The Dollyrots Chats With TTL, House of Blues, Dallas
By Ryan Javier
DALLAS – On June 6th, 2015 L.A. punk rockers, The Dollyrots, took Big D by storm on the second stop of the first leg of their US tour. They played an amazing set featuring tunes spanning their entire discography, along with new material as well. The band’s current endeavor is their first ever live album and a tour DVD. They are crowd sourcing this new project through PledgeMusic which means, fans have direct input in the album’s development. Since it’s a live album, that the Dollyrots are going to play the songs fans want to hear.
The Dollyrots formed shortly after the turn of century while attending in college in Florida. After 6 months of playing the local circuit, guitarists Luis Cabezas and Kelly Ogden decided to pursue music fulltime and moved to L.A. Original members Josh Harrold (vocals/bass) and Mike Benbow (drums) chose to stay in the sunshine state. Kelly took on the dual role of lead vocalist and bassist while Luis remained the lead guitarist. Luis and Key are the driving force behind The Dollyrots and the only permanent members. The duo has had a series of drummers over the years for the band’s studio recordings, video and live shows.
Dollyrots released their first album, a self-produced EP entitled Feed Me, Pet Me in 2003, shortly after moving to L.A. Twelve years and five albums later, Dollyrots have firmly established themselves as one the best pop-punk bands and live acts in the country. mThe commercial success of the Dollyrots has reached far beyond the traditional boundaries of the music industry. Their songs have been featured in countless television shows, advertisements and even in feature films.
After a stellar performance in Dallas, the band was gracious enough to answer a few questions from TTL’s Ryan Javier.
TTL: The Dallas set was incredible; thanks for allowing me the opportunity to shoot and listen. What was the reasoning behind your song choices?
DR: We toiled over the set list for tour for weeks. Because we’re doing a tour DVD, we [felt that] we kind of needed a balance of songs from all six records. It was very calculated.
TTL: Far out. Will your set list change from city to city on this tour?
DR: We’ll be playing pretty much the same set list.
TTL: Who was your drummer in Dallas? She rocked!
DR: Nikki Styxx. We had crossed paths in L.A. a few times and had seen her playing in other bands, but when we were looking for a drummer for this [tour], she sent us a Facebook message. She was like “Hey I’m available, you wanna see how it feels when we play together. Luis and I talked and we called her and were like “Yo, you wanna just hop on the Texas tour?” And we got together the day before our first show [of this tour] and hit a rehearsal studio and played for the first time.
TTL: And y’all just gelled right away?
DR: Yup. Totally. She’s great.
TTL: Was this your first time at the House of Blues in Dallas?
DR: We played exactly one year ago at HOB for the Bowling for Soup [20th] birthday show.
TTL: Your new live album and tour DVD is a crowdsourced effort through PledgeMusic. Was this the first time you’ve gone this route?
DR: Our self-titled album was crowdfunded through Kickstarter and then we switched to PledgeMusic. Barefoot and Pregnant was our first time with PledgeMusic.
TTL: Why did y’all switch from Kickstarter to PledgeMusic?
DR: A couple of reasons. The main reason is with Kickstarter, it will only go for a certain amount of time. Pledge is a lot more flexible, it’s more music based; it’s actually all for music, so they incorporate a lot of the social networking and it’s catered towards music which made a lot more sense for us. Their backend is a lot better organized for fulfillment so when it comes times to ship out everything that people pre-ordered it’s a lot easier to do through PledgeMusic. Kickstarter, at least when we did it, wasn’t like that.
TTL: So the PledgeMusic deal that you have going on right now is to pre-order the new album and tour DVD.. Was the DVD filmed last tour or this tour.
DR: That’s this tour.
TTL: Ok, so you’re currently filming the DVD now.
DR: Exactly. That’s the other really cool thing about Pledge[Music], is that we can get our fans on bard right at the start of a project. It was like “All right fans, we are about to hit the road and we’re going to be filing it and then putting it out”. So that way they actually get a lot more behind the scenes content and we can run things by them. We can say “Hey, do you think we should do this song or that song?”, ”If we were to switch one song out of the set list for a live DVD, which one would you guys pick?” It’s (PledgeMusic) just a lot for interactive and it engages our fans and I think that that has really helped our band to grow over the last few projects. It’s no longer just this thing where we disappear for a while, record a record, hand it over to our fans and hit the road. But only hit certain cities and then do it all over again. This way, we have real relationships with our fans even if we never meet them in person. They get to know us a lot better doing [an album through PledgeMusic]. It’s more fulfilling for us too; it’s a lot cooler making a records with our fans instead of with a record label. We make this music for our fans, not for us and not for record company. It’s way cooler if [our fans] are actually giving us input along the way.
TTL: You’re current tour, with Bowling for Soup, runs through June, and then starts back up again in September. Why is there a two month break?
DR: With both bands, we have families, we have lives that we have to part of outside of touring. This way, we did Texas which was four dates and then we’re doing the East Coast, so we’ll actually fly to Boston, do ten shows, then fly home. And then in September we meet up with Bowling for Soup again in Denver. This way it’s a lot easier to maintain a non-band life by doing it in spurts. We tour with our toddler.
TTL: Is this the first tour since River (your son) was born?
DR: Any shows that we have played [since he was born], he has been there. We haven’t spent an evening apart yet. For that reason, touring is a bit more complicated. We have to do a lot of extra planning to make sure that he is in the right places and all that sort of stuff. We kind of think of it like this is real-life travel experience for him and as long as we keep it within a couple of weeks, it’s pretty manageable for him.
TTL: Let’s go back the early days.. When Josh and Mike left the band, you guys moved to L.A. and Kelly took over bass and vocals. You guys have had a series of drummers, but you never got that second guitar back.
DR: Cause Kelly was the second guitar.
TTL: How do you feel that your sound has been shaped by starting out as quartet, but winding up as a trio? Do you feel that your sound would have been different today, if The Dollyrots had stayed a quartet?
DR: We played as a four piece for maybe six months. I (Kelly) was the rhythm guitar player and I didn’t know how to play. I was kind of just playing bar chord rhythm stuff and Luis would play the solos. A lot of the time, we were pretty much playing the same thing, because I had no idea what I was doing. Once I switched over to bass it made a lot more sense. We’re a band that when we’re in the studio and we’re recording, we don’t hold back and think “How are we going to reproduce this live?” We feel like our recordings and our live shows are different things. If we want to have three guitar parts going on in recording, we just do it; we don’t worry about having to translate that directly to a live show. Which is one of the main reasons we wanted to do this live DVD because our albums are really well produced, but live, we’re more of three piece punk band and so we want our fans who don’t get to see us in person, to get that energy as well as [from] our studio recordings.
TTL: You consider yourselves a trio or duo?
DR: We’re a trio, because there will always someone on drums. At one point Jaret from Bowling for Soup did say “you guys should have a drum machine that you play with live”, but we just couldn’t wrap our heads around that idea because we’re a rock band and then it would start seeming like some sort of electronic band, even if it was real drum sounds..so yeah, we will always have a real drummer.
TTL: What’s your favorite song to play live?
DR: Come And Get It, right now. That was the first song we recorded for the new album; first song we wrote. It was kind of one those songs that came out nowhere. Luis was just playing the guitar part and he recorded it, and I was like “wait a minute, I know the words!” I wrote them down and recorded it and that was it. We’ve never played that song live, and in Dallas it was the third time we’ve ever played that song and it’s such a good one. I don’t know where it came from, but I really like it!
TTL: Tell me about the episode of CSI: NY that you guys were in, back in 2006
DR: That was one of those things like: we live in L.A. and cool things are going to happen. Someone we worked with saw a casting call for a girl bass player. They were like “I know you don’t do acting but I can get in to an audition.” I was like, I’m never gonna get picked, but I drive to the CBS lot in my van, I downed two beers in the back of the van, I grabbed my bass and walked in. The casting [people] were like “play us a song”, so I played our song Out of L.A. cause it’s a bass [driven song] and I played it acoustic style. And they were like “this is great; its really cool. Would you feel comfortable doing a cover tune?” And I was like I guess I could, but my bands really good, here’s our CD and we could do it all together. And they just kind of laughed, and I was like, yeah I think I just ruined it. Then about thirty minutes later they called me [and said we got it]. And we got to play two of our songs, which was just crazy. It was really cool.
TTL: Yeah, it was Goodnight Tonight and Kick Me to the Curb.
DR: Yeah! That’s just one of the things, that could’ve never have happened if we hadn’t had taken the leap to L.A. Right around the same time, we did a Hewlett-Packard ad and those two things together just made us think “ok, we gotta like see this through”. We were working day jobs and it was hard times, but things started coming together and so were like “we believe in this; let’s keep going.” And at every point [in our career] we reassess. “Is this happening? Does this still make sense?” And you know, we’ve just forged forward every time.
TTL: You’ve had quite a few songs featured on television shows, commercials, in movies.. Did the CSI: NY appearance pave the way for all your other song placements in advertising?
DR: Between that and the HP ad, we got a publishing deal. We were on with an awesome company, one of the bigger independent ones called Windswept and they really believed in us. They pitched our songs like all day, every day and that’s how we’ve landed a lot of the [ad gigs]. They really loved us and believed in us and that was biggest component really.
TTL: By 2012 Windswept had been sold off and had gone “country”. What led to your song: Because I’m Awesome being featured in a trailer for the Disney film: Brave?
DR: We had no idea and all of a sudden it was like “we saw your song in a Disney commercial.” Sometimes we don’t even know and then fans will tweet at us and we’ll be like “Whoa, hold on, let’s go find out what happened”. That [placement] was really cool!
TTL: Your cover of the Offspring’s Come Out and Play was fantastic! What inspired you to cover that particular song?
DR: We feel like as a band that has an audience, it’s kind of our duty to introduce people to music that we feel is important. You know, Nirvana introduced us to the Vaselines, the Pixies and the Buzzcocks. It’s like once you have a cool band that you like, it’s sort of a rabbit hole and you can find out who they like. So we try to educate people who like our music so they know where it comes from. So, part of that is that we do a StageIt show, where we release a hundred tickets a month and we play an acoustic set, usually from our sofa in our living room and we pick themes, like we’ve done The Ramones and the Beatles, and that month we were doing California Punk Rock, and we were like “we gotta do an Offspring song” and that was the one we picked. And when we finished recording, we gave it away to our fans.
TTL: So you guys do that once a month? How would someone get involved in that?
DR: We’ll post it on Facebook, Twitter– all that good stuff. But really the best way to keep up with us is to join our email list; there’s a sign-up at dollyrots.com. We make our emails funny, and we don’t send them every often.
TTL: Are there any charities or causes that the band is involved with or support?
DR: We are giving a portion of what we make on this upcoming PledgeMusic campaign to Midnight Mission on Skid Row. It’s an awesome, awesome group and they house and feed a lot of the homeless population in Los Angeles. We have a relationship with [Midnight Mission]; once a year we’ll play their rec room during lunchtime. We’ll just play covers and Dollyrots songs, and you know, people who don’t have homes will get to come in a watch a concert and hear music and not really think about [life]…it’s just a moment for them to relax and feel like a normal person. We like to help out in any way that we can; sometimes we get to play music and this time we can actually give [Midnight Mission] some money.
TTL: Right on. Ok, last question.. Tell me about the band’s name.
DR: When we first started out, I (Kelly) wasn’t much of guitar player and our drummer; he said he played drums, but when we bought him a drum kit, he was like “well I played a drum in drumline”. He had never played on a full drum kit before.
TTL: So none of you guys knew how to play your instruments at first?
DR: Yeah, Luis was the only one. He was great. He taught all of us how to play. We pretty much just learned by learning Ramones songs and Donnas songs. The sound was very raw and fast and loud and rough around the edges, and I was singing most of the time, and my voice was even higher and cuter and super bubblegummy and so we wanted a name that would describe the band to people. You kind of get an idea of what we are by the name: Dollyrots. And also we needed something that you could “google” and it would only mean us. So, if you’ve got a new band, make sure you’ve got a unique google-able name. – The Dollyrots.
Visit The Dollyrots online to pre-order the new live album+DVD, get info on the current tour and have a listen to their current album, Barefoot and Pregnant. Score an autographed set of their 5-album studio discography here.
Article and photos by Ryan Javier
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