Biography
Ward Dotson once characterized his Pontiac Brothers with the observation, "Our singer was a drummer, our drummer was a bass player, and collectively we had all the drive of a perpetual hangover." Though the remark conveys the outfit’s self-mocking outlook and enthusiasm for beer, it leaves unmentioned their standing among the most consistently pleasurable American groups of the 1980s—an outfit that adopted vintage hard rock through a punk lens well ahead of grunge and did so with sharper wit and fewer airs than the Seattle acts that later made the style mainstream. Dotson, the band’s driving force, had previously played guitar in the Gun Club, the pioneering punk-blues outfit, before exiting in 1983 to launch the Pontiac Brothers alongside guitarist Jon Wahl, bassist Kurt Bauman, percussionist D.A. Valdez, and vocalist Matt Simon. Their debut, Big Black River, appeared on a French imprint in 1985; later that year an arrangement with Los Angeles indie Frontier Records prompted the group to discard half the existing tracks and cut fresh material for the domestic release Doll Hut. By the sessions for 1986’s Fiesta en la Biblioteca, Wahl had departed, and the record introduced a thicker ’70s hard-rock dimension to the band’s “Replacements meet the Stones” sound. Although a devoted following arose—including admirers the Replacements, who inserted a copy of Doll Hut into the clip for “Bastards of Young”—the group’s humorous, no-frills rock sat awkwardly amid mid-’80s indie circles and never reached the wider public its recordings merited. Following 1988’s Johnson the Pontiac Brothers chose to disband, yet four years afterward they reconvened to compose and track the clever yet unexpectedly warm Fuzzy Little Piece of the World inside a single month in 1992. A West Coast tour supported the album, after which the members parted ways permanently. Dotson subsequently fronted the Liquor Giants, whose lineup briefly included Matt Simon on drums, while Wahl, who had spent only a short time with the Pontiac Brothers, later started Clawhammer.
Albums
