Meet the Dogs: Ten Bands, One Name

OK, what do we have here? Looks like a glow-in-the-dark leash for your dogs. Hmm… the Dogs would be a pretty good band name…

Hey, Meh contributor @JasonToon here. Some band names are just so perfect, people keep thinking them up again and again. In the pre-Google age, two - or ten - bands with the same name could happily rock out in different corners of the planet, untroubled by the coincidence as long as none of them got too famous to render the name obviously off-limits.

A certain type of scummy rock ‘n’ roll freak around the world has always been drawn to the name “Dogs”: it’s short, punchy, evocative, wild, and easy for non-native English speakers. Here are ten bands called the Dogs, or slight variations (also compiled in a YouTube playlist). While the bulk are from the '70s and '80s, not even the rise of the Internet has kept bands from trying to finally be the one, the only Dogs.

Les Dogs - “Teenage Fever” (1978)
These Parisians started as a pub-rock cover band in 1973. By the end of the decade, they’d honed themselves into one of the few counter-examples to the stereotype that Frenchmen can’t rock.

The Dogs - “Younger Point of View” (1976)
Around the same time in L.A., this power trio carried the torch of MC5/Stooges provocation into that city’s nascent punk scene. This song challenges the hippie generation to live up to the glory days of the 1968 riots. The flip side, “John Rock”, is a tribute to '60s revolutionary John Sinclair.

Dogs - “Sötét Alagút” (1967)
But both of those Dogs had been beaten to the name by a band from communist Hungary, of all places, recording on the state-run Qualiton label. And that’s all I know about this band until I learn to read Hungarian.

Dogs - “Missing on the Subway” (1981)
Another band about which all I know is where they were from (the UK), when they released this song, and what they sound like: cheap-synth post-punk.

The Dogs - “Teen Slime” (1977)
Decorah, Iowa was another unlikely birthplace of another wild proto-punk outfit called the Dogs, small-town scumbags howling about “my sweaty brain! take the needles out of me”. They shoulda been huge.

The Dogs - “Finally Forgotten” (2012)
As far as I know, they have Google in Norway, but the latest entry in the Dogs race doesn’t seem troubled by the rest. The fuzzed-out, dramatic punk with garage-rock organ sounds like all these other Dogs played at the same time.

The Dogs - “Baby You Got Me” (1979)
The most mainstream-sounding Dogs of the '70s is also one of the most obscure, a melodic hard-rock outfit from Portland, Maine. If you ask me, this song beats most of what was on FM rock radio at the time.

The Dogs - “Hello People” (1980)
Was there some provision in the original EU treaty that required all member nations to produce a punkish band called the Dogs? If so, here’s Finland’s entry.

Dogs - “Tuned to a Different Station” (2005)
These Brits-come-lately can lay claim to being the most commercially successful Dogs, or at least the first one that comes up on Google. They rode the 2000s Brit-wave revival for a few UK Top 40 hits (like this one) and some big festival appearances before shuffling off to that big kennel in the rock ‘n’ roll sky.

Slaughter & the Dogs - “Situations” (1977)
OK, I’m bending the rules a little to include the '70s punk legends Slaughter & the Dogs, for three reasons: (1) I wanted to round this list out to an even ten; (2) when I first heard them, I assumed the singer was named Slaughter, with the Dogs as his backing band, which turned out to not really be the case; and (3) I like this song.

If you enjoyed this playlist, there’s only thing for you to do: go start your own band called the Dogs. It’s a rock ‘n’ roll tradition! Apparently! See you next week!

Fetch yourself some more treats from our weekend playlist archive:

• “Lights Out”: 12 Songs, One Title
• Chicano Rock
• The Police: Were They Ever Punk?
• Can’t You Hear That Thunder?: The '80s Australian Invasion
• Weekend playlist archive