Toronto indie-rockers the Golden Dogs hit the mark with a tasty Paul McCartney & Wings cover

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON NOV. 9, 2006

By Steve Newton

One of the coolest things about the Golden Dogs’ new CD, Big Eye Little Eye, is the wide-angle photo taken in the basement of the house that husband-and-wife bandmates Dave Azzolini and Jessica Grassia share.

If you pan across the room from left to right you can see—along with a myriad of pop-art knickknackery—handwritten signs for each of the album’s songs, arranged in the same order as they’re in on the disc.

And smack-dab in the middle of the colourful shot is singer-guitarist Azzolini, staring at the camera, clutching a cross between a ukulele and a guitar, and dressed from the neck down in a gorilla suit.

“We had a lotta time to work on this,” says Azzolini, on the line from their funky Toronto abode. “We’d come home after 12 hours of recording and then we’d be sitting downstairs, thinking about what we just did and talking about the album-cover art, and then we realized that we’d make the basement into our album art.”

Azzolini and Grassia are originally from Thunder Bay, Ontario, which, for better or worse, also spawned ’60s rock ’n’ roller Bobby Curtola and David Letterman sidekick Paul Shaffer. Judging by the propulsive pop-rock of Big Eye Little Eye, similarities can be drawn between the Golden Dogs and another group that featured a husband-and-wife pairing: Paul McCartney & Wings.

Since Grassia cowrote three songs on the CD, and contributes vocals, keyboards, drums, and percussion, she’s more of a musical asset than Linda McCartney ever was in Wings. But the comparison between the two bands becomes inevitable after hearing the Dogs’ faithful rendition of “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five”, arguably the best track on Wings’ famed Band on the Run album. The remake ends with a frenzied Telecaster wipeout by Azzolini.

“I’m not claiming to be a great guitar player or anything,” notes Azzolini, whose band plays UBC’s Pit Pub on November 11, “it’s just stuff that you pick up over time from the Stones.”

Both the Wings cover and the Golden Dogs’ original material have been knocking folks dead at the quartet’s appearances at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, and North By Northeast in Toronto.

Another route the band takes to get its music to the masses is through film. “Birdsong”, the leadoff track from its previous CD, Everything in 3 Parts, was included in the Douglas Coupland–written, Vancouver-shot comedy Everything’s Gone Green.

“It was interesting to see the movie and realize that they kinda chopped the song up,” relates Azzolini, “that they edited it to make it longer. I was like, ‘Oh, they chopped it there, why didn’t they chop it here?’ So it was funny to see how that worked.”