The Saga of the Workdogs

by Holly George-Warren

  The Workdogs : They've been a game show, a church group, a karaoke band, and the rhythm section for hire behind Mo Tucker, Half Japanese, and Don Fleming's Velvet Monkeys. In addition to recording with these and other artists, they've produced a handful of their own inspired singles, tapes, and albums, each of which presents a different approach to their unique brand of skewed blues. Over the past eight years, their live repertoire has ranged from bebop to R&B to metal to world music to hillbilly. Consisting of drummer Scott Jarvis and bassist/vocalist Rob Kennedy, the combo has been the subject of various legends, myths, and rumors emanating from New York's Lower East Side. In fact, the liner notes of their recently released "blues opera," Workdogs in Hell (Sympathy for the record Industry), declared the band dead.

  One thing never changes when it comes to the Workdogs, though: Since their inception, they have remained a wise-cracking two-man band with a revolving door of "sideman" -- guitarists, keyboardists, saxophonists, percussionists and various other instrumentalists -- whom they steadfastly refuse to add to their lineup as permanent members. Such players, among them Jon Spencer (of Boss Hogg, the JS Blues Explosion), Malcolm Riviera and Don Fleming (Gumball), Ivan Julian (Voidoids, Matthew Sweet), Greg Strzempka (Raising Slab), Jerry Teel (Honeymoon Killers), play only once with the Dogs, perhaps to be invited back some day in the future. Perhaps not.

  Maybe they've spent their time in Hell, but the Workdogs were very much alive recently, holed up in their 12th Street hangout in New York's East Village. While gulping down tumblers of gin on a sultry summer night, Jarvis and Kennedy, slightly bedraggled from working construction gigs all day, discussed their past, present, and future -- leaving it up to the listener to separate fact from fiction.

  Fact #1: To set the record straight, the Workdogs had nothing to do with rumors of their death. They blame the fabrication on the greed of their manager Yves Bisquet, author of the aforementioned liner notes and proprietor of the King Dog Biscuit music publishing company. Trying to unravel the mystery behind this character Yves Bisquet is no easy matter:

  Option: Who exactly is Yves Bisquet?

  Kennedy: He's French.

  Jarvis: He's an asshole.

  K: He's just this guy who's willing to do a certain amount of our business work for us much of the dollars as he can get his hands on.

  O: What does he look like?

  K: He looks like Satan.

  J: Have you seen those pictures in the National Enquirer, where Satan's face appears in a cloud above Sodom? That's him.

  K: That's how he appears to us.

  O: Does he ware a beret?

  J: Sometimes.

  O: Don't you help him on your liner notes or anything?

  J: We just get the final product in the mail four month after it's on the record store shelves.

  O: So you don't have quality control over the product?

  J: We have total control, but we don't use it at all.

  O: He's in charge of the artwork too?

  J & K: (in unison) Everything.

  K: He's like a lot of managers. He probably owns stock in a peanut butter factory, he's out supervising it, then he'll stop off and have dinner at Elaine's with some heiress babe. He tells us next to nothing but he can sell this stuff -- that's why we love him so dearly.

  O: Does he ever give you musical direction?

  K: He wouldn't hazard to do that.

  J: He's tried -- he tried to make us do the glam-rock thing....

  K: He's ridden so many cheap fades in the European style like a roller coaster, up and down. He's likely to throw any kind of crap at us.

  O: Do you feel taken advantage of by him?

  K: When he declared us dead -- that was painful.

  O: You're saying he knew you were alive but just said you were dead too....

  K: to sell records.

  J: And the sales have totally justified it.

  K: That's the sick part of it. He was absolutely right! That stuff has been selling like hotcakes. So in that sense, he's our very shrewd business manager and great friend, but we only see him once in a while, but when we do he gives us some kind of reward.

  O: Like a royalty check?

  K: Somethin' like that...

  J: He deals mostly in cash.

  Bisquet's Workdogs in Hell concept was this: He discovered a couple of rhythm tracks, one in A and one in D, that the Dogs had recorded way back in 1984, when they were just pups starting out. He sent a cassette of the two "songs" to 45 of the Workdogs' sidemen, friends, and fellow musicians. They were told to record their own bit, while listening to the rhythm track, onto another cassette. Bisquet then took the 35 recorded responses, and using all of them and more, performed some studio wizardry -- creating the 11-track Workdogs in Hell, a frightening glimpse into an inferno inhabited by dead Dogs, pimps, hookers, perverts, murderers, censors, and lead guitar players. Guest contributors include Mo Tucker, Jad Fair, Lydia Lunch, Malcolm Riviera, Jeff Evans (of the Gibson Brothers and 68 Comeback), Clint Ruin (aka Jim Foetus), and Fritz Fox (the Mutants). As harrowing as any recording that's surfaced in years, the album is not for the fainthearted. It takes its listener on a sonic adventure, beginning with a spine-tingling eulogy for the Workdogs, though washes of sound punctuated by an array of vocalization -- imploring, taunting, screaming, testifying, and, occasionally, singing -- ending with a warped version of "Satan Is Real."

  To truly understand the alleged death of the Workdogs and its portrayal on this album, it's helpful to look back at the band's birth. In late 1984/early 1985 (like everything with the Workdogs, dates are hazy), Jarvis and Kennedy, while playing in a couple of different combos, shared a rehearsal space. When their groups imploded, the two found themselves jamming together -- and liking their musical endeavors were somewhat ahead of their time: Jarvis had drummed for North Carolina's earliest -- and then sole -- punk band th' Cigaretz, and Kennedy sang and played in DC's avant-funksters, the Chumps, Kennedy and Jarvis each relocated to New York in 1979, playing in a succession of East Village-based bands, through where their paths crossed at seamy nightspots. The two discovered a mutual love for the second of rural bluesmen such as Son House, Reverend Gary Davis, Sonny Boy Williamson, Charley Patton, Sleepy John Estes, and Robert Johnson. But most important they found they had a similar distaste.

  "It dawned on us that we hated all the guitar players we knew and we didn't want to work with any of them on a regular basis, "Jarvis recalls about the duo's initial jam session. "So we decided to just rotate them and get less grief. After all, as is obvious to anyone who's ever been in a band, you need a good rhythm section to have a good band -- you can conceivably have a great band without a great singer or guitarist."

  From the start, Kennedy handled the vocals, concocting long story-songs peopled with denizens of juke joints and dark alleyways. One of the first of what would become the Workdogs' trademark extended blues jam was "Roberta," a hyper-adrenaline-fueled opus that was one-third Leadbelly, one-third Van Morrison, and one-third Kennedy. "I don't really write songs," Kennedy explains. "They just visit. I have an outline of stuff I think about for songs, and I try to add in whatever goes into the mix at that moment. I try to keep it different every time -- otherwise it would get pretty boring. Songs like 'Roberta,' I couldn't do the same lyrics twice if I tried. But the thing is 'Roberta' is just a song about falling in love with the wrong girl. So when I go up to do it, that's what's on my mind, so any given evening that can be a real interesting story, because people fall in love with the wrong person every day of the week." The song was released on an early Workdogs cassette and resurfaced in 1988 on an album (Okura) with four other Dogs blues classics, which, along with some unreleased tracks, has just been reissued by Sympathy on CD.

  One of the Workdogs' first sidemen was guitarist/engineer Jerry Williams. A founding member of th' Cigaretz, Williams had relocated to New York, too, engineering early recordings for the Bad Brains and other seminal bands in the city's nascent hard-core scene. As house engineer at ex-Utopia Moody Klingman's Hi-Five Studio, he manned the boards for the tracks that eventually became the basis for Workdogs in Hell. He also engineered the Dogs' first King Dog Biscuit single, "Funny $," featuring Fuzztone Rudi Protrudi on harmonica, and "Last Friend's Gone," sizzling with erstwhile Hi Sheriff of Blue Mark Dagley on guitar.

  Williams himself manned the ax for a particularly unruly Dogs gig. Performance artist/writer Mike Osterhout was there: "I put together a night at [legendary East Village club] 8 B.C. that included myself, [film-maker] Richard Kern and [artist/writer/musician] David Wojnarowscz (sp). Richard recommended the Workdogs [for the bill], describing their stuff as 'blues that punk-rockers listen to.' That night, Rob had on an afro wig and some hairy women's coat that was three sizes too small, Scott was completely naked, and Jerry Williams was wrapped up like a mummy. I loved it. Rob was totally fluid, the guy can come up with some shit from out of nowhere. When he's winging it is where the beauty of his vocal delivery can really shine."

  The following year, Osterhout put together his first-ever band, Purple Geezus, and enlisted the Workdogs as his rhythm section. Williams joined up soon after. Not long after the group's debut, Osterhout, along with writer/scenester Carlo McCormick, conceived their own religious sect, which they named the Church of the Little Green Man. With Osterhout at the pulpit, the Dogs became his musical henchmen and Williams the church organist. "Choir rehearsal is something the public will never know about," says Williams. "It was an event that only the inner circle of the church and the Workdogs will ever know about -- the creation of the rhythm and the state of mind that had to be archived by the participants before the rites could take place."

  The Weekly Sunday night services quickly drew a large congregation, who burned a buck for admission. Fervent worshipers also turned out for Purple Geezus and Workdogs shows on other nights of the week. Their reputations grew, and though Purple Geezus eventually fizzled, Osterhout remained a Workdogs admirer. "I really like their whole concept of the rhythm section being the front people, having the traditional 'front people' being expendable, that the Workdogs are a rhythm section for hire, approaching it as a conceptual art piece, rather than a typical band with 'Let's get a record out, go on tour and get famous, those kind of things, they don't have any of that. They continue to play and stay at the same conceptual level -- it's amazing to me that those guys still do it with such consistency."

  In the meantime, the Workdogs were continuously on the prowl for prospective sidemen. "We'd go see a band, and if one guy was really smoking, we'd approach him to play with us," Jarvis explains. A brief rehearsal would follow, usually the night before the gig. "We like that taste of fear," says Jarvis. "We give them just about 20 percent less rehearsal than they think they need. We have a theory about rehearsals: that some people require as much as two -- but we're never going to give them more than that. With other people we're not going to rehearse at all. It depends on how freaked out they're going to be onstage or how many stage hours a person has logged. Ivan Julian, for example, was a pretty professional showman. As soon as he had instructions where to go, he could walk right into it. We were supposed to rehearse but we got our signals crossed and met for the first time at the gig."

  The Dogs consistently go for the musical tension that only a debut show can bring, according to Kennedy. "All the years of watching other bands play, some of the best nights I've seen were the bands' very first show. That electricity was so great." Jarvis adds: "Or when they're totally facing the opposition, like the PA exploding or a crowd that couldn't give a shit -- that's always brought forth the best performance. So we actually sat around and said, 'How can we duplicate this madness and have a band that could have that kind of performance every night.'" Says Kennedy, "It's a slowly acquired taste for most people, but we've had a really fun ride with it."

  The Workdogs often choose a sidemen who can bring a certain sound to fit a particular theme or concept, or to feel right for a specific venue -- thus, they converse in a spectrum of musical languages. "The third person always changes the music," says Jarvis.

  Going for the unpredictable can prevent boredom from setting in, but it can also produce unexpected results. Like the time the Workdogs opened for the Butthole Surfers in the sold-out, over packed Cat Club. "This guy was an extremely good player, and our rehearsal with him was unbelievably good, but when he got on stage, he froze like hell, he only played about ten notes the entire set," Kennedy recalls. "Another thing about that show that was really classic," adds Jarvis, "was that we decided that me and the sideman would start the set and Rob K. would work his way from the back of the club to the stage. But it was a total oversold audience, the Butthole were two hours late, and we went on an hour after the Buttholes were supposed to be onstage. People were very angry and were crammed up front. Kennedy was trying to fight his way to the stage, but people weren't budging at all. Finally, by somewhere in the middle of the third song, he managed to punch his way to the stage, where he crawled over the edge, a bloody heap. In the meantime, it was me doing a drum solo, looking at the guitar player, saying. 'Hey, get it together.'"

  The Dogs say that show taught them some valuable lessons. "We bombed big time that night," laughs Kennedy, "but we learned that anything is possible and that we had to be able to do it as a two-piece band as well as three-piece. After that, we did a number of shows with just me and Scotty -- and if the fuckers ever freeze again, we'll go forward without them."

  No strangers to fiascos themselves, the Gibson Brothers, from Columbus, Ohio's garageland, discovered in 1986 that the two combos had an affinity for one another. "The Workdogs were at our first ever show in New York," recalls guitarist Don Howland, currently of Basshole. "It was at CBGB, and we got really drunk. I think I personally had about two 48-oncers within a half hour of when we went on. I know I blacked out onstage and I think [guitarist] Jeff [Evens] blacked out too. We just kept turning our amps up to the point that it was total overtone. Everyone hated it except the guys in White Zombie and Workdogs. A couple of weeks later we got a note from Rob K. that they enjoyed it. We knew he had to have the right attitude because we'd never played that bad before and he thought it was real cool."

  The bands met soon after, and a few years later hooked up to record in Columbus. After one rehearsal, the Gibsons and the Dogs masterpiece, Punk Rock Truck Drivin' Song of a Gun (Homestead), consisting of crazed C&W-meets rockablues material from the two bands' repertoires. "Rob and Scott are the kind of guys that make the people around them play better," says Howland. "There's no greater testimony to that fact than that the album we did together sounds halfway professional -- everything up til then that the Gibsons did sounded thoroughly rank and inept. They're very good at what they do and they have a real work ethic, they're real hard-working guys. To do a whole album in a day or two, you have to be real focused. For as much pot as they smoke, they're really focused and have a lot of energy." A skewed version of Red Sovine's "Giddy Up Go" and a twisted tribute to R. Kern ("Richard Curn)" were among the choice Workdogs contributions.

  By the late '80s, the Workdogs, both separately and together, had also spent time touring and recording with Mo Tucker, Half Japanese, and the Velvet Monkeys. Kennedy had known Half Jap visionary Jad Fair since his DC days. Fair enlisted the dogs to play on Music to Strip By and The Band Would Be King, two of his band's most compelling efforts. "When we recorded, I would have words but we wouldn't have gone over any of the material," Fair explains. "I don't really know any chords at all and Rob would come up with whatever. All the work in the studio was done so fast. Music to Strip By was done in a day and half. The Workdogs are quite unique. I've played with a lot of people but none that sound like the Workdogs. Scott's drum style is such a relaxed, Jazzy style -- he's an excellent, excellent drummer. And Rob has a real nice feel when he plays; I'm especially fond of his acoustic bass work."

  Fair introduced the Dogs to Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker, who'd recently started fronting her own band. The rhythm duo gigged a few times with Tucker when she comes to New York from her home in Southern Georgia, and she asked Jarvis to play drums on her 1989 solo effort Life In Exile After Abdication (50 Kimillion Watts), recorded at Kramer's studio in New York. "I liked Scott and Rob personally as well as their playing very much," says Tucker. She particularly appreciated Jarvis's studio contributions. "He's very basic -- or he can be basic when he wants to -- and that's the kind of drumming I like. I really didn't give him much direction, and I was very very pleased with Scott. He made the best drum part for the song "Talk So Mean." I love it!"

  The Dogs' next venture as hired hands was a U.S. tour with the Velvet Monkeys and Half Japanese. Gumball guitarist/keyboardist Malcolm Riviera, who then played with the Monkeys, recalls, "The Workdogs insisted on driving down through the Mississippi Delta, because they wanted to go and visit the old Delta blues towns. That was really important to them. The rest of us just wanted to get on down to Texas, but they were, like, 'No, we're on sacred ground, we've gotta drive through there.' But at the same time, they're not like some kind of blues cover band. Instead, they're acknowledging the roots while they're creating something new."

  Riviera became a Dog sideman, playing keyboards at gigs in DC (at which he donned an Elton John mask constructed by the band) and New York and recording on 1990 single, "Haunted House of Love" (Vital Music). "They're really whimsical with their approach to the music," Riviera reports. "And they have some indefinable musical chemistry that nobody can really put a finger on. Scott's the technically brilliant one, and Rob is the poet -- they complement each other. In the studio, I didn't know what was going on because we'd do multiple takes of the song and the lyrics would be different every time. I'd never been in a band where that happened. With Gumball and other bands the lyrics are all written out and sitting there on the music stand in the studio, so they're exactly perfect. But with the Workdogs there's a lot of improvisation -- I don't think that goes on very much in music."

  By the 1990s the Workdogs were cooking up new schemes to entertain themselves -- and their audiences. At the New York watering hole Max Fish, They hosted their "House of Games" every Sunday night for six month, creating warped versions of traditional TV game shows. such as Porno Concentration, Win, Lose or Die, and Band Feud, in which the combo cracksex maced the bar when they started losing. Other side projects included A Band Called Horse ("a ZZ Top/Bad Company cover band, one of our stupid money-making ploys that didn't make enough money to keep going," says Kennedy), which included Karen Black guitarist Samoa; Pooka, Bergland (of San Francisco's Faktrix and the Saara Dogs); and the infamous Karaoke band.

  "When someone asked us to put together a karaoke thing for their club, it seemed a perfect fit," says Kennedy. "Of course we were going to impose Workdogs-like rules on it. We only do songs that can be dealt with by pretty simpleminded sidemen, or else cut the songs down to two or three chords. And we have the only black Italian punk-rocker from Hoboken, Americo Corrado, on keyboards." Menus are handed out to prospective vocalists, with such numbers as "Love Is Strange" and "Stand By Me," and singers are provided with lyric sheets. Jerry Williams, who's been the karaoke guitarist on occasion, claims that this latest venture represents "The Workdogs selling out totally, doing everything Rob and Scott said they'd never do." He admits, though, that "We've stumbled upon something that transmits more fun to the audience than anything we've done. The idea is that we want to get the audience involved and show them that they can have a good time without any of the ills in today's society, like drugs and sex."

  Overall, the Workdogs' affect on their audiences has been mixed. "The Workdogs don't fit into any kind of category," Riviera points out, "so some people don't know how to relate to them. They don't know if they're blues or alternative or rock, so sometime people are wondering what's going on. There's no category at Tower Records to put the Workdogs into." Jarvis replies, "Year, that has been a problem -- but who wants to be in a band that can be categorized? It's worth all the trouble because we've build up a backlog of recordings and stuff that show all these different sides of the band. Once that gets presented to people, they see the larger thing. But it is sort of a problem when people come to see the Workdogs for the first time and we're doing our Seattle set or our world-beat set -- they might get the wrong idea. You have to see us a few times under different circumstances."

  The quest for sidemen, which by 1993 numbers over 100, continues for the Workdogs. Recent jam sessions with guitarists Jon Spencer and Jerry Teel resulted in the single "Electric Mutt" (In the Red), whose cover art looks suspiciously like Muddy Water's '70s war-war classic, "Electric Mudd." "They're real characters," says Spencer, whose Blues Explosion has recorded an as-yet unreleased song entitled "Rob K," upon which Kennedy puts in a vocal appearance. "Playing with them is very easy. They're working off the feel." Teel, who recorded the single during a basement rehearsal, says, "Jamming with Rob and Scott is like a ceremony. They're total musicians -- you just go in, get stoned, and sit back and whatever happens happens. You listen to Rob's stories and they tell you exactly what to play."

  Of course, the ultimate jam session is the symbolic one that resulted in Workdogs in Hell. As one missive from the Dogs to participants pointed out, "Year, make music with the Workdogs -- but with no social obligations! No intrusive 'meetings' required." According to Jarvis, the Dogs' hardworking jack-of-all-trades know-how really paid off: "Our carpentry stuff has helped us in the studio," he points out. "Our big epics Workdogs in Hell and Roberta were build piece by piece, like you would build a house. Put this in there, then stand back and look at it, then build the next piece. I guess you could say we're musical builders."

  It's a breezy, crisp September day in the Catskills and the Reverend Mike Osterhout is getting married. Not surprisingly, he's engaged the Workdogs to provide the entertainment. Filling in on guitar are Bond Bergland and Samoa, and Americo on keyboards. As drunken merriment gets underway, the Dogs kick off with such crowd-pleasers as a loping "King Dog Biscuit Time" and a skewed "Giddy Up Go," with Kennedy ad-libbing lyrics about the newlyweds. It doesn't take long before karaoke is initiated by the groom's grabbing the mike and howling along with "Leaving on a Jet Plane." He's followed by trio of banshees, consisting of Karen Black singer Kembra Pfahler, Comic Oven-chanteuse-cum-Hawaiian Green Party politician Keiko Bonk, and a dedicated OPTION reporter, who deliver raucous versions of "Wild Thing" and "Mustang Sally." The Dogs carry on which a few more covers before returning to their tangled-up, twisted, upside down blues. A five-years-old little blond boy joins in on harmonica, accenting all the right spots in "Talk Italian to Me." It looks like the Workdogs have just found themselves a new sideman, one who will perhaps carry their unique vision -- and the message of the blues -- on to the next generation.