During an argument about Dr. Dog that I was listening in on between my roommate and a friend of his, the friend happened to say in a derogatory tone that they sounded “just like the Beatles.” To that my roommate replied, “Don’t we love the Beatles? Why is that a bad thing?”

I thought his point was valid, and rare. We are so quick to fault bands for borrowing from their influences, when any one of us would be hard pressed to name a band that hasn’t gotten at the very least a concept and at most a whole career from some other artist or genre.

I’m going to boldly say that the Beatles are responsible for about 50 percent of the music that I listen to both personally and indirectly. But the more interesting point about the Beatles, which is totally singular to their influence, is that it is possible to take two bands of our generation who are known for sounding like the Beatles, put them next to each other, and have them sound nothing like each other.

Enter Oasis and Dr. Dog—an English, stadium-filling, anthemic rock band with terrifying egos, and a rootsy Philadelphia gaggle of hippies—bands that have almost nothing in common except that they wear their Beatles influences on their sleeves.

When the music industry’s gaze started to shift away from the singles system and toward album-oriented rock, the Beatles were at the forefront of the evolution, making albums that spoke to listeners in their entirety.

But in their early days, they were part of the system, releasing songs as hits and B-sides, and albums simply as collections of singles. Music as art is something that was always inside of the Beatles, and they pushed hard to achieve their goal of making exactly the albums they wanted to make rather than to structure their songs for commercial success.

The marked difference between the constructions of the poppy Please Please Me (“I Saw Her Standing There”, “Love Me Do”) and the experimental Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”, “Within You Without You”) just four years later is the perfect example of how both Oasis and Dr. Dog have drawn directly from the Beatles style and yet diverged from each other completely.

Oasis albums, like early Beatles albums, are built like vessels for carrying their anthems. For example, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? seems to exist only to house the band’s megahits “Champagne Supernova” and “Wonderwall.” Meanwhile, Dr. Dog’s two full-lengths, We All Belong and Easy Beat, sound best when played straight through, with the songs progressing through each other, obviously written and recorded with a larger theme in mind. Easy Beat tracks such as “Oh No” employ dreamy bridges and multiple movements as well as psychedelic sing-along sections and transitions that dissolve into improvised noises, all of which make the album more like a musical suite than a collection of possible radio hits.

But maybe the most obvious reason that Dr. Dog and Oasis vary on the same theme is that they emerged from very different scenes. While they both share a mid-sized-city underdog attitude—Dr. Dog hailing from Philadelphia and Oasis from Manchester—Oasis came out in the ‘90s during a wave of Britpop with the emphasis being on rock ‘n’ roll attitude and appearance, while Dr. Dog are part of a much more bohemian uprising of musicians in the American indie world. Though Oasis’ first deal was through British independent label Creation, the imprint was partnered with Sony, and the band was essentially thrown right into the majors and the huge commercial expectations that came along with that. Dr. Dog, on the other hand, works with Park the Van, a small, friendly label that moved to Philadelphia from New Orleans, and counts Dr. Dog as their biggest artist. The truly indie deal that they are under definitely offers Dr. Dog more artistic freedom, with very little input from the label on creative issues. So essentially, while they are starting out with the same media, it is colored by their contemporaries and by the expectations of the part of the industry they each belong to.

Not to say that all of the incarnations of Beatles envy in Oasis and Dr. Dog are differences. Both bands employ(ed) the Lennon/McCartney style of dual frontman songwriting. In the case of Oasis it was famously fighting brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, and Dr. Dog’s Scott McMicken and Toby Leaman have acted as their band’s songwriting yin and yang. In this way the structure of the bands is similar, but because of the differing personalities of the Gallaghers and McMicken and Leaman, the two bands turned the same method into a divergence from each others’ sound.

While Oasis aspired to the Beatles’ success and spent their entire career as a band trying to achieve the Fab Four’s magic touch, they only found temporary fame, somehow missing out on the element that would make their music as enduring. In contrast, although their catalog is still far from being complete, Dr. Dog’s Beatles emulation seems to become more in homage to the greatest rock band of all time rather than a relationship based on desire.

Oasis has had no qualms about admitting that their aim from the very beginning as a band has been commercial success, and they have found it, selling more than 50 million records worldwide. Their attitudes were as inflated as their sales, and eventually it brought them to ruin.

It’s not that we ever resented Oasis for their ambition. Even when they claimed they were going to be “bigger than the Beatles,” I’ll admit I was still singing along to “Champagne Supernova.” But in the long run, I feel like the only way to use an influence well, the only proper way to wear your Beatles on your sleeve, is to share in their true artistic spirit, like Dr. Dog has proven to do.

Watch: Oasis, Champagne Supernova [at youtube.com]

Watch: Dr. Dog, Fool’s Life [at youtube.com]

More articles by Lavinia Jones Wright:

Album review of Matmos, Supreme Balloon 

Album review of Portishead, Third

Introducing: Christopher Denny: Southern Fried Gothic