E-Mail This Article to a Friend Payback Dumptruck get some respect BY BRETT MILANO

Late last summer, Dumptruck played the opening slot at the Middle East on a Monday night. This, however, wasn’t the great Boston band that singers/guitarists Seth Tiven and Kirk Swan formed in the mid ’80s — it was a young Worcester outfit who didn’t realize that the name wasn’t up for grabs. And you can tell that your band have started passing into history when some young whippersnappers try to take your name.

"I called up those guys and said, ‘Uh, no. You don’t call yourselves that,’ " Tiven relates from his adopted home of Austin. "I’ve had that name for years and put out six records with it. Sorry, but you can’t have it. And what’s weird was that I don’t think they were even aware of us."

Nearly two decades after their formation, Dumptruck — the real one, that is — are finally seeing a revival. Rykodisc has just released expanded, remastered versions of their three landmark albums — D Is for Dumptruck (originally 1983), Positively Dumptruck (1986), and For the Country (1987). Thanks to a messy situation with the original label, the now-defunct Big Time, all three albums have long been scarce. The first was never on CD at all, and the other two had been deleted by the early ’90s. Although Tiven has continued to make good albums under the Dumptruck name (and maintain the old band’s style with a new, Austin-based crew), the three ’80s albums are the ones everyone knew, the ones that made Dumptruck a local headliner and put them within spitting distance of a national breakthrough.

And their re-release amounts to an overdue payback for a band who saw every bad break in the book. Trashed friendships, fights with labels, a million-dollar lawsuit — you name it, they went through it. At times their luck was comically bad, as when they advertised for a "kick-ass bass player" in the Phoenix and, through a classic misprint, came out with the ad "Dumptruck seeks kiss-ass bass player." One can only imagine the guys who showed up.

The music, however, remains stellar. Like many of Boston’s best bands at the time, Dumptruck had sophisticated songwriting and a loud-but-lyrical guitar sound. Big Dipper and Volcano Suns were probably their closest peers (in fact, bassist Steve Michener was in all three bands), but Dumptruck’s reference points were a bit different. "We had a lot of bands that we liked in college — Television, Richard Thompson, Fairport Convention," Tiven recalls. "Guitar-based, but it wasn’t rock-god solo-type stuff. It wasn’t about technique so much as it was about sound, putting the right note in the right place."

Dumptruck could seem a fairly dour band — even their drummer, Shawn King Devlin, tended to chainsmoke on stage — but both writers came up with some of the loveliest pop hooks of their era. The live tracks added to the reissues — notably the debut disc’s incendiary CBGB’s version of "Watch Her Fall," their long-time set opener — attest to how good they could be on stage. And they reached out to their fellow music nuts by learning some of the most challenging cover tunes in the book. Some of what took on — Thompson’s "Streets of Paradise," Dylan’s "Idiot Wind," Leonard Cohen’s 10-minute, lyric-intensive "Death of a Ladies Man"— were songs that even their authors seldom tried to pull off live.

It started pretty modestly, however. Bucking local trends at the time, Dumptruck made their first album before playing a single gig. Tiven and Swan hadn’t even formed a band yet, so they played bass on each other’s songs and brought in fellow New Haven transplant Mark Mulcahy (then leading Miracle Legion) to play drums. D Is for Dumptruck is the roughest of their albums; the songwriting hadn’t quite jelled yet, but the exuberance was hard to miss. "We had nothing going for us yet, but it all happened through word of mouth and college radio," Tiven recalls. "Somehow Robert Christgau got the first album and wrote a good review in the Village Voice ["These smart young depressives not only work their variation on the garage-guitar Amerindie vernacular, they make it signify. . . . A-minus"], and it all took off from there." Also added to the reissue is a track that some locals should remember: "Thanksgiving," a five-minute guitar epic done for a Throbbing Lobster compilation, received plenty of college airplay around that holiday in 1984.

Signing to Big Time — then the home of the Go-Betweens and Hoodoo Gurus — seemed a good idea at the time. And by the time of Positively Dumptruck (done with producer Don Dixon, fresh off the first two R.E.M. albums), Tiven and Swan had both streamlined their pop (the sophomore disc is all three-minute songs) and mastered their brand of melodic melancholy. With five songs apiece on the original LP, they were well matched. Swan was more plainspoken, more likely to come up with lines like "Walking down the street thinking to myself, wishing I could talk to someone else just once for a change." Tiven’s words were a bit more oblique: the band’s first major local hit, "Back Where I Belong," sounds like a bit of extreme self-loathing, but he says it’s really about loathing somebody else. "That’s just one of my fuck-you songs. Probably about an ex-girlfriend, but I can’t remember which one. I went through a lot of ’em."

As for happier Dumptruck songs . . . well, there weren’t any, though the music was invariably more upbeat than the lyrics. "We always got pegged as such a depressed band," Tiven notes. "That was just the way we wrote, but it wasn’t what defined us as people. You probably don’t want to write a song when you’re feeling great; you’re probably out doing stuff and having fun. It’s when you’re bummed out that you need to get the shit out of your system. That’s what ended up going in the songs, but it wasn’t what defined us as people. Our running joke was, ‘Well, what do you want us to write — "Don’t Worry, Be Happy"?’ "

Still, Positively Dumptruck probably represents the band’s happiest period — and after a long round of touring, Swan suddenly exited. The usual explanations about musical differences were proffered, but I recall Devlin putting it more succinctly when I cornered him at a gig: "Kirk and Seth hated each other’s guts." Although the friendship has since been patched up, Tiven admits that "things were getting pretty shaky there for a while." All the same, the band were catching on nationally and Big Time was asking for another record, offering to bring in producer Hugh Jones who’d done one of Tiven’s favorite albums, Echo & the Bunnymen’s Heaven Up Here. So he pulled non-singing guitarist Kevin Salem in to take Swan’s place, took over all the writing himself, and had Dumptruck playing out again within weeks.

Darker and prettier than its predecessors, the Tiven-led For the Country had another epic in the title track (which he says is "about a guy who goes off to live in a cave, though maybe only figuratively") and another local hit in the folkish "Going Nowhere"; and the band carried on without losing much steam. "To some degree it scared the shit out of me, but I was pretty determined to keep going after Kirk left. Making the album was some of the most fun I’ve had in a studio, because we had so much time and facilities at our disposal. Of course, there was a problem if I got a sore throat or anything on tour, because now I had to do all the singing."

The oft-reported nosedive happened next. In a nutshell: Dumptruck signed with another record label; Big Time got irked and sued them for a whopping $5 million. Big Time ultimately defaulted on the suit, but by then Dumptruck had lost the pending deal, their career momentum, and two years of effort. An appropriately bitter and jagged album, Days of Fear came out of those years. And it’s no shocker that Tiven was ready to leave town once the suit blew over. He’s been settled in Austin for a decade now. Swan moved to Los Angeles, made a solo album, and toured with Steve Wynn. Devlin and latter-day bassist Brian Dunton are still in Boston.

The Austin Dumptruck have been playing out lately to support the reissues; and their 2002 album Lemmings Travel to the Sea (on Devil in the Woods) is recommended to fans of the old stuff (especially since it comes with a bonus disc of live tracks from the ’80s). There’s even talk of a reunion with Swan during South by Southwest next year. Yet Tiven is now into taking things slower, settling into music for the long haul. "The problem with Boston is that it’s a prim and proper town in a lot of respects; the older musicians don’t get a lot of respect there. Austin is a pretty hard town to establish a band in, but playing music is seen as a more valid thing to do. There are people here who are older still playing music and not seen as some fuck-up who doesn’t want to get a real job."