Credit: Far Out / The Dwarves

Dwarves are living proof that, sometimes, you can fail so hard at everything you do, you eventually do a full 360 and end up being kind of inspiring.

After all, one of the Dwarves’ key inspirations is GG Allin, to the extent that the band visited the infamous punk rock fuckwit in prison before he died. Allin didn’t just literally throw his own shit at his fans, but metaphorically and musically too. Yet, his legacy is pretty enviable.

Formed in 1985 in Chicago, Illinois, right from the off, Dwarves were an exercise in bad taste. Everything about them is designed to shock. From the music that’s often as loud as it is short (and it’s very, very short), to their tendency to fight, fuck and take hard drugs on stage, to their lyrical content, everything is intended to be the very picture of punk provocation. Yet, unlike Allin, there’s one key difference separating Dwarves from the rest of the shock-rock pack.

The very last thing that Dwarves were meant to be was serious. Sure, the humour is near the knuckle, but whereas other bands were screeching about sexual assault and racism and trying (and mostly failing) to be taken seriously with it, Dwarves knew the whole thing was ridiculous and didn’t try to hide from it. If they could get a few column inches out of people being scandalised, then high fives all around, but otherwise, it was a lark.

I mean, come on, you don’t write a song called ‘Motherfucker’ with its title being completely (and disgustingly) literal, without mainly wanting to get a few puerile yuks out of other punks who never got past an eighth-grade sense of humour. Honestly? With the wordplay on offer there, it might just be the most sophisticated joke in their back catalogue, though the bar is set so low that the molten core of the earth melted it long ago.

Yet, despite all that, it’s difficult not to root for Dwarves.

So, how did Dwarves form?

In true comedy-punk fashion, the story of their formation sounds like I’m talking about queens rejected from Dragula.

However, these really are people who decided as a teenager that they were going to be called things like “Dutch Ovens” and “Gregory Pecker” and stuck with it well into adulthood, and there’s something to admire about that. Probably not respect, but one of the two ain’t bad. With that in mind, the story of Dwarves begins with their singer, Blag Dahlia. Would you believe it, that’s not his real name.

Born Paul Cafaro, he formed the first incarnation of Dwarves while still in high school (and in some ways, never left) and soon after, met the guitarist who would become his right-hand man. Hewhocannotbenamed (yup) would become the band’s mascot, known for his onstage outfit of a luchador mask and a jockstrap. Oftentimes, the jock strap is optional. The guitarist has often been the butt of Dwarves’ twisted sense of humour, such as in 1993 when the band put out a press release saying that he’d been stabbed to death in Philadelphia.

He hadn’t, he was fine, but their label didn’t see the funny side. They dropped them like a bad habit. However, no record label could ever end Dwarves. In fact, it’s probably going to take an intervention on the level of the one that the band joked about to bring them down. This is a band that has reached a level of cult stardom that anyone taking their music seriously could never dream of. After all, this is a band that has sung about every nasty and disgusting thing you can possibly think of without a care in the world.

Yet Blag Dahlia has also appeared singing one of his songs on SpongeBob SquarePants. Fittingly for a band that proudly says they’re “teaching kids to worship Satan”, all hail Dwarves!