Beginning their career as a Midwestern
garage band,
the Dwarves made an abrupt change once they moved to San Francisco, maintaining their recklessness, but getting faster and faster.
Free Cocaine traces the arc of that development, collecting singles, demo tracks, and other sessions from that time period, beginning with the
Lucifer's Crank EP, and progressing onward. Most early tracks betray tremendous musical inadequacies -- at this point,
the Dwarves were hardly the polished pop-punkers they would become by the time they signed to
Epitaph. Nonetheless, even this raw material has plenty of catchiness, playing ability issues aside. The album also collects compilation cuts like
"Lesbian Nun" from the
Amrep compilation
Dope, Guns, and Fucking in the Streets and singles all the way up through the late '90s on
Man's Ruin. Though known primarily for their hard-living, and reckless violence at shows, with most sets clocking in under 20 minutes,
the Dwarves, at this juncture, were the best in the
underground rock world at what they did: cooking up fast-as-hell, catchy, raunchy
hardcore punk. ~ Patrick Kennedy
