The Dickies frontman splits punk community with misogynistic onstage rant
Formed in the San Fernando Valley in 1977, The Dickies come from a school of punk rock whose guiding principle is to offend hippies and squares alike. Their music is your standard Ramones-style pop-punk buzz, leaving it to frontman Leonard Grave Phillips to make the band stand out. He does so with over-the-top crude, juvenile humor—the man performs with a penis puppet, for Christ’s sake—a shtick that’s been successful enough to keep the band going for the past 40 years.
That’s basically all the background you need for a story that ran in LA Weekly and about a million other outlets this week about a recent onstage in which Phillips went off on a woman from the feminist advocacy group Safer Scenes who was touring with the festival at a Warped Tour date in Denver. The woman, who was reportedly offended by Phillips’ onstage banter during earlier stops on the tour, stood in the crowd during The Dickies’ set holding a sign that said, “Teen girls deserve respect, not gross jokes from disgusting old men! Punk shouldn’t be predatory!”
And because Phillips can dish it out, but he can’t take it, he responded with a string of misogynistic obscenities that began with him yelling, “I’ve fucked farm animals that were prettier than you, you fucking hog!” Here’s the video, complete with fans in the crowd cheering Phillips on: