the other, and I’ll just keep doing it until I can’t do it no more.”

Fellow hardcore founding father MDC, which originated in Texas before relocating to San Francisco in the ’80s, joins D.O.A. on its Pacific Northwest dates. The band, based in Portland since 2004, celebrates its 39th anniversary this year with two original members in its lineup: vocalist Dave Dictor and drummer Al Schvitz.

The two bands have a long-standing friendship with a shared history of political punk-rock rabble-rousing. While D.O.A. spearheaded Canadian hardcore, MDC — along with The Dicks and Big Boys — created the punk rock scene in Austin, Texas, in the late ’70s.

“It had a very great scene. I mean, of course, if you went five miles outside of Austin, Texas, city limits, you’d get your ass handed to you, and we almost did many times,” Dictor said from Portland.

Its confrontational songs were backed up by the band name, which originally stood for Millions of Dead Cops (the title of the band’s 1982 debut album, which was championed by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain). Since that release, Dictor and company have shifted the acronym almost every album and tour, including Multi-Death Corporation, Millions of Damn Christians, Metal Devil Cokes and, for the current tour, Millions of Deceived Citizens. (Dictor even used the acronym for his 2016 memoir, “Memoir from a Damaged Civilization: Stories of Punk, Fear, and Redemption.”)

“We were Millions of Dead Cops in ’81 and ’82, and it was unbelievable going through a border, unbelievable getting stopped by the police after a show,” Dictor said. “They threatened our lives; they made it so scary. We once weren’t allowed into England; we once weren’t allowed into Canada just based on the name of our band. So we started saying MDC, and then, we became the Multi-Death Corporation, which everyone seems to love. We get pulled over by a cop: ‘What does that MDC stand for?’ ‘Oh, Multi-Death Corporation.’ He goes, ‘Cool name.’”

Earlier this year, MDC embarked on a “punk the vote” tour, registering fans to vote across the country. The group also released the album “Mein Trumpf” last year, which featured an updated version of its song “Born to Die” and its fist-pumping chant: “No war, no KKK, no fascist U.S.A.,” but with “Trump” in place of “war.”

The slogan went mainstream in 2016 when Green Day incorporated the chant into its performance of its song “Bang Bang” at the American Music Awards.

“It’s pretty incredible, and there’s nothing like it for me,” Dictor said. “I saw on CNN, I saw this little African-American woman looking at these alt-right guys … going, ‘No Trump, no KKK, no fascist U.S.A.!’ I almost cried, just like, wow, my words. These words that we sang can give voice to an older woman in her late 80s standing off against these … creeps. I feel proud.”