Sounds From The Junkshop #107 - American Dog

 

"I've done it all before and I'd do it again/I keep on spinnin' around, this hell never ends..." - American Dog - Train

Similar to American Heartbreak and Broken Teeth, American Dog were another band formed from the ashes of a Sunset Strip era group who promptly well and truly eclipsed their former incarnation in terms of quality. The precursor band this time was Salty Dog who put out a solitary album Every Dog Has Its Day in 1990 and...oh look, I'm just gonna say it, it really wasn't very good. They were basically one of those dreaded Sunset Strip groups who'd clearly listened to a fair bit of Led Zep and thought "hey, what if we tried doing that?" which, as we've established in Sounds From The Junkshop and Garbage Days Revisited columns past just NEVER works because if you try and copy Led Zep without at least trying to add your own twist on the formula then you basically just end up sounding like a poor man's Led Zep. Just ask Kingdom Come. Or Wolfmother. Or Greta Van Fleet. Or...well, you get the picture right?...

Anyway, Salty Dog would implode in a torrent of apathy when grunge hit and their bass player Michael Hannon would move on to Dangerous Toys who were just to say still clinging to their major label deal at the time. However, as the '90s drew to a close and Dangerous Toys mutated into Broken Teeth, he decided to strike out on his own by forming American Dog.

American Dog's schtick was that they were basically a bunch of Motorhead loving JD guzzling rock 'n' roll redneck bruisers and fair play to 'em, they've managed to mine that particular seam of music for two decades now. Their debut Last Of A Dying Breed kind of lays their influences bare with covers of Alice Cooper (The Ballad Of Dwight Frye - they also used to do Eighteen as part of their live set around this time), Twisted Sister (Under The Blade), Van Halen (Take Your Whiskey Home) and the Cult (Peace Dog) being a good representation of the Dog's sound - the UK version also came with a live album (the excellently titled If You Want Bud...You Got It) featuring them slugging their way through Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gimme Back My Bullets. Admittedly there's a couple of numbers which, shall we say, haven't aged too well in this more socially aware climate (Be A Man and Drank Too Much although the latter just about saves itself through its cornball humour) but the likes of Barely Half Alive, TV Disease and the cornball cowpunk of Dog's Life will at least make you grin and bust out an air guitar solo which is what this sort of music's all about, surely?

2003's Red, White, Black 'n' Blue was even better with the likes of Shitkicker, Train and I Keep Drinkin' (You're Still Ugly) packing a lumbering punch to them which knocked you into the middle of next week. I'd continue to roll with the band for three more albums (2008's Hard, 2010's Mean and 2012's Poison Smile) after which I kind of lost track of 'em to be honest. Those later albums didn't quite have the slugging menace of the first two but there's still enough good moments on each to make them worth a listen (I mean, you can't really dislike an album with a song called Just Like Charlie Sheen on it, can you?)

American Dog are still very much out there and actually recently released a 2CD Greatest Hits album called Unfinished Business. I have to be honest, it's probably about a decade since I last bought one of their albums (there was a period of a year or two where they were actually picking up a fair bit of press over here in the UK but that seemed to sort of dry up as the noughties turned into the teens which is probably where and why I lost track of 'em). But either way, for a few years their music was the soundtrack to a lot of post-pub drunken buffoonery by me and my mates and for that, they're deserving of their own entry here on SFTJ. Make no mistake, very much not a band for the easily offended but if a bit of good unclean fun after a few pints is what ya fancy then there's plenty here to enjoy.