The Dils

1977-1980

The Dils was the most politically charged band to emerge from San Diego County during the first wave of California punk. Brothers Tony and Chip Kinman, who hailed from Carlsbad, played a few local shows as the Negroes, then the Duds, before renaming themselves the Dils, a name which, according to Chip, "... does not mean anything. It's really nothing. That's why it's perfect."

The Dils were outspoken radicals who took their political sensibilities to their new home in San Francisco, where the Screamers, the Nuns and the Avengers had already begun to create a dynamic, thriving underground music scene. But where the city's other groups were largely rooted in the art school avant garde (not unlike much of the New York scene at the same time), the Dils' music was politically aware as was evident by the group's singles, "I Hate the Rich," "Class War" and "Red Rockers."

The Dils' sound was, like the early Clash, marked by a vocal urgency and a pronounced nervous energy. Like Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, the Kinman brothers were more musically sophisticated and ambitious than many of their fellow punks. This later earned them the sobriquet, "the punk Everly Brothers."

The Dils' best known pop culture moment came in the 1978 Cheech & Chong film, Up in Smoke, where the group perform "You're Not Blank" during a Battle of the Bands.

After the breakup of the Dils, the Kinman brothers went on to form Rank & File, an early 1980s cowpunk band with Alejandro Escovedo. In the 1990s they formed Cowboy Nation and had a one-album experimental project called Blackbird.

Although their post-Dils projects were met with derision from hardcore fans, critical reviews were favorable. Rank & File's first album, Sundown (1982), is now regarded as a pivotal album when punk paid homage to its ideological roots in country and folk music - a trend later explored by groups like the Knitters.