 There's a subliminal scale we all have, when we're discussing a particular piece of art (of any kind) which happens to move us extremely. There's a tendency to lionize things that no one else has heard of, specifically BECAUSE no one else has heard of them. You see this tendency run rampant in music fanzines all the time--c.f. "The Moonpigs, a Portugese garage band who never released any records, could blow the Beatles and the Stones off any stage." Yeah, okay. Me too. This is, of course, ALWAYS a load of crap. And those of us who actively seek out unusual or just UNHEARD music have to guard against these tendencies. Choose your hyberbole carefully! Because eventually you become the Boy Who Cried Beefheart, y'know? This is why, a couple of years back, I had to take a deep breath or three before calling everyone I knew and telling them "THE MONKS' ALBUM WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!! YOU MUST GO OUT AND BUY IT IMMEDIATELY!!! NOW!!! WHAT?? WHAT??? OH...SORRY! IT'S ONLY MIDNIGHT HERE!!!!!" The other problem, of course, is that we folks who seek out, etc, etc, as outlined above, tend to have tastes that tend away from the mainstream, DUH. Let's face it, The Monks ain't for everybody. Sorry, Eddie. But you knew that anyway. Which brings me to the guys I wanna talk to you about NOW.....finally. After three paragraphs. Every great once in a while an artist comes along that EVERYONE SHOULD LOVE, but they don't. Something goes wrong. And you can't figure it out. Again, you do have to make sure you have removed your Musical Snob Blinders (I myself have a HUGE set of these)--you know, the blinders that make you say Really Stupid Things like "I can't understand why Madonna fans did not flip for the new Nick Cave album."
Now....how about the songs? Ya don't got nuttin' if ya don't got no SONGS. Well, how's this.....remember those three top-notch singers? How 'bout if each of 'em was also a world-class songwriter as well? Is this starting to HURT yet? It oughtta. NOW....take this huge and unwieldy pile of talent, and what kind of noise does it make? Well....there are plently of precedents, and we could take all day listing them. Instead, just imagine this: it's 1974. God is bored. He locks Fagen and Becker of Steely Dan, Felix Cavaliere of the Rascals, Pete Townshend, and Keith Moon in a very small room with a lot of amphetamines and tells them they can't come out until they recreate the Beatles' Revolver album. And at that I'm leaving out a lot. Interested? As we attempt to pick our way through this story, you may wonder why you've never heard of any of these guys.....one rather infuriating reason is that they keep CHANGING THEIR NAMES........try and keep up, okay?
Mud In Your Eye either evolved or petered-out into something called Ruben Fox--these guys, remember, shed names at will--and this brings us well into the early 70s.
NHB gave way to a band called Sky King, and then Two Generations Of Brubeck, after which Jimmy--now using his middle name, "Carter"--pay attention--played with Gerry Mulligan. At this point he was sharing an artist's loft in Brooklyn, and that's where he bumped into Jimmy and Ronny. With drummer Skip Reed and "fifth wheel" Dean Bailin, they formed the direct precursor to the Laughing Dogs, a band called Foxtrot. Nowadays, they all say Foxtrot was too serious, and of course they all blame Dean Bailin. Why not? However, they were good enough to impress Rupert Holmes, who hired them en masse to be the backing band on his 1975 LP, called--aw, you guessed--Rupert Holmes. There is some rancor over their photo on the back of the Holmes LP. The picture is weirdly distended in a couple of places--Bailin is slightly "stretched" and Cathcart is so horribly stretched as to resemble nothing so much as a blond anvil. Says Ronny today: "Rumor has it Rupert stretched the picture himself--he was terribly jealous of anyone who could play better than him, which is why Jimmy and I look okay."  Shortly after this, Bailin was given the boot, as the band was mutating beyond his ability to fit in--although one band member now delivers the much more succinct "He wouldn't share his pot with us." Foxtrot evolved into the Laughing Dogs, and in the spring of 1976 they found themselves playing a Monday night audition at the current "place to be", CBGB. This landed them two songs on that summer's Live At CBGB album. Stardom did not instantly follow, if you needed me to tell you that. Smart, sharp, snappy, punky pop/soul bands would not appear on the musical map for another two or three years. Undaunted, the Laughing Dogs honed their act. I NEVER SAW THEM. Here's what I missed:
Strange-looking face masks would be passed out to all the audience members--masks referred to as "Joeheads." Sound good? They also landed a spot on the "Monkees Over Two" tour in 1977--more correctly named Dolenz, Jones, Boyce and Hart.
PAY ATTENTION!! Update: A Balloon Burst, here. I am informed that Potts' real name is "Marc Potosky." Apparently Jimmy suggested "Moe Potts." Well, that's okay. Finally, the Big Record Deal--with tiny little indie label COLUMBIA RECORDS. That's more like it. Of course, to those of us that heard them on the CBGB album and never again, it was a bit of a shock when their first LP hit the stores in June of 1979. I was working at Sam Goody in Paramus NJ at the time, and I vividly recall opening that package and seeing those four smart-ass faces staring out at me--and going, "YES!!!!" They only sent one copy, of course, and that was a herald of things to come. That summer of 1979 brought a real embarrassment of riches for music fans--never mind the mainstream for a moment, just take a peek at this small sample of "other stuff":
I could go on and on, but suffice to say that people who worked in record stores (The True Arbiters Of Good Taste, us) had a field day that summer. And, right in the middle of this huge unwieldy swirl, was....The Laughing Dogs album. Each song kicks you right in the stomach. You keep waiting for them to run out of great ideas and they never do. In fact, they perversely overstuff each tune with killer riffs and unusual chords that lesser tunesmiths would base a whole song around.......for every perfect little nugget on that LP, another songwriter would have stretched it out over four or five lesser ditties. There are parallels on here to pretty much everything you've ever heard and enjoyed. These guys were TECHNICIANS.....and, although that usually means "Great chops, no inspiration," all I can say is you have to hear it for yourself. A lot of artists base their style loosely around one or two older established artists that they wish to emulate. A lot of other artists have one particular thing in mind and they get it down cold. But The Laughing Dogs had the entire history of popular music down cold....name somebody ya like and I'll find you a parallel line somewhere on this album.
Ronny's voice is very Long Island, sweet but a little rough. If you were driving down Northern Boulevard with your seatbelt hanging out the door making sparks, the guy on the corner yelling "'Ey! Buddy! Ya seatbelt! 'Ey!! BUDDY!!!"--that would be Ronny. Got it? Jimmy's voice is similar, but sweeter, less rough, even a little "whiny"--which is a GOOD thing; when you hear it you'll know what I mean. His voice sounds exactly like his guitar solos, the tone of which will remind you of Day Tripper, if that helps. He's the guy in the band at the wedding reception who sings all the sappy ballads and your girlfriend can't take her eyes off him, and it has nothing to do with how he LOOKS.. And both of them have magnificent slow-and-impossibly-wide vibratos that you could drive a small armored vehicle through. This is a real New York thing, always has been. Way back before rock and roll. This quality is what led Jeff Baxter, who has a pretty good set of ears, to incorrectly assume that the Doobie Brothers were from Long Island--just on the basis of the singing on Listen To The Music, all true. Mr. Cathcart is the wildcard. The "George." The Finish Carpenter, if you will, who takes a fairly decent-looking dining room and effortlessly slaps up some Killer Moldings. As far as his vocal contribution is concerned--and, do please allow me an Ethnically-Based Metaphor from my own oeuvre--You gotta good piece-'a'-salame, (Ronny) You gotta good-a-provolone (Jimmy), you-gotta-"mustid" (That would have to be Moe)--whadda'you need? White bread, dummy. White bread from Indiana. You CAN'T MAKE THAT SANDWICH WITH RYE. IT'S TOO MUCH. To be a bit more serious, but only a bit, Cathcart's voice is a tad reminiscent of Brad Delp, the Invisible Singer from a little band you may have heard of, called Boston. The way these three, sometimes four, voices blended together was positively heavenly. Unbeatable. As much as I detest the Eagles, I've always marveled at the way three (or four) such dissimilar voices blended so wonderfully. Well, they have to take a backseat to Dese Bums F'um Brooklyn. It takes several listens before you can pick out who's singing what, if you're inclined to do so. And why not? Hmmm? What else do you have to do that's so damned important, Jack?? The album. They leap right out of the box at you, like...well, like DOGS, with Get 'Im Outta Town, a truly ferocious song that sounds like nothing so much as a mission statement for the rest of the record. Before you get a chance to catch your breath, they smack you with Low Life, Before side one is over, you've careened through two more screaming rockers and one other song, Reason For Love, that manages to find the heretofore-unknown place where the Beatles, Motown, and ROY ROGERS all intersect. You were waiting for that, weren't you? Side two opens with It's Alright, It's OK, which in 1979 should have been a number one single. It was perfect for the radio and for the times. What happened? I dunno. I do know this: the rest of the record is just as good. It'll have you turning backflips.
The Laughing Dogs were carried along by the same end-of-the-decade New York Tide Of Fame that propelled excellent-but-lesser bands (sorry, everybody) like The Shirts, Blondie, Ramones, Tuff Darts.....on and on. Blondie and the Ramones seem to have left some sort of legacy, wouldn't you say? What happened to THESE guys? When you play this record for someone who has at least a vague notion of the music of that day and time, their reaction is much the same as that of someone who has just heard Moby Grape for the first time--"Why have I never heard this before?" Again: I dunno. Again, I do know this: if they were fortunate--or unfortunate--enough to have stopped into the Sam Goody in Paramus NJ anytime during that halcyon summer of 1979, it was worth a couple of limbs to try and escape without buying it. They hit the road and stayed there, playing both as headliners and in various combinations with most of the aforementioned bands and more. Then, without warning, their second LP dropped on our heads in late August 1980.
THIS IS THE BEST BAND YOU NEVER HEARD. You're in up to your neck right in the first song, Zombies, which manages to sound like nothing else and like everything else--suburban white-boy leather-jacket funk layered over--over what?? I give up. You're wrenched straight from here to a literally perfect cover of The Animals' Don't Bring Me Down--I hate cover versions on albums, save 'em for your live show--but this one is not only excellent but essential. It puts the original to shame, and that's a long way to go. It's instantly apparent that, back in the day when these guys were playing other people's tunes for chump change, there cannot have been anyone anywhere who was better at it.
These three songs were all Ronny, but the next one is Jimmy's--Take My Chances--which is another example of their insane creativity--again they've taken a simple, common pop song structure, performed vivisection on it, and reassembled it into a quivering pileup of time signatures and multiple rhythms, and made it sound effortless in the bargain. Next you get Carter's Not What I Used To Be, a blast of pure pop but AGAIN with one serious "louie"--there's one chord in there which is straight from Mars and it goes by you so fast you might not even hear it. I love stuff like that. It's very vexing when you try to learn a song off the record with one of those Land Mines in it--but the thing is that EVERY OTHER MUSICIAN knows that it's a land mine, and when they hear you play it the RIGHT way instead of the "sneaky" easy way, their heads whip around--TOO LATE! Those little "gotchas" are sometimes the only fun you can have when no one in the audience is paying any attention. Next, Jimmy Accardi reveals his Secret Strength--the truly elusive ability to write a serious, heartfelt Love Ballad and not have it sound like a load of bulls**t. Stand Up. And that takes you, gasping for breath, to the end of side one.
And that's it. That's all you get. These guys should've gone on forever, but the record-buying public's indifference smothered 'em right on the vine. Do you feel guilty yet, readers? Well, maybe it's not precisely your fault. Radio was not exactly friendly to these guys. I think, in fact, they may not have ever been allowed in the same ZIP CODE as any active radio station. Just a theory. The REAL theory: just an embarrassment of riches. That's all. Each band of that era that achieved some success had ONE HOOK. The Ramones had "one-tuh-thra-faw," Blondie had--well, you know what (whom) Blondie had......bands like the Laughing Dogs and the Shirts, in particular, had just too much going on. The same thing that made 'em great was the thing that sunk 'em with the Big Stupid Ignorant Public--not YOU of course. Just all your friends. Carter was the first to jump ship, as per The George Harrison Theory. Makes perfect sense. A major songwriting talent in the company of two other major songwriting talents who write together as a team--that's gonna be the first guy out of the pool. There's never any room for him and that's probably what happened here, although certainly I'm talking out of school. They're all still making music, except Moe Potts--who apparently is now a painter. Carter's voice can be heard on many commercials and cartoons--you just don't know it's him. In fact, he does several voices on a VERY FAMOUS VERY IMPORTANT CARTOON on which, unfortunately, he must for legal reasons use--that's right--A PSEUDONYM. Here we go again. Jimmy--pay attention--is now "Jimmi" and lives in California, and has put out several home-grown CDs that have slipped under your radar. (Clue: search his name under Hotbot or Altavista) The one you stand the greatest chance of running into is Ronny--who no longer exists, of course; his name is now "John Dice." PAY ATTENTION!!!
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Okay, FOUR paragraphs. Were the Laughing Dogs better than the Beatles and the Stones? Well, no. Okay? Happy now? BUT--listening to their two long-vanished albums, and thinking about the times in which they existed, you can't imagine why the entire world did not go totally Dog-Mad. Here's your bullet: 1979-80. Great, inventive playing (including a couple of guys who excelled on more than one instrument.) THREE top-notch singers.....think about that. You're living in a day and age when ONE halfway-decent singer per band is unusual. These guys had three.....and not "halfway decent" but GREAT..
The first member of the future Laughing Dogs to make a blip on your radar screen would be Ronny Altaville. Back in 1968, fresh out of high school, he joined a very greasy-looking band from Long Island called Aesop's Fables, and appeared with them on an album called In Due Time. Ronny played bass, sang backups, and contributed to the arrangements, it says here. He cringes when recalling that music nowadays, but it was a fair blueprint for what was to come. Blue-eyed soul in the typical Rascals/Vanilla Fudge/Vagrants vein, but with more than a dash of 1968-style psychedelia. Their parents must have been proud.
Shortly after this experience, he crossed paths with Jimmy Accardi, from Brooklyn. It was a match made in heaven, or at least on one of the upper floors of the Brill Building. Their first band, Mud In Your Eye, lasted about two years and produced some very neat (if unpolished) demo tapes but no Path To Stardom. No wonder. What they were doing was (whether they knew it or not) a very newfangled sound--I hate to oversimplify, but of all the American bands trying to do "Beatles", nobody got closer than these guys. This kind of sound would not become popular till the tail end of the 1970s--and here it is 1969.
Meanwhile, let's go back to 1965--in Indiana. Yes, you have to, and don't take that tone with ME, okay? On stage, at the Miss Indiana Pageant, is 11-year-old Jimmy Cathcart, playing Louie Louie, and if you're going to go to Indiana for anything it may as well be Louie Louie, yes? From these humble beginnings he went on to study classical piano in Michigan, bumping into Chris Brubeck (son of Dave) and eventually forming New Heavenly Blue, a very ambitious project to say the least, which released its only LP on Atlantic in 1972, when Jimmy was 18 years old. Not bad for Indiana.
Without warning, they would on occasion bring along an opening act, "The Kojaks", complete with bald scalps and lollipops, doing Vegasy lounge versions of songs like Anarchy In The UK. Twenty years in anticipation of the current craze. (It was the Dogs themselves, of course, in disguise.)
In 1978 they lost drummer Skip Reed to some sadly typical Rock And Roll Problems, and started looking around for a replacement. Legend has it that they auditioned more drummers than most of us ever get to SEE--finally settling on Connecticut's Moe Potts; who played like thunder, looked great, and--let's face it--had that rare attribute, The Perfect Name. Jimmy and Ronny may have been jealous, I dunno--for suddenly they became James Leonard and Ronny Carle.
Here's the funny thing about this record--talk to the guys in the band, and they don't like the album. That's how you know it's great, of course. It was produced by Bruce Botnick, whose credentials don't need a re-airing here--but, according to one band member, it wasn't a happy combination. By account, Botnick's quest for a "live sound" left something akin to a Sea Of Mud, resulting in a complete re-recording--and even then, extreme "tweaking" during mixdown. I dunno--sounds pretty damn good to me. Beatles, Stones, Rascals, early Steely Dan, Sam and Dave, just keep going. Throw 'em all in a blender (with a LOT of olive oil) and don't skimp on the garlic and onions. Then put your ear IN THE BLENDER and for God's sake, DON'T shut it off. You'll thank me later.
None of the guys in the band like THIS album either. They must be nuts. They accomplished the impossible: this LP actually has MORE depth than the first one. It's not as loud, nor as uniform. They skip from one style to the next just like turning pages. Your head will just keep spinning around and around.