Emerging from an angsty, melancholy, Bright Eyes-heavy bout of introspection in my last year of high school, I had the good fortune of catching an intimate show at one small venue in UC Davis’ myriad of coffee shops. Like a dark cloud parting to reveal the big bright shining sun, Dr. Dog guitar-plucked their way into my teenage soul that night, and has remained one of my favorite bands ever since. So when the chance came to do an interview with co-lead singer Scott McMicken for Mean magazine, I leapt at the opportunity.
After attending an awkward industry-only midday peformance in Hollywood, I met Scott in the parking lot of the Roosevelt Hotel and we spoke for a blissful hour and a half of matters great and small. The meat of that interview will be published in the upcoming August issue of Mean (along with my interviews of Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, Towelhead star Summer Bishil, and my first sneaker column). In preparation of Dr. Dog’s amazing new album, , which hits shelves tomorrow, my editor has given me permission to post some excerpts from the remainder of my rambling conversation with Scott McMicken here. Enjoy!
Download: from the new album, Fate
[audio:drdog_theolddays.mp3]
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That would be really awesome. We did this album, generic cialis sale a long time ago, and we’ve always had dreams to make it a traveling piece of theater. There’s a real strong narrative throughout the album and it would be pretty easy and really fun to try and make it into a sort of low-budget theater production. But even a movie of that…
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No, it’s not. The problem is… we would have put it out already, but the concept on the album is that we didn’t make it, we got it in the mail. So the packaging is an envelope with our address on it. The idea is that we got it—this cassette tape—from this dude who used to live on earth, but escaped into this psychedelic parallel universe, as an effort to escape all the problems he was having on earth.
And when he got there, initially he was like, “Wow, this is awesome! Everything is so weird, and everything is upside down, with psychedelic aesthetics—nothing is predictable!” But over time, as he gained his frame of reference there, he realized that the same problems persist and there’s no real escape other than accepting and dealing with these issues that you have in your life. So he wants to make this album and send it back to earth to spread that message, like, “I’ve made this mistake, I thought I could escape but now I’m just trapped here. Everything’s the same.” And he appeals to us, saying, “Can you be the band that’s going to translate this music into modern American pop music, so that the message is understood?” He’s becoming so detached from reality the more he’s there, his ability to communicate and his way of going about representing information is becoming more and more garbled and detached and that’s why it sounds like a very psychedelic album.
The reason we haven’t put it out yet is because before we do that, I want to do what he’s asking us to do, which is to take all the music and re-record it as a live rock band with no psychedelic elements whatsoever. Very straightforward, immediate delivery, just like he wants it to be—a translation of his psychedelic mess. So when we do that, we’ll put ‘em both together and it’ll be like a double album.
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No… I want to. My friends do that. I have a few friends who live that way, riding around on the rails, and there’s something about it that’s very romantic. The three people I know who do it, it’s not a big social thing—they’re not with a huge group of people. Most of the time they’re on their own, so it seems kinda cool. Dangerous—very dangerous. Probably very uncomfortable. In truth, I’ll probably never ever do that, but I certainly like the idea of that. All I can picture are horror stories of getting sucked under and your legs get chopped off.
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We’re trying to kind of cultivate that persona for ourselves with this album. We did all these photos and we got all this great authentic turn-of-the-century blue collar train worker garb, like suspenders and lanterns and these cool caps and these weird shirts, just subtle variations on old clothing, and put all this dirt on our face, charcoal dust, and got our pictures taken on these old trains to try to become that character.
There’s a thread—a very minor thread—throughout the album, of life being work. Like life not being about a certain point of arrival, but rather always the getting there. You’re always on your way. Whatever you think is a resting point is never a resting point, unless you’re actually dead. And so it becomes work. Recognizing that, and taking responsibility for where you are, what’s influenced you being there, and where you want to go from there. Not in the negative way, but just as an ethic. There’s a need for a work ethic to keep you strong and energized to go through all this stuff we all face. So that’s why we wanted to be these workers, to become that idea.
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I have a lot of collections and hobbies! My first collection I had in life was Bazooka Joe comics, from the pieces of gum—cause if you saved up a certain amount you could cash ‘em in for shit, and get all these gag gifts and t-shirts and stuff if you had like, a hundred comics. Of course, I collected baseball cards when I was a kid, for a while. Then I collected those little plastic clasps on a loaf of bread that come in orange and blue and green, and I had a whole glass thing full of them—they looked beautiful all together. Then, I began a rubber band ball that I’ve had for about ten years now. It’s about thirty pounds now—it’s a beast. It’s my favorite thing.
But now I have this new collection: I think it started cause my mom was buying this kind of tea that was called Tetley Tea, and it’s just basic tea, like diner tea. You buy it in a box of a hundred bags, and it always comes with these little ceramic sculptures of a hawk, or a wise man, or a wolf or something. I went to her house once and I noticed she had four of them on a window, and I was like “Wow, these are cool,” and she said, “Yeah, you can have those.” So I took ‘em home and that was probably two or three years ago, and from that I began a collection of miniatures. I probably have like a hundred. It’s great, I just moved into this new apartment that has these beautiful wooden closets—unpainted, natural wood-finished closets that are carved and real ornate. Up at the top the ledge of it’s like a three-tiered ledge, so it’s a perfect place to put all these things and display them, so it looks like a whole freaked out parade up there.
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No way! I’ve gotta find out about that.
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Oh, my God…
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Yeah, I’ll probably just keep it low key. Most of the stuff I find on the street, so that’s why it’s great—little toy soldiers or plastic dinosaurs—so that’s where my collection is feuled, just from finding shit.
And then hobbies—I really love to draw and paint. I’ve gotten lucky in life—I’ve been into drawing and painting as long as I’ve been into music, and at times more than music. But it always seems to work out where if I’m in a dry spell with writing and I’m not in the right mindset to come up with stuff that I like, my attention seems to turn to drawing and painting. So it’s always sort of there to keep me having ideas or keep me busy if I’m constantly struggling with writing music, or not having ideas for recording.
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I’ve done all of it—well, not true—generic cialis sale was the first time we’d done anything that wasn’t our own artwork. I got a job one summer painting the walls clean white in this gallery in town called the , and they’d let me snoop around in the storeroom. I came across this collection of work by this dude named , who was a complete outsider artist, had never shown anything, and had never had any attention. He was just a Cuban immigrant who worked in a cigar factory in Virginia, and would go home every night and make these collages.
In his old age he moved to live with his niece in west Philly, where I live, and brought all of his artwork (which at that point had accumulated—like, 40 years worth of work—to hundreds of pieces) and died in West Philly. And when he died, his daughter, not having any clue about how awesome this stuff he was making was, just put it all out in a yard sale. And luckily, this guy from the Fleisher-Ollman Gallery happened to walk by and see the yard sale and bought this massive collection. So the Fleisher-Ollman Gallery is the only gallery with any artwork by this guy, and they did a big show of it and he got on the cover of “Folk Art America” or something. It started to sell for high prices, so I got the impression that he started to get a just amount of attention.
I saw them in there and I though, these not only would be great for an album cover, but these are everything I’ve ever wanted to be able to make. These are the pieces I would dream about making. They were so surreal and scathing in a lot of ways—there’s a lot of social commentary in such a surreal and fun and playful way. And not only that, but Consalvos was working with such common stuff: stuff he’d steal from his cigar job, like the little stickers that go around cigars—I imagine he’d get whole rolls of it, cause all of his images are bordered with that. And then he would use post stamps, money, images from Victorian magazines—it’s all very class-oriented, and it all seems to come from one strange world of antiquity. But for him, these were just the things that were around him. Like, for him to put on a Campbell’s soup can, or a candy bar wrapper, or the headline of a newspaper—these were just the things around him, but since those objects were made in the 40s and 50s, his collages take on a whole new meaning, sixty years later. He’s making very contemporary images, but now they’re not contemporary at all.
I love when time starts to get its fingers onto things and affect the feelings that come off of them. Cause then it’s larger than life—it’s not his decisions, it’s not his choice. It’s just enabling this thing, and it points to the constant shift in meaning and the constant shift in perception that occurs naturally throughout the course of human history. I love the process of time. To me, Consalvos’ work displays patience, and life itself—evolution.
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I’d probably go to New York City in the ‘60s, or, maybe more like New York City in the 1900s, at the turn of the century. I probably wouldn’t hang around in New York City the whole time, but I love New York’s history. I don’t know, though, that’s a tough question. You could go to Rome, Greece…
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I’ll tell you one thing, Igeneric cialis sale go into the future. I got no interest in the future. It would definitely be some time in the past. I’d have to go to like, Mayan civilization or something… there are some points in history that are pretty mysterious.
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Wow… thanks, man. That’s really strange—it’s an interesting aspect of art. I’ve had my life and my feelings profoundly changed by albums and movies, too—what causes that? I think it’s a testament to, again, that larger than life presence, ‘cause no one intentionally set out to affect you in that way, and I think what makes it possible is the process that a person goes through when they’re just making something honest for themselves, that they’re going to enjoy and gain something from.
Anybody involved in making something has a responsibility to themselves (and therefore, to everyone else) to produce something that helps them. That’s sort of what art is, in a general sense—and my definition of art isn’t confined to museums or albums or libraries or movie theaters—I feel as though art is a very practical part of the human experience and it shows itself in really mundane things. The clothes that you put on in the morning are an expression of yourself. The food you want to eat. Where you put your kitchen table. How you walk down the sidewalk—everything is an aesthetic choice, and therefore an expression of some aspect of your identity. In those things, as well as things that are more conventionally recognized as expressions of art, if you consistently do things in such a way that suit you in a true way, to keep you happy and progressive in some direction, then you’re serving a healthy duty not only to yourself, but to the world around you.
And there’s no rule for what’s supposed to make someone happy. Like grating noise and distortion and formlessness is what, to somebody, sounds good. And I really don’t think there’s any particular expression where generic cialis saleone person on the planet likes it and no one else. Unless it’s, like, the most heinous deviation from some awful malfunction of a brain.
This is awesome cant wait to read the rest of this.
nice job graham. I definitely agree with his sentiment about the future. I would much rather be in those mysterious pockets of the past.