Dogrocket

well i've been putting this one off for awhile b/c
1) it's all on cassette and running casstettes into th' computer is something i hafta be inna fairly specific mood for, like say totally sick and laying around reading the (7th)last samurai again and
2) i had it in my head that i NEEDED to scan all the dogrocket newsletters in and post them as pdfs concurrently with th' music
but when i realized i could just do that later and i realized that i was totally sick just laying around reading the (7th)last samurai again i thought hey it's probably high time i did that dogrocket post.
so.
one day i was sorta skating with my friend sonny and sorta having one of those hearttoheart conversations one tended to have with sonny when he mentioned that hey that evening he'd promised some friends he'd go see their new band at stache's and would i wanna come along. well it was getting along past one of those wonderful late summer sunsets and the parking lot we were in outside the mall where windbreakers useta be wasn't getting to be any better of a skate spot so i said sure let's go to that show what the hey. tho' it's interesting to no one, the fact is that this was the first time i had gone to stache's to see a local band. i don't know if i really believed in local bands. i had tried to have a couple and we played at houses or nowhere and i had heard rc mob and pica huss and seen basement underground too many times in garages and earwig in storefronts and everything but still it was awhile (well ok not a long while) before i saw greenhorn and it all came together for me. so we went to the thing and his friends were in broadcaster the band eric had before tiara that had brett who runs spoonful in it and matt duckworth maybe the best guitar player this town has ever seen and brian freshour who is in the top 3 just plain nicest guys i have ever met who also can-not seem to have a bass sound anything but way rad. [inhale] so they went on and man did they have it together and i thought HOLY SHIT there are other dudes who are trying to make the same musick i am listening to and trying to make as well which at the time was like a whole bunch of my bloody valentine and a smattering of the wackjob original pavement drummer's drumming and a lot of my own naïveté and retardation of course so that was an eye-opener and here i am still reeling from that and the perfect late-summer evening that feeling that is just teetering on the edge between two EQUALLY GREAT things but somehow it maintains and then dogrocket go on and i'm just blown away again.

i should stop to explain something here:
i had some friends in highschool who did not believe in anything but bob mould. and although i did not share their perspective (i like him fine), well what with hanging around with them and especially knowing that there were OLDER BROTHERS who were even more cultishly convinced made it into some arcane construct that i could not fuck with tho' i was not - as mentioned - chosen. it was a background hard truth to me that there was something about bob mould which i was never going to understand but which i should probably in some way feel a little less whole for not understanding.

anyhow - dogrocket being possibly the greatest of all the mid90s hüsker dü worshippers (overwhelming colorfast, arcwelder, &c. - who the aforementioned cult oddly not only accepted but pretty much universally revered, kindred souls i guess) my first thought was hey i hafta report back about this! but then i just fell into loving them all by my own self. this may seem runofthemill when you consider the degree to which their love of cheap trick parallels their love of bob/grant/greg and therefore warps their mpls angst blasts into something entirely more muscular and CHUNKED FULL of unabashed pop wizardry (not to mention childhoods obsvly sat in front of th' AM receiver sapping up th' sappy sounds and fostering an infatuation with th' sentimental side of th' radio dial), but there are a couple things here that roll against that assumption: dogrocket were not that easy to love. for starters there were a whole lotta shorts onstage. and tanktops. whoo. turquoise and white, even. no matter the time of year. and injokes. man were they all about the injokes. but hey, so was my band, so what could i really say against that (except that it was hard to feel like you were part of something that kept making it abundantly clear that you were not). but hey a band's gotta entertain themselves, first and foremost - and if we have anything to be thankful for in this town it's a take-me-as-i-am attitude from our entertainers when they climb onstage and dogrocket spent so little time up there NOT KICKING ASS that you didn't have any time to worry about it anyways. but i digress.

dogrocket remains one of my very favorite col's bands even tho' some day in 1997 or so they got a different bass player and when they lost their office temp jobs they stopped making that newsletter (which i really will scan soon ok). later they went on to be in other bands, SOME OF WHOM ARE/WILL BE *FEATURED* ON THIS HERE BLARG!

this file has three of their cassette eps and the rest of the tracks they did at thornapple while recording the third tape, 'blown' (which has absolutely no hidden tracks on it if you can believe that). the michelle era, if you will.

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