Dr. Dog brings makes retro-rock cool again

By Stefan Rogenmoser

A Dr. Dog show is far more than six guys on a stage playing badass rock ‘n’ roll.

It is a happening, a spectacle, an experience, a gathering of diverse minds who love to party, drink, dance and have a good time while watching and listening to one of the most entertaining live indie rock shows around today.

Dr. Dog’s music is accessible. Like all bands, when you see them live you understand their music more profoundly. Dr. Dog takes that to the next level. Many indie bands get on stage and either bore you with overly sensitive performances or use unusual instruments in such a tacky way it’s unbearable.

Many songwriters that are good at writing aren’t the most adept performers… and the best performers aren’t always the best songwriters. But Dr. Dog exceeds at everything. Their lyrics, melodies, backing vocals, guitars, bass, drums and keyboards are played with rock ‘n’ roll mastery.

It has always amazed me how Dr. Dog has so much energy: They dance around the stage, freak out on solos, spin in circles, jump while moving their guitar necks up and down like an out of control stereo needle while playing their instruments without hitting bad notes or missing a beat… and hurry back to the microphones to sing raspy lead vocals backed by complex high-note harmonies all in perfect pitch.

More importantly than hitting the right notes, they hit the right feel. It’s the musical equivalent of cracking open that first beer on Friday night after a long, shitty week. Everything about it is so dead on right.

It’s easy to be energized when the crowd is this into the music and the band. The people who aren’t dancing their tails off are bopping their heads or swaying their upper bodies to and fro with the beat and singing along to lyrics about hanging out on the weekends, going to work hungover and drinking cases of lager (the proper way to say Yuengling in Philly, where they’re from).

Given the laid back but not lazy sound of Dr. Dog’s ballads, they still wail soul-crunching lead vocals. The ballads give the show dynamic, proving that Dr. Dog is good at performing all kinds of rock from slower soulful numbers to full-speed rockers. Bassist Tobey Leaman tends to sing more ballads while Scott McMicken writes more of the up-tempo rockers.

I saw Dr. Dog for the third time on Feb. 3, 2011 at the Music Farm in Charleston, S.C. They were almost as good as the other two times I saw them in 2008, back when they had a different drummer, Juston Stens, who used his elbows, bottom of his fists and drumsticks to hit several of his drum heads and the crash cymbal all at once. He played with his entire arm. His drum fills were so fast I thought they were tape delay until I saw him do it with my own eyes.

Since parting ways with Dr. Dog, Stens released a solo album in August 2010 under the name Juston Stens & The Get Real Gang.

On Feb. 3, Dr. Dog had a radically different set list than that of 2008, augmented by songs from the two albums and the EP they’ve released since March 2008. They didn’t play my two favorite songs, “My Old Ways” and “Ain’t It Strange,” from We All Belong, their best album, released in 2007.

The 2011 Winter Tour set pulled heavily from Fate and Shame, Shame and an EP they released in November 2010 that’s in a gibberish Futurama secret alien looking language invented by the band. That EP is a double seven-inch single comprised of four songs – which are also available as a bonus disc on a special edition of Shame, Shame.

Standout tracks from the EP that were played live are “Nobody Knows Who You Are” and “Take Me Into Town.”

Dr. Dog rocked their classic hippie ballad “We All Belong,” with a twisting bridge as unpredictable and awesome that of any number of great Kinks songs. The live rendition of “Worst Trip” was superb as always, with its double-guitar solo that comes in perfectly after a cacophonous bridge. Leaman and McMicken wore red and white “Dr. Dog” beanies with a fuzz ball on top during the entire show. The beanies were being sold at the merch table.

The live version of “The Rabbit, the Bat and the Reindeer,” from Fate, hits your ears in the face like a careening glass bottle of rock ‘n’ roll rupture. Live standouts from Shame, Shame include “Shadow People,” “I Only Wear Blue,” “Stranger” and “Mirror, Mirror.” It’s an album full of classic Dr. Dog-style songs, but without the stop-you-in-your-tracks drum fills it’s not quite as strong as We All Belong and Fate. The lyrics are still playful and Dylan- and Beatles-esque (the first line to “Strangers” is “20 years of schoolin’ / I just never learned the math / That one and one don’t equal two / They often equal half.”

They couldn’t have picked a better song for the encore, “Jackie Wants A Black Eye,” with its chorus of “We’re all in it together now” being chanted by Dr. Dog and all the members of their two opening bands, the Head & the Heart and Buried Beds.

One of the best treats of the live set is a song they may never record, but they’ve been playing live since at least 2008. The lyrics go something like “Some days I do / Some days I don’t / Fuck it / Some days I work / Some days I quit / Fuck it.”

Dr. Dog is worth seeing in concert as many times as possible. Check out upcoming tour dates at their website http://d.drdogmusic.com/.