Adolescent clowning, grown-up reckoning

Rudy Childs's The Dogmatics: A Dogumentary tells a story of beery kicks and unfathomable tragedy

I caught the Dogmatics once or twice in the mid-1980s in Washington D.C., marveling at the barreling energy and loud grins that they brought with them down I-95 from Boston. Guitarists/singers Jerry Lehane and Peter O’Halloran, bassist Paul O’Halloran, and drummer Tom Long played rock and roll that threatened to fall apart with each measure, rollicking, good-natured, broken-string slop that wasn’t absent of hooks, craft, or sentiment. The guys were fun, and droll as hell in their songs and onstage, their Boston accents as thick as their barre chords. I associated them with a handful of other Beantown-area bands I liked, including Lyres, Barrence Whitfield and the Savages, the Turbines, Prime Movers, and especially the Oysters, who played, the one time I saw them, as if it were their final, desperate hurrah. (It wasn’t. They played the next night somewhere.)

The Dogmatics’ story and the lives of its members and their families took a tragic turn on October 23, 1986, when Paul O’Halloran, Peter’s twin brother, died in a motorcycle accident. He was twenty six. At that point, the band had released a home-grown single (“Gimme the Shakes,” in 1983), and two terrific mini LPs on Homestead Records, Thayer St. (1984) and Everybody Does It (1986). (Those songs and scattered compilation appearances were collected on 1981-86 in 2008, and again on EST 81 in 2021.) I heard the news about O’Halloran sometime later, through the slow-moving ‘zine/gossip grapevine that was the 1980s equivalent of social media. His death cast a pall over the records, the imprudent party vibe leavened with something darker and scary, and terribly sad. The band soon called it quits. Two months after O’Halloran’s death, twenty Boston-area bands, including Prime Movers, Gang Green, the Turbines, Scruffy the Cat, Classic Ruins, and the Oysters, played a two-night memorial show at the legendary Rathskeller in Boston. The city felt the loss of the beloved, generous-hearted O’Halloran keenly.

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Two years ago, documentary director and producer Rudy Childs told the band’s story in The Dogmatics: A Dogumentary, and, in the process, shed sympathetic light on the many like bands that have giggled, plugged in, and drunk up as if their lives depended on it. (The doc premiered two weeks ago on the band’s YouTube channel; the trailer’s here, a link to the full film’s below.)

A Dogumentary unfolds conventionally. Childs, executive producer Jada Maxwell, and Bob DeLeroy interview the remaining original band members, an early drummer, members from area bands, their former manager, roadies, a local scene historian/enthusiast, producers, two O’Halloran brothers who’ve replaced Paul, the new mandolin player. (The Dogmatics reformed in 2019, and play out sporadically, mostly at local benefits. They’ve released a single, “Automat Kalishnikov,” in 2021, and two sturdy EPs, She’s The One in 2019 and Drop That Needle in 2022.) Lehane, O’Halloran, and Long, all now well into middle age, bespectacled and wider in their midsections, speak about their band’s raucous early years and all-too-brief ascent on the Eastern Seaboard with a blend of bemusement and awe, and without a trace of regret, their memories (mostly) intact. The beer cans cluttering nearly every table around which the guys gather to reminiscence suggest that a boozy good time is still a common and unifying thread.

Child had access to a treasure trove of vintage film: early- and mid-’80s interviews; clips from live shows (including a 1985 gig at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. where I was in attendance); the lo-budget video for the song “Good Looking Girls,” and hilarious footage of the band horsing around in their derelict loft/rehearsal space/apartment in an industrial no-man’s land on Thayer Street, in South Boston.

Among the priceless stuff shot there was a feature for a local access channel dubbed “Lifestyles of the Poor and Unknown,” a take on Robin Leach’s then popular television show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, for which Paul “Blowfish” Lovell, a DJ and writer for Boston Groupie News, shows up at the loft garishly lit and looking like a poor-man’s Tom Wolfe. There, he “interviews” the band, who spend more time guffawing, drinking tall boy Budweisers, and wrestling each other on a filthy couch than conversing.

In one exchange, Lovell approaches Paul O’Halloran, who’s perched near a grimy window, playing his bass. “What a sty—uh, a style you have here, Paul,” Lovell deadpans, glancing at a shadowy corner where band posters hang on the wall and a woeful mattress is stuffed. “Did they force you to go in this room?”

Paul: “Nah, I chose it.”

Lovell: “Why would you choose this particular room?”

Paul: “The view.” Cut to a shot out the window of a bleak factory alley down which a mangy black cat prowls. Lovell remarks, “You know, a lot of suburban people can’t appreciate a cityscape like that.”

Paul: “Fuck ‘em.”

We learn that the band’s signature song “Gimme the Shakes” (video below) was written not about a girl but about the loft’s abundant and scarifying roaches. Pete O’Halloran relates a story of driving his van away from the loft one morning only to discover that “a hobo” had been sleeping one off in the back seat. Motorcycle aficionados, the band members took advantage of the loft’s service elevator to stock their living space with oil-dripping, mostly broken-down bikes. At one point, a manically grinning Peter O’Halloran mounts his bike and spins deafeningly loud donuts around Lovell. Later, they entertained their visitor with epic, drunken “jousting battles,” two guitar-slinging Dogmatics each on a charging motorcycle. Forty years later, Lovell wonders if the skid marks are still there. Ah, youth!

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Though the vintage footage is terrific—wobbly video of the band playing a pool party, with the skinny, sun-drenched attendees sporting ‘80s hairstyles and dance moves, is a film’s set designer’s dream—the contemporary interviews drive the documentary. Beefy Tim Downie, the band’s old roadie, remarks how unlikely it was for a group of juvees like the Dogmatics to have kept it together professionally without good management. “What, five guys in a van at twenty-two years old, giggling and drinking beer?,” he smiles. “I don’t know how well that would’ve gone off without Juli.” Juli was Juli Kryslur, the band’s manager, who was tasked with reigning in the members’ inebriated wildness. “You know, a lot of babysitting, a lot of den mother kind of stuff,” she remarks about her job description, adding hilariously, “I later became a middle school teacher. Nothing can train you better to run a middle school classroom in New York City than having worked with the Dogmatics for three or four years.” She’s wry. I would’ve liked to have heard more from her in the film.

The details that evoke indie band life are indelible: the cross-country van rides and long, sweaty gigs; hungover recording sessions; that dark, malodorous loft. The band’s songwriting catalogued daily life: girls; rock and roll; drinking by the pool; early MTV (“watching channel 31”); motorcycles; cruel Catholic nuns (“Sister Serena, there ain’t nobody meaner!”); drugs. The wittily-titled “Hardcore Rules” takes on scene hypocrisies. (The Dogmatics drew fans from all stripes to their shows.) I vividly recall “Teenager on Drugs” from Mr. Beautiful Presents All Hard, a compilation of bands that I’d spin on my radio show at WMUC at the University of Maryland. A snotty riff on Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman’s “Teenager in Love,” a big hit for Dion and the Belmonts in 1959, the Dogmatics’ lament replaces Dion’s doo-wop yearning with a Dee Dee Ramone belch, the earnest, heartbroken lyrics with disaffected, liver-damaged rhymes (Can’t wait to get paid / I wanna get wasted, I wanna get laid / …I’ll drive to the Cape / Get no results, I’m gonna go ape!). “That [song] was a big joke,” Pete O’Halloran happily relates. A cousin had provided the jokey chorus; O’Halloran filled in the rest himself, nakedly stealing the original song’s chord progression. “Then I go, ‘I’ll give him writing credits on it, because if I get sued by Dion and the Belmonts, then his ass will be in the sling, too’!” Great stuff.

Adolescent hijinks aside, Paul’s death—so sudden and senseless—is the paradoxical absence at the heart of the documentary. In contemporary interviews, the band members’ grief over the loss is palpable, still, particularly Peter’s. He relates a funny and sweet anecdote that’s placed in the film just before Paul’s death is explored; the sequence is powerfully poignant. “We did everything together,” Peter remarks. “If you’re used to having a twin brother, you’re used to having someone who looks like you, who’s always with you and in front of you.” One afternoon, when the twins were four or five, their father took Peter for a haircut, but Paul was too sick to accompany them. “My dad opens the door, I go into the barbershop, and there’s a full length mirror down the other end. I went, ‘Paul’s here!’ I ran to the end and just smashed into the mirror!” His eyes tearing up, he adds, “So, I think my dad had to explain the situation. I’m sure that they got a big laugh out of it.” Moments later, in the film, Paul is gone. The O’Halloran twins played twin guitars, two matching yellow Telecasters. Paul was buried with his bass.

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l-r, Lehane, Peter O’Halloran, Paul O’Halloran, Long

I’ll always have great affection for the Dogmatics and their urgent, beery shows. The songs were staples on my radio show; they straddled noisy, adolescent silliness with sober reckoning (check “Cry Myself to Sleep,” below)—a pretty good definition of rock and roll, in my book.

Who knows where they would’ve gone had O’Halloran not died. Their records from the ‘80s offer a time capsule of a gang of good-time buddies doing what they love to do before tragedy interferes. Their songs were simple, fun, and raucous, sacrificing a political edge or much social commentary for teenagers’ more gripping concerns. Maybe they would’ve struck a chord with the large fan base besotted with Ramones’ three-chord nihilism or the Replacements’ romantic, dissolute urgency; maybe they would’ve eventually vanished like so many other indie bands before and after them, drugs and drink derailing things. The documentary makes it pretty clear that band animosity likely wouldn’t have been a factor; the guys get along well, the bunker mentality forged among friends tangible, still.

In one sequence, Lovell enthuses over Pete O’Halloran’s guitar lick in “Good Looking Girls.” Cue O’Halloran, who cheerfully announces, and helpfully demonstrates, how the lick was simply an amped-up take on Hubert Sumlin’s playing on Howling Wolf’s 1956 recording of “Smokestack Lightning.” “It’s a riff, man, ya know?” he smiles. It’s one of my favorite moments in The Dogmatics: A Dogumentary, good-natured thieving among musicians as old as music itself. Keith Richards allegedly said that he wants his tombstone (should the need to erect one ever arise) to read, He passed it along. That’s all that O’Halloran and his mates were doing on whatever endless night or cracked morning they wrote “Good Looking Girls,” raiding his record collection and singing about eternal stuff with eternal chords. The beat goes on, even when the tools are downed, and sometimes, as Dogumentary illustrates with love and affection, those tools are picked up and plugged in again.

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Stills from The Dogmatics: A Dogumentary used by permission of Rudy Childs

Band photo via Discogs. Photographer unknown.