THE PONTIAC BROTHERS SUPPERTIME BLUES

THE PONTIAC BROTHERS SUPPERTIME BLUES

by

Ara Corbett

You gotta love ’em.

During their recent noontime set at UCLA’s West Los Angeles campus, the Pontiac Brothers appealed not only to the laid-back lunch crowd but to a group of grade schoolers who happened by during a field trip. Matt Simon, the Pontiacs’ lead singer, called to the kids, offering them some cookies. Three of ’em braved it and ran up to the stage, grabbed a handful, and ran off to the amusement of both the band and the sunbathing crowd.

Simon was in quite a generous mood, food-wise at least, on this humid Thursday afternoon, giving another youngster a coke (only to have it knocked out of his hands by his pals) and trying to feed a sandwich to a passing dog.

Oh, and they played some terrific rock ’n’ roll, too, including the Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night” and AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.’’ Nothing unusual for the Pontiacs, who have gained notoriety for their erratic choices of cover tunes.

“Well, kids. . .they clap for anything,” says guitarist Ward Dotson. “Give ’em some cookies, play a little Ap/DC and you’ve got ’em eating out of your hand, literally/’

Dotson, formerly of L.A.’s Gun Club, wears a road-weary gaze and Motel 6 tshirt, mementos of the Pontiacs’ recent five-week.tour of the east coast and the midwest—

The Pontiacs—including drummer Dave Valdez and bassist Kurt Baumann—covered a lot of ground in their hour in Westwood Plaza, banging out “Drop Of The Hat’! from their latest LP; Johnson, the touching “Almost Human” from their ’85 debut, Doll Hut, and a host of other raucous material. “Our band has so many influences,” Dotson mumbles while munching on a roast beef sandwich, “We don’t just do ‘Saturday Night,’ we do other Bay City Rollers covers that we’ll put out.

“We just happen to like everything, we have a fondness for everything from bubblegum to blues to heavy metal,” he continues. “We don’t sit down and go ‘let’s do this, let’s do that,’ we’re just trying to enjoy ourselves and play music that we want.”

That music has come a long way since Doll Hut, a solid but uneven album that shows the band searching for the groove they hit with the follow-up, Fiesta En La Biblioteca, which includes tune after tune of rave-up, bar band rock ’n’ roll, most notably Dotson’s (in)famous “Be Married Song.” After an EP early last year, the Pontiacs returned this year with Johnson, a tremendous record that ultimately distinguishes their sound and proves their extensive depth, creativity and humor. All of which has made ’em big critical faves. Still, college radio hasn’t exactly drooled over the Pontiacs’ sound, which naturally puzzles Dotson.

“I don’t know why we’re not a big college band. I guess ’cause we’re much more of a regular rock ’n’ roll band,” he shrugs. “We’re regular guys even though we were born and bred on punk rock. That’s how we all strated playing music about 1976, 1977. By screwing around and breaking something, lighting some shit on fire you draw attention to yourself and we don’t really do that too much and I think that’s why a lot of college kids aren’t going, ‘Wow! Those guys are wild!’ ”

A lot of them are making the Pontiacs out to be a “new Replacements.” Ward only gets a little defensive about it.

“I saw the Replacements right when we were starting out and said, ‘Hey, these guys are already doing this!’ ” Dotson says. “It bugged me a little bit; people compare us to them and I go, ‘Hey, I didn’t even know who they were when we started this thing.’ We were doing the exact same thing. We’ve played with ’em, we like them, they like us. There’s mutual collaboration.

“They (Replacements) still have a lot of punk rock tendencies like going on the radio and saying ‘we’re gay’ and screwing around. It seems like they’re always telling me, ‘Hey, you know what we did the other day. . .we wrecked our van!’ and I’m like, ‘Why are you telling me that?!’

“Believe me, that stuff gets written about a lot more than people finishing a perfect set and going to bed.”

After a passel of indie releases, the Pontiacs seem due to join the majorbound flood. Is such genuine unpretentiousness ready for the major leagues? Soul Asylum’s recent signing with A&M and Camper Van Beethoven’s move to Virgin suggest that the “underground” has something that the big companies are looking for.

“I don’t think any of these bands are making any money and that’s one thing that might backfire,” Dotson frowns. “It seems about every three or four years some new trend is picked up by the majors and then dropped because so few of the little bands like that turn a profit. It’s hard not to think of too many that don’t end up completely selling out.”

Dotson isn’t about to turn his back on the opportunity, however.

“I’d love to be on a major label,” Dotson admits. “Actually, I’d like Frontier to get picked up and distributed by a big label ’cause then we could still talk to people who are easy to deal with and genuinely like the band as opposed to someone who just says, ‘Can we make money from these guys?’

“It seems like there’s about a hundred albums put Out every day on independent labels so you kinda get lost in the mishmash and you really have to just hang in there,” Dotson explains. “Like the Replacements or Husker doodle Du, bands that just hung in there for four or five albums and then finally broke it... I don’t really think about it that much, I’m just happy that we go to do the songs we want to do and produce ’em the way we want to do ’em. We just want to be in control of our own thing.”

Dotson’s days with the Gun Club (a band he now detests) and a short-lived project afterwards sapped him of not only his strength but his interest in doing said “thing.”

“I got really sick with hepatitis; it completely laid me out and I decided I just didn’t like this rock ’n’ roll business,” he recalls. “People are really scummy arid it’s just not what I thought at first...

I wanted to be John Lennon when I started out and I ended up as sick as can be, finding out everybody in the business is trying to rip you off.”

After some time off, Dotson put together a band called the Gallstones. “We just played a few shows as this goof-off band and we realized it was a lot more fun because nobody cared if we were big or famous,” hife smiles. “We thbught ‘Let’s just keep this going, this is fun.’ We try to keep that attitude and it’s kinda toligh to do that when you’re talking to record labels and booking aoents.”

The past three years have marked significant growth in the Pontiacs’ songwriting. botson names Paul McCartney and Burt BacharaGh as two of the band’s faves. As a matter of fact, the cassette version of Johnson contains a cover of McCartney’s obscure “Magneto And Titenium Man.”

“Everybody’s a Wings fan,” Dotson says. “In fact, Dave used to have this really cool Wings t-shirt he’d wear all the time that got stolen in New York. We had this bag with a camera and a bunch of expensive stuff stolen and he goes, ‘Fuck! My Wings t-shirt!’ ”

With the impressive progress the Pontiacs have made in just three years, it’s hard not to think that these giiys could actually be the Next Big Thing. But even if they aren’t, there’ll be plenty of beerguzzlin folk ready to rock out at their next show, look to where they’re pointing and laughing to see just who the hell looks so funny.

(Portions of this article have appeared previously in BAM.) ®