w/ Wax Fang and Quiet Life
Friday, November 4
9 p.m.
$16
21+
Electrocution. Fireworks coming out of buses. Dudes named Cheese who might draw your picture. These are all things that can and have happened when Dr. Dog plays in Bloomington. Scott McMicken, vocalist/guitarist/songwriter for Dr. Dog, was more than happy to tell me about how that all occurred during their memorable show at The Vid last year when I interviewed him over the phone. Clearly unshy when it comes to telling stories, McMicken also opened up about other aspects of the Dr. Dog life including the recording of their latest album, Shame, Shame. Tonight, his band will be back for more at The Bluebird at 9. Go see them lest you miss out when the monkeys start swinging from the rafters.
Live Buzz: So this will be your second time in Bloomington in two years and your last time was at The Vid, which is right across the street from The Bluebird where you'll be playing this time. What memories, if any, do you have of that?
Scott McMicken: That's where we played with The Growlers right? It was like a little tiny bar?
Live Buzz: That's right, yeah. It's pretty small.
SM: Oh yeah, that was cool. I remember there was this cool thrift store there. I remember that show being crazy because it was- oh yeah! That was a crazy show! I remember the power went out on half the stage at one point. I got electrocuted through the microphone. But I remember it being like one of those real sweaty, packed-in kind of rock and roll situations. I really liked that.
It's weird, like we tour a lot and stuff, and we're not really like a band that's guaranteed to play in really big, nice venues and stuff. But as time goes by, from town to town it fluctuates so much. On that tour, I remember being like, 'Whoa, this is awesome,' because in some places we play, it's like a big theater and it can hold a thousand people or something and you get monitors, and it's this very kind of posh situation. And you have a nice dressing room and stuff. And then the next night, we'll be in a place like [The Video Saloon], you know? So I really enjoy that about what's still very much a part of our touring experience - the really wide, diverse spectrum of venues we play. And that one was really refreshing because that's the kind of venue that most bands who are working their way up start playing. A place like that that are just kind of beer-stained and have no monitors and are just about the energy of the moment and putting on a loud, rockin' show and stuff. So I remember being real psyched about that.
I remember meeting some cool people there. There were these folks from- I'm trying to remember what town they were from. They were cool, it was a big guy named Cheese. He ended up inadvertently designing a T-shirt for us because he was just all drunk and he bought a Dr. Dog shirt. He was trying to make fun of Frank, our tall guitar player, so he grabbed a Sharpie and just started drawing this picture of Frank. And I was like, 'Oh man, can I take a picture of that?' And he's like, 'What's that guy's name? Fuck that guy!' And he was just being hilarious and drew this picture of Frank as this six-foot tall stick figure with an afro. And I took a picture and it ended up being a Dr. Dog shirt later on that we sold on tour.
So that came from that night, and The Growlers were awesome that night. I remember them getting into trouble because they had that weird, psychedelic circus bus and they were blasting firecrackers out of it and stuff and the cops came. It was a really memorable night actually. It was kind of rainy at the end of the night, but I really enjoyed that. The show was kind of in shambles, but in the best of ways.
Live Buzz: Your next 13 tour dates are all in the Midwest, many in small cities. Dr. Dog's music has long incorporated elements of roots rock and Americana, and those are genres that tend to identify with the essence of the U.S.'s middle regions more than its biggest cities. Do you guys as a band prefer playing in the Midwest? What is the Dr. Dog-Midwest relationship?
SM: Let me think about that. Yeah, you're right, there's such a distinct flavor to being predominantly on the East Coast versus West Coast versus Midwest versus those regions between. But the Midwest, I really like it. I definitely feel like we are most in our element in the South. And I think that just has to do with that well-understood air of the South and the breezy kind of way in which people interact and the affinity other people express at shows compared to something like New York or the upper Northeast or even parts of the West Coast. But yeah, the Midwest is always great.
All of this is really unfounded ideas I have here, but in general, I kind of feel like you go to New York or a bigger city somewhere and you can have great shows, but it's like people in those areas, they see shows all the time. And any band you want to see is gonna be in your town. In parts of the Midwest, you feel this appreciation for just the mere fact that you're there, regardless of how good your show is or whatever. You feel this appreciation for just the fact that you're there at all. And it feels really good, that really puts you at ease, you know? And it makes you feel no pretense to the situation whatsoever, no expectations, that things are kind of good from the get go for a lot of parts of the Midwest.
Obviously, there are big cities all over the Midwest that get all kinds of touring band traffic and stuff. But places like Bloomington and stuff, you get the impression- for an upper, bigger-size college town, there's definitely an air of, 'We're going to a show and that means we're gonna have fun!' Instead of, 'We're going to a show and that means we're going to stand and analyze and absorb.' We don't like that. We would prefer to just be a party bar band. Obviously, that's not what defines our ambition to the band or whatever, but for a show, it's best as this inclusive, celebratory thing. And it seems easier to tap into that in parts of the Midwest than it does in a lot of parts on the Northeast and on the West Coast.
Live Buzz: The first time I saw your band was this great daytime set you played at Lollapalooza in 2008. Do you remember that?
SM: Oh, yeah yeah.
Live Buzz: That was immediately after you guys released Fate, which was kind of the start of your band's migration from your signature lo-fi sound to clearer production, and that continued with Shame, Shame last year. How was Shame, Shame most different from Fate, would you say?
SM: I think somewhere between putting Fate out and starting Shame, Shame, something happened for us where- like Fate allowed us to step up to a certain venue size that we'd never been in before. We saw our largest leap in growth as a touring band. So it made us a better live band. The material on that record was more challenging than the previous record for us to play live, so in order for us to pull it off, we got better as a live band. And then in order to keep delivering good shows in increasingly larger venues, I think that made us a better live band. So we came out of that record with a stronger identity of ourselves as a live band than we ever had before. And that became the primary lens with which we were looking towards our next record, which was Shame, Shame. So internally, the main difference was we wanted to sound more like we did live, we wanted to have more guitars on our album. We wanted to play more dynamically. We didn't just want to layer the sound and kind of craft these little soundscapes per song. We wanted to see what these songs actually felt like.
See, a lot of the times prior to Shame, Shame, we would never play- rarely had we ever played songs live before we recorded them. We recorded them first, would do all the things we wanted to do, and then figure out how to play them live after that. And with Shame, Shame, it was more about, 'What do these songs feel like when we play them live?' So that we can get right to that point that we like to get to at shows before we record so that we can inform our recording process by ultimately what feels best about these songs as the live version of us. So we went into it with that in a big way for the first time. And that changed the sound a lot, you know?
That made us want to push fidelity because when performing, it's more a part of where you're coming from. With recording, you want to capture it better, you want to capture the nuances of a person's performance and the things they're playing on their instruments. So it made it necessary, it made it exciting to try out more fidelities in the recordings, which essentially for us- it's not like we've always resisted fidelity. We've just always surrounded ourselves very comfortably with very low-level recording equipment. So for the first time, we were like, 'Man, it would be really nice to have an expensive microphone. It would really be nice to have a compressor.' I had those preamps, they really make things sound big and cool. So we started to branch out as engineers and tried new gear that was gonna help us capture a bigger sound, which is our live sound. We wanted to translate that into the studio, which prior to that point, hadn't really been a goal in the studio that much, at least not in the same conceptual lens. So that was a big thing that happened with the Fate record leading into Shame, Shame.
And since Shame, Shame's come out, we've got two new members who have pushed us in all realms creatively. Live and recording and just general levels of ambition are way up with these refreshing, two new minds in the band. So everything that I just described has certainly been furthered quite a bit in this new album that we just finished up and that we'll be putting out in February. So it's kind of more treading up that same road of looking for our live sound on the recording.
Live Buzz: Dr. Dog announced a new album coming soon. What can you tell us about it?
SM: It's coming out in February. I'm really excited about it, we had a lot of fun. We made it ourselves in our studio. We got some new cool stuff to do that with and it's faster and dirtier than anything. Talking about something from before, we kind of chased after our live sound more. I think we even got a little bit closer with this one and it's just supposed to be a real fun album to listen to. I really like listening to it. And it's faster.
Post by Steven Arroyo
