America loves its road-weary folk heroes.
Think Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen. These icons have written so many beautiful, moving songs about the road’s hardships that they have had the peculiar effect of romanticizing it.
Add Dave Doughman to that list. He runs separate but parallel to these artists, a touring juggernaut who will play almost anywhere with equally maniacal fervor.
Doughman’s band, Swearing at Motorists, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year and the release of its first new album in four years, “Last Night Becomes This Morning,” on Secretly Canadian Records. The band plays the Hi-Dive on Monday.
While Doughman’s songs may not be as overtly political as those other troubadours, his devotion to music-as-catharsis is just as intense.
“The music enables me to have this lifestyle which causes problems in my life, which then makes new songs, which enable me to have this lifestyle,” Doughman, 35, said by phone from a tour stop in Phoenix last week. “At some point it becomes a self-perpetuating myth.”
Swearing at Motorists’ songs fall somewhere between the candlelit ballads of Neil Young and the stadium-sized indie rock of Built to Spill. The guitar-driven sketches of failed relationships in liminal spaces (hotel rooms, airports, train stops) are often laden with reverb and multitracked vocals, lushly produced but strangely naked.
Swearing at Motorists always has taken a lean approach to performing, invariably as a duo, with Doughman on guitar and vocals, and, currently, Joseph Siwinski on drums. When the idea for the band struck Doughman in Dayton, Ohio, more than a decade ago, he more or less prefigured the two-piece rock craze that now includes bands like The White Stripes and The Black Keys.
Granted, there were others doing it then (The Spinanes, The Inbreds), but Doughman’s loyalty to the stripped-down aesthetic did not spring from any trend.
“It makes it so much easier to travel, and it makes it almost affordable,” said Doughman of the band’s austere setup.
In concert, Swearing at Motorists is propelled by Doughman’s manic stage presence, with his wild eyes, wiry brown hair and unpredictable high jumps, which have earned the band the tag “The two-man Who.” Whether he’s playing the L.A.’s Avalon or the Lion’s Lair on East Colfax Avenue, he works the crowd like an MC, improvising jokes between songs.
Dave’s weird charm is part of the reason Secretly Canadian Records signed him, said label co-founder Chris Swanson. “The first time I saw him play it was like watching Richard Pryor do a rock show,” Swanson said.
Swanson, whose label hews close to the folk ethic of eliminating the distance between performer and audience, is quick to place Doughman in the pantheon of deified road warriors.
“I kind of see him like Carl Perkins in the first few years of his career, going from one juke joint to the next,” he said. “He could have one person in the crowd, and he would rock like it was a stadium, giving it his all, doing kicks. But if you could quadruple that crowd he would give tenfold back.”
Balancing his ego with a humble realization that he’s “2 million miles under the radar,” as Doughman puts it, only makes Swearing at Motorists want to tour more. Swanson had to discourage the band from hitting the road last year for fear it would saturate its market, which includes most of Europe.
“If you’d told me 10 years ago that I’d be sitting in the kitchen of my flat in East Berlin sequencing the new record, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Doughman said.
Now based in Germany’s capital, Swearing at Motorists has come a long way from its roots in Dayton, where Doughman found himself in the middle of a mid-’90s rock renaissance.
He worked at Dayton’s nexus of cool, Trader Vic Records. His housemates (John Schmersal, now of Enon, and the late Tim Taylor, of groundbreaking electro-spazz group Brainiac) encouraged his four-track recordings, which led Doughman to extensive work with indie icons Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices and The Breeders’ Kim Deal.
Don Thrasher, a writer and former member of Guided by Voices, was the founding drummer for Swearing at Motorists. He remembers meeting Doughman – then a local recording engineer – and immediately liking his approach to music.
“The first time we got together we just jammed and recorded the song ‘New Teen Anthem,’ which is on the self-titled album,” Thrasher said. “There were people I could have played with that were more proficient, or had more experience, but it was just fun.”
The duo began playing shows at the encouragement of friends and labels, although Thrasher eventually quit to concentrate on his writing career and family. Doughman left Dayton for Philadelphia and snagged drummer Joseph Siwinski, moving to Berlin a few years ago for another change of scenery.
He has occasionally toured with and engineered other major label bands (like Philly’s Burning Brides), an eye-opening experience, even for a guy averaging 150 shows a year. Doughman remembers setting up Burning Brides’ equipment when they toured with Audioslave, looking out at the thousands of fans before the show.
“I just thought, ‘If only I could have five minutes of your time. Two songs, man!”‘ he said. “But I welcome playing to as many people as I can play to.”
Wherever he is, Doughman’s always looking toward the next tour stop. The road is his religion, his family and his muse.
Chris Swanson, who hopes to sell about 20,000 copies of the new Swearing at Motorists record, knows that Doughman is incapable of any other lifestyle, even if the one he has chosen is emotionally brutal.
“Dave and I were talking about the (new record) as the indie rock ‘Running on Empty,”‘ he said. “The only difference is that Jackson Browne was making millions of bucks and had a tour bus.”
Staff writer John Wenzel can be reached at 303-820-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com.
