There are only a handful of bands that consistently pack a punch live the way that Philadelphia’s Dr. Dog does night after night and tour after tour.  And after close to fifteen years, that’s still somewhat surprising for a band that built their notoriety early on through the critical acclaim of their lo-fi retro rock recordings. So with the release Live at the Flamingo Hotel, a collection of songs spanning their career and collected from soundboards of various tour stops throughout 2014, the band is looking back on their career so far and using the occasion as somewhat of a milestone. As a result, we got the opportunity to chat with front-man Scott McMickmen before he and his bandmates make their illustrious return to the House of Blues Saturday night.

Allston Pudding: This must be like the 15^th time Dr. Dog has come up to Boston. The first time I saw you here was at the Middle East downstairs, now this is your third time at the House of Blues, is there one memory or time that sticks out from playing in Boston?

Scott McMicken: You’re right we have played here so many times now, going back all the way to T.T. the Bears. We had some very ragged shows there that are pretty memorable, despite the fact there there was no one really there and we would just kind of be loud and rowdy about it. Tons of great shows at the Paradise before we graduated up to the House of Blues. I don’t know if there’s any one glaring thing, just some pretty minor details I remember from shows.

AP: I’m always impressed by Dr. Dog’s merch, at one point weren’t you hand crocheting those Pom Pom winter hats? If so how did you keep up with it? Are they you’re biggest seller?

SM: That’s true. In one way I do and still do occupy myself on tour often by using yarn and crochet, but it’s never been a thing where I’ve been supplying the merch situation, I would make one about every day and throw it up on the merch table when I was able to get one done. It was never relied upon though, just whenever it happened. Over the years I’ve sold a bunch, probably about thirty over the past four or five years. The hand-made ones are pretty obvious. Mine are just some hodgepodge colors strewn together.

AP: The aesthetics of the band have always been something that’s attracted me, now I look up and see Tom Brady wear pom pom hats, and just wondering if you ever feel like you’ve influenced trends or like you’ve stepped unconsciously into some trend setting DIY leadership role, the formula for a successful DIY band, everything from putting your own shows together early on, to vintage clothing and making your stage back drops. Does it feel like other bands look up to you in these ways?

SM: I haven’t sensed a direct relationship to that whole thing. I have noticed…I will say… we’ve been a band for a really long time and generally operating somewhat the same way the whole time. It’s grown and more people have become involved, but those people are all very like-minded. People have been added to further the thing that we’ve already been doing not to change it. We very much approach everything with the same attitude and the same general spirit. When I look back to early on, I do feel like, maybe we all did, have a sense as a band that we were a little bit more alienated. We were all really comfortable with that position, it was kind of self-affirming, but it didn’t seem like there was much going on around us that we had much in common with the way we were approaching things, but I’ll say now, I have noticed quite a lot more stuff that I feel a lot more kinship with in terms of the attitude and reasons for making music, and how they (other bands) go about doing that. I feel a stronger kinship now with a lot more artists and musicians than I did back then. I don’t know if that’s because we’ve been influential in any way, I’ve never been to draw any connection between our general output as a band and the kind of shift in the musical climate over the past years of us being a band.

SM: I think overall, it’s a thing of the common cause; the whole world is looking for a bit more personality in things they absorb and in the things they check out and a bit more uniqueness. It’s become harder to try to feel like there’s a more unique connection with our culture. And I think a lot of people are naturally and unconsciously reacting to that fact by putting more of themselves into the choices they make and trying to express themselves in what they do, and with a band that can be your general aesthetic and what you do with your live show, it’s very true of the live show experience. The live show feels like much more coveted thing than it was ten years ago. I only have about a 10-15 year small window of experience in observation of culture, but I’ve noticed some changes. They (bands) do seem to be kind of doing some things we’ve been doing all along, but I don’t know if there’s a connection there or not. It’s hard to tie those lines together.

SM: We’ve always been a band that’s been appreciated by other bands. I think even before we had much of an audience. There was a disproportionate amount of attention on us by other bands and other musicians rather than just like a general audience. That really shapes the early years because what it amounted to was getting us on the road and getting to do all of these amazing things. We did years of opening gigs before we even attempted headlining. That wasn’t so much an industry thing or someone doing someone a favor or some kind of conspiracy of commerce, it was literally just other bands taking interest in our band and giving us and opportunity. Now that were headlining and bringing bands out it’s very often clear that some of these are big fans of ours. It’s an interesting layer to be in when you’re talking to another musician and they say point blank “you’re such a big influence” and you can’t really see how their music aligns with your own, but that’s the main idea, it’s the spirit of the thing, the love of doing it.

AP: There’s tons of press already about the live record, but you have a solo record coming out too?

SM: That came out like two days ago. It’s very not a big deal thing at all. It’s not something I’m throwing an immense amount of investment into. It’s a bunch of songs I recorded in my bedroom on a digital 8 track with no real intent or grand design. It was a period of time when I was doing an experiment in writing where I was trying to get myself to write every day and so every day I wrote for a month and sing it into what was basically about the same as a voice memo machine, pretty much, just a single instrument and voice for the most part. The experiment part of it wounded up being very fulfilling so I felt like this record seeded in a way that to start was much more process oriented than the actual making of a record, it was just to be in a certain kind of process that allowed me to kind of spend that time. It kind of worked out and it kind of got beautiful in a way, life opened up around it. That was like 8 years ago or more. A few of those songs wound becoming Dr. Dog songs, actually 3 or 4 did. Dimitri started a record label about a year ago called Soild Gold, it’s exactly for this type of thing. You’re not going to push it, you don’t exactly need people to hear it, you’re certainly not going to tour behind it just the fact that you made it why not drop it out there in some casual way. The whole idea of Soild Gold is that it’s vinyl only, no digital and they only do 200 copies. And once those 200 copies are gone it’s gone, it’s done, it’s over.

AP: You’ll never hear those songs anywhere else? Streamed or anything?

SM: Yeah exactly, so it’s a super soft way of…it’s a tiny little outfit for those things that come and go that are just a part of life, they don’t have some big grand ambition behind it, it’s just a part of the process.

AP: About the live record, Toby was quoted saying something about how this was a milestone record and that it might be a way of kind of retiring some of these songs. This doesn’t seem like a new concept though because there’s already so many Dr. Dog songs that already seem to be retired. Is this a common thing when you feel an era of Dr. Dog comes to an end, or will we ever hear older Dr. Dog songs done live again?

SM: Oh yeah definitely, what he might mean by retiring might be more like sabbatical or something  because the songs eventually, after a playing a song a bunch of times you get to a point where it’s hard to feel very inspired playing it and that’s when you give them a rest. And they always can be refreshed or come back ya know, a couple years later, or maybe even a month later, sometimes they just need a break. Right now where on a tour where we have 70 songs to choose from and we prepared for the tour by learning tons of old stuff, all the old stuff really, including all the various EP’s and 7 inches and all these songs we have been able to catch up on as far as learning and getting them to go for the live set. It’s been awesome so far because every single night so far has been a pretty wildly different set than the night before and that’s good for us. The songs are never fully, there’s never a point where their nailed into the coffin, sometimes they just need some time, mostly for our sanity because who wants to be out there phoning it in and you can try as much as you like but sometimes a song you just get sick of it. It can have the most powerful perspective on earth and still just not find an original way to connect with the song in that moment and then you’re just phoning it in and you feel like an asshole and there’s no reason to be performing it that way. And that’s just mostly in our heads.

AP: One of my favorite moments was hearing Dr. Dog get played on the Howard Stern show. How did you hear about that and what was your reaction?

SM: That was another huge milestone for us too. I remember exactly where we were when it went down. I forget what record was out, but we were at WFUV, Fordham University’s radio station, which we only ever go there if we have a record out, ya know, do radio press and that kind of thing. I remember that day very fondly because everyone in the band are all huge Stern fans. Frank, our guitarist, used to be an intern, I think this is how this all went down. One of the other interns there became friends with Frank, who’s actually become a pretty prominent voice on the show at this point.

AP: Is that Steve Brandano?

SM: Yeah, exactly. He’s a good friend with Frank and comes to our shows in New York. So I guess at one point he thought it was interesting to present to Howard. It was also around the time we were playing Terminal 5 so that’s implicit to why he brought it up. So he was like “yeah this guy Frank used to be an intern and now he’s in the band and they’re pretty big and they’re playing Terminal 5. It was awesome because then Howard put it on and he didn’t seem to mind it which was cool on one hand because we were just like waiting for him to tear it apart, but on the other it’s funny because I’ve always felt like Howard’s had really terrible taste in music. Ya know the shit that he likes is pretty bad. So it was funny to be like “oh that’s good he likes it” but besides for like Zeppelin and the Beatles and stuff like he gets into some pretty wacky music. That was huge, huge for our band, we’ve all clocked in weeks and months of time listening to the Stern Show.

AP: The Lawn of the Mann was your first time curating some sort of original Dr. Dog festival atmosphere. Are there any hopes and dreams of one day putting together Dr. Dog’s own festival?

SM: Yeah, we’ve been talking about it for years and gotten pretty close at times. But it’s always been a logistical thing ya know and so many details that go into that. That was kind of our first simple way to pull it off. We want to play in Philly. We wanted to play a bigger venue than we’ve ever played in Philly so it made sense to add as much to the bill as possible. So it was a nice foray into that and I think we’ll try to do that more and grow into that more in time.

AP: You’re playing a gig at Madison Square Garden with Dispatch. Is there a desire to see Dr. Dog get that big to where you’re headlining arenas like that? Or is this the venue size you’re most comfortable with?

SM: I think our overall attitude has always kind of been we’re going to try to do the best that we can do with whatever opportunity is afforded to us. If that continues to push us forward that it has for years now we’re only continuing to grow as far as how many people and if that keeps kicking its way up into arenas we’ll keep on delivering, but it’s not we’re relying on that if we don’t end up there. But we always give the most into what we do and if that leads us there we’ll be happy to be there. But no one’s losing sleep over it if we never get an arena show, it’s not really a part of the design.

AP: You’re heading out to play My Morning Jackets festival in Mexico, how close are you with them still, is that something where if they ask you, do you automatically say yes?

SM: Yeah, we’ve been friends for a long time, from the early days of the band they gave us some of our first opportunities to go out and tour. We really haven’t played shows together in so long except for the occasional festival we might have been booked together at. We’re very excited to be out there with them again. They definitely are an important band for our band and important people for our people.

AP: Jim (James) used “Fat Dog” on a song for his solo record, does that mean a studio version of the song will never be heard?

SM: No, we’ve tried to record that. He created a sample out of part of it using a live recording from the tour we were on with them. He made that sample out of us doing it live. We’ve never released any recordings of that song. I will say we’ve tried to record it about three or four times, for three of four different records, that song is about ten years old. It never worked out. I don’t know. We can’t seem to get a studio version that makes sense. I think it’s because in our minds it’s just this utilitarian song that serves the purposes of what you might need to get done in a show but somehow should never be a studio recording. I’ve been speculating why the hell it hasn’t worked out in the four different attempts, but for whatever reasons it hasn’t.

AP: And it didn’t even make it on the live record either.

SM: Yeah! It didn’t even make it on the live record. That song is cursed to be just live.

Live at the Flamingo Hotel is out now and Dr. Dog is at the House of Blues Saturday January 30^th with Chadwick Stokes.