Pontiacs Play One for the Road : Band Regroups for Fullerton Show but the Payoff Is Mostly Personal
There they were, four guys aged thirtysomething, sitting around a back-yard table, drinking beer and talking about exploits from those bygone days when they were twentysomething.
Like a lot of reunions among old buddies who have moved beyond post-adolescence and onto the doorstep of pre-middle age, this one had been keyed by nostalgia and a desire to relive old times. But unlike most purely nostalgic reunions, this one also had a forward-looking agenda.
The four guys laughing and swapping stories in that back yard were the Pontiac Brothers, one of the best Orange County rock bands of the 1980s. They’d gotten together for old times’ sake, it’s true, but also with the aim of making new music.
During much of their career, which ran from 1984 to 1988, the Pontiac Brothers had practiced in a shed in singer Matt Simon’s back yard--the same yard where they were now seated. The shed was still there, and still stocked with instruments and amplifiers. The material for three fine albums issued from those back-yard sessions during the ‘80s--”Doll Hut,” “Fiesta en la Biblioteca” and “Johnson.” None of them had sold well, but they were enough to propel the Pontiac Brothers across the country on four low-budget tours, earning critical respect if not much commercial gain. The Pontiacs--Simon, guitarist Ward Dotson, bassist Kurt Bauman and drummer D. A. Valdez (Dave, to his band mates)--broke up in September, 1988, the musical career they’d embarked on just for laughs having gotten serious enough to breed undermining pressure and frustration over unfulfilled expectations.
Dotson had moved to New York City, mainly to pursue a love relationship, but also to keep pushing his rock music career. The other three kept playing in low-key bands on the local scene but spent most of their time answering the question posed in the chorus of the last song on the last Pontiac Brothers’ album: “Why don’t you get a real job?”
Then, last spring, Dotson found himself in his apartment on New York’s Lower East Side, poring over scrapbooks and listening to the old Pontiac Brothers records. He was preparing to write liner notes for a Pontiacs’ compilation album on an Australian label, and he was getting nostalgic. He made a few calls, and a determination was reached: The Pontiac Brothers would ride one more time. Not as a steady career, but just for the fun of getting together and making music once more--including an album of new material that they’ve just finished recording, and a show tonight at the Fullerton Hofbrau.
So there they sat late last month, in Simon’s back yard, conjuring up memories.
Like the one about how Simon had gotten so obnoxiously stinko in the tour van one New York City night that the others dropped him off to fend drunkenly for himself in the middle of Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park.
Or the one in which the Pontiacs, weary from too many nights spent sleeping on floors four to a room, lucked into an invitation to stay at the Athens, Ga., home of one of their fans, R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck. Each Pontiac Brother got his own room on that night of luxury, except for Simon, who was too sloshed to perambulate from parked touring van to beckoning haven of Southern hospitality. Dotson recalls Buck going outside to look for the missing guest and returning to report: “Your lead singer is in the shrubbery.”
“I was the bad boy,” the tall, affable Simon now admits, a bit sheepishly.
Bauman’s favorite Pontiac Brothers memory concerns a show the band played at Al’s Bar in Los Angeles on the day of a neighborhood street festival that left band and fans in an especially convivial mood. “We were drinking these great big jumbo beers they had, and everyone had been at the Street Scene. That was really fun.”
It’s fitting that beery indulgence should crop up in many a Pontiac Brothers war story. That, after all, was the founding principle of the band.
Bauman and Valdez were old school buddies from Anaheim. They hooked up with Simon, another old classmate, when they all attended Fullerton College. Simon had played drums in the Middle Class and Eddie and the Subtitles, a couple of early Orange County punk bands that made a brief mark in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Dotson, who had grown up in Orange, fell in with the others when they began hanging out at the Commonwealth Pub, a now-defunct bar in Fullerton.
Failing to find any fellow punk rockers in Orange during his teens, Dotson had drifted into the Los Angeles punk scene and became an original member of the Gun Club, a highly regarded punk-blues band. By the time he met Simon, Bauman and Valdez, he had become fed up with the music business. But it was Dotson’s idea to start a band, albeit for the most mundane purpose: If the four friends were to perform at the Commonwealth Pub instead of just hanging out at the bar, they would be entitled to drink for free.
“I got this stupid idea: We’ll do all these Stones covers,” recalled Dotson, a wiry man whose pointed features, sandy hair and beard and omnipresent baseball cap make him look a bit like Mike Love of the Beach Boys. “The Stones weren’t our favorite band, but it was easy--you could learn the songs in one rehearsal.” The others forced a reluctant Simon, who had never sung, to take the Mick Jagger role--and it turned out that his voice and phrasing were in fact Jaggeresque. They named themselves the Gall Stones.
Then they began writing original songs, chipped in $60 each to make a demo tape and found interest from a French label that figured any band with an original Gun Club member was worth a fling. Gall Stones wouldn’t do as a name for any semi-serious enterprise, so the band took its name from a “Free the Pontiac Brothers” poster belonging to Dotson’s roommate, which expressed solidarity with a ‘70s group of Michigan black radicals.
The first Pontiacs album, “Big Black Sun,” is now unavailable, but it helped the band attract interest from U.S. labels. Signing with the small Southern California label Frontier, the Pontiacs released “Doll Hut.” Early on, the band was a five-piece, first with Glen Floyd, the poster-owning Dotson roommate, playing second guitar, then with Jon Wahl, whose playing the Pontiacs still praise. Wahl left after “Doll Hut” and the Pontiacs settled into life as a quartet, with occasional keyboard help from their longtime friend Dan McGough.
“The idea of the band was to drink beer and hang out. We just wanted to get our kicks in our own little way,” Dotson said.
Simon recalls getting his kicks, but also being a bit nervous about his role as newly minted front man. That, he says, accounted for some of his excesses during early Pontiacs tours.
“I didn’t want to be the lead singer,” he said. “I spent the first two years in the band going, ‘I just feel like an idiot up here.’ I was being such a baby about the whole thing that I would drink until I couldn’t feel the fear of stage fright. By the last tour, I got it together.”
The Pontiacs got good notices in the rock press, invariably drawing comparisons to the Stones, whose influence was obvious in Simon’s charged yelp and in the band’s brash, gritty, freely rocking approach. Soon, the Pontiacs were also being compared to the Replacements. Like Paul Westerberg, leader of those Minneapolis college-rock faves, the Simon-Dotson songwriting team (with occasional contributions from Valdez) had a knack of bringing a wry but impassioned intelligence to reflections on what it means to be one of society’s misfits.
“When I heard the Replacements, I thought, ‘These guys are ripping off our thing,’ ” Simon recalled.
“We’re definitely kindred spirits, but we were never trying to be the West Coast Replacements,” Dotson added. The two bands shared many a bill, and the Replacements paid a backhanded nod to the Pontiac Brothers in their first video, “Bastards of Young,” which begins with a copy of the “Doll Hut” album being flung across a room.
Bauman, the burly, shaven-headed bassist, gets the quintessentially Pontiac-like final word concerning the Replacements connection: “I enjoyed drinking with them more than listening to them.”
As the Pontiacs moved ahead with their second and third albums, “Fiesta en la Biblioteca,” from 1986, and “Johnson,” from 1988, expectations grew more quickly than album sales. Despairing of ever expanding their small cult following, they called it a day.
“The band got together for all the right reasons--just to have fun, to laugh and enjoy ourselves,” Dotson said. “It broke up because we weren’t laughing enough. I think it worked out the right way. With all the petty complaints we have, we’re all pretty satisfied with the records we got to make.”
Dotson stayed in Orange County for a year after the breakup, starting a new band called the Liquor Giants with Valdez (who switched back to his original instrument, bass) before moving to New York City. There Dotson continued the Liquor Giants with East Coast musicians. The Liquor Giants’ first album, “You’re Always Welcome,” will be released by a Seattle independent label, Lucky Records, later this month.
“Ward is still the starving artist,” said Valdez, who, like Simon and Bauman, has made overtures toward the world of real jobs. Bauman helps run his family’s grocery store in Stanton, and Valdez has a white-collar job with General Electric. Both are married, with Valdez about to become the father of twins and Bauman’s wife expecting their second child. Simon makes money these days painting faces at kids’ parties, which doesn’t exactly pass muster as a “real job.” But after the Pontiacs broke up, he earned his bachelor’s degree in history at Cal State Fullerton, and he plans to pursue a career as an elementary school teacher.
Bauman and Simon continue to play together in a mostly-for-fun band called Extravaganza, in which Simon gets to lay back on drums while his old Middle Class band mate, Mike Atta, plays the front man’s role. Valdez has been playing bass in Sol La Ti, which he describes as an “esoteric pop band.”
The three ex-Pontiacs who remained in Orange County have continued to socialize regularly since the band broke up, while Dotson has stayed in touch via periodic phone calls. Last spring, he called with the suggestion that the old band regroup to make another album.
“I just started thinking that it was a fun band, and I liked those guys,” Dotson said. “I got melancholy and misty and nostalgic and blah-blah-blah, and thought it would be cool to hang out for a month or so to make a record. It’s like a nice summer vacation-slash-record project.”
Frontier’s owner, Lisa Fancher, agreed to subsidize the Pontiacs’ recording reunion and put out another album, even though past experience doesn’t suggest a vast audience waiting out there for new product. Fancher estimated that combined sales of the Pontiacs’ first three albums for Frontier so far have totaled a bit over 20,000 (with the recent release of “Doll Hut” and “Fiesta en la Biblioteca” on a single compact disc, all three Pontiac Brothers albums are now available on CD).
“I let my heart guide me, not my checkbook,” Fancher said of her decision to pay for a fourth Pontiacs album. “I totally loved ‘em. We’ll just throw it out there, and see what the waters are like. I think they’ll put out another great record, and that never hurt anybody.”
Simon says he was a little leery when Dotson sent him a tape of proposed new material for the album. “I didn’t like it that much, but there were germs of good songs.”
After Dotson arrived in late June, the other members started to learn and, as Bauman put it, “Pontiacize” the new songs, with Simon helping to add or revise lyrics to nine of the dozen songs Dotson brought along (Valdez contributed a 13th). Members say the reunion’s mood has been easygoing, because nobody in the band sees this as the start of a continuing second chapter of the Pontiac Brothers.
“If something (like that) happens, that’s beyond my wildest dreams right now,” Bauman said. “I feel so easy about this.” That wasn’t the case as the band tried to catch on during the ‘80s, he said. “I was thinking, ‘Is this it? If this doesn’t sell, what happens?’ Now I just want to have fun.”
“The ultimate release valve for this band is that we don’t really exist,” Dotson said of the reconvened Pontiacs’ working relationship. “As soon as tension builds up, we can go, ‘We’re not really a band.’ ”
The album, tentatively called “Fuzzy Little Piece of the World,” was recorded in Hollywood the last six days in July and is scheduled for an October release by Frontier. Leading with their heart, as always, the Pontiacs haven’t forgotten to mark the occasion with a few songs reflecting back on the pleasures and failures of the band’s first run. Dotson’s “Being With You” is an especially tender song, a ballad (unusual in itself for the typically rocking Pontiacs) that resembles the Minutemen’s “History Lesson, Part II” in its fond remembrance of friendships bound up in a band. It ends with a warm summation of the Pontiacs’ career as honorable failures:
Meanwhile the world spins and other folks get off the ground;
OK, so we didn’t catch--we had fun not catching.
We were just young then, instead of has-beens,
But I don’t care, I’m glad you were my friend.
After the Pontiacs’ two reunion shows this weekend (tonight’s concert in Fullerton and a show last night at Club Lingerie in Hollywood), Dotson will return to New York. The band members expect to reconvene for a few shows when their new album comes out, but they don’t plan the extensive touring that a band with an ongoing career would pursue to promote a record.
“We’ll see some money, but it won’t be a king’s ransom,” Dotson said, adding that the reunion’s real rewards have been personal. “It’s like self-imposed psychiatric treatment for me to come out here and go, ‘These are people I know, and I feel real warm with them.’ In retrospect, I think we did become like brothers.”
The Pontiac Brothers and Too Many Joes play tonight at 10 at the Fullerton Hofbrau, 323 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Tickets: $4. (714) 870-7400.
