Party time

Love Dogs put their mark on R&B; Superfly hang cool

by Brett Milano

Sometimes you can tell you're listening to an album under the wrong circumstances. So it is at the moment, with the Love Dogs' I'm Yo' Dog (Tone Cool/Rounder) sitting on the player. For one thing, I'm sitting at a computer screen with a deadline coming up. For another, I'm sober.

Make no mistake, this outfit's brand of R&B is a clear inducement to get whacked out of your gourd. They play it that way, with lots of randy-sounding horn and piano solos and a preference for up-tempo numbers. They sing it that way, with frontman Ed "Duato" Scheer coming across like an overeager party host. They even play a few relevant songs. "Drink Up, Drink Up" -- one of the few cover tunes on the CD -- was first done by an obscure '50s doo-wop group called the Dew Drops, and it's refreshing to hear a pro-tippling song this blatant in the fun-starved '90s.

Fortunately there's also enough solid musicianship going on for those who are selective about who they go drinking with. Those sober enough to notice will hear well-constructed horn charts, authentic New Orleans parade rhythms, and an overall approach that stays on the right side of the line between joviality and goofiness.

Scheer put this crew together after a long series of gigs, including a tour with Louisiana legend Johnny Adams, and a few years with the tastefully named R&B band the Swinging Johnsons (with whom he still plays drums). Among the seven-piece line-up are some familiar names. Tenor-saxophonist Gordon Beedle has been in scads of bands, notably Duke Robillard's and Luther Johnson's. Keyboardist Alizon Lissance's playing always struck me as too squeaky clean when she was in Girls' Night Out, but she's apparently done some homework and learned some necessary grit since then (her most obvious influence seems to be Chuck Berry pianist Johnnie Johnson with a little Professor Longhair thrown in, neither a bad choice). Alto-saxophonist Myanna, also a GNO alumnus, is the biggest local name, usually playing with her own jazz band; she sounds better in the Love Dogs, where the songs favor short-but-tasty solos and the style demands that she loosen up. Put it together and you've got a more compact version of a big band -- not quite a whole Roomful, but maybe a broom closet full of blues.

Appropriately, the group were launched in watering-hole-type clubs rather than ones strictly devoted to blues. Two summers ago they had a brief residency at the Faneuil Hall nightspot the Green Dragon; their first regular gig around that time was a Wednesday-night series at the Brighton bar the Greenbriar.

"The crowd hadn't heard a lot of blues, but we had a positive enough vibe that we could bring them around," Scheer notes. "They didn't know what it was, but they knew they liked it. I don't want to sound like the people at the Greenbriar are ignorant, but you don't have to be into the genre to get what we're doing. For me the idea of playing a regular weekly night was a more appealing way to launch a new project -- rather than playing the House of Blues every 12 weeks or taking a Monday night at Harpers Ferry. It was better for the morale of the band."

The group's preference for borderline-novelty songs probably helped to bring the audiences around; but we're talking novelty in the double-entendre R&B tradition, not the Weird Al tradition. "That's my personality; I'm a wacky person," Scheer says. "It wasn't any calculated tradition to win people over, just the personality of the band. Our name itself implies that, like we're this big friendly dog who only wants to run over and smother you with hugs and kisses."

Is there a danger of pushing the humor too far?

"The key is to make sure that doesn't happen. I would never write something completely as a comedy piece. For instance, we did a show at Lincoln Center last week and we were on the same bill with Candye Kane . . . To me she was on the other side of the line. The band was great, but her act was a little further than I wanted to go." Guess it was Ms. Kane's habit of playing piano solos with her boobs, a move that Lissance apparently doesn't plan to emulate.

The one thing that the Love Dogs haven't got is a hot guitar player -- or any guitar player at all (save for a few rhythm parts added by baritone-saxist Glenn Shambroom). Scheer says it was planned that way to give the band a more acoustic flavor, but the disc still leaves you wishing for some hot-shot six-stringer to crash the party. (Where's their labelmate Monster Mike Welch when you need him?)

"We don't have one and that's by choice," Scheer insists. "I personally wanted to stay away from that, because there's so much blues guitar around that we've been saturated with it -- and I was a big Stevie Ray Vaughan fan. But unless you've got someone who can take a whole different approach to the instrument, you're better off trying to go in a different direction."

At their disc-release party at Johnny D's last Wednesday, the band's stage presence was slightly campy (or slightly vampy, in Lissance's case), but the music backed it up. Not relying on their own material as much as the album does, they included solid covers of Muddy Waters' "She's into Something," Irma Thomas's "Ruler of My Heart," and Ike Turner's "Much Later" (and you have to give Scheer points for chutzpah after he introduced the latter as "a song by a guy who knew how to treat women" while Lissance and Myanna glared in his direction). The group's diehard fans seem to be into swing dancing; that's what they were doing on the floor for most of the night. The dancers looked fine, but the Love Dogs' best numbers lent themselves to something a little more lowdown.

SUPERFLY EP

The rhythm section really whomps, the lead guitarist's blazing all over the place, the singer sounds like a crazed swamp creature . . . can this bad-ass band really be Cliffs of Dooneen? Technically, no. Last December Cliffs ceremoniously buried their old name and became Superfly. The personnel remain the same, but the song sure doesn't, and the just-released Royale with Cheese EP (on Pacifico) makes good on their promise to deliver an entirely new sound -- which apparently stems from misplacing their Celtic influences as well as their acoustic guitars and forgetting everything they ever knew about subtlety. A suitable local parallel would be the Heretix, who were a rather twee new-wave band for years before becoming a potent metal-edged outfit on their third (and last) album, The Adventures of Superdevil.

True, Superfly's choice of B-movie imagery is a little dated, and the title track's Pulp Fiction reference (which doesn't turn up in the lyric) would have looked better last year. But it suits the lowlife ambiance they're looking for, and it's a surprise how well this formerly nothing-if-not-earnest band adapt. Singer Eric Sean Murphy has traded in his higher register for a deeper and more menacing tone, and Martin Crotty has discovered dirty guitar tones that he never got near in the Cliffs days. The best thing about the Cliffs, namely their sense of melody, is still around, notably on the softer tracks "If You Don't Know" and "Last Day." But what's most evident here is the release the band feel at shaking off the old image and getting into non-Cliffs grooves like "Pissing in the Wind" (just try to imagine the old group pulling a lyric like "Your misery is gonna come and bite you on the ass someday"). If you buy their claim that Cliffs and Superfly are two different outfits with the same personnel, I'd say Superfly are the better band.

FORT APACHE

Local recording hot spot Fort Apache launched its in-house CD label with a major splash early last year, releasing the compilation This Is Fort Apache through its distribution deal with MCA. Relatively little has happened since then -- just two albums, by the Minneapolis band Shatterproof and Boston's Cold Water Flat, neither of which set the charts on fire. This week the label springs back into action, releasing CD singles by both of the above bands as well as Speedball Baby (the Blues Explosion-type outfit fronted by ex-Blood Orange Ron Ward) and Boston's Sky Heroes. All four are being released through the Rounder-affiliated DNA label, but MCA-distributed albums will follow.

Fort Apache owner Gary Smith blames the label's hiatus on shake-ups within MCA. "There's a completely new regime, from the top of the corporate ladder to the lowliest of workers, so it seemed inopportune to put records out for a time; we'd be damaging bands' careers." Surprisingly, much of the just-released material wasn't recorded at Fort Apache. Part of the Sky Heroes CD single was done across town at Q Division. "Recording at the Fort is part of the appeal for signing to the label, but it's heavy-handed to tell artists where to record," Smith says. "If they come from Minneapolis and want to record there, or if they have ties to some other studio, that's fine. We don't need to double-dip Fort Apache."

The new releases are a varying collection -- each of Fort Apache's five in-house producers has signing power -- but the clear standout is Shatterproof, who sound the way Squeeze would if Steve Albini were producing them. The band's first album got lost in the MCA shuffle, so the time's right for rediscovery.

COMING UP

Quivvver play their first gig in a while at T.T. the Bear's Place tonight (Thursday); the Sky Heroes (see above) and Jack Drag are at the Middle East, Four Piece Suit go surfin' and spyin' at Bill's Bar; Scatterfield are at the Phoenix Landing . . . Michelle Willson and Evil Gal have a disc-release party at Johnny D's tomorrow (Friday), and Club Bohemia begins a two-night "best of" showcase, with the Strangemen and the Varmints; Surficide and Kenne Highland follow Saturday.

Also Saturday, Stompbox does the reunion thing at the Rat, Eric Martin & the Illyrians are at the Middle East with Velveteen, and that brilliant guy from the Replacements who's making even better albums since the band broke up comes to town. We're of course referring to Tommy Stinson, who hits T.T.'s with his new band Perfect . . . Local faves Quintaine Americana and Chelsea on Fire play a free show at Mama Kin Sunday; the Godrays (the ex-small factory band who were featured in this column a few weeks ago) play the Middle East . . . And Social Distortion wave the smart-punk flag at the Middle East on Wednesday.