Liquor Giants

Ward Dotson once said that he left the band the Gun Club because he got tired of playing for people in black leather who never smiled and he responded by forming the considerably lighter hearted hard rock outfit the Pontiac Brothers. Given this logic, it probably made sense that after the Pontiac Brothers called it a day in 1989, Dotson found himself moving away from the good-natured crunch of the Pontiacs and started indulging his fondness for '60s-style pop and the result was a witty and tuneful new project called the Liquor Giants. The group released their first album in 1992, You're Always Welcome (which was released in some overseas markets as America's #1 Recording Artists), but from the start it was obvious that this was a "group" in only the broadest sense. Dotson, who handled guitar and lead vocals and wrote the lion's share of the material, was the only musician who played on every cut of the album, with a round-robin crew of various L.A. cronies pitching in on bass, drum, and keys (among them former Pontiacs drummer Dave Valdez on bass; drummers Dan Earhart and Bill McGarvey, and keyboard man Dan McGough dominated the supporting cast). The material played down the hard rock stomp of Dotson's work with the Pontiac Brothers in favor of hooky but enjoyably unpolished pop/rock tunes that made no secret of their roots in the sounds of '60s AM radio. You're Always Welcome was released by short-lived indie label Lucky Records, and the second Liquor Giants full-length, Here, was released in 1994 by ESD; this time around, Dotson was joined by guitarist Steve Dima and bassist Joel Katz, with Bill McGarvey returning as drummer. While this might have suggested Dotson was settling on a stable lineup for the band, that assumption was tossed out the window in 1996 with the group's first album for Matador, simply called Liquor Giants, in which Dotson played everything except for drums (another former Pontiac Brother, Matt Simon, was this album's timekeeper), a few keyboard parts, and female backing vocals. The album found Dotson refining and broadening his pop influences, dipping his toes back into hard rock while still embracing the tunefulness of British Invasion pop and melding snarky humor with a heartfelt but realistic romanticism. Dotson once again was most of the "band" for 1998's Every Other Day at a Time; coming clean with his influences, Dotson tacked on a few obscure '60s and '70s pop covers as unlisted bonus tracks, which subsequently appeared on a separate all-covers album released the same year, Something Special for the Kids. Unfortunately, Every Other Day at a Time proved to be The Liquor Giants' last album for Matador, and their next album, Up With People, was recorded for an Australian label, Elastic Records, owing to Dotson's significant cult following down under.