Dotson Awaits Hit, Gets on Base
Even though I’m not a king
Well, I’ll take another swing
And it don’t mean anything
--from “Here’s to You,” by Ward Dotson A long drive over the fence counts as a home run in the record book, even if there is hardly anybody in the ballpark to witness it.
By that reckoning, Ward Dotson already has secured his place in the Hall of Fame of college-alternative rock. Starting with Orange County’s Pontiac Brothers in 1984, and continuing with a five-year solo career carried on under the band name Liquor Giants, Dotson has been responsible, as a driving force or sole author, for seven albums over nine years.
Listening to them is like watching the seasonal highlight reels of a perpetual pennant contender, a team with the savvy and spirit to play the game the way it was meant to be played.
The Pontiacs’ “Doll Hut” (1985), “Fiesta en la Biblioteca” (1986), “Johnson” (1988) and “Fuzzy Little Piece of the World” (a one-shot 1992 reunion), and the Liquor Giants’ 1992 debut, “You’re Always Welcome,” are richly rewarding works.
In them, Dotson embraces (and at times openly steals from) the ‘60s-rock tradition of the Beatles, the Kinks and the Rolling Stones, yet rises above hero-worshiping rehash by using rock ‘n’ roll as a way to express an outlook that is very much his own.
Like Paul Westerberg, to whose work his own has often been compared, Dotson, a self-described “screw-up,” takes the stance of the perpetual underdog.
The character personified in his songs is a fellow who knows that the games of love and pop careerism are probably rigged, but he keeps plugging away stubbornly. Crusty irony and a curdled sense of humor sustain him in the face of the defeat he has come to expect, but he is not so hardened that his guard can’t fall, revealing real hurt and true, full-hearted affection.
If Dotson’s track record holds course, the release last week of the second Liquor Giants album, “Here,” won’t mean anything to anybody outside a small cult following. Nevertheless, for lovers of ‘60s- and ‘70s-based pure pop, “Here” is a resounding home run, a tape measure drive of an album that may be the best of its kind we’ll hear this year.
Dotson, who turns 35 next week, has no clear game plan for turning creative fruitfulness into commercial success. The campaign, such as it is, starts Saturday night with a show at Linda’s Doll Hut (the Pontiac Brothers immortalized the funky little Anaheim bar in their song “Doll Hut” before it even became a rock ‘n’ roll joint).
Dotson, who has presided over at least three different Liquor Giants lineups, will front a trio that includes his girlfriend, Lisa Jenio, on bass and harmonies, and his old Pontiac Brothers sidekick, Matt Simon, on drums. In the Pontiacs, Simon was the lead singer and Dotson’s songwriting partner. Dotson says his buddy has had no trouble taking a less glamorous backup role in the Liquor Giants: “Matt said, ‘I’ll play drums in your band and help you out.’ We’re older. There’s no battle of egos. It’s worked out fine.”
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When the Pontiacs folded six years ago, Dotson, who grew up in Orange, immediately formed the Liquor Giants with another Pontiac Brothers alumnus, D.A. Valdez, and several other players from the local scene. In 1989, he changed his venue to New York City--not for career reasons, but because he had promised his then-girlfriend that they would move there (she hailed from the East Coast).
“You’re Always Welcome” was a patchwork job: Dotson recorded half the songs with his Orange County friends, the other half with new recruits he found in New York. The budget, which he says totaled just $1,000, was supplied by Rubber Records, an Australian independent label headed by a big Pontiac Brothers fan. An obscure Seattle label, Lucky Records, licensed the album, retitled it, and printed up about 2,000 copies for a domestic release about two years ago.
The reviews were glowing. After a rave in CMJ (College Music Journal), “my phone rang constantly for two weeks,” Dotson recalled in a recent phone interview from the apartment he and Jenio now share in North Hollywood. The inquiring record company scouts “all asked the same question: ‘How old are you?’ I’m in my 30s, and they wanted somebody in their 20s.”
He said he did get some meetings with record executives not put off by his age, but “There’s so much butt-kissing you have to do. I probably offended these people by my attitude. I’d just go to these meetings and be frank.”
Having failed to impress any labels as somebody whose style might bend to fit their marketing strategies, Dotson got together $2,000 saved from his job with an animation company (where, he says, his tasks didn’t involve any drawing: “I was not a complete gofer and idiot, but pretty damn close. I actually worked on ‘Beavis and Butt-head’ the first season. I thought, ‘This is a waste of money, they’re going to show this once and it’ll be a huge bomb’ ”).
Somebody referred him to Mark Spencer, a Brooklyn guitarist who owned a small home recording studio. “Here” was cut there, using New York musicians. Spencer, who plays in the band Blood Oranges and has backed Freedy Johnston on tour, would prove a lucky contact: when no other deal turned up, he touted the Liquor Giants to East Side Digital, the Minneapolis independent label whose roster includes Blood Oranges.
That was last November. By then, Dotson and Jenio, who was a singer in the Pussywillows, a New York City band Dotson moonlighted with, were back in California. (Dotson and the woman he moved to New York with in 1989 broke up in 1991; he says that some of the more downcast songs on the two Liquor Giants albums “are chronicling that messy situation of living in New York and not having my friends and family (nearby) and going through this huge crisis and not knowing what to do.”)
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Like his Southern California contemporaries Redd Kross and Dramarama, Dotson has made a career of appropriating classy ‘60s and ‘70s sources for his own purposes, rather than striving to push rock’s stylistic boundaries.
“At one point in the Pontiac Brothers I was trying to be original, to play some game and keep up with somebody else,” he said. “But now I don’t care. I just want to write songs that please me. I was tired of entangling myself in the game of pop music, and just tried to enjoy it. Just be who you are, create stuff that you like and be satisfied with it. If it sounds like somebody else, I don’t care.
“There are songs that are directly lifted: ‘Paper Cup’ is (derived from) ‘Yes It Is,’ by the Beatles. I tried to evoke that song, but hopefully it wasn’t exactly like it. There was one song on ‘Here’ that I took off because when I listened to it later, I realized I’d completely ripped off a Big Star song.”
Dotson does echo the lovely fragility of Alex Chilton’s Big Star balladry on his more tender new songs, “I Don’t Mind” and “Here’s to You.”
He pokes fun at the alternative-rock pursuit of novelty in “Everybody’s a Genius,” a satiric song from “Here” that oozes deadpan sarcasm over the declaration of a hot new regional “scene” every 15 minutes or so:
It started in the South when someone opened their mouth
Right away, the world was blown away
And the scene up in Maine got into the game
Right away, they blew themselves away
Well, everybody’s a genius nowadays
Hard to believe, but that’s what they say
Another new song, “Wanna Belong,” is probably the most personal and painful one he has written. Addressed to his estranged mother, it surveys the emotional wreckage that comes with growing up dysfunctional. But--and this is what separates a fine songwriter from a mediocre one--Dotson is able to give the song depth and dimension beyond his own victim’s tale.
He moves from intensely bitter verses that comment obliquely on his own upbringing to a chorus of pure, yearning loveliness that states a universal truth: “They just want to belong, be understood before they’re gone.”
The song’s bridge also widens the scope: “There’s so many others on this train, can’t figure out why they’re getting this pain / When they ask you straight out, you can’t explain / Well, you got yours, so why should you?”
That last line, putting up a flinty, defensive front just when he seems ready to have a good cry with with a fellowship of fellow sufferers, is pure Dotson.
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Given his commercial disappointments, Dotson says he harbors few rock-star fantasies anymore.
“I’m down to about zero,” he said. Still, he thinks that “Here” may have a better chance of being heard than any of his previous work. Dotson said he is impressed with East Side Digital’s distribution network, which is part of an alliance with another well-regarded indie label, Rykodisc.
“The thing I’m most happy about is that I know I get to make another record after this one, and most likely a third,” he said of his new deal with ESD. “That’s a nice slap on the back. There were points in the last four or five years when I didn’t have a deal, everything was up in the air. Now I’m aiming at something.”
Touring prospects are uncertain: “Hopefully some (established) band will say, ‘We really like these guys and we want them to open for us.’ I don’t want to go out as a club band again. You come back with no money, and you’ve lost your job.”
In “Here’s to You,” baseball fan Dotson celebrates a love relationship that can “get me up like a three-run blast.” When it’s done right, his brand of scuffed-up pop-rock classicism can have much the same effect.
The masses--or even a medium-sized cult--may not be cheering for the Liquor Giants yet, and perhaps they never will. But working in obscurity hasn’t stopped Dotson from splintering the bleachers with amazing consistency.
He may not be a king (or even a royal valet) in the world of college-rock. But in the not-so-little league of Orange County alternative music, his talent as a singer-songwriter-arranger makes him the Sultan of Swat.
* The Liquor Giants, the Joneses, the Visionaries and Virginia Wolf play Saturday at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim. 9:30 p.m. $5. (714) 533-1286. The Liquor Giants open for Downy Mildew on Sept. 23 at the Foothill, 1922 Cherry Ave., Signal Hill. 9 p.m. $7. (310) 984-8349.
