I remember playing a wedding reception at the Double Down on a Tuesday night. We get there and [bassist Rob] Ruckus goes, ‘Look, I’m not feeling too good. I’ve got to work in the morning. Let’s make this quick.’ I said, ‘Let’s do a couple shots. We’ll be fine.’
“A couple shots turned into everything. From Ass Juice to Jager to Goldschlager to tequila and Crown Royal, I’m talking everything. By the end of the set, it became a roast of the bride and groom, just absolutely trashing them. Then the bride walks up and whispers in my ear, ‘My bridesmaid wants to f--k you.’ I go, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it turns out ...’ I said it out loud, and her boyfriend is sitting in the first row. He gets all pissed, grabs her, yells at her, and then he hops on a plane back to California.
“By the end of the set, my shirt’s gone. Ruckus is naked. I’m on the pool table, out of my mind, yelling; they’re throwing drinks at me. They couldn’t get me to turn off; they finally just unplugged my amp. I ended up leaving there, coming to the shop and just trashing it. I wake up on that couch, no recollection of anything.”
Dirk Vermin, kicked back in the desk chair of his Pussykat Tattoo Parlor’s piss-green office, eyes the tan loveseat a few feet over. Rough-jawed and compulsively clad in a black tank, the vocalist/guitarist sports a shaved head, barrel chest and stomach like a mini-keg. His pores practically secrete ink, everything from Elvis and the logo of the band Fear to Frankenstein and a rooster in a noose on his lower left leg, next to which he’ll soon inscribe the phrase “Your name” (“Baby, I’ve got a cock that hangs below my knee with your name on it”). The only thing he’s gathered more of than tattoos is tales of drunken exploits. Or maybe tail. Or perhaps respect from the local—and increasingly national—punk-rock scene for telling the Man to f--k hisself for nearly 25 years. (“That’s longer than some of the women I’ve dated have been alive!”) Either way, Vermin’s seen it all and then some. He’s the Ghosts of Punk Rock Past, Present and Future all rolled into one mischievous, foul-mouthed spirit. And he’s just getting started.
“I hadn’t paid taxes in a decade, and I had a meeting the following morning. One of my guys comes rolling in. He thought the place got robbed, I destroyed it that much. I asked him, ‘Have you seen my shirt?’ I walk over to the little clothing store over there, buy a shirt, have to walk to find my car. I drive to the tax guy. I reek of too many cigars and too much alcohol, my eyes are bloodshot, and I’m still a little drunk. I go, ‘Uh, I had kind of a rough night. Be gentle.’”
We played a show at the Double Down, and this piece-of-shit bitch smashed my bass,” Ruckus remembers. “She was crazy, just came out of the audience and literally smashed my bass. I decided I wasn’t going to play at the Double Down, but Dirk got everybody in the tattoo shop and at the Double Down to put in cash. They had a surprise party for me at the Double Down. I walk in and the banner over this whole wall says, ‘F--k you, Ruckus.’ And they gave me this brand-new bass that they bought. That was one of the coolest f--king things anyone’s ever done for me. Just goes to show how much of a heart the guy has.”
Growing up on Vegas’ west side, Vermin attended Bonanza High School, aka “punk-rock high.” Raised on Elvis, the rebellious student began pissing his parents off early with AC/DC, Van Halen and Ted Nugent. But once bands like Self Abuse, A.W.O.L. and Subterfuge sprung up in and around Bonanza, Clark and Valley Highs in the late ’70s and early ’80s, he found a whole new way to rebel.
One afternoon, having told the principal they were a country band, Self Abuse played Bonanza’s quad. First song, their cowboy hats flew into the air and something clicked inside the boy who would one day croon, “Yeah, I think I knew your mother/Found her facedown in the gutter/Underneath a pile of shit/Oh, aren’t you dazzled by my wit?” As he recalls, “Anthony Hudak was the bass player at the time. He looked like Sid Vicious to me. He had the dog collar, the lock and chain around his neck.”
A few years down the road, Hudak—now a drummer—would approach the young musician about starting a new group. Vermin From Venus began gigging frequently, then released the 1986 single “The Attack of the Killer Virgin Prom Queen,” one of the very first, and wholly independent, Vegas punk records.
The band lasted off and on for 10 years. A stint with mostly-covers band Knuckle Sandwich followed, then a similar project called Godboy with Ruckus. “We brought him in and started jamming with Hudak, and it changed our entire sound,” Vermin recalls. “He was such a good player, and the music I was writing was so much more darker and aggressive than the Venus stuff, which had a little bit of a metal edge to it. Vermin from Venus had to go.”
“Originally I had gone to school with his sister,” Ruckus says. “When they put out the Vermin From Venus 45, they had something on there that was very similar to a [fellow punk band] 5150 45, like ‘All copyrights will result in death,’ or something. I told his sister that it took off of the 5150 thing, and then when me and Dirk met one night at the club, he was going to beat my ass.
“And now we’re an item. He’s my heterosexual life partner.” Says Vermin, “The comedy and the interplay between me and Ruckus is insane. That guy’s my soul mate, man. It’s too bad he doesn’t have tits.”
Over the course of 12 shit-talking, beer-spitting years, The Vermin have released three full-lengths on Wood Shampoo Records (Hell or Las Vegas; The Vermin Vs. You; Loose Women, Hard Livin’ and The Devil); brought in Turbo Proctor on drums; played five-plus-hour sets; shared a stage with (“... and in a lot of cases, blown off the stage”) Circle Jerks, D.O.A., The Adolescents, T.S.O.L., Fear, The Reverend Horton Heat and The Horrorpops; and been kicked out of every joint in town.
Save one.
“They’re always welcome here. They don’t go too far; they’re not hurtful,” says Double Down owner P Moss, who has utilized Vermin’s artistic talents for countless promotional posters. “It stays within the broadest definition of good taste. I’ve always called them the punk-rock Marx Brothers.”
Three or four years ago the band recorded a live album that remained shelved due to poor sound quality. “It was recorded in a strip club, so you can imagine the jokes on that one,” Vermin laughs. “Naked women everywhere, naked Ruckus everywhere ...”
September’s A Fist Full of Hell, a retrospective comprising 30 live, unreleased, compilation, cover and studio tracks The Vermin managed to commit to tape between fast-and-furious dick jokes, has sold roughly 2,500 copies and recently required a second pressing. Independent-music bible Razorcake gushed. New York’s Punk magazine, once responsible for heralding The Ramones and The Dictators, spoke in superlatives.
“They finally understand,” Vermin enthuses. “Some of the things we’re usually criticized for, the misogynist lyrics, all that crap, now they get it. They see that it’s tongue-in-cheek. I’m not really that way.
“Well, part of me is, I’m sure.”