It's out! Dog Legs & Feet's remastered live album, “Bottom (A Live Collection)” is now available for streaming and download in all the places. 

So please do stream it, download it, and tell your friends and relatives to stream and download it too! Don't stop bugging them until they do it. The spirit of Nick Bottom will smile upon you. 

A Listener's Guide

For those who are encountering this music for the first time, I want to offer a listener's guide of sorts. Couple points.

First, although many of the songs are great on their own, this record predates the “shuffle” era, and so in my view it really goes best if you listen to it beginning to end, at least the first time. There is an emotional arc to the whole thing, and it's supposed to sound like you are in the front row at a live show. 

But you do you. 

Second, the thing I personally love about this album, and the reason I dragged it forward into the streaming era to begin with, is this: despite whatever technical flaws it might have (and it has many), it has Heart. You can hear how much the band loves playing these songs for the crowd, and how much the crowd loves hearing the band play these songs. What we might lack in precision, we make up for in passion and raw authenticity … so if you like those things, I humbly hope you enjoy it.

Okay! I now invite you to listen along to the album, while I provide a quick guided tour through the playlist, answer some basic questions, and set the scene, as it were. 

The Scene, As It Were

It is Sunday, March 29, 1998, in Austin, Texas. 7:00 p.m. A pleasant spring evening. We are at Pato's Good Tacos on E. 38th street, a Tex-Mex restaurant with a big covered back patio and a stage for local music acts to play. Dog Legs & Feet has booked a three-hour gig. All our friends and fans are coming out because tonight is special. 

Why? Because it's Michael Mergen's last show before he leaves the band to Do Other Stuff. We are giving it our all tonight (but then, when do we not). Look, the future is uncertain. This might be our last chance to play these songs in this way, so just in case, we are going out with a bang. 

And because of that … the show is being recorded live for posterity. This being the pre-smartphone era, many of these songs have never been recorded, even as demos; they've only ever been heard by people who saw a live performance.  If we don't capture them tonight, they might never get captured. 

And look, there's Mars Hall checking the mixing board, and Toren Smith setting up the digital minidisc recorder. We can't afford fancier gear that would make a multitrack recording, so we're just going to get one shot to make a stereo recording of the live mix. We hope it turns out okay.

What you're about to hear is a live show, caught in the moment, from a band giving it their all. It promises to be a good night out. So settle in. 

And there's the band coming on the stage now. Let's listen…

Prelude: Tune-Up

Every DLF show really did start this way: We would march out on stage and theatrically pretend to do vocal warm-ups, then stop abruptly (John Botti would tap a conductor's baton and raise it up to silence us) and launch into the first song. There's a bit of artifice to the recording here - in mixing the album, I layered in some other sounds from the show (like the bass and the audience noise) to give it a bit of a Sgt. Pepper's feel - but the vibe is genuine. 

One other bit of artifice, I guess, is that the actual first song wasn't Georgie Porgie - it was always an a capella cover of “The Bruces' Philosopher Song” by Monty Python, but we chose not to include that on the album. We had too much good original stuff to share, and not enough time!

Georgie Porgie

Georgie Porgie was a new song. Michael and I had written it within the previous few weeks. We had each recently had breakups that left us, not bitter or heartbroken, but introspective.  The lyrics reflect a desire to see failed romances as stepping stones to something better. 

I wasn't familiar with Old 97s back when this was written, but now that I am, I think Georgie Porgie sounds like an Old 97s song. Folk rock with a country heart and see-what-I-did-there lyrics, turned up loud and played fast. Jon Watson and I sang the lead together, but his mic was way louder than mine so his is the main voice you hear, even though he's technically singing a harmony much of the time. But whatever.

At the bridge, you also get a hint of the intimacy and improv-troupe feel of a DLF show. We stop dead and ask “have you ever been in an unhealthy situation like this?” and the audience answers back. There'll be plenty more of that kind of thing throughout the show. 

We were super excited about the song. I think this might have been the first or second time we performed it for an audience, which explains why it seems to end unexpectedly (you can hear JonWa say “Whoa!”) … we just hadn't quite practiced it enough, and someone decided it was over before everyone else was ready. It was probably me. 

Eva (Sweet Godmother)

JonWa sings this acousti-funky-folk song, which he also wrote. Bit of a Jack Johnson vibe here, albeit some three years before Jack Johnson's first album came out. A presciently Jack Johnson vibe. Oh, to live in that alternate universe where Jack Johnson is always described as having a “Dog Legs & Feet vibe”! But here we are. 

Eva always got people singing along with the refrain “She's a sweet godmother, don't you know.” I once asked Jon if the character of Eva was supposed to be modeled on someone specific in real life. He said no. As with many of Jon's songs, I don't think I could give you a lyric-by-lyric explanation of what it's talking about, but to me it sounds like a song about a good friend who comes over and tells you about all their drama. And don't we all know someone like that?

Five Prime

An instrumental (well: wordless) tune that presciently calls to mind something like Nickel Creek. I wrote it in two parts. The “do do do” part was something that used to get stuck in my head for days on end; I was always singing it to myself, but I didn't have any lyrics for it. The instrumental part was something I composed separately, but I thought it would go along with the vocal part because they both had these long, descending chord progressions. 

John Botti plays the lead mandolin part, which gives the song its name. The mandolin is playing largely in 5/4 time (while everything else is in 4/4), so that explains the “five” … I'm not sure anymore what was the thinking behind “prime." I think we were referring to a mathematical concept, but my last college math class was even longer ago than the recording of this album, so I'm not sure. 

Fall Dance

Michael sings this one, which he and I co-wrote, and I'm pretty sure he uses up an entire harmonica in the final solo section. Michael used to get red in the face when he sang. Like myself, he was a big fan of the local jug band Asylum Street Spankers, who used to play acoustic shows in big clubs without amplification, and like them (and unlike myself) he could project the bejeezus out of his voice. 

I wrote the guitar lick for this first. Memory can be a treacherous thing, but I feel like I might have written this during my first summer at Shakespeare at Winedale, which would have been 1996. Anyway I had pretty much the whole structure of the song finished but no melody or words. I played it for Michael, and I remember him saying “you've written a fall dance!” Then he came back with all that you hear here. 

Michael and I were roommates at that time, and we were both kind of dabbling in paganism in those days, so I've always thought a lot of the seasonal references are informed by that perspective. 

Also, it should be said that fall is the best time to be in Austin, one hundred percent.

Johnbo calls Michael “the man who can do no wrong” because it's (ostensibly) his final show.  

San Francisco

Jon Watson sings; he wrote the lyrics and John Botti came up with the banjo hook. It's another one that sounds like it's about a specific real-life story but, as far as I know, isn't actually. JonWa was always good at writing songs that gave that impression, and that had catchy hooks and choruses and memorable lyrics (darn him) but he always said that he wrote lyrics primarily based on how the words sounded together.

Case in point: “the ??? weeping every day,” what is that word? On the lyric sheet it was written “lyvers” and he didn't have a definition for it. But it always made me think of “lifers” i.e. people serving life at Alcatraz, or perhaps just spending their whole lives in San Francisco. “Lyvers” is just easier to sing and sounds nicer (and you can't spell it “livers” because that's something else). 

Who is Silvia

Lyrics by William Shakespeare, music by Jon Watson. This is one of two songs on Bottom that we later made studio recordings of and released on our “Shakespeare's Palpable Hits" album. (The other is Irish Dement.)

Without digressing too much here, four of the original Dog Legs (JonWa, Michael, Johnbo, and myself) were heavily involved in the local Austin theatre scene, especially via the UT Shakespeare at Winedale program. We did a fair amount of pit-band and theatre-tech type work and wrote music for various plays around town. 

You frequently have to write new music for Shakespeare plays in particular, because the texts contain lyrics for lots of songs, but there's no notation of what the original music - so just like sets and costumes, you make it up afresh for each new production. 

Who is Silvia comes from the play Two Gentlemen of Verona. In the play, the eponymous gentlemen are Valentine and Proteus. Basically, Proteus sings this song as a way of trying to steal the heart of the girl (Silvia) Valentine is in love with - while, unbeknownst to him, his own girlfriend watches from the shadows.  It's supposed to be cringey, but also the song has to be a little serious and sexy. 

JonWa wrote this version originally for a production of Two Gents in 1996, in which he directed a group of former Winedalians who styled themselves the Boxtree Players.  There's a somewhat lengthy story here in which they were going to take the money they made off of that production and invest it to form a new powerhouse theatre company... but through an unfortunate series of events, they lost all the folding chairs that they had used for audience seating, and they had to pay to replace them, ending up back at square zero. (Movie script begging to be written!!!)  Some of the Boxtree Players split off and helped form the powerhouse Austin theatre company Rude Mechs - with which DLF also worked very closely.

Anyway DLF rearranged this tune a bit to make it a jazz number, and started playing it on stage featuring John “It's Actually A Cornet” Botti. In the studio version, the trumpet is played by Andre Rogers. 

Interlude: Wham Covers

Dog Legs & Feet was a lo-fi labor of love, and we had a lot of cheap or hand-me-down instruments. Also, we switched off instruments frequently (especially Johnbo, who can literally make music with any object handed to him). And we had no roadies but ourselves. 

These things, taken together, meant we spent a lot of time tuning on stage…

… except for JonWa, whose only instrument were kazoo and tamborine, and Michael, who played mainly harmonica and flute. As a result, they naturally gravitated toward bantering with the audience while the rest of us plucked strings and twisted pegs.

This interlude is a representative example of the kind of thing audiences would have heard often at DLF shows. You can really hear the improv-comedy and local-theatre roots of the band (and our audience) in this exchange. You can also hear how intimate and participatory the show was. 

Also: JonWa had been the last to get on board with Dog Legs & Feet as a band name (as I recall, he had really wanted it to be “Bang Trim”), and so he had this long-running joke about suggesting different names. He WAS serious!

My Boots Are Achin' For Your Love

A tongue-in-cheek bluegrass tune. Boots was a red-meat fan favorite, and I'm certain we played it at every single show until our last, which would have been in 2007 or so. We were not ALLOWED to play a gig without including Boots. Surely our biggest crowd-pleaser, with the possible exception of Irish Dement.

Jon Watson wrote the main verses and chorus when he was about 15 years old. When DLF got together, in 1997, it was one of the songs Jon picked to enter into the songwriting contest that gave us our start. Michael Mergen and I wrote the extended barbershop-sounding intro section. 

A bit of trivia: On this recording, in the banjo solo, Johnbo misses a note, and then the band gets back on track in the next couple of measures. It's something that we could have fixed (via digital editing) in the remastered version, but we decided not to. The reason will be clear when you get to the next track…

Interlude: Working on a Car

Johnbo explains as the audience bursts into applause, “I was working on a car yesterday and I broke a nail on my middle finger, that's what happened with that note there.” That moment really captures the personality of the band, and it seemed more fun to leave it in than to take it out. 

The noise I make at the end of this segment that sounds like “ware-dr-wurr” was some kind of joke about the fact that the kitchen staff kept calling out people's orders over the intercom, and they were almost as loud as we were. You haven't heard it yet on the album, but listen at the beginning of the next track for the word…

Down to Anniston

JASON!!!! There it is. JonWa laughs and almost misses the first line of the song.

Nowadays we have the power to edit this kind of thing out with our fancy digital tools, but not so much back then. But it was so much a part of the show that we decided not to mess with it for this remaster. 

JonWa sings Down to Anniston and he wrote the music & lyrics. It's straight up acoustic 90s folk-pop, catchy, and makes a good earworm, and it's one of my favorites on the album. I strongly considered releasing it as a single (though Galaxy won the non-scientific poll I conducted). 

Apparently there is not a specific Nisha to whom the song is dedicated. But if YOUR name is Nisha, I invite you to consider this song to be about you.  

25 years ago I was not familiar with the 1961 attack on the Freedom Riders bus in Anniston, Alabama, (now I am, thanks to the interwebs) and it never occurred to me that the song might be about that. As I mentioned above, Jon's lyrics are not always on concrete topics, and he never said Anniston was about that incident (so it might not be). But if you want to make that connection in your mind, I think it adds an additional depth to the song, so go ahead.

I suppose that, unless I am one day going to get interviewed on late-night TV about this, right now is probably my best chance to say to say that we had a lot of inside jokes about the lyrics of this song. “God, I'm a case-butt” and “so many pizzas to remind you” and some other less repeatable ones. I think of them every time I hear it. So, now you will too. You're welcome!

Shenandoah

Shenandoah was, I'm pretty sure, the first song I ever wrote lyrics to. 

It doesn't sound like a Beck song really, but I was really into Beck's “Odelay” which had come out the year before, and I know I that in writing this, I was consciously imitating the song “The New Pollution” where he starts every line with “she…” and then some cryptopoetic line. 

This is another introspective breakup song, similar to Georgie Porgie (but this one was written first, about an earlier breakup). 

The idea I was going for was that “Shenandoah” was the platonic idea in my head of the relationship I was looking for, and I realized I was faulting “her” for being a real person and not being identical to that imaginary thing. 

Anyway, I wrote it (or the first 2 minutes and 30 seconds anyway) around the time that I came back to Austin after living in the UK, in early 1997. I was sleeping on my brother's couch and I remember working on this in his living room. I played it for Johnbo one night, and he said “this needs to end with a hoedown” and grabbed a mandolin, and we wrote the last part together. Jon Watson then added the final lyrics (which he sings). 

Also: Daryl, your food's ready.

Galaxy

Galaxy (alternate title: The Night Carl Sagan Died) is what I'd call introspective alt-folk, maybe in the vein of Elliott Smith or The Tallest Man on Earth.

It started out as an instrumental guitar piece that I wrote in 1996-1997 while I was living in the UK. I actually wrote it as sort of an exercise for myself: I was trying to make a song out of only chords that contained an F# (don't ask me why). 

Jon Watson wrote the words (which he sings) based on a conversation we had. I told him how, when I'd lived in England, I had kind of lost track of the news in the US. It wasn't until I came back to Texas in the spring of 1997 that I realized Carl Sagan had died some months before. He was one of my childhood heroes, and I felt an out-of-proportion sense of loss, amplified by the fact that I'd been walking around all this time not realizing he was gone. 

Jon turned this into a melancholy song in which my ignorance (or innocence) makes me into a sort of psychopomp or limbo for Carl Sagan's soul, because to me he's still alive. This is layered onto a JonWa-esque love story full of longing under the stars. 

The final piece to come into place was the bridge, in which the band sings the refrain “outside it's raining” while I sing a counterpoint melody. In this we were definitely inspired by the Jayhawks song “Blue,” which has a bridge with two vocal lines singing counterpoint to each other.

The lyrics to my part of the bridge are adapted from a poem I'd written in college about watching the sky at night from the back seat of a car on a dark highway. “The moon too is a Marco Polo” fits right in with the overall theme of being stuck between worlds, and looking for connection across lonely distances that can feel as far apart as the stars. 

There is a glockenspiel in the song, but the ting-a-ling sound you hear during the intro is actually a small metal wind chime, shaped like an owl, which we called the Owl Bell. Johnbo brought the Owl Bell to every gig, specifically to play it in the intro to this song. Such was our dedication to the craft. 

Best of Advice

Speaking of unusual instruments, on Best of Advice, Johnbo literally played a folding TV tray covered with a random assortment of percussible objects like wood blocks, bells, plastic cups, etc etc.  This was the only song he played “the table” on. 

Dog Legs & Feet was a true “jug band” in the sense that we played whatever was to hand, even if our music didn't always sound like “jug band music." But this song does have a definite jug-band vibe, with a kind of silly jazz sound (not unlike the Asylum Street Spankers, I think) replete with kazoo and slide whistles.  

Anyway, Best of Advice was another song like Fall Dance, where I wrote the music and Michael Mergen added the lyrics. I remember having a conversation with Michael around this time where he described how he'd come to see sex as being a lot like food. And sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.

I'm not sure if it's obvious to the casual listener, but this song has a very large number of chords in it, as well as some bizarre key changes. I don't remember how to play it any more (though I think I have it written down somewhere). 

I blame Brett Youens, a friend who later ended up joining the band, and who was the only one of us with a music degree. I visited Brett in Germany when I was living in the UK, and he gave me a couple of pointers about songwriting. So a few months later, when I was writing Best of Advice, I just took that advice to its furthest possible extreme. Brett later said that when he first saw us perform this song, he thought “whoever composed this is really crazy.” 

Perhaps, perhaps. Let us look at another example to be sure.

Interlude: A Really Weird Song

Many years after we made this recording, JonWa sweetly apologized to me for saying that Dream of the Meat was a really weird song. But he's not wrong. It is a weird song, and people should know that going in.

The Dream of the Meat

John Botti wrote the music for this song. We were all into a wide variety of musical styles, but he in particular was fascinated with various world folk musics and wanted to do a klezmer-style song that would start out slow and then speed up to a frenetic pace at the end. (We were also strongly influenced by Medeski, Martin & Wood's “Bubblehouse” which does the same thing.)

I said earlier that Shenandoah was the first song I ever wrote lyrics to, but in fact the lyrics for DotM did predate those. This was a poem I had come up with in a college creative writing seminar. We repurposed it to serve as a Ken Nordine-style beat-poetry piece, and I added in bits of guitar solo for good measure. 

We made another recording of this song in 2001, under the band name “The Fricace,” when several of the Dog Legs took on a project to serve as a pit band for the Bedlam Faction's production of Ben Jonson's “Volpone.” 

Freedom

In those reckless pre-smartphone days, we used to say Freedom was the cigarette-lighter song… the one where people would hold their lighters (as opposed to phones) in the air and sway them back and forth. 

Jon Watson wrote this heartstring-puller, and sings lead on it (with lots of harmonic backing from the rest of us). 

As I'm sure you've guessed by now, Shannon is not a real person. But if YOUR name is Shannon, go ahead, get that song-lyric tattoo… 

Missing the Sun

There's something a little bit Simon-and-Garfunkel about this simple song, which features just JonWa on vocals and me on guitar.

Like Galaxy, this is one where I'd written the instrumental part and Jon added the lyrics based on a conversation we had about my time in the UK. I had told him how it was my first time living in a northern latitude (having grown up in Texas) and I was really dismayed by how dark it was in the winter - the sun would come up at 10 and set around 4. 

That, and I was truly on my own for the first time and feeling lonesome. And of course he made it into a love song too. 

Irish Dement

Irish D was the show-closer and always came at the end of the setlist (even though it's third-from-last on the album, for reasons which will become clear shortly.) John Botti wrote it, or most of it, and we all sang. Typically our audiences knew all the words and sang along heartily: “Hi hi ho and a hi hi hey, you're sure to be dying someday!”

Like with Boots, this was a song we HAD to play. There was one show (at Stubbs BBQ in Austin) where there was another band on after us, and we had to end the set a bit earlier than we expected to make room for them, so we didn't get around to playing it. A bunch of fans literally waited at the door as we were packing out, and we all sang it together in the parking lot. 

Part of the reason for its popularity is its connection with the Shakespeare at Winedale program. I mentioned earlier that several of us were alumni of Winedale. We all took a trip out there in the summer of 1997 and taught the song to the summer class. At Winedale there's a tradition that the class sings songs together before every meal, and so Irish D got inserted into the canon of mealtime tunes. I'm not sure whether they sing it there anymore, but there were several years in a row where it was getting passed down from generation to generation of students. That's also why it appears on the “Shakespeare's Palpable Hits” album even though it's not a Shakespeare song. 

Why is it called “Irish Dement”? During that summer when it was being written, we were also listening a lot to “Let the Mystery Be” by the folk singer Iris Dement. That song is also a somewhat lighthearted take on death. It was kind of a joke but it stuck; now it's too late to call it anything else.

Come Along Now and Join the Party (Michael's Last Show Version)

This is the one cover song on the album. (We played a few other covers during the show, but they didn't make it on the album, which is already over an hour long without them.) 

This song was the end-title theme from The New Casper Cartoon show that aired in the 60s and reran in the 70s. We pretty much always played it after Irish Dement. It bookended our show along with the “Tune up” at the beginning. 

In this version, because it was Michael's last show, we sang “goodbye from Michael” three times instead of once, and the audience obliged with an explosion of “NOOOO!!!” each time. Fantastic. 

Incidentally, it was NOT Michael's last show after all. He came back for numerous guest appearances, though he somehow managed to avoid all future band meetings.

Postlude: A Capella Techno

In the 90s, we had these things called CDs, and for some reason we thought it was clever to include “hidden tracks” on them. For you youngsters: This was a track that didn't appear on the CD track listing, which made it feel like an Invisible Extra Bonus Super Song to our simple minds. It was usually appended to the final track on the CD, separated by a bit of silence. 

A Capella Techno was our hidden track. In remastering the album for streaming, we've kept it at the end, but we brought it into the light. There's just a couple of extra seconds of silence at the end of “Come Along Now” to preserve the feeling that this is like an encore or something extra, not just a show that keeps on going after the final song is over.

In the past 25 years, other bands have probably done something like A Capella Techno, but we did it first. And if we didn't do it first, we did it best. And if we didn't do it best, we had a great time doing it. 

Who's singing what? In order of appearance: John Botti on drums, Joe Trent on Bass, myself on razor synth, Jon Watson on “doodleoodle” synth, and Michael Mergen on sampled-not-sampled vocals. 

And one last bit of trivia. What is the thing Johnbo says in German at the very end? It's "Und es gab keine Eichhörnchen" … “and there were no squirrels.”