Dr. Dog: Gettin’ To That Thing
By Team JamBase Jul 24, 2008 • 5:33 pm PDT
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“Some things present themselves in everyone’s lives in a million different varieties. These things make music feel substantial,” says Scott McMicken, one of the voices and architects of Dr. Dog. “I find the most solace and realization in knowing about these things. No matter how sort of stuck in the muck you get, if you can find evidence of these same things existing in other people’s lives, well, it just feels like a function of life and a human attribute. It’s really good. The most dangerous thing is getting lost and locked up in your own experiences. I find these moments of shared experience to be so beneficial.”
It’s this universality, this quest for commonality and connection that informs Fate. That they deliver this message in a package that recalls great pop artists of the past makes their philosophical slight of hand all the more impressive. Their Wikipedia entry begins:
Dr. Dog is a psychedelic rock band from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Their sound has been compared to that of various 1960s pop bands, especially The Beatles and The Band, as well as The Beach Boys.
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“That word is just swimming around there for anyone to pick up on. It’s a very, very subjective word at this point in time. Any music possessing a general characteristic of color and some sort of imaginary landscape immediately falls into that psychedelic category,” points out McMicken. “I feel this issue is somewhat of a problem but can also be seen as a challenge, not just in the building of the identity or consciousness of your band but in learning how to feel a personal connection with something that is so easily tagged and so easily referenced. To re-appropriate all these elements and sort of become familiar with the history, the grand narrative of whatever you’re a part of – whether it’s your own self-analysis or your family or culture as an artist – is an opportunity to learn to keep the peace with your own personal history AND to be very comfortable in terms of any given point in what precedes you, and being proud to carry these things on instead of lashing out against them or feeling like they only exist in their most beautiful form only for you to dodge and avoid. For the most part, that’s kind of what Fate, the record, is about in a nutshell.”
The ABCs
Do you feel like you’re stuck in time?
Forever waiting on that line
If nothing ever moves
Put that needle to the groove
And sing
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“We used to roll the tape and record a song. If it was awesome it was awesome, if it was bad it was bad, but we’d never go back. Now we can do several takes and let the music develop more naturally,” says McMicken. “In a band you’re constantly working on things together. It’s very delicate. The good thing is you work through things and you wind up stronger than ever. For me, that’s linked up with being in a band and always improving.”
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And they are a little better each time out, their new evolution obvious from record to record, tour to tour, and even in the cheek of their band listing on their MySpace page, which only lists their nicknames (real names added for your informational pleasure) and poetic gloss on their role, befitting a group that took their name from a mishearing of Captain Beefheart’s “Doctor Dark”:
Taxi (Scott McMicken): lead woof+mud distortion guitar, vocals
Tables (Toby Leaman): finger bass, vocals, rhythm stomp
Text (Zach Miller): keyboardings, some guitar/singing
Trouble (Juston Stens): hammer hands of a surgeon, harmonies, embellishments
Thanks (Sukey Jumps): multi-string guitar, full-grip chords, vocal nuances
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“The craft is just as fulfilling as the poetry or philosophy behind it. It’s like a dummy you can dress up,” says McMicken. “Originality is such a relative word. For me, to be honest is to be as original as you can be. You’re given certain faculties, and you live with them and operate clearly through this sort of looking glass that’s undistorted. That’s originality at its core. It shows up in the most formatted, traditional, structured thing to the most wildly unrecognizable thing. People often seek out originality for its own sake, as if it existed outside of them so that they have to catch it in the wind.”
The new album is a distillation of a lot of things Dr. Dog has been working on for a while, not least, a role for the studio that functions like another band member and truly serves the songs. All the elements on Fate work in a very empathetic way, rarely drawing too much attention to any one part since the whole is suffused in such an organic, dandy way. To wit, one doesn’t sit around thinking about Ringo’s drumming or George’s searing guitar work while listening to “Back In The U.S.S.R.” It’s the cumulative a-wop-bop-a-loo-lop a-lop-bam-boo that seizes you. And this is how the Dog’s version of Fate operates. This is pop rock but the band is standing up on their hind legs today and yowling, “This is OUR voice.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. As is to be expected as you remain a band and explore the root of the process and grow with it, at what ever pace you’re comfortable moving at. We definitely feel we had a more informed, Technicolor view of what we are as a band and where we’d come from this time,” says McMicken. “There’s so many threads to this ‘fate’ notion that apply in a purely logistical sense to where we are as a band, as well as in a more philosophical sense.”
“From all the live playing, we’ve gained such a different relationship to the music we’re playing. For years and years, the music we made was almost pure fantasy. The writing of it has sort of always been the same, though the intensity and need for that has grown. We’d always been kind of a blank slate each time we went into the studio before. For the first time, this record felt really, really informed by all these elements that exceeded our imagination in the studio and are just the natural byproducts of us being in a band. We wanted to distil that,” continues McMicken. “It was very intuitive but now that it’s over I can see it’s a whole new vocabulary and a whole new set of needs that I know has everything to do with our observations about music nowadays, as well our own observations about where we are as a band. There’s been a certain dynamic and growth as engineers and producers. We’ve now made a handful of records, and I’ve had the luxury of working on other people’s records. My experience of just making records has opened up more, and all of these things felt like very, very necessary aspects of what we were going to do, in so far as you go into a project and take stock to say, ‘This is where the bar is right now and we have to hit it.’ You open up this forum of problems and go about solving them as best you can.”
Army of Ancients
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“Certainly not. At its core, we really just make music we enjoy the most, and have always had faith that if we reach that point with something then we’re doing the best we can. Our sole responsibility, even to any sense of an audience, is ultimately based on a personal responsibility to do what makes us happy. I think that’s really all people want. At least I would hope so,” McMicken says. “[Fate] is by no means a thesis or anything; it was a forum for us to look at these things, think about them and breathe them into our lives. It can definitely be ‘caveman.’ It was exhilarating while making it to not only think about sound but also these larger concepts that are perhaps even more relevant to our lives than the fact we make music.”
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Fate‘s opener, “The Breeze,” begins in quietude that doesn’t hint at the largess to come, a brilliant kind of seductive bait-and-switch that goes on throughout Fate. According to McMicken, “The Breeze” is “structurally a one chord cycle going through. It’s only one melody. There’s no hooks, no refrain or anything. So, to look at the album as a piece, in and of itself – which we did by stringing all the songs together and not having any silence [between cuts] – we saw it as one, big, long composition. Sonically, we intentionally built [‘The Breeze’] with a warbly acoustic guitar on a four-track that pops into a little bass and a little percussion and then the backups come in. It sort of represents where we started to go after Toothbrush [2002] through Easy Beat [2005], a little bit of We All Belong [2007] and now here we are at this Fate record. It represents where we’ve come from sonically on a very logistic level, including the equipment we used. We definitely tried to be as self-referential as possible on this record. This album feels like fate in the sense that I’m very aware that this is only a record we could have made with EXACTLY the experiences we’ve had in this band so far. And the lyrics are rooted in that concept, too. It’s about fate but it is fate itself, too.”
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Trickster figures and coal shovelin’ men abound, archetypes animated with human breathe, that make the arrow of time flow both forwards and backwards. Even the band’s new Steinbeckian Dust Bowl stage outfits reflect this visceral connection with other time periods even as they pound out a sound that could only surface in the wake of what’s come before. Portions of Fate feel like limericks or nursery rhymes (“how did the fox get the raven to crow?”). There’s something primal or folk art inside their latest work that taps into deeper places than rock is known for, especially today.
“The further you delve into things the more you come back to these very simple, very timeless truths. It’s a complicated mess to get to these simple things though,” wisely observes McMicken. “More and more, I find that catchphrases and clichés that float around and become popular forms of advice at first seem like trivializations but in truth say things better than any amount of longwinded analysis can. That pursuit of getting down to some sense of simplicity – and in essence a sense of harmony and peace or whatever it is you’re going to devote your thoughts and time to – is actually a very simple and shared experience. It is very tough to get down to but it’s part of what I consider to be the work of life. I really feel we were connecting to these notions, and not being afraid if they came off as overly simplified. The truth is it’s a pop record. You don’t need to sit down with a pad and pencil to listen to it. We put just as much effort into making something aesthetically appealing that’ll make your ass shake a lil’ bit.”
Hang On
And what you thought was a hurricane
Was just the rustling of the wind
Why you think we need amazing grace
Just to tell it like it is?
Well, I don’t need no doctor
To tear me all apart
I just need you
To mend my heart
The reason folk and pub music works so well is because it focuses on family and hearth, death and birth, feast and famine. These subjects make people throw their arms around total strangers and sing. There’s an element of that universal bonhomie in Dr. Dog. Whether conscious of it or not, the collective undertow within their music helps to generate a feeling of togetherness at Dr. Dog shows. There’s a great beat and plenty of stunning bridges to help the ontological nuggets go down, which is probably why most of the time you don’t notice how bright and thoughtful they’re being. When you’re having fun there’s little time to ponder the abyss or our place in the universe; we simply exist and revel in the carefree free fall being conjured around us.
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“I would feel like an asshole if we were doing anything other than that! It feels awful to go into the making of anything with really strong, demanding expectations about your experience with it,” says McMicken. “It’s a function of our lives, it’s a process we’re involved with, so personally and on a purely selfish level it needs to be fulfilling. It needs to feel good. Beyond that, if I were to stop and think about what I hope people get out of it, this is just a thing a bunch of dudes like to get together and do, and it does mean something to them. I say that because from my standpoint, looking at art or listening to music, I really have no parameters on what it is I like. I couldn’t define for you what it is I like about ANYTHING. It’s just that intangible thing, the realization that there’s a life behind this thing and this is evidence of one human being’s needs. That exists in everything from the most wildly abstract art to Top 40 stuff. Even outside the realm of art, you walk into someone’s house and see how they organize objects. Or it’s in the shoes somebody chooses to put on or the dirt stains around the light switch – just evidence of something going on, something real.”
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So much so that McMicken has recorded a “way, way more personal” solo album since Fate entitled It.
“It was this cathartic thing for me. I’d built up so much muck and so much obstruction to my sense of self-worth,” says McMicken. “Literally in one night, I did a 180 on seemingly the most incidental circumstances. With this new perspective I could dig into things that I was struggling with but with a much clearer lens, a much more harmonious sense of what they meant in my life. I hung onto that feeling long enough to crank out eight or nine tunes, singing ’em all into my four-track in my room. The reason it’s called It is one of the songs talks about the saying, ‘It’s all in how you look at it.’ Then all the verses are this laying out of things – ‘It’s cursed. It’s praise.’ ending in the refrain of ‘It’s all in how you look at it.’ These things are gonna come and go. You can’t control them but you have the power of perception.”
“Fate” is a power word. Like “God” or “Soul,” it vibrates with associations despite its one syllable brevity. Only its construction is perfectly simple; its meaning is fluid and open to interpretation. Naming one’s album Fate almost tempts it in some ways.
“Now that it’s said and done, I think we tempted it for sure [laughs]. It’s a living, breathing beast in my life, and I started to see everything in these terms. But, it’s by no means a dogmatic thing. I’ve come to feel about fate that it’s this constant duality, this constant balance between realizing life is both within your control and not in your control,” says McMicken. “There’s simple ways of applying that to your understanding. It’s like, ‘Here I am today and there’s obviously nothing I can do about that.’ So, a reconciliation of your own personal history and the choices you’ve made is absolutely necessary. You can’t resist those things. All you can do is use them as these tools to measure the value of life and the mistakes or the right moves you’ve made. If you’re interested in being a happy person, if you’re interested in growing and staying on top of things, you can’t carry around this baggage. You have to step up and take responsibility for what’s gotten you where you are AND realize that the future lies ahead of you. From this stronger vantage point you can move in that direction with more security but also realizing these elements are going to keep popping up, coming and going over time, and you’re going to make mistakes and not know what to do.”
Dr. Dog is on tour now, dates available here.
Check out exclusive interviews, live footage and more with Dr. Dog on JamBaseTV here!
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