This month is the 25th anniversary of the Three Hour Gig that evolved into into Dog Legs and Feet's live album, Bottom. So how should we celebrate?

I've got it: by re-releasing one of the songs as a single!

There I said it. Yes: by the end of this month, DLF will have a “new” song available for streaming, downloading, tiktoking, and so on. Stay tuned for more info as we get closer!

How We Got Here

In 2016, several years after Dog Legs & Feet broke up, a friend posted about us on her Facebook page. She said she'd played one of our albums for her kid, and it still made her happy to listen to it. 

This got me thinking that I should go back and re-listen to all our old stuff. I dug the “Bottom” CD out from the back of the closet, and ripped it to my iTunes library. 

When I pressed play, I was prepared to cringe… but I really enjoyed it. I mean sure, there were the things I would do differently, but it also sounded like a fun night out.  And that had been the point all along. 

So I started to wonder how to bring Bottom into the 21st century. 

The idea stayed in the back of my mind for a long time. At that point, I wasn't thinking of myself as a music producer. I didn't have any idea what I would do with the album. I just thought, someone should do something. 

Of course, that someone was me, and in 2019, I finally got around to doing something. In the process of starting to record new original songs of my own (another story for another post), I got acquainted with some of the truly remarkable revolutions in music production tech that have happened since 1999. It didn't take long before I was confident we could revive Bottom for the streaming era. 

The Vaults Open

I started by creating a DLF YouTube channel - low stress, low commitment, free.  For a couple of years, I posted simple videos once a week until I had gone through all DLF's recordings: 

• Bottom; 
• our unreleased second album “Last Night”; 
• our album of Shakespeare songs called “Shakespeare's Palpable Hits”; 
• and another album that several of us made under the band name “The Fricace."

A few people - maybe you're one? - asked me if the songs were available on Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, etc etc. Well, they weren't. But also, I started to see how to make it happen. 

In the end, the main obstacle was just getting the other guys on board; or I should say, finding consensus about what we wanted to do with the recordings. 

Should we just copy over the exact track listing from the CD to the streaming services, without changing anything? Should we change the cover art? How would we divide up the fraction-of-a-cent that we'd receive for each stream? Should we go back and remix the album from scratch, as if for the first time? Should we re-record the whole thing and make it into The Album It Should Have Been?

In the end, we scaled back our ambitions. We decided to just re-release Bottom the way it had been before, with some minor tweaks to make it friendlier for streaming. 

And… I just finished making the tweaks! Last week. So here we are, up to the present moment. 

Single to drop later this month (right around the anniversary of the recording, which is March 29). And yeah, then, the full album in April. Stay tuned for more!