DOUG DRAGON RELEASES THE PROPHETEER

[ESQ Editor]

DOUG DRAGON RELEASES THE PROPHETEER; ALBUM PRODUCED BY HIS BROTHER DENNIS
 
Tracing The Dragon Family's Serpentine Path
from Legend to Reality and Back Again

BURBANK, Calif. - Dec. 14, 2010 - In the early 1960s, when Award-winning film composer and conductor Carmen Dragon was at the top of his game with the Glendale Symphony Orchestra, Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and Capitol Symphony, his sons, Dennis, Doug, and Daryl, were just launching their musical careers in their hometown of Malibu, California, initially as The Dragons. By the early '70s, all three brothers were at various times playing with the Beach Boys on the road, as well as with several other bands, including their own.

Eventually they went their separate but interconnected ways: Daryl worked on Dennis Wilson's solo material, then became "The Captain," married Toni Tennille, and the duo had a hit recording and performing career and a TV variety show as The Captain & Tennille. Dennis ran his own studio, drummed on two of the Beach Boys' albums (Sunflower and Surf's Up), and earned a Record of the Year Grammy for engineering the Captain & Tennille hit, "Love Will Keep Us Together." He engineered and produced many other records, movies and television shows, moving to Santa Barbara and later to Oregon, operating and producing from a state-of-the-art recording studio that was built and formerly owned by classic rock icon Steve Miller. Meanwhile, Doug moved to Hawaii in the mid-'70s and went on to expand his career by touring and performing in Australia, while continuing to write and compose music.

Fast forward to 2007, when a song called "Food for My Soul," from the unreleased BFI album that The Dragons had recorded in the late '60s, was accidentally discovered by a DJ named Kevin, a/k/a "DJ Food," at Ninja Tune in England, and wound up in his latest mix. He had found the song on a soundtrack album that Dennis produced for a mid '70s Hal Jepsen surf film called A Sea for Yourself. The then 37-year old BFI collection was finally issued in August 2007 on the Ninja Tune label and was well-received in the UK and Japan.
 
Now, with 2011 around the corner, the Dragons are back on the front lines with a new album of original songs, uniquely recorded and joined in cyberspace between two studios located in Maui and Southern Oregon. The result, Doug Dragon's The Propheteer, produced by Dennis Dragon, is now available as a physical release or download through CD Baby and as a download through DigStation and the usual online outlets (iTunes, Amazon.com, etc.).
Dennis Dragon on the new Doug Dragon recording

"Doug sent me these files: 'OK we're doing this.' My first impression was, 'Oh my God. What a challenge.' Without the internet, this could not happen. I used to feel digital was a cartoon of the sound. However, over the years they have increased the sampling rate and the bit rate to where it is almost acceptable and not depressing to my ears.

"Doug is a 'groove guy' as a pianist. He came from a KBCA-FM jazz background, a Les McCann trip. Daryl was more into Fats Domino. I've been playing music with Doug since the mid-1950s, and I do have a telepathic relationship playing music with him. I just accept it. We're very close. I talk to him two or three times a week. He bought me my first stereo set from Japan when he was in the Navy.

"It was time to really do another album together, and we were somewhat goosed by the BFI album we did in 1968 that garnered a CD release a few years ago on Ninja Tune Records in the U.K. That release got all sorts of great reviews.

"The song 'Radiation Blues' was written in the late '50s. I remember when Doug wrote it. I thought it was great.  And it's a mind-blower that the song never got recorded until now. Things like this tune are what Doug refers to as 'headline mews tracks.'

"I played drums on the tracks. I'm a chameleon when it comes to drumming. My style and my drum set both adjust to whatever music I'm playing. For example, the Surf Punks -- totally different. BFI -- totally different again.  Stuff I did in the '70s - yet again, totally different. I try and make the drumming work for the music, and I had to come up with a special style for this particular record. I had a special set. I used a Gretsch wood kit, which I thought was kind of tubby sounding, but I thought worked for this particular record. I used nylon tips and I like the way they sound on cymbals -- they have a beautiful sound.  I've been collecting cymbals since I was 6 years old. I used three cymbals on Doug's record because I wanted it to sound like it was one session. I started 'banging' at age 2. My first drum set was given to me at age 5 by my father, after years of drumming on Quaker Oats boxes.

"Doug's main vocals and his reference piano tracks were recorded in Hawaii. Almost everything else was done here in Oregon. I pulled from the best talent that was available to me: Keyboardist Brett Claytor gave us his last overdubs before succumbing to cancer. Guitarist Tay Uhler was in the Surf Punks for a few gigs and wrote "Teenage Girls." One of the bassists is Charles Button. I shared my studio with him for a while. A noted music veteran, he played with Jan and Dean, and performed with group members from Joe Walsh's Barnstorm, Sugarloaf, the Sanford-Townsend Band and the Mark-Almond Band.  Button was a co-founder of the West Coast bands Romance, with Tony Berg and Art Wood, and Push Button and Hold with Richard Kosinski (Ambrosia), Phil Kenzie and guitarist Michael Thompson."
Doug Dragon on his new recording and
collaborating with Dennis Dragon

Doug describes how this album started: "I sent some tunes to Dennis and asked him to check them out. Dennis heard them and asked, 'Got any more of that stuff?' 'OK. Here's one, Obese Nation.' 'O.K.' 'Recession?' Now things come to fruition and Dennis takes an active interest.   
 
"I want the music out there to be interpreted," Doug Dragon emphasizes. "I said to myself, 'What can I come up with that is going to be good and different?' There's a lot of stuff in the headlines, Headline Mews, so what has happened here is the Propheteer has gone back to his prophetic blues roots. On the one hand, I had new ideas for songs, and on the other, 'Radiation Blues' goes back to 1959! The germ for that came when everyone was buying bomb shelters; radiation was in the air. No pun intended. I've had the song for fifty years. I doctored up the lyrics a little bit.

"I'm not a 'greenie.' I weaved into my material that I was composing in 2008 and 2009, like 'My Uncle Sam.' 'Obese Nation' is a comment on the American diet in the news, and then there's 'Swine Flu.' The mews is a double play on news and muse. I was going to write one called 'Foreclosure,' so economics would also be addressed.

"The title, Propheteer? It came to me early one morning in late summer. The working title was The Caretaker. Which I've done a lot of in Maui. I went with it and changed the spelling to 'eer.'  It weaves itself back to prophetic blues, as in the seer at the keyboard. It's not a clairvoyant thing, or psychic, but he is addressing current issues. That is where that came from. 

"I don't actively play 'live' in Maui, and haven't in my thirty-five years here. I don't play Top 40 or Hawaiian music. I did take my cover tune repertoire on my trip to Australia in 1979 and 1980 and really did well.

"In retrospect, the Propheteer thing is as simple as going back to the Prophetic Blues, 'cause the words reflect that we were being confronted by a massive dose of reality. I don't have cable TV. I'm 2,200 feet up in the mountains, and not influenced by anything. I take two magazines a week, TIME and Newsweek, I read them religiously, and review: 'OK, here's some meat. I'll chew on it for a while.'
 
"The recording facilities were provided for me and the people who worked with me. My landlord, Rob Loney, God bless him, has a studio. So I did it with him in Hawaii, where he also played bass on the tracks 'Por Poquito' and 'Prophetic Blues.' Also on 'the island side' is Richard Rose, who played additional keyboards in Rob's studio.

"From then on, it was file sharing with Dennis. For me, it's still the human person recording. I used to play music 'live' for years with Dennis and Daryl in clubs and frat houses all through the mid-to-late 1960s. I was the primary vocalist and Dennis could sing 'Satisfaction' or a Bob Dylan tune. Then Daryl went on to become 'The Captain' of Captain & Tennille."       
Recorded in state of the art studios

"Now in 2010, this recording with Dennis is a different trip," Doug continues. "At first, I was a little bit uncomfortable with it. I had to get locked in with the concept, the evolution that had taken place. But after a few songs, or concepts, I got the feel of the digital going across the water. And Dennis, my God, was on top of it. 'I'll embellish this tune.' 'Let's start off with Obese Nation.' And all that horn work. Dennis came up with that. Some of his Blue Note Records influences were showing. 

"It's the same writer and vocalist, with the same drummer and producer; these elements remain the same, with me at the helm with the lyrics. It is linked in some small way to the retail commercial release on Ninja Tune, our surf soundtrack album from forty years earlier, released in the U.K. a few years back, but originally recorded in 1968. One of the songs from it, 'Food for My Soul,' was on surf filmmaker Hal Jepsen's A Sea for Yourself soundtrack, and it was birthed on an English record label after a DJ mix tape, something that took me by surprise. I was very excited: 'This is a real out there thing,' was my initial reaction.  This album, BFI, was first shelved, and then engineer Donn Landee's friend Howard Weiss saved the master tapes from the studio dumpster many years later, and finally DJ Food spotted it in that soundtrack, rediscovered it and got in touch with Dennis. The Propheteer is the forty year follow-up!"

Doug Dragon's jazz roots and the Dragon family are profiled in Harvey Kubernik's book, Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and the Music of Laurel Canyon (Sterling Publishers, 2009), in the chapter called "The Dragon's Lair."

For more information about The Dragons, please visit thedragonsmusic.com.