My first band was called Dog Legs and Feet. If you'll indulge, I want to tell their story just a bit (at least my own piece of it). DLF doesn't have a website anymore, but the internet ought to know a few things for posterity.
Here we are/were. (Apparently, in those days, in-focus photographs had not yet been invented.) Left to right: Joe Trent, myself, Michael Mergen, John Botti, and Jon Watson:
We got together in the summer of 1997. At that time, I had just come back from six months of living in the UK on a BUNAC visa - working odd jobs, living in cheap flats with shared bathrooms, busking in the streets and subways, and writing songs in my spare time.
When I came back to Austin (Live Music Capital of the World) I felt ready to start a band. I started playing with three friends I knew from college - John Botti who sort of played everything, Michael Mergen who sang and had a double-serving of personality, and Joe Trent who played bass - as well as Jon Watson who also had a double-serving of personality and wrote songs. I didn't know JonWa from college. He was a friend of friends through the Shakespeare at Winedale program, which Michael and I had done the year before.
JonWa had this idea that he wanted to submit his songs to a songwriting contest, and he wanted a band to help record them. I also had some songs (mostly half-written) and I thought it would be fun to submit them as well. What clinched the deal was that my dad had a home recording studio in his garage, just a four-hour drive away in Dallas. So we drove up there every weekend that summer to record our demos on my dad's reel-to-reel (as this was pre-digital days).
We didn't end up winning the songwriting contest. But: we did finish the summer with 14 original songs all written and arranged. We thought: why not start playing gigs? So we did. Starting with open mics, then coffee houses, then bigger Austin stages like Stubbs and the Electric Lounge.
What kind of music, you ask? The center of gravity was sort of theatrical acoustic folk music, with forays in the direction of jazz, pop, and country; by turns goofy and heartfelt. Nowadays you would call it Americana. We had a sort of chaotic stage presence, but intimate and with lots of heart, which endeared us to our fans.
Anyway, after a few months we started to get restless. Michael wanted to leave the band to work on other projects, and I was getting itchy feet to go overseas again. But we had decent catalog of songs now (having written a few more) so we decided to go out with a bang.
In March of 1998 we rented a digital minidisc recorder and plugged it into the soundboard for a three-hour “final” gig at Pato's Good Tacos on east 38th (now long since closed). All our friends and fans came out. It was officially Mike's last show, even if not the final final show - so we hammed up the goodbyes a bit, but mainly we just played our hearts out. And recorded it for posterity, warts and all.
The band broke up (for the first time) two months later, when Johnbo, Michael and I left town to spend the summer in the Winedale program again.
There's actually a second act (and a third) to the DLF story, but before I venture down that road, I want to highlight something that starts here.
A year later, for reasons I shall discuss in a future post, DLF had reconstituted and was performing live again. So in the spring of 1999, I took the live recording from the Pato's show and dumped it into a Digital Audio Workstation, edited it down to an hour, mixed it, and turned it into our first album. It was called “Bottom: A Live Collection of Dog Legs and Feet.”
We pressed CDs and sold them at our shows - I'm optimistically recalling that maybe 200 copies were transacted in those heady days. During the pandemic in 2020, I dug up those old recordings and put them on YouTube, but so far, Bottom has never been distributed to your Spotifys and Apple Musics and Deezers and so forth.
So far…