Sweden’s gift to retro rock The Soundtrack Of Our Lives leveled the El Rey last Friday in a surprise return to North America. They played the Troubadour in 2009 and usually don’t grace this continent for an eternity of another two years. That’s seven-hundred-and-thirty days, people. So this tour was a rare and delectible delicacy of an epicurean treat. Seriously, if this tour were food, it would be a black Périgord truffle.

Kicking off this momentus occasion, opening local trio Nico Vega exploded onto the stage and rained face-melting chaos until strangling out their last note. Between sweaty spurts of furious rock they thanked TSOOL for being so awesome and wished Ebbot a happy birthday and seemed to genuinely appreciate the treasure it was to be on tour, right here right now, with this special band. This wasn’t as evident to a clump of people who promptly left before the headliners had time to finish their beers backstage. Cool with me though because it meant those people who spend the entire show gabbing into the ears of their bff not listening to the music were now at home, not standing behind me.

Finally the moment arrived and Sweden’s coolest sick-pack roared in all smiles and rock, playing tracks from the new album, Communion, along with older hits and favorites like “Sister Surround” and “Thrill Me.” Frontman Ebbot, a portly and imposing figure draped in flowing robes, is the kind of guy who commands attention at all times, even when he wasn’t tossing tambourines around his neck or throwing his micstand all over the stage. It was hard to keep your eyes off Ebbot, even with the rest of the band flying apeshit all around him—Ian leaping on monitors grinding his axe into the faces of the front row, Martin thrashing the keyboard like a man possessed, Fredrik pulverizing his drumheads with each forceful, Mattias attacking his guitar with his ass. And then there was Kalle, chugging away at his basslines with cool earnest. So rockstar. (In a good way.) In a mind blowingly epic finale, Wayne Kramer from the MC5 and Nico Vega’s band joined them onstage for “Kick Out the Jams” in an insane circus show with everyone grabbing an instrument and jumping and stomping and swirling and twirling each other around and culminating in an exhausted collective orgasm. Closing out the evening with a third and final encore, just Ebott and Martin took to the stage and lulled the audience with the beautiful piano ballad “Tonight,” singing: “Tonight I am on top of the world, Tonight I’m the center of the universe.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

—Linda Rapka (words + photo)

Stream: Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey “Here And Now”

(from hERE aND nOW out now on Bar/None)

Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple were (legendarily) the only people in North Carolina who bought Big Star albums the very first time around, and they’d team up most famously for the power-pop band the dB’s. (Stamey would also release Chris Bell’s ‘I Am The Cosmos’ 45 and Holsapple would go on to play with R.E.M. and Hootie and the Blowfish!) They are now teamed up and touring as a band with no official name. This interview by Dan Collins.

Peter, you joined a band when you were eight?
Peter Holsapple (guitar/vocals): What?
Admittedly, this is from Wikipedia. But it says you were born in ’56 and joined a band in 1964.
Peter: That is true. I played in combos. But they weren’t professional. The first professional band I played in was when I was 12—when I earned money. We lived in a city with a lot of very active places for young people to play. They were the assembly halls for churches. On the weekends they’d get a PA and bands would play. That was kind of fun.
Did you ever cut a single?
Peter: No. Chris and Mitch [Easter] and I had a band that had an album in 1973 called Rittenhouse Square. It was not very good! It was what you’d expect out of 14- or 15-year-olds. We certainly listened to a lot of Yes, a lot of the Move. Things were funny and grind-y, but in retrospect it’s pretty naïve stuff.
Sounds like you met each other early in life.
Peter: Chris and Mitch were ahead of me in school. I do remember him standing in the parking lot of the school with an instrument case waiting for his parents to pick him up. His dad was a pediatrician in town—a lot of people went to Dr. Stamey! I saw him as a sort of inroads in a lot of ways. When I met him, he wasn’t playing music at all. He was learning to record, which I thought was very cool.
Yeah! And Chris, you produced Peter’s band Little Diesel in ’74.
Chris Stamey (guitar/vocals): We made it in an afternoon in my bedroom at my parents’ house. I’d moved the bed a little bit, and I had little tweed Fender amps nailed up to the wall and we made it on a four-track tape recorder. At the time I think they made 10 copies. They recorded it on an eight-track recorder, and by that I mean a little recorder that made 8-track cartridges. There were only literally a few copies made.
Do you have an 8-track you can send to me in the mail?
Peter: No! But a vinyl edition did come out a few years ago. It came out on Telstar records.
Chris: I was talking to Mitch about how we should find that, and he was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got the master tape still!’ So we dug it out and I mixed it up a little better than I had back then, and it’s a really cool energetic record! Anybody who’s heard it loves it.
Peter: There were a breadth of covers that we were trying to tackle. We were doing Free and Spirit and Status Quo. We didn’t really ascribe to the Allman Brothers/Marshall Tucker stuff that was popular there at the time. We sort of rooted for the underdog. That’s probably why we were such huge Move fans. That’s probably why the first song off our new album is by a band called ‘Family,’ who we love very dearly. That’s a band that had really meant an awful lot to us.
Chris: The MC5 had just come to town and just really transformed the Winston rock scene.
Peter: I was in school in New Hampshire at prep school for a year, during which time I did get to play in bands with Bob Tench, who went on to be Tom Petty’s keyboard player. He was one of those guys who was very deeply into the MC5 and the Stooges. The first Mott the Hoople album came out, and we really absorbed that.
Did you see the revival tour the MC5 did a few years ago? Evan Dando and Mark Arm from Mudhoney were singing with them.
Chris: And Marshall Crenshaw playing with them too—I have to say, the night I saw them in Chapel Hill, it was not a huge success, but it was only one night on a tour. It was kind of dark, I guess you’d say—the energy. The singers were reading all the lyrics—it wasn’t totally all together.
Well, enough about the past—tell me about the sound on your new album.
Chris: Well, what’s refreshing about talking with you is that it does remind me of a sixties interview. It’s not the usual questions. But Peter and I think about this as a band that we have together that has its own identity, and we just don’t have a band name for it. We recorded Mavericks in 1992, and in some ways we see this as a continuation of that.
Why is that?
Chris: It makes a connection to I guess what used to be called ‘good guy’ radio, almost like sixties AM radio. My experience with Big Star, for example, was hearing them—they were a hit band in Winston/Salem, and they were on the radio with bands like the Grass Roots and the Seeds. It’s just that they weren’t anywhere else but my hometown. It just isn’t a Porsche—more of a Woody! A family station wagon.
If somebody was a dB’s fan who had never heard this album, what differences would they see between this album and your old stuff?
Peter: dB’s records and the duet records are such that they both have as their main contributors myself and Chris. But if they’re dB’s records, they’ve got Will on drums and Gene on bass and it’s a harder rocking and slightly more frenzied thing.
Chris: The way the dB’s bass player and drummer play together is kind of like you drop an electric blender in a bathtub, and yet it keeps running. It’s a very explosive combustible combination. And we use really good players and we have more drums on this record than we thought we would, but this is more about our guitars and our voices.
Peter: It is two different voices! Even though Chris and I are the main guys writing for both groups. You know, there’s only been one saxophone on a dB’s record—on a single maybe. And here we’ve got Branford Marsalis who played on a couple cuts on this album.
That’s a score!
Peter: Yeah, Bran is a great guy. For years I was the keyboard guy and utility guy for Hootie and the Blowfish, and Branford always came down for their charity golf tournament every year and played. A couple years ago I said, ‘Well, I’ve got these songs that would be really well served if you could find some time to come and play on it. It’s about New Orleans.’ He was like, ‘I’m busy, but let me know! We’ll make it happen.’ Both tracks were lifted incredibly by his presence.
Lou Reed, before he was in the Velvet Underground, cut a single with King Curtis as the session horn guy! But I think you just beat that. Do you want to gloat at Lou Reed for besting him?
Peter: Lou’s contribution is sacred! Even his bad records aren’t that bad. I have no opportunity to diss him, frankly.
A few years back you recorded an album called A Question of Temperature.
Chris: Peter and I just came up with that title, I recall. On a record with a lot of covers, to name it after a cover that we weren’t doing seemed, you know… it was originally called Vote, and it was done as an EP. We did too many things… it became the world’s longest EP! We put it out right before the election that John Kerry lost to try to encourage people to vote. It seems crazy in retrospect. It was then released as a regular record in January. It was never intended to be an album-album.
What songs did you cover?
Chris: We covered a song of mine called ‘Summer Sun.’ The Yardbirds, we did. We covered ‘Venus’ by Television.
Can I get a statement from you about the death of Sky Saxon?
Chris: He was a friend of Chilton’s. I never really met him. When I played with Alex, we used to do ‘I Can’t Seem to Make You Mine’ almost every night. Alex was a really big fan.
How did you meet Alex Chilton?
Chris: I was making a record with Terry Ork. He’d put out the first Television 45, and I’d just moved to New York. And he said that they were putting out a record by Alex Chilton, and he needed a band because he was going to come up for one day—to play Valentine’s Day in New York. And Alex called me up, and we talked, and he asked me what my sign was, and everything seemed to be okay. I was playing bass—I think Tina Weymouth almost got the call, but I ended up getting it. And Alex stayed for over a year, and we kept playing. He’d stay on my couch a lot, and we went up and recorded a lot, most of which never came out.
There was another celebrity death this month as well. You guys once had a song called ‘Neverland.’ Do you think Michael Jackson named his ranch after you?
Chris: I think that would be a stretch.
The dance music movement that came along in the mid-early eighties, with Michael and Prince and Sheila E.—did that eclipse the fame that bands like the dB’s might have earned?
Peter: It certainly didn’t help it get on the radio! But… the music was great. All the music was great. We felt that we weren’t particularly in competition with that.
Chris: I think that for most bands, the whole idea of making it big wasn’t around. Once MTV came along, and it went out into the world, people got the idea, ‘Yeah, let’s make it big!’ But that wasn’t why we were making music. We weren’t trying to win the lottery.
Peter: Even as well known as we are for our contributions to sort of ‘new wave’ with the dB’s, we had already been writing and recording well before that. We just happened to come along at the time. The dB’s didn’t even have an American label for many years.
Of the people who were your contemporaries, who would you say sounded like you?
Chris: I think the Soft Boys! I clearly thought Television had the right idea, but I think the Soft Boys would be the closest.
Peter: Without meaning to be left of center, it appears that we were left of center. My dear friend Mark Brian from Hootie & the Blowfish says things to me like, ‘You’re my favorite eccentric weird songwriter.’ And I listen to my songs, and I don’t think they’re all that eccentric and weird. They’re simple, they’re rock ‘n’ roll, they have verses, they have choruses and bridges. What’s so different? Same thing with a Michael Jackson record. They’re still set up approximately the same way. Yet there’s a world of difference between them. The thing that we’ve all had to learn over the years is that this is not about huge success. That would be wonderful! I’d love it if a song got used in a commercial that would take the load off of being an unemployed musician. If I could ever get my publishing straightened out, maybe I could do something! The great thing is that I’ve got a job that I love. I love to be a musician. I love the reaction of people when they like my songs. Maybe I’m just a ham, but I really do dig it a lot. It feels really good. I’m not really comfortable in the rest of the world. I am on stage, though. Music was just about the most important thing to me until my kids came along.
Can you get your kids involved in music?
Peter: I play at my son’s school. I was the kids’ entertainer at Borders in New Orleans for about five years. I started working on a kids record, but then I realized that practically every old semi-failed new waver had done a kids record! I don’t want to be in that number until I can do something really good. Dan Zanes does a great job! Robert Warren is great! Disney’s got the Imagination Movers—that’s just the shit! I love it! The kids love it! You want to make kids music so that parents don’t jump out the window.
Chris, you haven’t released any kids albums to my knowledge—but you released Chris Bell’s first single on your label, right?
Chris: Right! Again, that was through Alex. Alex told me about it. I was very proud to have done that, but it wasn’t anything very creative except to the extent that A&R is creative. He’d made it a while back. He’d done in a guy’s garage, in a shoe box in Memphis, and then moved to London and mixed it with Geoff Emerick at George Martin’s Air studios.
In the last couple decades, we haven’t heard a whole lot from you! Have you been recording and producing bands or selling crystal meth, or what?
Chris: I do an album or two a month—some mixing, some producing. I probably work on about fifteen records a year. I just did a band called Megafaun. I did Rosebuds, on Merge. The Old Ceremony. Luego, which hasn’t come out yet…
How about some L.A. bands?
Chris: I did a whole bunch of recordings with Patrick Park! I don’t think he qualifies as a ‘band,’ but if anybody qualifies as a one-man band, he can really do it. That would be the most recent thing. I lived there, working there with Scott Litt on a Flat Duo Jets record for a while at Ocean Way, which became Cello. I definitely put in time in California. In a lot of ways, I consider the span I spent with Peter Holsapple to be a California band. We really started in L.A. We live in North Carolina, but the spirit of our birth was really in the Santa Monica kind of thing.
I have the Sharp Cuts compilation you came out on in 1980 on Planet Records with ‘Soul Kiss.’ You’re on there with a lot of other L.A. bands. Did that record come about because of your association with people out here?
Chris: No, I think that would be prior to it. I think we just got a call about it. I do remember they accidentally put the wrong tape on there, which always bugged me. That was a joke mix! It never was supposed to be out like that.
If it makes you feel better, on the album sticker, they list Suburban Lawns twice and forgot to list the Alleycats.
Chris: It figures.
Besides just songs, did people constantly misspell the ‘dB’s’ name on albums and flyers and such?
Chris: I think we knew we were in for trouble. It was interesting to see how things change in translation. I kind of liked that it did change all the time, but I guess it was an uphill struggle.
Did people ever spell it ‘D-e-e-B-e-e-s’ like the Bee Gees?
Chris: I think we’ve had every kind of possible ramification. The embarrassing thing is that we never should have put the apostrophe in there to begin with. It was archaic even then. It’s pretty incorrect.
I was listening to your early discography, Chris, and I feel like you were playing a brand of power-pop that even now sounds a bit more youthful. I feel like other power-pop sounded a bit mannish, and yours sounds more teenaged—even maybe had a bit of a bubblegum feel.
Peter:We listened to everything—depending on what you feel is bubblegum. I was married to Susan Cowsill of the Cowsills, so I love the Partridge Family. I love the stuff that was on Buddah, the Kasenetz-Katz Orchestra and things like that. But I don’t love it anymore than I love Otis Redding or the Dave Clark Five or Big Star. I will admit to having listened to more than the lion’s share of AM radio. Anything that goes from about 1964-1974.
Did you have a hard time convincing your peers to appreciate something more gentle and delicate?
Chris: I always played with good musicians, and we just talk about how to play music. You know on iTunes, they have a little pull-down things for genre when you want to make an MP3? I actually think I do more ‘folk rock’ over ‘power pop.’
What folk rock bands inspired you?
Chris: I would say the Byrds would be the biggest.
Speaking of 8-tracks, you guys did a lot of cassette releases as the dB’s. You did one that came in an actual can! Wasn’t that expensive?
Chris: We didn’t get the bill, but I don’t think it was that expensive. Probably a big waste of chow mein noodles or something! Cans can’t really cost that much—otherwise, they wouldn’t put cheap food in them.
Did the people who bought them actually have to use a can opener to get the tape out?
Chris: Oh yeah!
Why did things end? Why did you shelve the dB’s?
Chris: I think it’s more of a mystery why things continue. I look at bands I like like Blind Faith where they last for five months and a few gigs. It seemed like it went on a long time.
And you guys are still working together as a duo, so it’s like this working relationship that was in the dB’s is still going.
Chris: It had started 11 years before that, really. It’s just that the dB’s got more press because there were press agents involved.
Peter, you had a huge bunch of press when you played with R.E.M.
Peter: I did play with R.E.M. We did a tour for Green, the first album they did on Warner Brothers, and we recorded Out of Time—I played the acoustic guitar on ‘Losing My Religion.’ And then we went to England, and we reached a point where it was ‘untenable’ to work together. Much as I love those guys and respect what they’ve done, it was time for me to move on. I joined the Continental Drifters for ten years, and was serving in the same capacity I had with R.E.M. in Hootie & the Blowfish, which was a great gig I had for thirteen years.
You were saying that the dude from the Blowfish thinks you write weird songs. For our readership the weirdest thing you’ve EVER done is play in Hootie & the Blowfish!
Peter: The guys in the band are remarkable people. They truly are! They worked very, very hard for their success. They did some things that were probably ill-advised—they rushed out a second record out because they were afraid their fans were sick of the first record! They were thinking of their fans, which I thought was really cool.
Yeah, but… Hootie and the Blowfish! Chris, were ever moments where you were like, ‘Peter is killing the brand?’
Chris: I can’t even think in that way! He had been doing flower deliveries in New Orleans before that happened. I can’t think of how many times he went to Vietnam with them. I think it was kind of fun!
Peter: I would certainly rather do this than not work! That’s probably the best job I ever had. I enjoyed playing the music—it was really comfortable music, and really comforting music. It was not like playing with Yes. But to get to back up a world-class singer like Darius Rucker for 13 years was a serious honor. I was able to rope him into a tribute to Sandy Denny—I was the music director for a show that was celebrating the work of Sandy Denny, in Brooklyn, and I asked him to sing ‘Black Waterside,’ and he just tore it up! We got him on the R.E.M. tribute show at Carnegie Hall, and he did ‘I Believe’ with Calexico. People are more inclined to hate Hootie & the Blowfish because they think they’ve heard Hootie & the Blowfish. But Hootie did five really good studio records. Every one of those records had songs that could have been hits on them. The shape of radio changed, and the band stuck with their style. It was tough to go from being nobody, to being a huge hit, to being a punch line. People just think it’s ‘Hold My Hand’ and Darius in a cowboy hat hawking Burger King.
What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever played?
Chris: They all seem so normal! With the Golden Palominos, we played the Montrose Jazz Festival. We were playing after the Herbie Hancock Quartet, with Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock. I think we played after Miles Davis, too.
Have you had any crazy stories recently where you two put out an album or did a show, and some rabid fans did something… rabid?
Chris: I usually hide after shows! You seem to be looking for fun, tabloid stuff, and you’re probably looking in the wrong direction. We come from a very Southern, polite tradition.
I was actually at the 99 Cent Store on York in Highland Park, and ran across the Chris Stamey and Friends’ Christmas album— for a buck! It wasn’t bad! Can you tell me how that came about?
Peter: I did ‘O Holy Night’ on the very first version of the Christmas album years ago. I love that stuff! I grew up in the Episcopal Church, singing in the choir. I love the popular stuff! The Beach Boys’ Christmas record, the Ventures Christmas record, the Phil Spector Christmas Gift for You, the Beatles 45. Love ‘em, love ‘em, love ‘em! And the best part of Christmas albums is that they sell every year.
Chris: Gene Holder, who plays bass in the dB’s, always wanted to make a Christmas record, always thought that would be a fun thing to do. We were so impressed that even after I was no longer playing with the band, I wrote a song called ‘Christmas Time’ kinda with him in mind and got the other guys who had been in the dB’s to record it with me. And we put together other tracks based around that one song.
Who sings ‘Silver Bells?’ That was my favorite tune off the album.
That was Kirsten Lambert. She’s a friend of ours who lives here. That may be her only recorded effort, as far as I know.
That’s a tragedy! Tell her! If she ever goes on tour, I’ll give her an interview.
Chris: Okay—haha!

PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY ON FRI., JULY 17, AT McCABE’S GUITAR SHOP, 3101 PICO BLVD., SANTA MONICA. 8 PM / $20 / ALL AGES. MCCABES.COM PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY’S hEAR aND nOW IS OUT NOW ON BAR/NONE. VISIT PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY AT HOLSAPPLESTAMEY.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/HEREANDNOWPETERANDCHRIS.

We weren’t able to get a hold of everyone in Southern California who is observing Record Store Day tomorrow, but we did ask a few of our favorite local stores what sort of special things they’ll be doing. If you aren’t at Coachella—or if you want to sneak away—be sure to go out tomorrow and get the something you can’t get off the Internet. (We recommend the This LP Crashes Hard Drives compilation, a joint effort between L.A. RECORD-loved labels like Sublime Frequencies, Light in the Attic and more!) And remember—as the good folks at Poo Bah in Pasadena remind us all, every day can be Record Store Day. List compiled by Steven Martinez.

AMOEBA RECORDS
12 NOON TO 6PM: T-shirt silkscreening from Family Industries! Make a $5 donation to one of Amoeba’s Green Charities (Sierra Club Angeles Branch or Conservation International) and Family Industries will silkscreen one of several cool designs on the spot onto a tee of your choice (courtesy of American Apparel).
1 PM: DJs Wendy and Lisa!
5 PM: DJ Babu!
ALL DAY: Limited-edition vinyl releases from Sonic Youth, Beck, Jay Reatard, Elvis Costello, the Smiths, Flight of the Conchords, Leonard Cohen, and so many more! Plus a limited-edition Record Store Day vinyl compilation featuring UNRELEASED tracks by Willie Nelson, Q-Tip, Franz Ferdinand, MGMT and more!
AMOEBA RECORDS, 6400 W. SUNSET BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. AMOEBA.COM.

FINGERPRINTS
NOON: Crystal Antlers live set!
2 PM: Listening party for Bob Dylan’s Together Through Life!
5:30 PM: The Bird and the Bee live set!
7 PM: Matt Costa live set!
ALL DAY: Limited-edition releases from Arthur Russell, Akron/Family, Bad Religion, Cold War Kids, Jesus Lizard, Lykke Li and El Perro Del Mar, MC5, Sonic Youth, Jay Reatard and more—plus the awesome This LP Crashes Hard Drives compilation!
FINGERPRINTS RECORDS, 4612 E. 2ND ST., LONG BEACH. FINGERPRINTSMUSIC.COM.

FATBEATS
In-store performances and signings from Houseshoes (FatBeats LA), Inka One (Boombox LA), Kutmah (Sketchbook, Dublab), Shafiq Husayn, Chikaramanga (Tres Records, Shibuya Club DJs), Yotah (Shibuya Club DJs), Jedi, Mona Lisa, J1 and more to be announced! Plus 10% off all items all day!
FATBEATS, 7600 MELROSE AVE., STE. J., LOS ANGELES. FATBEATS.COM.

FREAKBEAT RECORDS
10% off records and over 100 limited edition titles will be available!
FREAKBEAT RECORDS, 13616 VENTURA BLVD., SHERMAN OAKS. FREAKBEATRECORDS.COM.

ROCKAWAY RECORDS
Limited exclusive Record Store Day releases and storewide sale—discount to-be-announced!
ROCKAWAY RECORDS, 2395 GLENDALE BLVD., SILVERLAKE. ROCKAWAY.COM.

STREET SOUNDS
DJ sets (line-up to be announced) and 10% off all items all day!
STREET SOUNDS, 7704 MELROSE AVE., LOS ANGELES. STREETSOUNDS.COM.

VACATION VINYL
Limited exclusive Record Store Day releases and possible live guest TBA!
VACATION VINYL, 4670 HOLLYWOOD BLVD., LOS FELIZ. VACATIONVINYL.COM.

VINYL SOLUTION
10% off new records and 25% off used records!
VINYL SOLUTION, 18822 BEACH BLVD., HUNTINGTON BEACH. MYSPACE.COM/VINYLSOLUTION.

The Dogs “Fed Up!”

The Dogs were born in Michigan in 1970 and made the White Panthers a little worried before they moved to New York (and drove Kiss around) and toured the midwest (where they were beaten onstage by cops in front of 9,000 Bob Seger fans) and finally settled in L.A., where they were instrumental in the Radio Free Hollywood scene that came just before the Masque. They have just received a 2XCD tribute comp despite only releasing five songs before they broke-up. They are now back together and are working on a new DVD.

What’s the most ridiculous exit you ever made from a stage?
Loren Molinare (guitar/vocals): We were opening for Bob Seger at the Toledo Sports Arena and we got charged with felony inciting a riot. We had moved back from New York to Detroit and were booked with Bob Seger before he really broke, and we were like right before Seger. We’d waited all day and we were already set up and Bob’s road manager said, ‘Bob is tired and he wants to go back to Ann Arbor. You guys will close the show.’ And there were 9,000 kids there to see Bob Seger who barely knew who we were—‘We can’t do that! We’re gonna go play!’ And they say, ‘If you go on stage, you’re going to jail.’ “Oh yeah? Well, rock ‘n’ roll, motherfucker!’ So we go out on stage in front of 9,000 kids and started to play, and they pull the plug and Ron [Wood] started doing a drum solo. And the next thing—Toledo city cops come onstage in front of 9,000 people and beat the hell out of the band with billy clubs! They hauled everybody off to jail but me—I was running around screaming ‘rock and fucking roll’ to the crowd! They threw one of our roadies through a plate-glass window and charged him with destruction of public property. Needless to say, the booking agency—who did the MC5, the Stooges, Brownsville Station and Bob Seger—refused to have the Dogs on any of their shows in the Midwest. Their bands would not play. We got blackballed for standing up for rock ‘n’ roll! This was before they called it punk rock. We were raising a lot of of hell standing up for whatever we thought was justice.
Where did you get your code of ethics?
There was a lot of change going on, and especially with John Sinclair and the MC5 mentality—it became White Panthers on steroids for us! But it was still the music business. We didn’t realize that. It’s all about justice and doing things for the right reasons. Someone called me a hopeless optimist, and I said, ‘Oh yeah? Put it on my fucking tombstone!’ A lot of great bands—Beatles to Stones to Hendrix—paved the way, and MC5 opened the door. From Chuck Berry to the Beach Boys to the MC5—you got me going on a roll, motherfucker!
When you first heard the MC5 on WILS, did they play the version that says ‘motherfucker’?
The MC5 corrupted me at such a young age, but I didn’t hear ‘Kick Out The Jams’ on the radio—it was AM radio in those days. But in high school I was in cadet band class—I played drums, but really it was a derelict class for all the losers in school to come and just play records.
Did you get a grade for that?
I took that class for three years—it helped me graduate! We’d listen to MC5—B.B. King I learned in that class—and I got into the MC5 so much. They were gonna play our high school but the band teacher heard ‘Kick out the jams, motherfucker!’ and went and told the principal! So early on I was corrupted by passion, honesty and power and the political kind of expression of just breaking out and kicking out the motherfucking jams! It set me free—total liberation.
What was it like to graduate into the world of 1970?
I had no fucking idea! Other than I knew I wasn’t gonna go to college—it was gonna be rock ‘n’ roll. I made that conscious attempt. The Dogs were still kind of kids playing with toys. We opened for the MC5 when I was in 11th grade. The Back In The USA days—it was the first time I got to see them and it was so amazing! Truck driver, hippies, rednecks, rockers—it was the first time I’d ever seen a band that transcended cultural barriers. I saw young girls melting in the front row. It was the most powerful thing I’d ever seen in my life. A freight train coming through the center of my brain.
How did John Sinclair feel about the song you wrote about him?
That song was kind of a sore spot for a while. When he got arrested, we wrote ‘John Rock ‘n’ Roll Sinclair’ as a tribute to get him outta jail, but after a while, we never got to play any benefits, and we felt a little put off by their organization. Maybe they thought we had cow shit on our shoes since we were from Lansing and not Detroit? We felt he got a bum rap from the government, and we wanted to free his soul with rock ‘n’ roll and get him out of jail. The C.I.A. was doing a lot of weird shit in those days. Freaking out about rock ‘n’ roll in Ann Arbor and Detroit—‘Ask the C.I.A., see what they gotta say…’
What were they doing?
That MC5 movie that never came out—Dave Thomas had footage of the MC5 playing the 1968 Democratic Convention, and they were filming that secretly. The Detroit area was a political hotbed—rock ‘n’ roll and Sinclair and the White Panthers. The government just freaked out about it. So ‘John Rock’ was kind of our ‘Johnny B. Goode’ but a political Michigan rock ‘n’ roll thing. I think John was a little put-off and didn’t understand, but when Detroit Jack put our tribute CD out and asked him to do the liners, it came full circle. He didn’t think we were these mutant kids from Lansing anymore. But we were like the mutant kind of result of the MC5 and the Stooges, and here we were making the Detroit psychedelic hipsters uptight—it was punk rock offending the original punk rockers! And when we were playing that song when we moved to L.A., no one even knew who he was! Our first single in 1976—we can laugh about it now!
Why were you so set on moving to L.A.?
We moved from Lansing to Detroit in 1973 to a big three-story Victorian house in the slums by Tiger Stadium. Every Dog house has been torn down now. The Hollywood house—which had a rehearsal studio—was High Time Studios, after the 5 record and the fact we liked to smoke a lot of weed! We moved to New York in 1974 and that was a real experience. We opened for Kiss, played with the Dictators and Television at Max’s Kansas City—back when Patti Smith was Tom Verlaine’s girlfriend.
Did Kiss have their make-up then?
Yes, they did! The first day in Manhattan when we got there, I saw all these posters on poles: KISS AT THE DIPLOMAT HOTEL! So we went up—so naïve, green behind the ears!—and I found Kiss and went up to Paul Stanley like, ‘Hi, I’m Loren from the Dogs! We just got in from Detroit. Can we play your show?’ And he was like, ‘Look, this is fuckin’ New York! You can’t come in and think you’re gonna play a Kiss show!’ And we’re like—oh, wow, welcome to fucking New York! Needless to say, New York was too hard to survive in, and we ended up booking a spring of ’75 tour down south to Florida to play spring break in Daytona Beach. We were getting fired in every city. That’s when disco was going—‘You’re too loud and too fast!’ Ron Wood our drummer quit in Orlando and left us stranded. His girlfriend had moved from Michigan to start stripping at some strip club by our motel: ‘Fuck you, I’m staying!’ So [bassist] Mary [Kay] and I and the road crew said, ‘Fuck it—we’re going to Hollywood!’ So we borrowed money from our parents and made it to Hollywood and stayed in the Starwood parking lot for a week. And then got our place on Gower. And then Ron came out.
They broke up, huh?
She threw him out.
It’s like a drummer joke come to life.
He came back and we met the Motels, the Pop, the Berlin Brats and we got started on the whole pre-punk thing. 1975—pre-Masque. No bands who were original could get booked. We partnered as Radio Free Hollywood with the Motels and the Pop and got written up in Billboard, and after that the Starwood and the Whisky started booking the so-called ‘new wave’ scene. And it started exploding then. And then the Masque thing. But Radio Free Hollywood was the beginning of the independent out-of-the-box anti-establishment music scene—Back Door Man magazine, Phast Phreddie and them were on that too, pushing things, and Greg Shaw out in Bomp! Different factions pushing to make it happen. That first wave from ’76 and ‘77—you had the Whisky, the Starwood, KROQ Cabaret, the Masque—it was pretty much on fire! And by ’78, the hardcore thing started happening and the punks were out of the Masque scene. We played our instruments too good and we were caught in a weird spot. Normal rock people—if you’re talking ‘70s rock, Journey or REO Speedwagon—thought we were a little too weird. And the punkers thought we played our instruments too good! We weren’t here or there. We lost it! We’d recorded at the Record Plant—the live ‘Slash Your Face’—and our manager who worked with Journey had recorded the stuff, and we ended up stealing the mixdowns of those tapes and bootlegging ourselves so we could go on tour.
So the ‘Slash Your Face’ EP is a bootleg of that live Mabuhay set?
We stole our own tapes and released it ourselves—total punk rock stuff!
Who was your best fan in L.A.?
Keith Morris—this was before the Circle Jerks. He was a surf kid. And Greg from Black Flag. Just beach kids from Torrance and Redondo. And that guy Kid Congo—and Jay Lansford who ended up in Channel 3. They were at all the shows. Keith Morris was always almost at every show, yelling, ‘Play “L.A. Times!”’ I think we had some sort of impact. They liked us because they knew we were from Detroit, and we did sound like the 5 and the Stooges a bit. I think we had a small part in influencing those guys to get the balls to kick out the jams!
What was the song ‘L.A. Times’ about?
That was one of the first songs we wrote when we got here. We had two L.A. songs—‘Sleaze City,’ about the bondage houses and people who come here like locusts to make it, and ‘L.A. Times’ was the first song. At that point, the Whisky was closed—‘The whiskey ran dry in the summer of ’75…’ and the L.A. Times newspaper and I thought ‘Right on time with the fucking L.A. Times.’ Just a song to document what I felt the scene was with the Motels and the Pop and how we met them and the beginning of Radio Free Hollywood. And just a song about if you lived in the Midwest and dreamt about coming to Hollywood like I did. Creem did an expose on Hollywood with Alice Cooper at Pink’s, and we had pulled it out and saved it and that was our road map when we got off the Hollywood freeway!
At one point or another were you the heaviest band in L.A.?
The scene was pretty vibrant, but we could hold our own with Van Halen headlining the Starwood or the Whisky—but it was rough opening for them because their crowd was die-hard. They’d be asleep while you were playing! But Dave Roth—the first Hollywood date the Dogs ever did was Van Halen, Quiet Riot and the Dogs at the Starwood in ’76!
How were you able to move between all these little scenes?
Because of that Midwest normal-rock background. The Dogs opened for AC / DC’s American debut at the Whisky. A three-night stand with two shows a night. And we did things that sabotaged our chance to get signed—you’ll love this. We had our code of ethics and it damaged our career! Our manager said, ‘Look, I’ll get you to open for AC / DC, and if you guys dress a little more punk, I can get you a record deal!’ We were wearing kind of tight jeans, pointed shoes—kind of Detroit—and we go, ‘We can’t do that! That’s not punk!’ So we come out our first night—we took baggy dress pants and white dress shirts and put ‘em in the mud and pissed on ‘em and put mud on our faces and we were just like bums on the Bowery, and we came out played! And Richard Cromelin—who still writes for the L.A. Times, and who was a really good supporter of the band—he didn’t get it! He said we came out with a pretentious look.
Pissing on your clothes seemed pretentious?
Yeah, yeah! Our hair had mud in it—we looked like derelicts from Skid Row, and we got a bad review in the L.A. Times. But the funny thing is Iggy showed up that night with mud on his face.
Independently?
Yeah, kind of a coincidence! Needless to say, we didn’t get signed.
How did someone get a broken foot and a broken hand at your Japan reunion shows last year?
I don’t know about the broken hand but the one night it got really wild and our roadie from Detroit had to do to mouth-to-mouth to a guy who got crushed in the front row!
What do you think about getting a 29-song tribute comp when the Dogs only released five songs during their lifetime?
It blew my mind. I didn’t think about it til they brought me one. Detroit Jack’s girlfriend Aruha came up and I met her and she gave me the CD and said, ‘Loren, you’re my Chuck Berry!’
Do you still have your old MC5 records?
My collection got stolen when we came back from England. All our gear was ripped off, too. We were really stupid—really crazy! No matter what happened, we kept going. You can’t stop the rock!

—Chris Ziegler

THE DOGS WITH THE CONTROLLERS, THE PISS POPS AND THE STITCHED LIPS ON FRI., JULY 18, AT RELAX BAR, 5517 HOLLYWOOD BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 9 PM / $10 / 21+. MYSPACE.COM/RELAXBAR. THE DOGS’ DOGGY STYLE TRIBUTE CD IS OUT NOW ON FUTURE NOW. THE DOGS’ PURITY NOT PERFECTION DVD WILL BE OUT SOON. VISIT THE DOGS AT MYSPACE.COM/THEDETROITDOGS.