The Golden Dogs Graduate From Rock N’ Roll University

On a chilly, blustering February Sunday in Toronto’s east end, The Golden Dogs are rehearsing in their makeshift studio and jamspace, basically a split up sort of garage directly under principle songwriter Dave Azzolini and his wife and musical partner, Jessica Grassia’s apartment. It was here, just a couple flights of stairs from where the couple lives and eats and sleeps, that they recorded almost all of their newest record, 3 ½. It’s also home to their cat, which Grassia warns is in the throes of an annual relentless winter heat, ready to make close friends with anything that’s warm. She notes, though, that the purring machine has not been spayed and has never really had access to other cats as an indoor cat her whole life, with this yearning deep inside she doesn’t understand. She just knows she wants whatever it is real bad. “It’s like the feline equivalent of, 'I don’t know why, but I wanna put this shower head between my legs…'" Stefanie McCarol, one of the band’s new members (along with bassist Alejandro “Alex” Cairncross) points out.

It also draws a parallel with the feeling of listening to 3 ½ for the first time—you’re not sure exactly why, initially, that you want more of it, but you know you do, and by the time it’s over you want it again. It kicks things off with the spacey, bizarre pseudo-disco jam “Decided”, and then punches you in the face with a slew of hyper-catchy rock n’ roll tunes before knocking you out with the heavy, unstoppable instrumental juggernaut “MK Ultra by Yama Hama”, the product of an aborted side project delving into all manner of new, weird things for the band. Everything closes off with the epic “Spider Legs”, ending with soothing synth leading to the album’s special treat, a cover of “My Drug Buddy” by The Lemonheads. While there are flashes of brave new directions sound-wise, 3 ½ is still Azzolini writing songs the only way he knows how: in the form of toe-tapping, head-banging pop. There’s a specific reason for the record to be set up that way, though. “I wanna try and fool people into listening to the rock stuff,” Azzolini says. “Open it with the disco, sort of easy listening stuff, then it blends into really heavy riff rock, then into rock and comes out with the jams. Fool the ladies into listening to rock,” he laughs. “Gotta get some more ladies out to the show,” Grassia adds. “Having two girls in the band now helps for sure.”

The Golden Dogs have been around for a while, putting out their first, self-titled EP in 2002. Their recorded output has never been prolific, but there was an unusually long amount of time between 3 ½ and 2010’s Coat of Arms. The reason for that, simply, was life. 3 ½ is the band’s first album they recorded and produced almost completely themselves, and without grant money or outside funding. Grassia says that in 2011, the band was “basically defunct,” having gone through an astounding number of players and toured a big chunk of the planet, their frenzied live show landing them their own great headlining slots as well as opening ones for acts like Feist and Sloan. But the break was necessary and rejuvenating. The story so often is that bands burn themselves out touring non-stop to make ends meet, become disillusioned, break the bank to put out records if they can’t secure funding, and end up imploding. Instead, Azzolini and Grassia opted to take the time to figure out how they could keep playing and recording music, simply because they knew it wasn’t an option not to. The result is a new album full of big, infectious energy and a band that feels solid and set in place for the first time in a long time.

The band will be heading out on a short tour of Ontario and Montreal, kicking things off in Toronto at the Rivoli on February 21. Over beers, a short detour and educational visit to YouTube videos of The Lemonheads, and a game of roulette, Noisey sat down with The Golden Dogs to talk about rock n’ roll university, marriage, and making things work.

Noisey: So what feels different about 3 ½ compared to your last records?
Jessica Grassia: This was the first record that we actually went downstairs and were like, “what are we gonna do? Let’s just start making songs!” So it was me and Dave and we had the songs and we realized we should put a band together. Alejandro came in on bass so we started playing with him a little bit.
Dave Azzolini: Not only did he come with a bass, he came with a fucking van, two amps, one for me, learned all the bass lines in less than two weeks, just nailed all the shit.
Stefanie McCarol: And I came in with nothing. I just stand around and play the guitar.
Azzolini: Stef learned how to rock just in the last two years with the Golden Dogs. She’s got her own band now, Brave Shores.
Grassia: Her brother Jay was on bass in the last touring outfit of [The Golden Dogs], so we knew Stef could play guitar.
Azzolini: She soaked it up pretty damn fast.

So the musical chairs bit is part of having new people come in.
Grassia: Well it was just out of necessity. When it was Dave and I trying to figure everything out, we needed to find a drummer. We thought of some people but then we just thought well, I play drums on the record, why don’t I just try doing it? And it was just us two for a while. At that point we still didn’t even know if it was gonna be The Golden Dogs.
Azzolini: There’s no business involved, basically. We tried, with the Yama Hama stuff, which is the seventh track on the album. It was like an experiment. We had a band we were gonna call Yama Hama, which was just entirely improvised everything. So that’s why it was different players at the time, when we recorded that. It opened up groove stations in the band. Like, let’s ride out some parts a little longer, and just experiment with that kind of stuff.
Grassia: Yeah, we just explored a little bit more. Like, “what are we now?” We can do anything we want, really.
Azzolini: But I just write pop songs. It just comes without thinking about it, I have to do it or something. So it just ends up sounding more like The Golden Dogs that way. Especially with Jess in the band.
Grassia: And the recording process informed everything as well. We had never taken the helm that way before. That was a huge learning curve. And the songs just started taking shape out of that. There are a lot of songs we did that aren’t on the record, that we just sort of whittled away and just tried to find the core of them.
Azzolini: Yeah, there were 14 songs on it, and I can’t even listen to albums with 14 songs on them.

Was it a conscious decision to make it as short as it is?
Grassia: It’s 30 minutes exactly.
Azzolini: And there’s another 30 minutes that’s pretty much done, ready to go as another EP down the road. We’ll just keep calling them albums. We read somewhere that 30 minutes is technically an album, and we’re just under 30 minutes by a couple seconds. But that’s all 1940s rules too, what an album is. The records could only fit that much music, so that’s what the companies told artists was an album. It’s just arbitrary really. Our first EP was six songs, and that was like a perfect little unit, and I remember when we tacked the next EP on to that EP, it’s nice but it really should’ve been just two albums. Anyway, that’s what we’re doing now. Economy.

The other thing about these shorter records is that they often don’t get the chance to get bad or boring.
Azzolini: I really think so, and I’m liking that a lot. I drive around a lot for my job. I’m a night rider, like David Hasselhoff, got a cool black car and stuff. So I listen to a lot of music in the car, basically. I keep finding that all these songs sound good in the car, and it’s just a sort of natural driving music. I have the time to listen to full albums but I don’t listen to full albums a lot of the time.

Why such a long break between albums?
Azzolini: We’re doing everything on our own dime, we’re learning from our friends. Mixing took forever because we were gonna mix it ourselves, but that didn’t work out because we realized you have to know a bit to make it sound good. We learned a lot from that process. We know how to start a record label now ‘cause we started our own record label. You have to order records, have to get a guy to get it out to press. So that five years was basically like going to university—rock n’ roll university.
Grassia: And just finding the people to play with us. Because it was such a new line-up we spent a lot of time rehearsing, just getting ready to even play. Some of the songs we recorded are pretty involved, like there’s a lot there, so how do we make this into a live show? We just took our time, spent a lot of time rehearsing with these guys, and slowly started playing shows…
Azzolini: Everything just takes time.

One of the most complexly arranged tracks is “Decided”, which is also the only one you guys recorded live, right?
Grassia: That was the only one we didn’t record here. We recorded that with Joao [Carvalho] at Revolution Recording. We just practiced it a lot at rehearsal. And that was the only song on the record that came to fruition that way. All the other songs were me and Dave in the studio, playing around doing bed tracks, overdubs and that kind of stuff, and they formed that way. This was the only song that was done, finished when we went into the studio to record it live off the floor.
Azzolini: And it’s just a testament to that being our commodity, as a band. We have certain people who really like us. The Sloan manager, for instance, he let us go and mix in Sloan’s space for a decent price, and that made the sound that much better. And then Joao said, “I want to do something for The Golden Dogs.”
Grassia: It was a total rock n’ roll spa day.
Azzolini: It was so fast, because we have to do everything usually, but he did everything for us. We came in, just laid back, got our toes waxed (laughs).
Grassia: And with “Decided”, we felt like starting the album that way. People are hearing the newest sound from us, and then it almost goes back in time because it ends with “MK Ultra by Yama Hama”, probably one of the oldest songs on the record. You just hear the evolution of us from 2011 to now.

How have you guys changed as people since the last release? I mean, you two [Dave and Jessica] are married.
Grassia: Yeah, we’ve been together for like, 16 years.
Alejandro Cairncross: We’ve all been married for about two and a half. (laughs)
Azzolini: She works in the day time, I work in the night time, so we don’t see each other that much, which really helps. We see each other for about two hours, from five to seven, and on the weekends we rock n’ roll.
Grassia: We’re at the point now that everything works. There’s this balance to the music, our work, our lives, so we’re in a really good spot. It’s nice that we’re not dependent on the music to live. So that pressure is off. The music side is the joy in life. We’ve never had it before where everyone in the band is pumped and enthusiastic to do stuff. Not to say anything bad about anyone whose ever been in the band, but it’s always been me and Dave leading it, doing all the stuff, and everyone else just shows up and plays. This is totally way more of an all for one, one for all sort of thing, even on the back end stuff. While this has been happening Alex has been doing all the social media stuff and working at tour managing. But before that was all me and Dave doing that stuff, so it’s nice. And they’re always wanting to rehearse too, which is a change for us.
McCarol: When we jam it’s like a free lesson for me, because I’m still learning so much, technique-wise or even theory-wise. Like when you guys said today, “Hit an A,” I could be like, “I know where that is now!” When we started it was like “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” it was just shapes.
Cairncross: Dave and Jess just make us better players.
Grassia: This is the most fun being in a band has ever been.

Do you feel that this album and what you’re writing now is a progression?
Azzolini: Hopefully. I always feel that when I’m working on something, it’s the greatest song on the world, basically. I kinda pretend that it is. Then we work on it and record it, and it’s kinda like, “well, that didn’t end up exactly how I thought it would, but it’s still pretty awesome.
Grassia: And we’re trying stuff now like, Dave’s on drums on this new song, Stef’s holding it down on guitar, and I go back to keys. We’re not afraid to just try stuff and make those kind of things work. We want everyone to have fun at all times.
McCarol: I got my eyes on the bass.

Why did you decide to cover “My Drug Buddy” by The Lemonheads?
Grassia: I just love that song.
Azzolini: I’ve always loved The Lemonheads. There’s a line in it that goes, “As the cars fly up King Street, it’s enough to startle us,” and it reminds me of being on acid, sitting at the bus stop on the corner with a friend at the time, and we’d just watch the cars stop and start, and it was a hazy fucking summer road with all the heat coming off the road, very psychedelic, and just the idea of people stopping at red lights and following the rules like robots felt really strange. (laughs)

Stefanie and Alejandro, how have your playing styles changed since you signed on for this?
McCarol: Entirely. I only played acoustic guitar in my bedroom before I tried with The Golden Dogs. They informed everything when it came to my style and playing. I didn’t know anything, really. I knew basic chords and then it was all mystery tones.
Grassia: She’s got a crazy ear. She was playing music and not even realizing the chords she was playing. She could just pick it up and remember it.
McCarol: I didn’t even think of music as an option for me. I was kind of distracted by school and being a girl. Just regular, what-you’re-supposed-to-do things. I wonder what my music would be like if I started a bit earlier.
Cairncross: I grew up playing punk and hardcore music. Post-hardcore was my last band (Sleeping Pilot) before I left Ottawa. I also played in a sort of post-rock, orchestral band (As The Poets Affirm) that was very challenging for me. So that prepped me for a lot of stuff other than punk. And playing with these guys, I’ve learned a whole lot more because playing the music I used to play, there’s a complete lack of traditional pop structure, so learning all that, it’s definitely a lot different than I’m used to.

How do the dynamics work when you’re operating with no outside funding?
Grassia: For a lot of years me and Dave didn’t work, and neither did the people we were playing with at the time. So we put everything we had into the band and keeping it going, and touring, and then some, and it was great. We had so many fun times and the touring was amazing, we went all over the world. But then it’s not sustainable. It’s hard to sustain that. For us, we’re together, so this is our life, we have the most to gain. But asking people to come on the road for three weeks at a time, and saying, “well, we can’t really pay you, but you won’t lose money while you’re on the road, we’ll pay for your food and all that stuff.” We had some awesome times but now we have a different approach, where we can only do what is feasible. And it’s working for us. Everything’s on our own terms.

That’s cool that the band is still a band, though. Because doing the “all in” thing and realizing it’s not sustainable, then keeping the band and a marriage together, is pretty impressive. Do you think one has a bearing on the other?
Azzolini: They’re two separate things. Well…
Grassia: No they’re not! We don’t even know any other way. It just is what it is.
Azzolini: Yeah, but if I lost my hand or something and couldn’t play music, it’s not like we wouldn’t be together. It’s just that the music informs everything, our life and art intertwines. So we’re gonna do that even if we can’t tour, if these guys can’t play with us for some reason. We’re gonna keep playing music.
McCarol: Part of the live show, too, is seeing your chemistry on stage, what you guys have together.
Grassia: We really just get to connect. Everything’s out, everything lets go on stage. That’s why we keep doing it. That feeling.

@MattGeeWilliams feels things, too.