| swearing at motorists |
BANDLIVESTUDIOWEBSTORE |
september 12, 2002 - las vegas, nv - cafe espresso roma
from las vegas weekly
Dayton, Ohio-based, two-piece, lo-fi troubadours Swearing at Motorists tour so relentlessly that it's a wonder they have any "real life" left to write songs about. Yet main man Dave Doughman (currently backed by drummer Joseph Siwinski) claims that context is all but irrelevant to his creativity as, rather than studiously crafting his Elvis Costello-meets-the-Replacements lamenting gems, he is but a conduit for bolts of inspiration that flash from out of the blue.
"I don't really write songs. I'm either fortunate or unfortunate—I look upon it as unfortunate—that songs just come to me," Doughman says. "I wish I could be a Ryan Adams or a Leonard Cohen ... people who are 'songsmiths,' who are completely, wonderfully talented and inspired, but they actually work at their craft. I'm just some guy who, like, lives, and in the middle of the night or in the middle of the day, I have this 'thing' come to me and I have to do it. And those things are the songs."
For Doughman, the touring ritual has become the "normality" from which he perceives the world. "For me, this (touring) is real life; this is what I do for a living. I'm not rich—I probably make as much as working a minimum-wage job—but I wake up every morning in a different town knowing that last night there was a handful at least—if not a room full—of people who enjoyed what I did."
Since forming in the early '90s amid Dayton's bustling indie-rock scene, Swearing at Motorists have released a number of EPs and mini-albums, returning with their second full-length, "This Flag Signals Goodbye" (on cult label Secretly Canadian), earlier this year. While "This Flag" pays homage to Doughman's bedroom four-track roots, there's a restlessness amid the seemingly introverted compositions that hints at an arena act struggling for release. And released it is at the Motorists' live shows (they've already played a 100-plus this year), where their energized, chance-taking performances have earned them their "two-man Who" tag.
"For me, for the show to be believable, I can't just get up there and do a reading of the songs," explains Doughman. "The albums have all the subtleties that the songs require from a recorded medium but, live, there's only two us and we can't have all that subtlety. So we try to take it back to the raw emotion from the inception of that song, from where the song came from.
"For those three minutes onstage I'm trying to put myself in a place of how I felt when that song first came to me. Normally, that's just me at 4 in the morning, after the bar, all f---ed-up, playing my acoustic guitar at the foot of the bed," Doughman elaborates. "But when you take that emotion and plug it into a big amp, and you have a drummer going, and you're in front of five, 50, 500 people, whatever, it just amplifies it—and that's why it becomes this 'two-man Who' thing."
With the recent high-street success of the White Stripes, who share Swearing at Motorists' two-piece approach, Doughman has had to field repeated comparisons with the Led Zep-obsessed Detroit outfit, yet there's been no palpable trickle-down effect for Swearing at Motorists. "I haven't noticed any increase or decrease in what's happening," he deadpans. "It's not like we're having this giant White Stripes crowd showing up. There have been a few people—journalists, if you will—who haven't done their homework and think that this is our first record and we're ‘cashing in' on the White Stripes. Man, we put out our first record when (White Stripes frontman) Jack White was still Don Gillis, or whatever he was called, in The Go."
And Doughman neither craves nor expects the mainstream's embrace. "I don't think I have to worry about it. I mean, I'm certain I don't have to worry about it. For me, the ultimate success would be if we can continue to sell around 20,000 records and play 1,000-seaters ... and, at that level, you're not ever going to be on MTV or on any magazine covers. But I'm happy playing in 200-seat clubs or playing in coffee houses."
Dave Doughman and Swearing at Motorists are an ancient, yet dying breed: traveling musicians who scrape a living by being good at what they do and sacrifice any semblance of security to do it. And, as "This Flag Signals Goodbye's" understated majesty displays, Doughman has all the talent to continue to ply his trade for as long as he chooses.
-- Josh Bell
for questions or comments contact: webmaster@swearingatmotorists.com