Los Doggies

Our second EP, the inevitably-titled Dos Doggies, was released around Christmas of ’03. It was a simpler time in silico. Back then there were no smartphones save the cellular bricks yuppies carried around. There was no social media save the fogie-infested AOL chatrooms and my beloved IMDb message boards (RIP). The Internet was the wild, wild west of a thousand websites, unlike the trio of apps people use today. There was an actual End of the Web you could gaze down upon and despair at, not this bottomless pit we’ll never crawl out of. You were considered a nerd if you sat around on a computer all day. Grown men were using Yahoo to search. Wiki-what? Modern file-sharing was in its infancy and took a blow when Lars from Metallica shut Napster down. If you wanted to release a DIY album, your best bet was to burn discs and hand them out like a caveman. Lots of artist were disguising their own Mp3s under popular names. Did you ever hear “Gin & Juice (Cover)” by Los Doggies?

Our self-titled debut was released the year before, mostly performed in one take on a single acoustic guitar, a testament to its campfire origins. Dos Doggies expanded the sonic palette into full-on electronica with all of its marvelous colors. Barely mixed, wholly unmastered, I present this 18-song, 20-minute EP in its original form, recorded with a tiny computer mic taped onto a soda bottle for a stand in a small studio bedroom in New Paltz, neither recording studio nor proper studio apartment. The electronic timbres were heavily inspired by old video-games. Not one keyboard was played here, but rather preprogrammed MIDI tracks.

These were the good old days when Los Doggies could be criticized for being a bit of a joke-band with short songs, and not a bunch of emo poseurs who like to jam till the cows home. Despite being comedic, I never considered this music to be any less sincere than our current material. There are many twinklings of profound sadness to be found despite the sunny-bunny sound, although I’m not sure why tear-jerking an audience is any better than tickling their fancy. But hey, they laughed at Stravinsky too, and look at that old goat now! Like some of our favorite bands, They Might Be Giants, Ween, Flaming Lips, and even Zappa or Phish to an extent, Los Doggies’ early work was a silly, synthetic stop along the way to getting serious sea legs as a band, although in circular fashion, I’d like to revisit this wonderfully naive style.

Less than a dozen Dos discs were burned with accidental gaps, labeled in sharpie, and handed out to friends and family. Bedroom pop didn’t carry the same prestige that it does today, where everyone is craving (or feigning) lower-class authenticity to up their social credit score. Aside from this limited pressing, Dos was never given a proper album cover and release. I had envisioned a technicolored dodo surrounded by neon electric cables and synthesizers. Close to two decades later, it’s finally complete thanks to Kaitlin Van Pelt, local artist and friend-rocker from Breakfast in Fur. She designed the album art and it’s just perfect, as though she reached back in time to render my vision. The background is cyan, my second favorite blue. The dodo looks like he could waddle onto a samurai woodcut. You can find her artwork on Etsy. She also specializes in pet portraiture if you want your floofy or doggo immortalized.

I love when songwriters take us behind the music, especially when they’re as irreverent as the four lads from Liverpool, so if you’ll indulge me, I’ve included a breakdown of each track to accompany your listening experience. The EP was meant to be listened to in one sitting, as each song segues into the next, like the pop suite on Abbey Road.

“The Dodo Trilogy”

For a while, the tragic dodo bird became something of our spirit animal. I was reading Gravity’s Rainbow (I know, I know, “Nerd!”) and there was a memorable passage about the Dutch genocide of those poor birds, too weak-winged to fly away, too stupid to run away, marooned on their island tomb of Mauritius. One sympathizes with the underdog dodo, icon of extinction and Dutchman delicacy. When I first saw a dodo skeleton on display at the Museum of Natural History, I reached out across the ages to touch his bones through the glass, but I could not.

The opening bars of harp arpeggios were stolen from the Prologue to Final Fantasy III (USA). Sung by the throaty and perverse “Buchephalus,” a reoccurring character from Los Doggies, “Dodo Bird Eggs” rhetorically asks the listener, “Would you like to get to know me? / Would you feed me your dodo bird eggs?” Why yes, of course you would!

“Divorce of the Dodos” establishes the melody that originated in Part 3. Like Fleetwood Mac, much of our music could be classified as “divorce pop,” although I wouldn’t want to marry the band to such an antiquated genre. A similar palette was used throughout the album: Heavy moog bass and synth drums, combined with distorted acoustic guitar, and lots of squirrelly pitch-bent sounds on top.

“Egg Chen,” named for the sorcerer in Big Trouble in Little China, was the first song written for the Dodo Trilogy. The melody was mistakenly raised a half-step too low, but adds a sense of urgency to the purchase of store-bought dodo eggs.

“Your Urine”

The hook comes from Finnegans Wake, the punny dream-book which caused James Joyce to go blind and possibly even drove him mad, although if you read his dirty letters to his wife, he was probably already quite mad. In The Wake, a female character’s urine is likened to white wine and traced back to the “secret source” of the Nile river. For voice and acoustic guitar, the song harkens to the minimal folk sound of our debut.

“Sodapopinski [sic]”

A doo-wop ode to the drunken, red Russian boxer from Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! Okay, he’s actually pink. Today’s gamers are beating the entire game blind-folded, but back in the ‘80s, we couldn’t get past Soda Pop. Cold War tensions were at an all-time high (never mind today’s Russohysteria), so when the Russki knocked you out, walked down-screen to laugh in your face, it felt like the world had already ended.

A capella over a kick and snap, the doo-wop feel harkens back to a time when pop music actually popped, and a Russian bomb attack was not just a thumb-wrestle cheat. Nowadays we have Beluga spy-whales and Russian bots. The Soviet bogey is back. Like the poet says and the idiot repeats: “Same shit, different century.” We could all use a little love diddy to a video-game baddy, even a Red (or a Pink) as menacing as Soda Popinski.

“Creamabutter”

As the dodo was Los’ spirit animal, butter was our spirit condiment, before the band imposed a draconian vegan diet on its members. The hook wasn’t meant to sound as obscene as it does, especially not in such close proximity to the children’s chorus at the end. Buchephalus appears for the second but not the last time to list off his top butters, although he stumbles over the third. Haven’t we all? The bridge features the first instance of the Doobie Brothers turnaround from “Listen to the Music.” Please don’t sue me, Doobies!

“The Night of a Million Stars”

On the intro and outro of this song, you can hear the raw power of our computer mic. It was so small you could swallow it whole and sing with a loud fuzzy distortion, which was the only reason to untape it from our soda-bottle stand.

“Rule of Thumb”

A draftsman’s pun that went south. In art school, I learnt about Phoenician dyes and was fascinated by the origins of the color purple, so in typical nerd fashion I wrote a song about it, laden with hypersexual overtones. A local Hudson Valley band used to cover this song with a more folksy feel and incorporated the rarest of pleasures: an upright bass solo! If you’ve heard our recent music, you’ll know we can’t get enough bass solos, and I think it was directly inspired by this cover. You can hear the strong Ween influence here, which in turn is a lingering Zappaesque presence.

“Super Mario”

Another sexualized video-game diddy, written in a living room on Long Island. I remember the lights were low. The smoke was fresh. Old friends were laughing along. It’s amazing what music was written with good people to reflect off of. Music was more of a social experience back then. Now I’m far too old to have friends or hang out.

The lyrics concern an awakening pubescent mashed with an impressive gaming achievement. There is tacky Freudian symbolism in the flagpole and fireworks, the 1-Up and mushroom which makes one bigger, not to mention the awkward but endearing opening lines which every parent can relate to, “Now I got the biggest boner / So where am I supposed to go? / Super Mario.”

“Live Long Fucker”

A dirty acoustic punk ballad which would’ve been at home on our first EP. This song, along with many Dos classics, were a part of the early live repertoire (Shout-outs to Matty Pants and Johnny Boom!). The squirrelly pitch-bends in the interlude were a built-in option in Cool Edit (the software we used to produce Los & Dos) and it was actually called “squirrelly.”

“Emeralds in the Twilight”

To paraphrase Dali, “The first man to compare a woman’s breast to the moon was a poet; the second man was an idiot.” In the original quote, it was a rose, but I’m not sure what he meant either way. In college, Dali’s autobiography was huge for me, and I borrowed most of my ideas from it since I have none of my own, everything from intra-uterine fetishization to the adverb “Jesuitically.”

Once again this song begins with harp arpeggios, which are the best kind of arpeggios. For shorthand, we could make the portmanteau “harpeggios,” which I’m sure is a popular joke for classical nerds.

“Cherub”

Part of a series of a suite of Greco-Roman love songs that never achieved lift-off. I won’t tell you what we did with the gryphon! Written long before the rest of Dos, the non-sequiturs and obscenity set the stage for things to come. The chorus chord progression is copied from the band ’90s space-rock band Hum, who exclusively use the Major Seventh Add Nine Chord on a lot of their songs.

“I’m Just a Guy”

The stealth sequel to “Your Urine,” which makes Dos a concept album. The lyrics dip in and out of 1st and 3rd person as per the intoxication of the singer. Like Joyce, he seems to be a wino and urophile.

“At Moonrise”

An actual love song with no profanity. The Lydian mode is one of my favorites, especially with the A and B chords ringing out the open strings. Acoustic guitar is an E major machine, no matter how many capos and pitch-shifters you use.

“White Womb Woman”

“She’s a white womb woman with a blackberry bosom.” Who hasn’t met someone like that? The wordplay is very Joycean. I think I was originally trying to come up with a pseudo-Zeppelin chorus. You could hear Robert Plant screaming the hook in between some Lord of the Rings allusions. Once again the Doobie Brothers’ turnaround provides the 7th and 8th bars.

“I’m Just an Elf who Eats Undergarments”

The obscene nadir of the album, borrowed from a MIDI made by our friend and cover artist. The pitch-bent vocals finally make sense as you discover they were elves all along. This song references the old shoemaker fairy tale, although instead of assisting his trade, the elves violate the shoemaker while he sleeps.

“Mommies, Pt. 2”

The saddest song ever written concerning the eternal question: “Why do mommies have to die?” asked by the existential child. Part 1 appeared on Los Doggies, but no answer was given. Who can say? The upbeat of Part 2 attempts to rephrase the question, but it remains bittersweet. Not sweet at all actually, just bitter.

“Tigerbutter”

An allusion to the story of Little Black Sambo and his melted tigers, which may not be PC enough for today’s kids. The hook contains the Latin “deliquesce,” a fancy word for melting. The instruments are synth vibes, bass, and drums. The solo, a koto and FX pad. For a while, this was the last Los Doggies song anyone heard. The toy instruments nicely segues into the subsequent opening track on Onebody, “Caramel Bug Nuts,” with its toy glock and phone guitar. A nice bit of unintentional continuity.

The year is 2019 of our Lord. May the twelfth. I am blessed to still be alive and write you this overwrought essay. I hope to make lots more music. Thanks for listening, whosoever you are. At the turn of the century, Los Doggies began as a series of answering machine jingles. Fifteen years ago, Los Doggies Dot Com crash-landed onto the Internet, although it wasn’t the beautiful mess of outdated Flash widgets you see today.

Evan
New Paltz, 2019