As Dicks frontman Gary Floyd told Texas historian David Ensminger, early Austin punk “had nothing to do with the Sex Pistols or the Ramones. It had to do with your own personal life changing.” Meaning that as Floyd and Randy “Biscuit” Turner, respective frontmen for the genre’s two most prominent local bands, the Dicks and the Big Boys, realized personal and artistic growth, so evolved the native DIY scene. Small-town Texas gay men who’d been through the late-Sixties zeitgeist, Floyd’s communism roared through his bluesy bellow and Biscuit’s psychedelic art pranksterism drenched his band’s funk damage. Ensminger compiles interviews from his Left of the Dial fanzine and other publications, plus copious photos, lyrics, and Biscuit’s wonderfully idiosyncratic artwork into these two slender volumes. What emerges is bedrock Austin culture.

I Said That, Volume 1: The Dicks

by Gary Floyd; edited by David Ensminger
Left of the Dial Books, 92 pp., $10

Mutant Rocker: The Art of Randy “Biscuit” Turner, Volume 1

Edited by David Ensminger
Left of the Dial Books, 96 pp., $12

This article appears in December 15 • 2017.

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Tim Stegall contributed to The Austin Chronicle 1991-1995, and was a staff writer 1995-1997. He returned as a contributor in 2013. He has also freelanced for publications ranging from Flipside to Alternative Press to Guitar World. He plays punk rock guitar and sings in the Hormones.