Citizen Dick Featuring Members of Pearl Jam to Release Debut

citizen-dick

After well over two decades the fictional band portrayed in the movie ‘Singles’ is finally releasing their tongue in cheek single “Touch Me I’m Dick”. Of course the song is a play on words mimicking the Mudhoney tune with one different letter and the band is Citizen Dick.

In case you’ve forgotten or never knew in the first place, Citizen Dick, was a fictional grunge band featured in the Cameron Crowe 1992 film Singles about  our local music scene. Now the band is getting a 7-inch release for Record Store Day 2015. The vinyl will feature “Touch Me I’m Dick”, on Side A, and Side B will be a humorous explanation of the meaning of the song. “My name is Dick, and, you know, you can touch me, but, I think, you know, it can be seen either way.” – Cliff Poncier – Citizen Dick

Pearl Jam collectors are going to be in seventh heaven on Saturday, April 18 when this year’s annual Record Store Day officially kicks off. Citizen Dick featured members of Pearl Jam while they were still doing business as Mookie Blaylock and there is plenty of nostalgia surrounding this release.

The film itself included cameos from a lot of the key bands from the Seattle music scene of the time, such as Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and grunge favorite Tad Doyle (lead vocalist of the Seattle bands Tad and Hog Molly). Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, and Eddie Vedder, all members of Pearl Jam, have small parts as members of Matt Dillon’s character Cliff Poncier’s fictional band Citizen Dick. Their parts were filmed when Pearl Jam was known as Mookie Blaylock. Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell has a cameo as the guy who comes out to listen to a car radio. He also appears in a later scene with his band Soundgarden performing the song “Birth Ritual”. The members of Alice in Chains also appear in the film as a bar band, playing the songs “It Ain’t Like That” and “Would?”.

The film was shot at a number of familiar locations around Seattle, and includes scenes from Gas Works Park, Capitol Hill, Pike Place Market and  Jimi Hendrix‘s grave  in Renton.  The now closed OK Hotel was of course the central coffee shop featured in the film.  Additional concert footage was shot in the now defunct  and quite legendary RKCNDY bar. RIP RKCNDY

Pearl Jam‘s Jeff Ament  was not only in the movie and the band but he played a couple of key roles behind the scenes. Most of Matt Dillon’s wardrobe in the movie actually came from Ament and during the making of the film he produced a list of song titles for the fictional band, Citizen Dick. Chris Cornell took it as a challenge to write songs for the film using those titles, and “Spoonman”, which would later become a monster hit for Soundgarden was one of them.  In fact, an early acoustic version of the song was created and can be heard playing in the background during one of the scenes of the movie. As stated earlier in this article, Citizen Dick‘s song name “Touch Me, I’m Dick” is a word play on the song “Touch Me, I’m Sick” by the Seattle band Mudhoney. Also, in the inside cover photo of the soundtrack, there is a Citizen Dick CD with the track listing on the CD itself. One of the songs is called “Louder Than Larry (Steiner)”; a wordplay on the Soundgarden album, ‘Louder Than Love’. The band name Citizen Dick is a wordplay on the Seattle band Citizen Sane, which itself is a wordplay on the 1941 film, Citizen Kane.

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