Fine Liquor Giants, 1960s Are Byrds of a Feather

Will success spoil Ward Dotson?

Seventeen years into his record-making career, that proposition remains sadly untested. But if this perpetually fringy pop-rocker ever gets lucky, he might have to forfeit his best material.

Losing and boozing are Dotson’s core subjects, and he isn’t afraid to repeat himself. Through five albums as guitarist and co-writer in the Pontiac Brothers and now four as front man of Liquor Giants, he has sung of little else but bad luck in love and marginality in the marketplace.

Almost none of it has been a downer (except for “Thanksgiving in Zuma,” from the 1996 album “Liquor Giants,” which was about as bleak as a song can get). That’s because Dotson, who came up in the Orange County rock scene and is now one of the less-heralded pop luminaries of the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles, always complements his trash-can outlook with a platinum ear for melody and a witty, wordplay tossing, pop-allusive touch with a lyric.

Like everything else Dotson has put out, “Every Other Day at a Time,” which arrives in stores Tuesday, sounds as if it was assembled from the musical equivalent of a stolen-car ring’s chop shop--one that deals exclusively in parts from classic ‘60s models.

This time he steals repeatedly from the Byrds--both the folk-pop side (“Dearest Darling”) and the country side (“Kentucky Lounge”). The poppy, Day-Glo school of ‘60s psychedelia and the usual unabashed Kinks theft are accounted for as well.

While previous Liquor Giants records featured ad hoc casts, or Dotson singing and playing almost everything himself, “Every Other Day” is the work of the performing band he put together in 1996. Matt Simon, an old Pontiac Brothers sidekick, drums splendidly, and the bass and guitar tandem of Mark McGroarty and Mark McNally supports Dotson, a scrappy, scratchy-voiced lead man, with Liquor Giants’ richest harmony blend yet--heavy on the Byrds and on the Move nicking the Beatles and Beach Boys. As a lead singer and songwriter, McNally contributes “Caroline,” a fetching taste of simple, innocent, smitten-in-love pop nectar.

Dotson crawls out from under his cloud for the ultra-romantic “Raining Butterflies” and “Summer School,” a zesty Kinks / Replacements rocker about academically unmotivated times at Everywhere High, where we glimpse the student body “Studying hard at decolletage / Cutting class is espionage.”

*

Otherwise, Dotson engages in his usual clever self-laceration, with wit and heart his bulwarks against unseemly whining. When not crustily bemoaning his own lot, he sympathizes with pop history’s fellow losers (“Beautiful Flo” is about Florence Ballard, the tragic ex-Supreme) and shovels dirt on its fat-cat winners (the stereotypically shallow Hollywood rich guy of “What’s the New Mofo?”).

“Dearest Darling,” which cops its feel from Gene Clark’s Byrds masterpiece, “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better,” is probably the pithiest statement yet of Dotson’s musical antiquarianism and underdog allegiances:

Dearest darling, catch me I’m crawling,

Over that line.

Alkies and ex-tramps, caught in the headlamps

Over that line . . .

But it’s not like I’ve never been here,

This is right where I’m supposed to be.

Rewriting history,

While the whole world’s ignoring me.

(Have you noticed that rock critics seldom quote lyrics at length anymore? It’s because most ‘90s-vintage songwriters can’t sustain an idea with verbal vitality for more than a few syllables. Dotson knows that rock songs should be as much about playing the language as they are about playing guitars.)

“Every Other Day at a Time” is essentially the same old Liquor Giants’ story that’s been falling on very few ears. Any new ones not deaf to the appeal of primo pure-pop shouldn’t mind being bent by cranky old, barstool-sitting, in-his-cups-lamenting, songwriterly gifted Ward Dotson.

* Liquor Giants, All Day Wire and All the Madmen play March 13 at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim. $6. (714) 533-1286.

Ratings range from * (poor) to **** (excellent), with three stars denoting a solid recommendation.