| swearing at motorists |
BANDLIVESTUDIOWEBSTORE |
from moo magazine
Anthony T. Barnett
THIS STORY WAS CONSTRUCTED FROM AN INTERVIEW THAT TOOK PLACE IN THE SPRING OF 1997
Dave Doughman sits next to me on a crowded couch at a party being held at the home of the Dayton band Mink. Earlier in the evening he and drummer Don Thrasher, collectively known as Swearing At Motorists, played their noise-pop at what appeared to be a University of Dayton frat bar; pledge paddles lined the walls. Now, after all the bars have closed, people come to and fro from the house as the Beatles' White Album plays on the stereo. Most of the crowd is blowing off steam as less than a week before they buried a good friend and comrade, Tim Taylor, singer for the Dayton-based band Brainiac. No one is sobbing, no one is fighting, and hardly anyone is talking about the tragic accident that took one of their own. Even though there is a cloud hanging over the festivities, people are doing their best to get past the misery of the week before. By the look of the half-open eyelids, the Cheshire cat smiles, the flirting, and the empty beer cans, they have succeeded.
"Tim would have kicked my ass if I wouldn't have played this show tonight," says Doughman, who shared a house with Taylor. "He was the one who really pushed me into believing in myself."
Doughman has the looks of a silent film star; thin, high cheek bones, dark features, and deep soulful eyes. A thick moustache helps complete his screen looks. He talks about the friend he will deeply miss, but he his also ready to take on new challenges. It's almost as if the death of Taylor has made Doughman want to push himself creatively harder than ever before. His eyes light up as he discusses working the next day with someone else in Dayton he respects very much, Bob Pollard of Guided By Voices. "Bob and I have been talking about working together for some time and tomorrow it's going to happen!" His moustache curls upward and a smile finally breaks over his face.
Doughman moved to Dayton in 1994 and immediately befriended musician and artist Neil Blender. Even though Doughman was a novice when it came to music, the two started writing songs and from that point on there was no turning back. "He (Neil) is a great musician and a really good guy," says Doughman a few days later from the home he, Taylor, and a couple of other local musicians shared in Dayton. "We would work on more country and bluegrass kind of stuff, and 60s pop stuff. I didn't play guitar or anything. I just sang and did weird stuff, and then borrowed a few guitars that year and a four track and started to do a lot of four-track stuff at the house."
The following year with the assistance of former Stronghold and Honeyburn guitarist Mike Volk, Doughman began to understand how to use the guitar to his advantage. Enter drummer Don Thrasher.
Don Thrasher is a veteran of the Dayton music scene. He played in early incarnations of Guided By Voices and writes a music column for the Dayton Voice. He's a member of 3 Dream Bag with former GBV bassist Greg Demos (who put out one of the best pop singles to ever come out of Dayton), and currently plays in a number of other projects outside of Swearing at Motorists including the cowpunk-on-acid band Johnny Smoke.
"When we got together," remembers Thrasher, "that was all it was. We just got together and had the four track setup, and we'd goof around for awhile and record stuff. We did that for about a year or so. With Dave we just kind of got along. I had known him, but the first time I really worked with him he was recording this project called the Hopeful. I knew he was a studio guy, but I had no idea he could sing. He did some melodies and backing vocals and I was like, 'Wow, this guy knows what he's doing.' He just knows harmonies. You can't learn about it, you just have to be born with it."
Swearing At Motorists create four-track pop that takes simple, but very infectious melodies and adds haunting harmonies, minimalistic instrumentation, and abstract lyrics. Occasionally they add spoonfuls of sounds that both attract and distract the listener; voices carrying on conversations underneath the mix, atmospheric feedback, sound bites, and other cosmic debris swirl in a tornado of audible imagery. The result is a mixture of Syd Barrett playing with Flying Saucer Attack as recorded by Joe Meek or Spaceman 3 copping the Beatles and the Byrds with Mike Rep turning the knobs. This mishmash of low-rent recorded material could easily be tagged lo-fi, but Doughman takes great pains in either layering and layering the music and noise until it's a drug-induced trip without the chemical substances or stripping down the madness and emotion that dwells in his head and his soul until it's as sharp as a knife, ready to slice into someone else's psyche. Sometimes, it's easy to forget Swearing At Motorists are just two guys from Dayton with a four-track.
"With home recording...anybody can do it now. The stuff is so inexpensive," says Thrasher. "When I was in the New Creatures, we were doing four track stuff in 1984, but those Fostex machines were really expensive, and we were just lucky to be able to get one. As the years progressed, things just kept coming down in price and getting better in quality. Now you've got 16 year olds in Indiana who can do amazing things. (Don's plug for the band the Students - Midwest A&R ed.)
You can do anything and you don't have the confines of studio time or people breathing down your neck, or people telling you that's the wrong way to record things. You get a lot of mistakes. A lot of times it's real spontaneous and the song structure is not like it would be if you sat down and tried to write it."
"Like everyone else, the only reason we do stuff on four-track is it's the only thing we can afford," adds Doughman. "The reason that we're so satisfied with it is because it is so personal. I have also listened to other home recording bands, especially ones in Dayton that we're big fans of. Being in Dayton helped us see that it was alright to do stuff at home. Until I moved here I never had any clue about home recording."
Being based in Dayton also lends itself to comparisons that to Doughman and Thrasher seem unjustified. In more than a few reviews, including one by this writer, the duo has been compared to fellow Gem City resident Bob Pollard, a.k.a. Guided By Voices. It doesn't help that Thrasher is one of the many alumni of GBV.
"We were wondering when that was going to come up," laughs Doughman. "let me start by saying that I understand that, what with Don's pedigree, if you will. The fact that we're from Dayton, it's four-track, and a lot of songs are short...there are going to comparisons. I think it's very unfair. If you listen...Bob Pollard and I have had this conversation many times, because every time I get a review that says that, I freak out. We use this odd tuning that I came up with. It's like a bastardized version of an old pre-30s bluegrass tune. We've gone out of our way using certain guitar sounds to make sure we don't do something that sounds like anything on any of their (GBV) records. I've said that to him (Bob) and he's like, 'People say you sound like us? If you sound like anyone contemporary, it would be the Grifters. You don't sound anything like us." Hearing that from him, and so consciously making the effort to not do it, I just can't understand why anyone who's actually listened to the record would say that.
I'm ripping off Buffalo Springfield. If anyone wants to really nail Dave D., they can go back and listen to the Neil Young stuff on those Buffalo Springfield records and they'll go, 'Aha!!! That motherfucker!' I'm surprised we haven't been called on it yet. I rip off Neil Young everyday of my life."
One thing that Doughman says he does have in common with Pollard however, is the way both songwriters listen to music. "Yeah, we've talked about that. We both always sang along, but when we listened to a record we would try to add the part that should be there. You'd sing along and wish they would add that to it. Sometimes from doing that, you'll write a really good line. I've written a lot of songs from singing along to favorite songs of mine. I just write the lyrics down and use the harmony as the new melody, and I write a song around that. I think it shows the kind of student I am and find things that complement each other well...creating something that sounds and feels good."
"Oh my God, we have the 7" coming out and we should play shows!" Doughman recalls that this was his first reaction when he realized that it was time for Swearing At Motorists to come out of the studio and in front of people. The day this interview took place was the one year anniversary of Swearing At Motorists' first live show. (For the record, it was a showcase of Dayton and Cincinnati bands put on by radio station 97X.)
"We would play them (the songs) three or four times and learn them, then we would record them and never play them again," explains Doughman. "When we went to play out the first time, it was rough for us because we had to reinvent the songs. We had this show booked and we'd never even practiced. We were totally happy with it being bedroom. But there came a point where I was at a show and I realized we were doing music just as valid as this. When people started liking it and giving us feedback and saying what we were doing was valid, it made us want to be in a band."
For Swearing At Motorists playing live means reinventing their home recorded music. In the past the duo has brought in an occasional extra gun including Amps/Breeders guitarist Nate Farley on farfisa and rock critic and another GBV alumni, Jim Greer, on guitar. (It should also be noted that Tim Taylor played drums on the first recording by Swearing At Motorists.) Recently, Doughman and Thrasher have brought in Pretty Mouth guitarist Matt Bowman to help them fill out their live sets, but both are quick to point out that what you get live is not necessarily what you hear on the recordings.
"We're definitely deconstructionists. It totally started out as being constructionalism and minimalism. When we decided to play live my songwriting took a turn," states Doughman. "Everything was gauged on whether or not I could play the guitar and sing the song at the same time. It wasn't about me just getting these weird sounds anymore or starting on a riff and building on it. I want to go back to the older way. I don't think the songwriting has been hurt because of it, but it has changed. We used to write songs and forget them. When we wanted to go back and play them, they were so oddly tuned with some weird rhythm or some quirky thing that could not be reproduced live properly. We would just reinvent the song. I want to do more of that. I like that we're going to continue in the new style, but I want more of the songs where if we can't pull them off live, we'll just reinvent them."
"They might be confused, but it's just impossible...it's something we learned to deal with a long time ago and I guess everybody else will have to deal with it too," answers Thrasher when asked about throwing off the audience when it comes to two variations on the same song; one on tape and the other live. "A record is a totally different experience than going to see a live band. It always is and there are certain concessions you make. In this case, maybe more so, but I think people enjoy it. A lot of people tell me they like the live shows as much as the records or better sometimes. It's just a different thing."
As far as recorded material, Swearing At Motorists have a number of cuts on various compilations, as well as a self-titled, self-released 12-song cassette (which will be rereleased on CD this August on the Dayton-based label Simple Solution). In addition to this is a 12 song LP on the New York label Spare Me Records and their newest 12-song 12" (to be played at 45 rpm), The Fear of Flying Clouds, also on Spare Me. As our conversation turns towards these recording projects and where Swearing At Motorists hope the future takes them, a strange sound is heard over the phone lines:
"We have some aggressive planning," begins Doughman. "I'm already trying to book a fall tour and we're still supposed to do a full-length with Spare Me, and we are definitely doing an EP with Recordhead in Indianapo..." DON, are you pissing???!!!
"Um, sorry guys," replies Thrasher from the portable phone he's carried into the john. Don't be surprised if you hear the sound of Don Thrasher relieving himself on the next Swearing At Motorists' record. Sure, it might possibly be buried underneath the mix, but then again, you never know with these guys.
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