Dr. Dog’s Scott McMicken on Trains, Tea and Time Travel

After attending an awkward industry-only midday peformance in Hollywood, I met Scott in the parking lot of the Roosevelt Hotel and we spoke for a blissful hour and a half of matters great and small. The meat of that interview will be published in the upcoming August issue of Mean (along with my interviews of Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, Towelhead star Summer Bishil, and my first sneaker column). In preparation of Dr. Dog’s amazing new album, Fate, which hits shelves tomorrow, my editor has given me permission to post some excerpts from the remainder of my rambling conversation with Scott McMicken here. Enjoy!

Download: “The Old Days” from the new album, Fate
[audio:drdog_theolddays.mp3]

Have you ever thought about creating a Dr. Dog musical?

That would be really awesome. We did this album, Psychedelic Swamp a long time ago, and we’ve always had dreams to make it a traveling piece of theater. There’s a real strong narrative throughout the album and it would be pretty easy and really fun to try and make it into a sort of low-budget theater production. But even a movie of that…

Is Psychedelic Swamp available anywhere? I’ve tried to find it before and haven’t had any luck.

No, it’s not. The problem is… we would have put it out already, but the concept on the album is that we didn’t make it, we got it in the mail. So the packaging is an envelope with our address on it. The idea is that we got it—this cassette tape—from this dude who used to live on earth, but escaped into this psychedelic parallel universe, as an effort to escape all the problems he was having on earth.

And when he got there, initially he was like, “Wow, this is awesome! Everything is so weird, and everything is upside down, with psychedelic aesthetics—nothing is predictable!” But over time, as he gained his frame of reference there, he realized that the same problems persist and there’s no real escape other than accepting and dealing with these issues that you have in your life. So he wants to make this album and send it back to earth to spread that message, like, “I’ve made this mistake, I thought I could escape but now I’m just trapped here. Everything’s the same.” And he appeals to us, saying, “Can you be the band that’s going to translate this music into modern American pop music, so that the message is understood?” He’s becoming so detached from reality the more he’s there, his ability to communicate and his way of going about representing information is becoming more and more garbled and detached and that’s why it sounds like a very psychedelic album.

The reason we haven’t put it out yet is because before we do that, I want to do what he’s asking us to do, which is to take all the music and re-record it as a live rock band with no psychedelic elements whatsoever. Very straightforward, immediate delivery, just like he wants it to be—a translation of his psychedelic mess. So when we do that, we’ll put ‘em both together and it’ll be like a double album.

Have you ever hopped a train?

No… I want to. My friends do that. I have a few friends who live that way, riding around on the rails, and there’s something about it that’s very romantic. The three people I know who do it, it’s not a big social thing—they’re not with a huge group of people. Most of the time they’re on their own, so it seems kinda cool. Dangerous—very dangerous. Probably very uncomfortable. In truth, I’ll probably never ever do that, but I certainly like the idea of that. All I can picture are horror stories of getting sucked under and your legs get chopped off.

Just listening to the record, I could totally picture you with a sack on a stick, jumping on to a train.

We’re trying to kind of cultivate that persona for ourselves with this album. We did all these photos and we got all this great authentic turn-of-the-century blue collar train worker garb, like suspenders and lanterns and these cool caps and these weird shirts, just subtle variations on old clothing, and put all this dirt on our face, charcoal dust, and got our pictures taken on these old trains to try to become that character.

There’s a thread—a very minor thread—throughout the album, of life being work. Like life not being about a certain point of arrival, but rather always the getting there. You’re always on your way. Whatever you think is a resting point is never a resting point, unless you’re actually dead. And so it becomes work. Recognizing that, and taking responsibility for where you are, what’s influenced you being there, and where you want to go from there. Not in the negative way, but just as an ethic. There’s a need for a work ethic to keep you strong and energized to go through all this stuff we all face. So that’s why we wanted to be these workers, to become that idea.

I have a lot of collections and hobbies! My first collection I had in life was Bazooka Joe comics, from the pieces of gum—cause if you saved up a certain amount you could cash ‘em in for shit, and get all these gag gifts and t-shirts and stuff if you had like, a hundred comics. Of course, I collected baseball cards when I was a kid, for a while. Then I collected those little plastic clasps on a loaf of bread that come in orange and blue and green, and I had a whole glass thing full of them—they looked beautiful all together. Then, I began a rubber band ball that I’ve had for about ten years now. It’s about thirty pounds now—it’s a beast. It’s my favorite thing.

But now I have this new collection: I think it started cause my mom was buying this kind of tea that was called Tetley Tea, and it’s just basic tea, like diner tea. You buy it in a box of a hundred bags, and it always comes with these little ceramic sculptures of a hawk, or a wise man, or a wolf or something. I went to her house once and I noticed she had four of them on a window, and I was like “Wow, these are cool,” and she said, “Yeah, you can have those.” So I took ‘em home and that was probably two or three years ago, and from that I began a collection of miniatures. I probably have like a hundred. It’s great, I just moved into this new apartment that has these beautiful wooden closets—unpainted, natural wood-finished closets that are carved and real ornate. Up at the top the ledge of it’s like a three-tiered ledge, so it’s a perfect place to put all these things and display them, so it looks like a whole freaked out parade up there.

My roommate Mary-Ann’s main collection is crystals—she goes to the estate sales of dead crystal collectors and stuff—but she also tried to get into miniatures for a while, and she applied to this thing called the National Association of Miniature Enthusiasts.

No way! I’ve gotta find out about that.

Apparently, it’s run by all these old people who are really elitist and it’s kind of a closed-door society. The annual miniature conventions are really expensive, so she wrote this long letter explaining all about how she’s an artist, asking if there was any way she could get a scholarship if she contributed manual labor, and they were just like, “No. You can’t.”

Oh, my God…

Those miniature collectors mean serious business.

Yeah, I’ll probably just keep it low key. Most of the stuff I find on the street, so that’s why it’s great—little toy soldiers or plastic dinosaurs—so that’s where my collection is feuled, just from finding shit.

And then hobbies—I really love to draw and paint. I’ve gotten lucky in life—I’ve been into drawing and painting as long as I’ve been into music, and at times more than music. But it always seems to work out where if I’m in a dry spell with writing and I’m not in the right mindset to come up with stuff that I like, my attention seems to turn to drawing and painting. So it’s always sort of there to keep me having ideas or keep me busy if I’m constantly struggling with writing music, or not having ideas for recording.

Have you made any of the artwork for the albums?

I’ve done all of it—well, not true—We All Belong was the first time we’d done anything that wasn’t our own artwork. I got a job one summer painting the walls clean white in this gallery in town called the Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, and they’d let me snoop around in the storeroom. I came across this collection of work by this dude named Felipe Jesus Consalvos, who was a complete outsider artist, had never shown anything, and had never had any attention. He was just a Cuban immigrant who worked in a cigar factory in Virginia, and would go home every night and make these collages.

In his old age he moved to live with his niece in west Philly, where I live, and brought all of his artwork (which at that point had accumulated—like, 40 years worth of work—to hundreds of pieces) and died in West Philly. And when he died, his daughter, not having any clue about how awesome this stuff he was making was, just put it all out in a yard sale. And luckily, this guy from the Fleisher-Ollman Gallery happened to walk by and see the yard sale and bought this massive collection. So the Fleisher-Ollman Gallery is the only gallery with any artwork by this guy, and they did a big show of it and he got on the cover of “Folk Art America” or something. It started to sell for high prices, so I got the impression that he started to get a just amount of attention.

I think your interest in time is extremely evident in your music. Your lyrics are often infused with temporal aspects—it’s all very time-related—and, um—I guess what I’m trying to ask is, if you had a time machine, when would you go?

I’d probably go to New York City in the ‘60s, or, maybe more like New York City in the 1900s, at the turn of the century. I probably wouldn’t hang around in New York City the whole time, but I love New York’s history. I don’t know, though, that’s a tough question. You could go to Rome, Greece…

You could go into the future, too. You don’t know what you might find there.

I’ll tell you one thing, I wouldn’t go into the future. I got no interest in the future. It would definitely be some time in the past. I’d have to go to like, Mayan civilization or something… there are some points in history that are pretty mysterious.

Do you think that putting out an album can change things? Just personally, I know that listening to Easy Beat affected the way I felt, on a profound scale.

Wow… thanks, man. That’s really strange—it’s an interesting aspect of art. I’ve had my life and my feelings profoundly changed by albums and movies, too—what causes that? I think it’s a testament to, again, that larger than life presence, ‘cause no one intentionally set out to affect you in that way, and I think what makes it possible is the process that a person goes through when they’re just making something honest for themselves, that they’re going to enjoy and gain something from.

Anybody involved in making something has a responsibility to themselves (and therefore, to everyone else) to produce something that helps them. That’s sort of what art is, in a general sense—and my definition of art isn’t confined to museums or albums or libraries or movie theaters—I feel as though art is a very practical part of the human experience and it shows itself in really mundane things. The clothes that you put on in the morning are an expression of yourself. The food you want to eat. Where you put your kitchen table. How you walk down the sidewalk—everything is an aesthetic choice, and therefore an expression of some aspect of your identity. In those things, as well as things that are more conventionally recognized as expressions of art, if you consistently do things in such a way that suit you in a true way, to keep you happy and progressive in some direction, then you’re serving a healthy duty not only to yourself, but to the world around you.