WALRUS COMIX VERY PROUDLY PRESENTS:
AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH SCOTT MCMICKEN OF DR. DOG!!

Every once in a long while, a band comes along that truly stands out amongst the wall paper, conveyor belt, lowest common denominator shlock which has unfortunately become the standard fare in music today. When I first heard Dr. Dog’s ‘Easy Beat’ (released by their label Park the Van Records) a couple of years ago, it was hard to believe that this was, in fact, a current act. It wasn’t that their sound was so actively retro, it was that it was so actively GOOD!

Their next full-length effort (an EP, entitled 'Takers and Leavers' was released in Fall '06), the superb follow up ‘We All Belong’ was released to universal critical acclaim, and as far as we are concerned, surpassed all our expectations. They decidedly delivered the goods evading that dreaded ‘Sophomore Slump’ that has felled more than one promising new band in recent years. I guess when you’ve got it, you’ve got it, and thank goodness they’ve got more than their share.

We believe that ‘We All Belong’ is one of the best albums we’ve heard from any time period. It’s romantic, and soulful... it’s simply American rock music at it’s best. Dr. Dog have toured with the likes of; My Morning Jacket, The Strokes, The Raconteurs, Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah, along with many other of today’s elite musical groups and performed on Late Night with Conan O'brien and the Late Show with David Letterman. They’ve been singled out by none other than The New York Times as being one of the brightest spots on the musical horizon, and bottom line they’re colossal!

In light of this impressive resume, you can only imagine how excited we at Walrus Comix were, to get the opportunity to interview Scott MckMicken, one of the two main singer/songwriters of the band we’ve been following so closely these past years, and after talking with him, we were left just as impressed with his eloquence, and thoughtfulness as we are with his music – and that’s saying a lot!

For more information on the band, check out their official website, Myspace page, We All Belong website, as well as their label Park The Van Records’ website

Dr. Dog is comprised of guitarist/vocalist Scott McMicken AKA Taxi, bassist/vocalist Toby Leaman AKA Tables, Keyboardist Zach Miller AKA Text, drummer Juston Stens AKA Trouble, and guitarist Frank McElroy AKA Thanks.

Currently Dr. Dog is releasing a song a week for the next ten weeks through their We All Belong website. Each song will be accompanied by lyrics and images and its all FREE!! Please do yourself a favor and check it out, like immediately!!

And now, without further ado, the interview….

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Before we get into it, I just want to let you know how much we truly love the band and appreciate what you guys are doing, in the midst of all the abject mediocrity inflicted upon the listening public nowadays, you guys are like a beacon in a starless night.

Well thanks a lot man, I really appreciate that

So, your band hails from the city of brotherly love, can you tell me a bit about the Philly scene? Is it unique? 

Uh, I would have to say so, yes, not knowing not much about any other town. I can say it’s a wonderful place to be in a band. That’s sort of why we all moved there. There’s a lot of really great bands and it’s easy to get to know people. I guess it’s a relatively big city, but it feels small. Everybody kinda knows each other. Yeah, you know, on a very basic level it's inexpensive, and most people devoted to making music typically don’t have any money. So that works well for a lot of people. You can find cheap rent and big houses and fill it up with people and make it even cheaper. So yeah, its great and it’s also in very close proximity to a lot of major cities, so you can stop off for a show here and there, and even within the city there’s lots of great venues that are supportive of local acts, so its easy to find a place to play on any given night. There’s so much really healthy competition, you know, the good kind. It drives you to do more for yourself. Everyone’s friendly and there’s tons of studios.

Your sound is so musical, and uncommonly sophisticated compared to the majority of bands out there. Did you all come from musical backgrounds?

Um... Not particularly. I certainly didn’t. There wasn’t a whole lot of music being played (in my house at least). Toby (Toby Leaman - Bass player and co-lead singer of Dr. Dog) comes from a really musical family. His dad was in a vocal group. From a very early age, he became comfortable with singing, which is something that I thought was really embarrassing and hard to do in front of people, but he just exuded this confidence about it. So I vicariously picked up a lot from his musical upbringing.

"We’re always, in essence, making music that we can take home and really enjoy listening to ourselves."

The Beatles and the Band are our two favorite groups of all time. With your soulful blended harmonies, melodic Danko-esque bass lines, searing organic guitar parts, gurgling B-3 and dry recorded “woody” drums, to our ears, your music is a beautiful and unique combination of the two.  Were those bands a big influence?  What other bands inspired you?

Oh yeah completely, those bands have been on heavy rotation for all of us since we were kids, at this point its sort of subliminal.  I do think that those two bands are among what kind of set the standard for us.  They’re just undeniably great, it’s impossible to not want a piece of that, not want to get across those same feelings. We’re always, in essence, making music that we can take home and really enjoy listening to ourselves.  I don’t find it to be much of a coincidence that those kind of comparisons come up, because in other circumstances, that is what we would be listening to ourselves.  Certainly, as you suggested, that’s not the be all and end all of the influences, obviously.  Between the five of us, there’s a whole lot of stuff going on.  Musically, Juston’s (Juston Stens – Drums) turned me on to a lot of instrumental, cinematic type of stuff… French music... Italian… Zach (Zach Miller – Keyboards) just runs the gamut.  If I could own anybody’s Ipod in the world, it would be Zach’s. It’s just packed with everything -  all corners of culture.

I guess specifically its kind of hard to feel confident hammering down what our influences are, because it feels so vast.  There’s certainly a lot of artists that we owe a massive debt to.  One of those artists is R. Stevie Moore, from New Jersey, who we’ve all been closely following for a long time.  Aside from being one of the most underappreciated pop artists ever, he also just has this kind of work ethic about him that I certainly believe we gleaned a lot from just due to the fact that he’s so insanely prolific, and operates with practically no reward whatsoever,  being a guy working out of his house.. making album after album , literally 400 albums and not a dud in the bunch.  So the home recording side of things, he turned us onto and showed us how legitimate it can be.

Dr. Dog has been conceptually in the stewing pot for years since we were 11, but it hasn’t been until the last 3-4 years that our line up has clicked into place.  It’s been a struggle for a long time to find the right people.  There was no real sense of urgency to get that going, ‘cause we were writing and recording obsessively at home.  Our realization of working that way I think is modeled after R Stevie Moore.  He really added credence to that.

"...EVERBODY IS AS IMPORTANT AS EVERYONE ELSE."

The liner notes on your albums don’t reveal too much information about the members of your band, nor does your website, which excludes the obligatory “biography” section. You even go by your nicknames instead of your given ones.  Is this an intentional move on your part to force the listener to perceive the group as a whole entity rather than a collection of personalities? 

Most definitely.  We strive… we work hard towards that.  It keeps things nice.  Not that these specific things you brought up, liner notes and the names and stuff,  not that its all falling on that, but it comes from a general spirit within the band which is that EVERBODY IS AS IMPORTANT AS EVERYONE ELSE. We are all friends before we are a band.  So, it’s just a kind of a built in sensitivity that we all have towards each other, just loving each other as much as we do… and its fun too! It’s kind of playful. A band can be so many things all at once, besides just a music making machine, or a performing thing.  It’s a club. You can have a lot of fun just setting up these structures for it, and just playing around with it.  It just makes it more interesting for us more than anything. I suppose that the logical byproduct of that attitude, might be a certain mystique and mystery about the band which is also fun to play with.

You answered my next question which is that the album definitely seems to have a “collective” feel, even the title, “we ALL belong” suggests a feeling of inclusiveness

That’s good.  It’s nice to know. It’s how we all live and I’m glad that that comes through.

In addition to the rich harmony that is prevalent through your work, you have two distinct lead vocals, very rare indeed. It really deepens the overall sound. Are you two the primary songwriters of the group?

Yeah, yeah we are and typically 99.9 % of the time whoever is singing is the one who wrote the song… 

OK that was my next question…

Yeah Toby and I have been writing songs together for years and years.  Not ‘together’ in the sense that we sit down together, but rather we follow each other’s leads closely and learn a lot from each other.  I just feel really fortunate having someone like Toby in my life as a songwriter.  Just the variety to be gained from having two different songwriting perspectives in one band is really important to me. I just really value variety in any sort of art form, from any artist.  It just makes it that much easier that there’s another prominent songwriter in the band.  In fact everyone in the band is a songwriter in their own right, and have all fronted bands of their own in the past. What comes from that is an immense back catalog of songs that we’re still sifting through, in addition to the songs being written every day.  I think once me and Toby feel like we can come close to catching up on all the songs that we had written before the band was really operating, then we can start to let in more of Zach, Juston and Frank’s songwriting, cause they’re all really good.

Since you’ve become so popular, it must be great for you to have that platform to get those songs out. Now you can release everything you’ve had in the can all those years and have an audience for it.

Yeah it’s wonderful, I’m really happy about that prospect.  In fact, I don’t know if you know this.  I don’t know how apparent this has been made, but we have an album coming out TODAY of a bunch of old recordings from cassette tapes we’ve had sitting around, that we’ve continually pulled songs off of.  One song comes out a week and it’s free and you can get it off the ‘We All Belong’ site.  Each song will have an image and lyrics, and so for 10 weeks, starting today, one song a week will come out, and after that 10 weeks, the entire playlist will be available.  So doing things like that is awesome!  I feel really fortunate. We all push to release as much music as we can realistically.

"So much for us of what’s going to determine what works in a song as objective listeners has to do with the spirit that went into the making of it."

All your albums have such a great ragged glory to them; with the little sounds in the background, the creaking piano benches, coughs, chatter…  It really makes the listener feel like he/she is sitting the room with you.  Have you always recorded this way? 

Yeah, definitely.  We’re not the most tidy of individuals.  We’re sloppy when it comes to most aspects of life.  You wait for those moments. Those are the things that make it most interesting and provide a context, and since the process itself of recording is so important, it’s nice to leave those elements.  They’re the natural byproduct of human beings in a room working towards something.  We always leave whatever ‘happy accidents’ occur, because it’s really those things and that spirit in the studio that’s going to determine the outcome of the song.  So much for us of what’s going to determine what works in a song as objective listeners has to do with the spirit that went into the making of it.

It makes it fun for us to hear those little moments.

Do you guys use all vintage gear? What guitars do you use? It sounds like you have a great Lennon-esque Epiphone sound.
ALL EPIPHONES MAN! It’s the Epiphone Sheraton! I got my first when I was 18 and I haven’t played another guitar since then. I’ve had 3 or 4, just due to some of them breaking or getting stolen, and I just keep getting them. They’re just inexpensive and I have yet to find anything better! I’ve played around with other people’s top shelf stuff, like the ES-355 or 335 or whatever… and I honestly just don’t like it as much. It doesn’t feel as comfortable and so I got Frank (Frank McElroy – Guitar) to get an Epiphone too. That guitar works so perfectly, it feels like a natural extension of my playing.

Your albums seem to be recorded to tape (4 or 8 track) as opposed to the digital pro tools sound of the day, you just cant get that rich bass and drum sound and scratch to the guitars any other way. 

We’ve ONLY ever recorded to tape actually. ‘Easy Beat’ was recorded on a machine that Toby and I bought in 1999 off of Ebay, a Tascam 388. It’s a quarter inch tape machine, and it’s a wonderful tool. The preamps are built right in. It’s basically an inflated looking 4 track with one giant tape window… 8 channels built right into the whole thing. It’s heavy as hell, but not too unmanageable. You can move it around. We recorded on that for years, and so by the time that we got to making ‘Easy Beat’, we had so much experience with it that I feel like we knew exactly what we were doing. We had really kinda schooled ourselves on it over the years. It prepared us to make more of a ‘legitimate’ sound. So many of the earlier recordings are less a representation of the band, and more just experiments, like the kind of thing you would hear on ‘Toothbrush’ our actual first album.

When we made ‘Easy Beat’, we didn’t have a label. We made it, and then found a label for it. Once that scenario happened, when it came time to make ‘We All Belong’, we actually had some money to put together a budget. So, we bought a 24 track, 2 inch tape machine and a big console from a studio in town here --so we went from quarter inch tape to two inch tape. 

"TOO MANY CHOICES IS NO CHOICE AT ALL."

You just cannot get that sound any other way.  It’s practically a lost art nowadays ‘cause everything goes directly into the computer.

Yeah I know.  We never really felt comfortable working that way.  It’s like the saying, ‘TOO MANY CHOICES IS NO CHOICE AT ALL’.  You can get yourself in front of a computer, and suddenly it’s wonderful all the possibilities, but I think it’s also a major distraction for us.  You tend to lose perspective, and you can’t see the forest from the trees.  You start paying too much attention to incidental crap that nobody would ever even appreciate.  We just try to keep it as simple as possible.  We try to keep the recording process as effortless as possible, so our attention can remain on the main issue at hand, which is; a song and its parts and its arrangements.  So, it works for us to stay with the analog gear.  It’s not a moral or ethical platform (analog vs digital) it just sounds better to us.  It sounds like you and I agree on that as well.  We’ve always recorded ourselves and it’s such a big part of our lives.  It’s important that we know what were doing and that we’re comfortable.  None of us has the background with computers or music making software.  I’m sure its possible to do it, and more and more I hear albums recorded digitally that blow me away by how warm and nice they sound, but it’s just not within our grasp.

"In the studio, we definitely try to downplay the technical aspect of recording as much as possible, so that the music itself is what is coming to life more than the knobs and dials."

‘We all Belong’ definitely shows a progression in the band’s direction. Every song on ‘We all Belong’ is a gem, whereas some songs on the first album feel a little more like sketches, like you were stretching out into space,  feeling each other out.  The new songs are a bit more reigned in, yet grander.  Did you set out wanting to make a more cohesive collection of tunes?

There wasn’t much of a mission statement going into it.  Basically, it was more of us trying to maintain the same spirit that we’ve always had in the studio, but attempting to incorporate all this new equipment that we had, and trying to sort out things that we always wanted to do attempt but couldn’t for lack of tracks. So that album is more than anything just a reflection of all our efforts with this new situation for ourselves.  Even more than that, is the fact that we just had so much more time.  Part of the budget allowed for none of us to have to work our jobs or anything during the making of the album.  We spent a year on it.  We did ‘Easy Beat’ in less than two months, and we were only working on weekends.  So we had so much more time and it turned out to be totally necessary, because it took a lot of time to hack away in the studio and get ourselves acquainted with the new equipment.  We had to find that little path for ourselves so it didn’t turn into too much of a technical thing.  We only used two microphones on the whole record.  With ‘Easy Beat’ it was just one!  There’s not a lot of mike placement going on with us! The philosophy of mike placement in the Dr. Dog studio is, ‘Oh you got a part you’re sitting over there?  I’ll put a mike near you’.  You know what I mean? There’s not a whole lot of emphasis on that, and when you submit those kind of ideas, you submit to CHANCE.  I think you really arrive at more interesting results that way than you might have had you actually tried to artificially force a vibe.  In the studio, we definitely try to downplay the technical aspect of recording as much as possible, so that the music itself is what is coming to life more than the knobs and dials.  I’m really happy with the album.  I hear it as a body of work.  I hear it as our process.  I hear everything we learned from it, and I’m eager to use that experience on our next album and push it a little further.

There’s been a lot of recording being done since the completion of ‘We All Belong’. The making of that album was certainly among the largest learning experiences of my life.

The new album is very romantic and windswept.   When I listen to it, which I have many, many times by now, I get the feeling of being on an island staring up at a starry sky. Were you guys in love when you wrote the songs to the album?

OH HUGELY! Yeah we’re all in love for better or for worse, depending on what day you catch us.  Relationship issues, be they romantic, or familial, or anything, is definitely a guiding principle in all of our lives, and as a songwriter, I think I can’t help but talk about that.   I know that Toby has a very unique twist on that as well in his songwriting.  You tend to write about you know, and if you’ve spent the last two months of your life obsessing over your girlfriend, and state affairs of your heart, then that’s what you draw from.  It’s also important to know that you’re not alone.  Everybody has those feelings.  Sometimes songwriters can be a little too self-pitying a nd alienate themselves over these kind of issues. You don’t really gain much from taking that perspective.  The songs that stick are the ones that are a little bit more universal.

The song Alaska is one of the most beautiful songs to come out in the last 20 years and seems like the tune most reminiscent of the Band on the album.  Was the line “the dog is howling out back he thinks he’s in the Band” a little shout out? 

(Laughs)…I dunno, Toby wrote that song.  I also find that song to be amazing, especially knowing where it came from.  It’s very literal… not a whole lot to interpret with that song, as its all 100% true and from his heart.  I’ll have to ask him if he was conscious of any reference, or if it was just the right line.  It certainly makes sense for you to draw that conclusion, since the song is more reminiscent of ‘The Band’ than any other songs he’s ever written.

The song ‘My Old Ways’ is another beautiful song and I think a perfect single.  Do you have a good relationship with your label?  Do they focus in on singles?

We have an awesome relationship with our label.  In fact, it was started by someone we had been friends with for a really long time (Chris Watson).  He heard ‘Easy Beat’ and said, ‘I want to start a label just so I can put this out!’  Our origins with our labels are so ‘down home’ in a way.  Since then, he has continuously stepped it up and as more opportunities arrive for us as far as touring etc.., it also works well for the label as it allows them to do more great things for us.  We have a great symbiotic relationship, wherein we both push ourselves to grow.  He’s one of our best friends, and I’m really happy to be a part of it.  He’s creating the dream that I always hoped for as far as being involved with a label.  For starters, placing an emphasis on the Philly music scene, which I’ve felt for years has been really overlooked.  He’s just tapped in and tries to sign as many of these bands out of Philly as possible, and it feels good to be part of a label that has a sort of local color to it.  As a result, we wind up being labelmates with bands that we’ve been friends with for years and played shows with etc… 

Yeah I’m really proud of Park the Van, and I think they feel the same way towards us.

'My Old Ways' video

Another stupendous track from the album is ‘The Worst Trip’, a tune you performed on Conan.  The horns give it a kind of ‘Cant buy a Thrill’-era Steely Dan vibe.  Who arranged them?

Toby did.  That’s his first foray into horn arrangements, and yeah I couldn’t agree more.  He really just nailed it!  I couldn’t believe he was even attempting it, and then we got the parts down, called a couple of our friends who could get around on the horns.  When I first heard it coming back out of the speakers, I just thought it was the greatest thing ever.  That song is such a wonderful thing in our history, because never before has a song been so effortless.  It was just one of those things that from the first take everything just worked.

What do you feel is more important the album or the live performance?

There again it’s a symbiotic relationship (performing live and recording) and it’s growing more and more so.  For years we weren’t a live band at all, we were just recording, and those recordings were not a reflection of what a band would come up with in a room.  But as we’re starting to play more live, and recording less, we’re learning a lot more about how to play live, and how to play together… how to form a rhythm section, how to pay attention to the nuances, and also creating energy with it.  So now when we go in the studio it’s a major part of the focus… to get some of that energy onto the tape in a way that we’ve never been able to.  It’s a major reference point to us now; the live aspect to it.  In ‘We All Belong’, there was much more of an emphasis on having it sound more like a band, more ‘live’, but still not at the expense of experimentation.

I think that the next record we do will be a lot more about rehearsing as a band for along time and then learning about how to record things in a more live fashion. 

OK, 5 quick questions for you…

Favorite movie?

‘Waking Life’ by Richard Linklater

Favorite band?

The Beatles’, but my favorite songwriter now, is Joanna Newsom

Favorite cartoon character?

That’s a good one!… Charlie Brown.

Favorite album?

(long pause)…  Seeing as I’m in the business of making albums in a way, I’ll say our concept album ,‘Psychedelic Swamp’.  The making of that album was so amazing to us…not the greatest album to listen to, far from it, but the existence of that album makes it my favorite.

Who are you voting for in 2008?

Time will tell. We were just talking about it.  I’m not in a position to really say… and that was the gist of the conversation.