Gary Floyd, the multiformat artist who helped define the Austin punk scene as the outspoken frontman of rowdy punks the Dicks, has died at 71. He was taken off life support after a stay in the hospital with congestive heart failure.⠀
⠀
Floyd grew up in Palestine, Texas and spent two years in Houston – where Floyd, a conscientious objector, worked as a janitor at a state hospital in order to avoid the draft – before he moved to Austin in 1974. By 1980, he, bassist Buxf Parrott, drummer Pat Deason, and guitarist Glen Taylor had formed the Dicks.⠀
⠀
Perusing the titles on definitive compilation album Dicks 1980-1986 – “Anti-Klan (Part 1), “No Nazi’s Friend,” “No Fuckin’ War,” “I Hope You Get Drafted” – you get a sense of the band’s Reagan-era politics. Most aggressively upfront was Floyd himself, a fat, openly gay man who often wore drag while performing to Eighties Texas crowds. “Dicks Hate the Police,” a brutality satire often covered by Mudhoney back in the day, might be the band’s calling card, but “Saturday Night at the Bookstore,” an atonal tale of gloryholes and self-hating closeted men, best depicts Floyd’s blunt style.⠀
⠀
Floyd moved to San Francisco in 1982 and, after the Dicks disbanded in 1986, led a number of other projects. More than a screamer, the vocalist showed off his singing chops in alternative blues ensemble Sister Double Happiness, which toured with Nirvana and Soundgarden in the Year Punk Broke. Aughts band Black Kali Ma followed, blending the styles of his previous projects.⠀
⠀
Outside of music, Floyd wrote books – including the 2014 mini-autobiography Please Bee Nice: My Life up ’til Now and 2017 Dicks lyric book I Said That – and made visual art. In 2022, he debuted his last Austin art show, Maybe We’ll See Butterflies, at Prizer Arts & Letters. Issues with diabetes and congenital heart failure, plus a fall the artist suffered during the pandemic, kept Floyd from returning to Austin for the opening.
