Interview: Dog Eat Dog's Dave Neabore, May 28th 2006, Groningen, The Netherlands

Dog Eat Dog is one one of the bands I used to go see whenever they were in my area, back around 1996. It was always a lot of fun, the band's energy always rubbed off on the crowd. I spent half of one of those gigs at the emergency room because the pit was a little too rough. The band always came out to meet their fans after the show, I still have pictures somewhere of me and my friend and the band. Good times. My interest in music changed [i.e. I had a boring boyfriend who didn't want to go to gigs] and I kinda lost track of what Dog Eat Dog was doing. In fact, I thought they didn't exist anymore. Fortunately, I was wrong. They are still very much alive, as this special feature will show you!

This interview wasn't really planned like the others I have done. I was told to just phone someone when I got to the venue and they would see if the band would have time for me. Luckily, Dave - one of the founding members of DED, killer bassplayer and resposible for writing most of the music - was prepeared to postpone his dinner to have a chat about the current life of Dog Eat Dog.

Imre: First of all: did you ever eat dog?
Dave: No. And that’s a very funny question. No, I hope I haven’t eaten a dog, but I was eating some strange Chinese food just a few minutes ago...

Dave looks a little nauseous now, so I quickly move on to my actual list of questions to distract him.

Past vs the future

Imre: What made you guys decide to release an album after so many [7] years?
Dave: Well, we were planning to release an album right after the Amped record [1999], so we started writing material in 2000, 2001, demoed material and ended up getting new management who got us off Roadrunner records and then couldn’t get another deal for us. Between 2000 and 2003 was a very difficult time for this band because we were stuck. We had music that we wrote, but we didn’t have any way to put it out. I started another band called All Boro Kings [after DED’s very successful 1994 album, ed.], which got a record deal, we had an album and went on tour. So I was busy in that time, but I don’t think I would have ever done that band if Dog Eat Dog had been continuing according to plan.
At the end of 2003 we got a new manager who got us back on the right track again, got us in the studio, got us writing songs again and it took a long time, but it wasn’t on purpose. It’s just the way things are. And now we’re really happy, because I think the record we make is fantastic. I love it! I worked my ass off on it and I’m very proud of it, so I’m feeling that the best thing we can do now is make another record as soon as possible so that you and everyone else realises it’s not gonna be another seven years till a new record comes out.

Imre: I used to come see you guys a lot ten years ago and I think I saw you three times in one year at one point, but then you kinda just disappeared and weren’t in the media at all.
Dave: Well we never stopped touring. We were in Europe every year, we toured to make money for ourselves, to get by until we could finish this record.
Imre: In ’95 and ’96 Dog Eat Dog was pretty big out here in Europe and you played a couple of huge festivals. I think everyone remembers JC [singer] crowdsurfing on a surfboard at Dynamo in ’95. Do you want to go back to that status?
Dave: Dynamo, yeah that was the best festival we ever did! It’s out on DVD as well, Roadrunner released it. But erhm, yeah, I mean the music out today, and in this industry you could never have another show like that. That show, Dynamo ’95, was very special. You can’t go back there again, so we’re not trying to. All I wanna do is write songs, and make the best record I can. I love creating and making something and having people like it, hopefully, because I do that for everybody and that’s really good. I mean, we’ve already been playing and next month we have a festival with 35.000 people, so we’re still playing big shows. We do very well wherever we play. It’s very possible that we’ll be back on the biggest festival. I think that we’re one of the best live bands and we always have been. Now we’ve got new songs, we already have half of another record written! So it’s not gonna be a long time to finish it. It will maybe take another year. If Walk With Me does good, we’ll be touring for a long time on it and then record a new album.

Imre: I heard that you’ve dropped the saxophones
Dave: Yeah, we haven’t had a permanent sax player in this band since 2001. We didn’t want a bandmember that was a sax player. We’d take someone on tour, but they weren’t in the band permanently. Dog Eat Dog’s not music that’s written for a sax player.
Imre: was a very distinct sound though, when you heard a sax, you knew it was Dog Eat Dog.
Dave: Yeah, but it got too much. I didn’t want to hear sax the whole time. That’s not why I started this band.
Imre: why did you start this band?
Dave: Kind of out of anger and revenge for the band I was in before this one. I was in a band touring Europe called Mucky Pup and I didn’t get along well with the singer. So I quit and started my own band and that’s what Dog Eat Dog was. Most of the songs were just to get my frustration out about what was going on, but basically it was to have fun. When I was in Mucky Pup I was always told what to do and I’m not the kind of person who can work that way. I’m not a follower and I wanted to make a band where everyone is the leader. We’re all together and that’s the way it’s going today. It’s all democratic and that’s why we’ve lasted for sixteen years.

At this point I had kind of run out of specific questions and Dave asked me whether or not I had heard the new album yet. Unfortunately I hadn’t, hence my lack of clever questions about it. How could I have, it’s not even out yet?! He said he’d get me a copy later if I’d do a review, which I found no problem at all, of course. Luckily he was more than willing to tell me all about it.

Walk With Me

Imre: How does it work, do you have people choosing what’s gonna be the single, or do you decide that yourself?
Dave: I have to say that this time it was kind of chosen for us. We could have fought it, but a big German television station, RTL, had picked it as the theme song for their summer programs, so it was a logical decision. It’s gonna be huge, it will be one of those songs you’ll hear too many times.
Imre: Is the album released worldwide?
Dave: Right now it comes out on June 23rd all over Europe. It was originally May 26th, but it was pushed back because a lot more countries wanted to distribute it on the same day. In the UK it will be like one month delayed, so July. Nothing in the US right now, but that’s ok. We really want to get our European fanbase back together and tackling the US is a big job. You need a lot of money and a lot of support and we just don’t have that right now. We’d end up driving around in a van and playing little shit gigs, that’s not what we wanna do. We’d rather stay in Europe.

Imre: Is it easier for you to get yourself out there again with the comeback album than when you started out?
Dave: That’s a good question! *thinks* When we were starting out, things just kind of happened really fast. It was really weird. The first thing we brought out wasn’t really successful, and we were like ‘yeah, whatever’ and then we released the record and toured with Biohazard and things went crazy. It went off the hook and it never really stopped until 2000. And then we got a break, which we kinda needed anyway. But now the new record’s coming out there kind of a positive vibe going on. We’re getting a lot of good responses to the record, one magazine said it was the perfect summer album and there’s a lot of good things happening. I don’t call it a comeback album, because we were never really away, but a lot of people are now writing it’s the best record since All Boro Kings, and that’s real people who are saying that, not just the ones we are paying.
I’m very excited. I’m very picky, I’m the biggest critic of our own music and if I allow it to be out for the public it means I am happy with it. I feel that I can listen to this album and when it ends I don’t think this or that could have been better, or I wish I did that. I never feel like anything’s done and I can’t listen to our old records, because I feel like I could have made it better and now this one really feels modern. It really feels like today and I’m happy about it. I don’t think anyone’s gonna say ‘oh, this would have been good in 1994.’ It feels like a 2006 record. It’s a new album for a new generation of fans, that will hopefully give out the same vibe as All Boro Kings gave back in 1994. Our last record was a little overproduced, we spent 10 months in the studio trying to get it perfect. With this one, we wanted to have a live feel to it, a kind of rough edge and we left some mistakes on it deliberately to create that. I’m a perfectionist, so that was difficult for me, but I knew that by leaving mistakes on, it sounds like a real band. We used vintage rock equipment and we made it on a farm. We were completely isolated. There’s no modern sound, it’s all like rock guitar, simple things with not a lot of effects.
We had a lot of different people working with us on the record. There is a duet called Undevided, with Marta from Die Happy, a German rockband, Dr. Rinding, who is like a German dancehall artist sang on it and we’ve got backup singers. We invited all of our friends over to have a barbecue in the studio and at some songs there’s like twenty or thirty people shouting and there’s really a good party vibe. All of our records have had guest musicians. We made the record in Germany, so we’ve invited our Germany friends to work with us.

Imre: What is your favourite song on the album?
Dave: Undevided, with Marta. It’s about being unsure of your relationship, when you know you love each other and you’re together, but you also don’t know if this is the time when you maybe you should break up. John wrote the lyrics, I wrote the music, so I don’t know exactly what it means, but that’s what it means to me. It’s the most mature song we’ve ever written and I like to hear something that sounds forward and not back. I wrote the music so quickly and some of the best songs ever are the ones that only took like five minutes to write. I’m very proud of it.

Being the co-owner of the My Chemical Romance forum, of course I had to throw in a last question about this fellow New Jersey band.

Imre: What do you think of My Chemical Romance?
Dave: I don’t know them personally, but I know of them. I have the record, it’s good. I’m not a fan of emo music at all, it’s not my thing, I think it all sounds alike, but My Chemical Romance are one of the best bands playing that style of music.
Imre: They like you too. Gerard, the singer, said in an interview recently that he used to come see you guys play.
Dave: Really?! Well, that's very interesting!

Dave went downstairs to check out his friends of Screaming Mike play their set, keeping his promise to me by slipping a copy of Walk With Me into my bag during the show. Thanks Dave! You were awesome.

Imre