NEWSLETTER

BY SAM MCPHEETERS

Doc Dart performing with the Crucifucks, Baltimore, 1986. Photos by Billy Whitfield

On a Wednesday afternoon in February 2007, I shared a booth with a man named 26 inside the Travelers Club International Restaurant & Tuba Museum in Okemos, Michigan. We’d picked a spot far enough from the door to give us some respite from the winter blast, and dozens of African masks and beautiful battered tubas lined the walls above us. Police reports have listed 26 as 5' 7" with a “thin” build. In person, it was a little hard to tell how thin he was. He wore a blue crocheted sweater, fraying and loose, and an oversize baseball cap with the logo of the Weather Channel covered his scraggly hair, which was wild and wiry but not yet gray. He wore large rings on almost every finger and projected an amiable fragility.

The waitress seemed surprised and delighted to see him. “Oh, you have some new music since Patricia?” she asked in a Russian accent, referring to the solo album he named after the therapist he used to see in the 1990s, back when he was a regular at the restaurant.

“I’ve had a couple of records since Patricia,” he said. “And I put one out just a few years ago under the name 26.” She nodded, perhaps thinking he meant this as a band name, not his own. “Before that, I was in another band, with a bad word in the name.” She smiled again. Earlier in our conversation, he’d winced repeating this bad word—26 no longer swears—and he seemed slightly relieved that she didn’t force the subject.

Stereo speakers played NPR in the background, and when an update came on from the Lewis Libby trial, 26 quickly plugged his ears. Since March 20, 2004, he has refused all news of the outside world. “Technically, I don’t even know who the president is,” he said gleefully after the story was over. “I told one of my tenants not to tell me about anything in the news. Then he told me about this president that had died recently. I specifically told him not to tell me the news. He said, ‘Oh, I thought it was OK if someone was dead.’ I had a lot of problems with this tenant.”

Thinking the president he was referring to was Gerald Ford, I mentioned that I would be taking a trip to the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Grand Rapids later in the week. “No, it was the other president,” he explained with a slight irritation, meaning Ronald Reagan, who’d passed away three years earlier. Our waitress’s shift ended not long after we arrived, and she made him promise to bring her one of his newer CDs. On the other end of the restaurant, a large black woman barreled in and screamed, “Where’s my fucking money?!” as she disappeared behind the counter.

“Oh,” 26 murmured, rising from our table. “There’s that word again.”

Doc Dart performing with the Crucifucks, Baltimore, 1986. Photos by Billy Whitfield

26, 54, was born Doc Corbin Dart outside Mason, Michigan, and has lived in the greater Lansing area all his life. His former first name is not short for anything, having been inherited from his grandfather Doc Campbell Dart, who was himself named after a local Dr. Campbell. His great-grandfather Rollin C. Dart founded the Dart National Bank, and his great-uncle Bill founded Dart Container, the world’s largest manufacturer of Styrofoam cups.

Most people who know of Doc Dart do not know that he was well into adulthood before gaining notoriety. He started work at the Dart National Bank while still a teenager, beginning at the lowest position, collections, but on track to eventually become the family’s fourth generation of bank president. In 1980, he returned to Michigan State University for his bachelor’s in anthropology, married his girlfriend, Angie, two years later, and became a father the year after that.

His first passion was music. Doc turned 11 the year the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show and the band made a huge impact on him. From adolescence on, WABX and WKNR in Detroit served as slender lifelines (sometimes smothered by the signal strength of a local country station) to tectonic shifts in American culture. For young Doc, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix had equal weight with the images of the antiwar movement he saw on TV, and the points where the war intersected his own life. Eighteen in 1971, he was issued a card for the last Vietnam draft lottery.

In the early 1970s, he played keyboard for local bands Kilgore Trout and Swell (to be said with a manic smile: “We’re Swell!”). He bought records voraciously in East Lansing and had a huge collection by the mid-1970s. But by that time, he’d also come to feel that his favorite bands had run out of steam, addled by drugs and withering under the malaise of the Me Decade. When Doc first heard the Sex Pistols in late 1977, he found a great continuity with the ferocity of his favorite 60s bands. More of this energy arrived in a deluge of new music: Talking Heads, Buzzcocks, the Stranglers, the Ramones, and especially Devo all had a huge impact on Dart. He’d felt for years that the United States had gotten too apolitical after Vietnam, and the confrontational politics of punk rock invigorated him.

A new subculture had bloomed in late-70s America that seemed to finally capture Doc’s mood: a faster, more aggressive strain of punk rock calling itself “hardcore.” Although its brightest stars hailed from the coasts, the Midwest produced its share of luminaries, covering a wide slice of the genre’s diversity: teenage skaters the Necros hailed from small-town Maumee, the ferocious Negative Approach came from Detroit, Lansing had the sadistic pranksters the Meatmen. When the pioneering Los Angeles hardcore band Black Flag came through central Michigan in 1980, they played Club Doobie in Haslett, near Lake Lansing. It was here that Doc met Steve Shelley (later of Sonic Youth) and Scott Begerston, both members of a Joy Division tribute band Doc was fond of. Dart introduced Steve and Scott to his cousin Joe in 1981, with the idea of forming a band in which he could finally uncork his id. True to this concept, the new group called itself the Crucifucks.

Doc Dart was 28 when the band started playing shows but refers to himself during this period as a toddler. As a child, he’d been called Little Doc, to distinguish himself from his grandfather, and this nickname now became his alter ego. When Little Doc performed live he would frequently cut himself with razors or broken glass. Alcohol was often involved, and he did even more damage to himself diving off tall objects into the crowd. Because of their name, the band found themselves locked out of most venues. They played Lansing as the Scribbles (named for Doc’s old dog), and on the road would find themselves billed as Crucifex, or Cruise Effects, or the Christmas Folks.

Doc Dart performing with the Crucifucks, Baltimore, 1986. Photos by Billy Whitfield

In April 1982, the Crucifucks were slated to play with the Meatmen at Bunch’s Continental Cafe in East Lansing. Passing out flyers before the show, Dart continued off the sidewalk and into a restaurant, handing more flyers to bewildered diners as he walked through the building and out the restaurant’s back door, where he was greeted by a police officer. The band didn’t get to play that night, but Doc’s mug shot became moderately iconic in the scene. That summer, the Meatmen got the Crucifucks on a much larger bill in Pontiac, Michigan, just outside Detroit, with San Francisco’s prestigious Dead Kennedys headlining. The Dead Kennedys had been a band for four years at this point and were bona fide celebrities in punk circles. They were also very similar to Doc’s band in style, temperament, and confrontational theatrics.

Jello Biafra, the lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, recalled this set: “Here was this singer with a really high voice and Lyndon Johnson ears and a great big grin tormenting every single person in the room. I mean, not all of Negative Approach and Necros fans were real bright. And the singer of this band had bored in on that and was just finding ways to needle them over and over and over again to the point where they were swinging at him or taking shots at him and yelling ‘Get off the stage!’ and then he’d just leap on top of them! And somehow they’d miss and he’d get back onstage and annoy them some more.” When he came through Michigan the next year, Jello brought the Crucifucks along to Cleveland, where he invited the band to release a record on his label, Alternative Tentacles.

Without this intervention, the Crucifucks would probably have puttered along as a local band for a few years and then disbanded. Instead, their 1984 debut album is a pinnacle of outraged and outrageous glee, a record that can be best described as unreasonable. The album’s notoriety belongs to its vocalist. Doc’s voice is so far beyond the pale of normal performance that it defies comparison. He squeals through several words at once, dripping with derision, at times channeling the quavering drama that Jello brought to his songs, at other points sounding like Roger Rabbit. In “You Give Me the Creeps,” Doc bleats, “Give me your money! I don’t have to make it!” In “Hinckley Had a Vision,” he bawls, “I wanna take the president”—here the band drops out and he continues a cappella—“chop off his head, and mail it to them in a garbage baaaaaaaaaag!” This last word is as stretched out as the squall of a child having a meltdown in a toy store (perhaps because this act was expressed as desire, not an intent, Doc never received Secret Service attention). I asked Biafra, a formidable record collector, whether he’d ever encountered any vocalist who sounded quite like Doc. He said he hadn’t.

By the mid-80s, the group had the dubious distinction of being one of the most extreme bands in a musical scene that was already pretty extreme to begin with. The punk subculture, having loudly dispensed with most hippie artifacts, retained the word “pig” to describe police, and in the early hardcore scene being anticop was one of the few issues everyone could agree on. Almost every band reflected this sentiment in their lyrics, from Black Flag (apolitical) to the Dead Kennedys (wildly political) to the Bad Brains (Rastafarian). But there was a distinct line between opposing police brutality and calling for the actual death of police officers, and Doc Dart was further past this line than any of his contemporaries. In 1992, rapper Ice-T caused a national controversy with his song “Cop Killer.” Only obscurity saved Doc’s own “Cops for Fertilizer” from wider scrutiny.

The second time the Dead Kennedys came through Lansing, the Crucifucks again opened. “Much to my own shock, the audience loved the Crucifucks,” Biafra recalled. “And this was a real shock to Doc. He wasn’t quite sure what to do. So finally he said something at the end about ‘the pointless spectacle that the hardcore scene is today.’ And then of course the whole audience turned on him and began booing and throwing things and Doc was grinning ear to ear. He had to find a way to get at them, and he did.”


26 lives in a suburban neighborhood of comfortable two-story houses and the occasional barn. The nearby streets are lined with well-shoveled driveways and a good selection of American flags—both the traditional house-mounted kind and the smaller yard flags that, in the president’s second term, generally indicate support for Bush and/or the wars—as well as a smattering of peace signs. An anarchy symbol has been badly spray-painted on the back of a traffic sign one block away.

His home was easy to find. Set back from the sidewalk, eight huge sheets of bright blue plywood had been nailed over the windows of the house. Hurled eggs had washed off with time, but there were still plenty of visible white streaks from dozens of paintballs shot at the property. Two large sheets of tarpaper covered several messages that had been painted near the front door. From the outside, the building looked abandoned.

Inside, a bright light shone upward on a floating staircase, spotlighting long, two-story front windows and the unpainted plywood underneath. In the living room, we had to step around a half-dozen 50-pound bags of bird and animal feed neatly arranged by the sliding glass doors leading to the backyard. Maps of Africa, India, and Lake Superior had been carefully placed around the room, and a poster of Princess Diana hung on the wall near the kitchen. The space seemed unused, but not dirty, the living-room parlor reserved for the rare visitor. The scent of incense was so thick that my jacket still smelled of our conversation hours after I’d left.

The layout of the backyard didn’t quite conform to what I’d already seen online, but when I described peering down at the property a week earlier using Google Earth, I realized this may have been a violation of his news blackout. The rule was hard to abide by, partially because I constantly found myself tempted to test him. Driving through Okemos earlier in the day, we’d passed a flag lowered to half-mast and I’d asked whether he ever felt curious about what was going on in the world, prompting this strange exchange:


“I assume Cheney is president now.”

“Well, I’m not going to tell you.”

“Good.”


In his living room, I produced an iPod to record our conversation. When I mentioned that it could hold hundreds of hours of interviews, he seemed incredulous.

26 frequently refers to himself as “a weirdo,” and things he does not like (the first Crucifucks record, Rush Limbaugh, Buddhism) as “abominations.” His conversation is sprinkled with Midwesternisms: “aw jeez,” “gee whiz,” “oh gosh,” and the occasional flat “yah” I had previously associated with Minnesotans. When he offered me “some pop”—he keeps a refrigerator stocked with Faygo and little else—it took a moment to realize he didn’t mean a joint (a grave mistake with the rabidly antipot 26).

When I tried to unearth the root of his antipolice attitudes, I was surprised to hear there had been no one defining incident in his history with the law. His first arrest in 1971 came as the result of social experimentation. “I didn’t feel like I had a lot to be afraid of, but at the same time I was confused about the whole thing about rights,” he told me. “And it was my understanding that you could say anything you wanted to say. I thought, ‘I can say anything I want to say! And I can say it to the police! And I’m going to! So there!’ And I wanted to see how that played out. I’d assumed that would play out fine in real life.” He laughed. “But that’s not the way life works.”

Two more arrests came in the early 70s, one after he’d insulted an officer during a friend’s arrest. In court he’d acted as his own attorney. “I was completely convinced that police officers lied under oath all the time. And now I can only point to my own experience in that regard. I can’t assume that anymore. My experience was all bad, all bad, but there could be a lot of reasons for that. I was just so saturated with hate. For police. It was glimmering all over me. And they pick up on it right away. I couldn’t have pretended I liked them. It was just a given that if I was anywhere around a police officer,” he snapped his fingers, “they were going to pick up on that hate and they were going to take me in.”

His four-and-a-half-year career at Dart National Bank during this period only hardened his radical bent. Rising through the ranks, he found his politics veering further and further left, even as he had to deal with the resentment of coworkers for the seeming nepotism of his ascent. “I looked like an ass wipe,” 26 told me. “I had a beard and long hair. And I was depressed. I had no business being in a bank to begin with.” Doc had been in charge of raising the American flag in front of the bank every morning and used to cross the lobby dragging it behind him on the floor. A long-standing dispute over his hair length spurred the final confrontation in 1976. The following year the bank denied him unemployment benefits and he went to court against his father.

By the 1980s, Doc was a known quantity to the Lansing police, especially after he started publishing the Lansing Police State Journal, a small fanzine filled with articles and photos relating to slain police officers. In the spring of 1985, Doc held an “Ozzy party” and for some reason a local band asked to play his porch. This was in a residential area, after midnight, and a severe departure from the party’s theme (to play every record Ozzy Osbourne appeared on), but Doc agreed because he thought the authorities would give him one customary warning. Instead, a phalanx of squad cars converged on the house and police started arresting people. Doc ran back into his house, grabbed a beer and—in what he concedes was not a masterstroke—exited through the back door and returned to the lawn to watch the mayhem. Two policemen subdued him, beat him, and dramatically snapped his pinkie in front of horrified onlookers. He was charged with assaulting a police officer and lost the case to a judge he recognized as a friend of his father’s.

After his final arrest (for resisting arrest) in 1987, he was given two consecutive 20-day sentences. His uncle Steve Dart, a prominent local attorney, arranged to have Doc released with a $1,000 fine and a promise to seek psychological counseling. His wife had earlier threatened to leave him if he ever got arrested again, and she made good on this threat after his arraignment, taking their four-year old son, Evan, and three-year old daughter, Sarah. After his family left, Doc found himself alone in a messy house, drifting toward rock bottom, emerging for occasional beer runs wearing nothing but an oversize tie-dyed shirt.


CONTINUED
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