Sundogs Bring Swamp Boogie

Summer is here and what better way to send the mercury bursting out of the thermometer than a Sundogs concert at the Fort Spokane Brewery.

Live, the Sundogs, which boil up a swampy mix of Cajun, zydeco, rock, blues, country and folk, are as blistering as a hot summer’s day yet as cool as an evening breeze all at the same time.

Through years of exhaustive touring and thousands of sweaty performances, not to mention an adeptness for melding genres, the Berkeley, Calif., band has been one of the most talked-about unsigned groups around.

Thus, the band’s shows should not be missed, especially since the Sundogs only make it to the Inland Northwest once a year.

“We’ve always enjoyed playing live,” said singer and fiddler Tom Rigney in a phone interview this week. “A great thing for us is to get on stage in front of a big crowd, maybe that doesn’t know us, and just go, ‘Oh, you folks are in for a big surprise.’

“Initially, when Joe (Paquin, guitar, accordion, rub board and vocals) and I started putting a band together, we were looking for … musicians who had the sense ‘Yeah, put us in front of an audience and, my god, we’ll tear them apart.’ And that has stayed a fundamental (aspect) of the band.”

Not being limited to any specific style has been both beneficial and detrimental to the Sundogs’ career. On one hand, few bands roil a palatable melting pot of music, both on stage and in the studio. On the other, the Sundogs have been unsuccessful in a quest to find a permanent home for their music.

“Just before we signed with Rounder, there was a lot of interest in Nashville,” recalled Rigney. “They thought that maybe we might be the next big area that country music could expand into. Of course, we’ve never considered ourselves as a country band at all.”

Yet the band was willing to give the country genre a shot. Even by rearranging their songs to sound more country, the quintet still posed a marketing nightmare for the corporate giants.

“After a lot of interest and a lot of meetings … it all boiled down to the industry lacking the confidence that they could sell our music to the traditional country audience.”

Despite lacking commercial savvy, Rigney, Paquin and the rest of the band - guitarist-vocalist Teddy Politzer, bassist John Aughney and drummer Jimmy Hobson - have never considered narrowing the scope of their music to boost album sales or garner a recording contract.

“I would much rather have songs riding up the charts, but not to the extent that I’m going to change everything I’m doing in order to have that,” Rigney said.

For the last two albums, the Sundogs have been with Rounder Records, a perennial haven for musical misfits all over the world. Their Rounder offerings include 1992’s “Howlin”’ and 1994’s “To the Bone.”

At the moment, the Sundogs are three weeks into recording their next album, due out in a couple of months.

“It’s going astonishingly well,” Rigney said of the recording session. “We haven’t figured out how to screw it up yet.”

Unlike their last two, this one, still untitled, won’t be on Rounder. Instead, the band will finance, market and distribute the record on its own and hope that a label will come along and re-release it.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: SUNDOGS The Sundogs perform at the Fort Spokane Brewery in downtown Spokane Friday and Saturday at 9:30 p.m. Cover is $7 each nights.