SLUGS DON’T TOUR AT A SNAIL’S PACE

Doug Bennett is hardly your typical frat rat. The droll, personable 35-year-old singer has a background as a graphic artist for Toronto advertising agencies and as a newspaper editorial cartoonist.

Yet for the last eight years Bennett has been the head of his own little fraternity--Doug & the Slugs, a Vancouver-based sextet that spends as much as eight months a year barnstorming the United States and Canada in its custom tour bus.

And indeed the Slugs’ sound could best be described as frat-rock, ‘80s style--something of an update of the convivial sound associated with the likes of “Louie, Louie” as done by the Kingsmen or Paul Revere & the Raiders and today represented by the workaday rock of Huey Lewis.

“We call it gonzo lounge music this week,” joked Bennett by phone from San Francisco. The band is in the middle of a tour that brings it to town for a three-night stand at At My Place beginning tonight, plus the opening slot with the KBC Band at the Beverly Theatre on Saturday.

“We developed our shtick in the roadhouses and bars,” Bennett said. “It’s sort of your wilder approach than the generic rock. The thing about roadhouse rock is you have a chance to let your own style come out. Even if the music isn’t particularly innovative you can make a dull job exciting.”

The band’s style is linked with its geography, as much of frat-rock’s history took place in the Northwest. Both the Kingsmen and the Raiders came from the region, and the movie “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” which commemorated the scene and sparked a revival of the sound, was filmed in Eugene, Ore.

“We were able to develop our own personality in Vancouver, sheltered by the mountains,” he said. “And we were forced to get out on the road because towns are far apart. You couldn’t just drive half an hour to the shows. You had to go four hours to the next town.”

The band has done well in its home country, but less so in the States where its albums--including “Cognac and Bologna” and “Music for the Hard of Thinking”--were released by RCA to little consumer or radio interest, though the band did develop a solid following in the Boston area, another frat-rock stronghold. Now the band has gone the independent route with “Doug & the Slugs,” an album combining cuts from its Canadian album “Popoganda” and a Bennett solo project.

Bennett knows that the image of a 35-year-old journeyman rocker is not necessarily a flattering one--especially in light of his once-promising Toronto career--but he’s quite comfortable with the way his life has gone.

“If we were trying to be a flavor-of-the-month band, you might have trouble with us being in our 30s,” he said. “But we’re not just a haircut band.”

In the end, he said, what matters is that he likes what he does.

“The satisfaction quotient is higher than working for someone else. You’re getting up there and no matter how much bull you go through in a day with lousy hotel rooms and food, you get on stage and have a great show and it makes you feel like a hundred bucks--or in inflationary times, 110.”