DWARVES Singer BLAG DAHLIA Discusses His New Book, DVD And Upcoming Solo Album

Greg Prato interviewed DWARVES singer Blag Dahlia last week about several of Blag's current projects — including a book he wrote, a live DWARVES DVD that covers their entire career, and his next album. A few excerpts from the interview follow:

On recently completed video with Suicide Girls:

"We just made a video with the Suicide Girls, which they beat the shit out of us naked for an hour, so that was great. And I just wrote a book called 'Nina', which is a book about a naughty 15-year-old girl, and the things that she does."

On the new DWARVES DVD, "FEFU":

"There's three things out now — there's that 'FEFU' DVD, which has the Suicide Girls video, and also has like 20 years of violent DWARVES footage — insane shit. It's a really cool little product. The new DVD has years of insane DWARVES footage. It just came out on Tuesday. It's really cool because it has the 'FEFU' video, where the Suicide Girls are beating us up, and where I get to make out with a Dwarf chick and everything — it's just everything most videos are not. And then there's like 40 minutes behind the scenes with them, where you see these cute little naked girls scampering around and giggling. That's kind of wonderful. And then there's a whole hour of crazy-ass DWARVES footage, which starts in the mid-'80s — when we started — and goes on for like 20 years. A lot of people, when the first DVD came out ['Fuck You Up and Get Live'], they said, 'Where's all the violence? Where's all the insanity? This just looks like a regular show?' So I've got years of violence and insanity if you want that — me getting smashed in the face, me getting beaten with things. That whole thing that people like."

On his new book, "Nina":

"I wrote a book that came out, called 'Armed to the Teeth with Lipstick' around '98, and I wanted to write a more readable book that wasn't so sort of experimental. Some people complained that my first book didn't have enough sex in it — it was all this stream of consciousness weird stuff — and I said, 'O.K., I'm going to write a book that's all sex.' 'Cause I was married, and when you're married, you have to think about sex. So I wrote this book called 'Nina', and the idea is supposed to be kind of that she is this sort of amoral character. So she's 15 and all she cares about is fucking, and she has no real regard for other humans. It was kind of like writing my story, but through the eyes of a 15-year-old chick. Kind of turn the dynamic around, and it's written in a very spare, minimalistic style — I'm pretty proud of it. I guess you'd have to call it fiction, but it's just kind of based on girls that I knew in high school in the '80s — sort of pre-AIDS — that were sleazy and fun, and that I really loved and respected for their total lack or morality. I've been getting really good feedback from it. It came out through this press called Scapegoat, which is also reprinting Jim Goad's old 'Answer Me!' stuff. So that puts me in some nasty company."

On the band's last album, "The Dwarves Must Die":

"With the DWARVES, I hooked up after the whole Sub Pop era with Eric Valentine, who became a really big-time producer doing a lot of pop bands and stuff like that. The last DWARVES record we made, 'The Dwarves Must Die', we really were very proud of it, because it came out on an independent label on Sympathy, but it sort of had every genre. It had legitimate hip-hop songs, experimental songs, surf songs, songs that came from loops, noise shit, as well as the kind of usual pop-punk and all that stuff. The album, I'm very proud of. Basically, it was the usual thing — because it's the DWARVES and it came out on Sympathy and there wasn't a big publicity push, a lot of people have just ignored the DWARVES' music for years. This album is just the best-produced punk album of all-time. If you stick it in a CD player next to anything, it's just louder, bigger, heavier. Because it didn't have lots of hype behind it, it went largely ignored, so I'm always happy when people locate it and go, 'Oh shit, there's a lot of stuff here I wasn't expecting.'"

On his upcoming acoustic solo album:

"[I'm] not working on a new DWARVES record – 'Dwarves Must Die' took a lot out of me. I really kind of wanted to die after that one, so I'm making more a kind of an acoustic-y, comedy thing. I've been playing for many years with Nick Oliveri, from MONDO GENERATOR, and he and I just did a tour of England, which was almost like a comedy act. We were going around playing old DWARVES and MONDO songs, making fun of hecklers — doing like a weird, almost Vegas comedy act. Just playing acoustic guitars and being funny. It was a whole new thing. So I think I'm going to make a record of that kind of thing. I'm sure Nick will wind up on it, but there's a great guitar player — I don't know if you've heard of this band, PERSEPHONE'S BEES. There a really cool band from Oakland on Columbia — the guitar player in that band reminds me a lot of Brian May — got him playing guitar on there, and my friend Clint who is now playing with GNARLS BARKLEY. It's a big collection of people."

The above-mentioned book and DVD can be ordered through www.thedwarves.com.