New Dogs, old tricks
Hot young band plays second Winnipeg show in less than three weeks
Jen Zoratti

It’s 10:30 on a Friday night in February, and The Golden Dogs are lounging around upstairs at the Pyramid while The Paperbacks warm up the room downstairs.

The scene looks hilariously bad. Singer/keyboardist Jessica Grassia is wrapped in a fur coat, chugging cough syrup from the bottle. Singer/guitarist Dave Azzolini, who’s married to Jessica, is wearing mismatched shoes and sharing his wife’s medicine. Everyone else — bassist Stew Heyduk, drummer Taylor Knox and guitarist Neil Quin — is smoking.

We haven’t accidentally stumbled on The Golden Dogs dark secret or anything. Dave and Jessica, who met and fell in love in their hometown of Thunder Bay, really are suffering from an ass-kicking cold. Just another of the joys of touring Canada in February.

Still, touring life hasn’t lost its lustre for the Dogs just yet. In fact, the quintet only made its first cross-country trek last November, in support of its Big Eye Little Eye album.

“That tour put muscles on the whole band,” Azzolini says. “We had never had the experience of being on tour, and I always felt that we wouldn’t feel like a real band until we did that. I think it added up to being tighter as a band.”

While the Dogs got their feet wet opening for The Meligrove Band on their last time through Western Canada, the current tour has been a crash course in headlining. So far, the only major problem seems to be finding the perfect road music.

“We’re trying to find Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours at a truck stop,” Azzolini laughs. “We’ve found it for $20, but it really should be $9. It’s a road album for us for some reason. It’s nice to have something familiar when you’re driving through those storms.”

Touring outside Ontario has helped alert people to the incendiary indie band, but The Golden Dogs’ explosive live show hasn’t been the band’s only selling feature.

Big Eye Little Eye is also luring fans with its raucous romp through garage rock heaven, accumulating rave reviews that have helped launch the Dogs into Next Big Thing territory.

“I’m glad people like it,” Azzolini says of the record. “We have always had a lot written up about our live act, but I always wanted to make a great record.”

The road to making a great disc has been a bumpy one for a band that went through nine bassists in one year. But with a solid lineup and a regular tour schedule, this version of the Dogs feel more like a band than ever before. But Azzolini is still cautious.

“It’s a combination of having these specific people and having the time to figure it out,” he says. “The dream is to do another studio album with this lineup, but I’m used to things breaking down, so I’m just happy to be touring now.”