Dave Dictor, frontman of Millions Of Dead Cops (M.D.C.) has written an autobiography of his life titled "Memoirs From A Damaged Civilization".

Apparently the book is completed and undergoing editing. No word on a release date as of yet.

So what can you expect, you ask? Well stories like this...

"Oh John Wayne, John Wayne
June 11th 1979 I find myself daydreaming in bed about the college graduation, I'm not going but I'm curious. I don't rent a gown. No one I know is coming to see me. I don't even know anyone graduating either. But I go to the student union to sign up and pay to get my diploma in the mail. That is done and I'm just taking in the sights of all the students in there gowns. Thousands of conversations all at once and then a news announcement comes across the large full screen. "Last night John Wayne died of cancer' and the voice trails off. All of a sudden it quiets up fast. My mind quickly flashes on John Wayne, the movie character, His speeches and his bravado. Then I think of John Wayne the "John Bircher". His white man's burden view of Native Americans and African Americans. Yuck I think. I am there just taking it in and Franko appeared. We both were surrounded by dozens and dozens (hundreds) of young white Texans graduating and then all at once it was a roomful of sobbing students. Franco and I couldn't quite believe what we were witnessing. Franco and I lipped softly together at the same time. "John Wayne Was A Nazi". We both started laughing and said it over and over louder and louder. We walked to my house and wrote the song together. It rolled right off our lips."

"My Family Is A Little Weird
My first years on this planet, it seemed to me, I was very on my own. My blood father was off some where and my mother was working a lot and I was dropped here and there quite often with various people. I do remember my grandmother had a friend who had a granddaughter nicknamed Tutti Fruiti. Tutti and I were mesmerized by each other and we were left alone a lot and my first and only games of doctor were played together, we held hands and we were digging each other quite a bit. As well, I lived in an apartment building and a mysterious tall black haired woman lived upstairs from us and when she went by I got plain ol' excited and those were my first erections in my life. I didn't understand it and certainly couldn't control it but there it was... I was having inappropriate sexual feelings at the tender age of five.

As a kid I went to two very small Catholic schools. One was Presentation Boys School and the other was St. Boniface. Probably cause I needed something to believe in. I really bought into it all. I tried to become an altar boy year after year. You would have to memorize long psalms and I kept getting rejected. I went to Catholic school camps in the summer and I thought everyone in the world was Catholic. At age 7, President John Kennedy was shot. I could feel that more than something terrible had happened. But that something truly sinister was going on behind the curtains. Still I prayed in true earnest hoping for some answers. I didn't get them. I was a disillusioned nine year old and already a recovering Catholic. A few years later Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were also murdered. By then I was flat out cynical tween.

When I turned eleven we moved and I went to public school and the kids were very socially advanced compared to me. The Jewish kids were dating already. I remember being told by my classmates in no uncertain terms that there was no Santa Claus. It was a big school and I was a bit lost from growing up in Sea Cliff but my mom married my Uncle Joe and we moved to Glen Cove on Long Island. Eventually I made friends, made my way around. So by the time I was 16 I had become a pretty radicalized high school student. My whole high school walked out of school after Kent State over the protesters being killed. With the Vietnam war going in the background and all the protests with Richard Nixon as president. It was not that hard to be an anti-system teen. I remember watching John Wayne on television in Cambridge standing on a tank suggesting we should turn the tanks on the protesters. I was brought up on John Wayne movies. All of a sudden he made me sick to my stomach. I realized a lot of the propaganda we were fed was just that, propaganda.

Along the way I picked up a fetish for women's undergarments. Shoot I'd get raging erections just thinking about them ( doesn't everybody). There was no one to share this with and I thought I was the only one that felt this way. I was still attracted to females and I still am. Though a lot of folks even now think that if you wear woman's clothes you must be gay. Trans issues maybe but in my case not really homoerotic gay but I never denied it. By the time I was out and about playing international hardcore, I lot of hardcore bands didn't understand being different. American Hardcore seemed to need a gay person to represent and I silently went along giving ambiguous answers. Typical questions=, “are you gay” My reply, “ doesn't everyone have some gay feelings now and then. Our song, “My Family Is A Little Weird” was written at a pretty young age. Years before punk. My family was a metaphor for me. I was a little weird.

So by the time I was 13, when people offered me my first joint, I took it and I inhaled. I felt “what the fuck”. I wanted to “Kiss The Sky” as Jimi Hendrix sang. Soon I was drinking, trying acid, quaaludes, black beauties meanwhile getting picked on by upperclassmen jocks. I mentioned this before. They really felt the need to enforce a sexuality no free zone. Still, I chatted up the upper class cheerleaders and those humorless upper class jocks ... they no liked. My best friend Mark's younger sister who I adored answered a wrong call and flirted with the guy and invited the him over. He brought a pound of pot, orange sunshine, and just about everything else under the sun in the drug world and fronted it all to us.. At 14 we were dealing to students much older than us. We were holding the bag and on top of that my friend's mother didn't have a true sense of right and wrong so she was in on it. She drove us to our drug deals, took us on vacations that was made with drug money. We went to Disney World, Hershey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and everywhere else we wanted to go. Somewhere a long the way my friend's sister took me to bed and when I admitted I'd like to wear a pair of her panties she enthusiastically obliged. It was a nice way to lose my virginity. Thank you very much Patty. Just remember, “everyone has got something to hide except for me and my monkey”.

Music to a lot us then and now was our soundtrack and a very big part of our lives. My mom bought me my first Beatles record at age seven. She Loves You and I Wanna Hold Your Hand. It was great that every year the Beatles released another record that seemed to get better and better every year. I have had younger band members through the years try to tell me Metallica was greater than the Beatles. Not in my book. Anyway I remember my 45rpm collection meant everything. AM radio was king growing up and there was a lot of great music in there. The dream of being a musical artist was ever present on my mind. Then my mom brought home a guitar and suggested I write and play my own songs. Well thank you very much mom. I was not alone and my circle of friends all started picking up instruments. This was still years before punk rock. After high school after a few semesters of college we all packed our instruments to live in the Rocky Mountains. That lasted till the snow started to fall.

I skipped ahead here, so let me digress. I did some college and that is where I met my future drummer Al Schultz, at the staid, conservative University of Tampa in Florida.. We were both New Yorkers, both liked recreational drugs and he had a near encyclopedic mind when it came to all things musical. He also played a Gene Krupp inspired style of drums except as a lefty. His paradisaical drum strokes even then went from upside down to inside out and were way rocking and unique. At school that year a friend of ours named Tate Bryant broke into a drug store and stole a minor amount of pharmaceuticals on the way out the door, police ordered him to stop. He kept going and was shot in the back dead. He died for a few vials of drugs. It reenforced my distrust of law enforcement, as I realized that the police can and will shoot you dead for a minor crime. This definitely played into the naming of our band seven years later..

After all that in Tampa, I went back north and read how Boston University had great Creative Writing courses. I got excepted and with my parent's help, off to Boston I went. In the courses I took for the first time, people were positive toward my writings. It made me feel good. I found myself throwing myself into my songwriting. People still weren't going crazy for my singing voice but I was gaining confidence I could write. I went home to Glen Cove and hooked up with my friend and guitar mentor Jimmie Brighton and went west with another friend and banjo picker Steve Loskot. We played day and night living in a cabin in West Yellowstone, Montana. Writing songs and playing just for ourselves and trying to get better. Summer came and went and my friends headed home but I wasn't ready for that and slowly drifted south looking for somewhere and something in my Volkswagen Bus.
I arrived eventually in Austin. With my dear friend Mark Dubicki. I was walking around with my acoustic guitar playing songs to anyone that would listen. I was positive Willie Nelson or Jerry Jeff Walker was gonna walk by and hear me and wanna play my songs. That I'd be riding around in the back of Willie's tour bus, rolling joints and writing songs the rest of my life. And was hoping as well amazon hippie women would want to sit on my nose while I wore their panties. Well that didn't happen but soon new music was happening anew and I was excited by it all. Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, The Sex Pistols. The Ramones, The Runaways, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Devo and so many more. Wow, fairly simple and great new music that's goal wasn't to become Stadium Rock.

So here I am in Austin. This stoner boy with gender issues. “Fast Times At Ridgemont High” meets “Animal House” while looking to take a that “Walk On The Wild Side”. I started to take some courses at University Of Texas and across from the school was a little Chicano Club named Raul's. Monday nights was open mic night and when I was walking home from my night astronomy class I found it complete with punks hanging on the sidewalk. Soon I was coming to all the Monday open mike nights. Meeting people and singing our songs on the sidewalk to anyone that would listen. People started complementing me, voice and all.

Soon I was showing up on the weekends and started seeing local new wave and punk bands. The Huns with their singer, Phil Tolstead had the famous incident where he was arrested off the stage and attempted to kiss the cop in handcuffs. His famous song was “Eat, Scum Death”. He earned his picture in Rolling Stone magazine and put Austin punk firmly on the map. Then I picked up Gary Floyd while he was hitchhiking and later spotted him selling snacks off a cart on campus. Soon I was skipping classes just to chat him up. Gary was such a unique individual. Who new how to protect himself. And to give as well as he took. One day a sorority girl (think of one of the Bush daughters) walked by, saw us and rolled her eyes and tilted her head so she didn't have to look at us. Gary let out, “girls like you make me queer” and she let out a yelp and scurried away. Gary was able to create his version of the universe so strongly and with so much conviction that it was just so great just to hang around him. His truth to power, scared the dickens out of these over privileged Texan youth. He was very very inspiring and he truly changed the trajectory of my life. I met Ron Posner through friends and we both wanted to start a band . He as well as I, had a real political bent and that was exactly what I was looking for. Soon a partnership was sealed. Ron was a real musician and that was pretty cool. All of a sudden my songs were sounding pretty good. The nucleus of what was to become the Stains and eventually MDC was formed. We were on our way.