The Dodos
June 19th at the Independent

San Francisco’s avian hope, the Dodos, were greeted with a hero’s welcome at the Independent last week after returning from a three-week tour of Europe. Comrades Thee Oh Sees and Dreamdate played the opening slots while the Dodos’ Meric Long and Logan Kroeber cleaned up the sold-out crowd with furious fingerpicking, reconstructed 6/8 rhythms, and additional percussion (trash can, xylophone, and toy piano) courtesy of touring member Joe Haener. They even swapped instruments so Long could put on his “Morrisey hat” and play frontman/trombonist. That’s thinking! During Thee Oh Sees’ raucous soundcheck, Crawdaddy! got a chance to talk with Long and Kroeber about Europe, Dublin’s Crawdaddy Club, and the Dodos’ quick flight to the top of the indie rock shortlist. – David MacFadden-Elliott

Crawdaddy!: Was this your first time touring Europe?

Meric Long: Yeah, it was good. The crowds were awesome for being our first time over there.

Crawdaddy!: What were your favorite towns?

Logan Kroeber: Amsterdam, but not for the reasons you think… smoked a little bit of hash there, but it was our driver who bought it. It was just a beautiful town, really sort of a romantic town. Every street you turn down there’s some bridge over a canal and boats everywhere. It seemed even more of a romantic place than Paris even. I was really surprised by the cleanly and romantic—

Long: Well, we didn’t see the Red Light District, so maybe—

Kroeber: Yeah, yeah, true.

Long: We missed out on all the—

Kroeber: The skeez.

Long: The snuffs.

Crawdaddy!: I wanted to ask you about the Crawdaddy Club, because the magazine I work for is actually named after the original Crawdaddy in London…

Long: No shit.

Crawdaddy!: And now that one’s no more, but there’s the one in Dublin where you played. How was that?

Long: It was awesome.

Kroeber: It was our close-out show.

Long: We were kinda clueless ‘cause at that point we had parted ways with our tour manager. I went for a walk [and] I saw this building. I was like, “Oh, that’s a really cool building.” And it turns out that’s the Crawdaddy. [Dublin] was another—with Amsterdam—another top highlight, just in terms of people’s reaction and being in a beautiful city. It feels like both of those cities are small, like model cities, like, somebody’ll pop out of the river [laughs] and wave, like the “It’s a Small World After All” ride.

Crawdaddy!: One guy wrote about the Crawdaddy gig that you had “sacrificed some of the album’s subtlety for unadulterated psych-folk intensity.” Do you feel there’s that difference between the record and the live show?

Meric: There is. But also that show was at the end of a tour, and it’s hard to manage more subtle moments with louder moments when you’re exhausted.

Logan: Not to mention that the gear we got for that show was rented. And hours before we played we were all sort of dealing with all this different shit that we’d never played on before. And I definitely remember having certain songs not work for me, and just being, like, “Fuck it. I’m gonna put it up to 11 and hope it goes well.”

Crawdaddy!: Could you talk about your drum setup, Logan?

Kroeber: It was just like a linear thing from when I started playing with Meric when he was a solo guy. It was way minimal. And then as we started playing more together I was just like, “I need to add another drum,” and this and that. And it’s just sort of built itself into what it is from bare-bones necessity. It’s kind of growing to a normal-sized drumkit.

Crawdaddy!: Everything is displaced in a way.

Kroeber: I like to think of it as a table.

Crawdaddy!: How did you come up with the foot tambourine?

Kroeber: I didn’t want to play with a hi-hat at that point, and so I couldn’t have the tambourine that clips onto the hi-hat. So it had to go straight on to the foot, which is where it has stayed ever since.

Crawdaddy!: How about that little trumpet of yours, Meric? I read that you were working on your chops trying to get that in order.

Meric: Working and failing.

Crawdaddy!: Are we gonna see it tonight?

Meric: Nope, ‘cause we got Anna [of opening band, Dreamdate], who plays trumpet way better than I do, and I have not had time to practice it, so it’s back to trombone… but one day…

Crawdaddy!: I read a review of your 2006 performance at Mission Creek festival and it referred to you as “some guy named Meric Long.” And here you are today with a sold-out show at the Independent and a well-stocked dressing room. Can you reflect on how far you’ve come?

Long: [Laughs.] Now, it’s just “some dude.”

Listen:Various Tracks [at myspace.com]