On a peaceful fall day in 1972, Baker Street was about to get loud. The residential neighborhood on Lansing’s south side wasn’t known for hosting rock ‘n’ roll concerts — there wasn’t even a music venue. But that wouldn’t stop the Dogs, an MC5-worshipping local rock outfit, from plugging in their towering stacks of amplifiers on an ordinary front lawn.
An hour before, the Dogs attempted another nearby gig, but that was promptly shut down after the trio rattled some storefronts. Guitarist and vocalist Loren Molinare said the series of events on that sunny day ultimately led to the band’s first, but not last, trip to jail. He was 19 years old at the time.
“The Dogs were asked to play the Lansing Mall for a candidate running for Lansing City Council,” Molinare recalled. “Four Marshall stacks got us kicked out of the mall for being too loud. Then a local hippie named Mouse from Baker Street suggested we set up in his front yard and play.”
As word spread across town, muscle cars lined Baker Street, local kids pulled up on bicycles, and longhaired hippies swarmed the makeshift midday fiasco. The Dogs were about to offer up some top-shelf proto-punk riffs. Molinare was ready. Mary Kay plugged in her bass. Drummer Ron Wood sat down behind his kit.
“Before we even played, the police arrived and said, ‘We’ve had a complaint,’” Molinare said. “Of course, we said, ‘That’s not fair! We haven’t even played yet!’”
Not surprisingly, the officers refused to compromise with the Dogs: “If you play, you’re going to jail,” they said. Molinare snarled, “So what?”
“As soon as Ron did the opening bit on the drums, just like that, they pulled the plug and arrested us,” Molinare said. “We got arrested before we even hit a note.
“It was a classic day in the life of the Dogs,” the 71-year-old added. “Get kicked out of one place, go somewhere to play rock ‘n’ roll and get arrested.”
But the story doesn’t quite end there.
“That day, Ron Wood and I had dropped acid,” Molinare said. “We went into the Lansing jail just frying on LSD.”
Joint Issue, an underground, 1970s-era East Lansing newspaper, published photos of police breaking up the Baker Street show with the headline, “PIGS BUST DOGS.”
Aside from a few bad nights, Kay said the Dogs’ formative years in Lansing were largely happy days of bashing out high-octane rock ‘n’ roll and having fun.
“It was all of us all together,” Kay said. “There were a bunch of us, always doing LSD and smoking pot. It was just a big family, and that’s what we did. We just hung out. The music kept us together.”
Local artist and musician Dennis Preston recalls the band’s earliest days and recognized from the start that they were different from the rest of the pack.
“They amazed me,” Preston said. “Especially when they played Cream songs like ‘Politician.’
“Mary Kay was all over the place. I was a bass player in a band at that time, and she surely impressed me. Loren and their first drummer, Art Phelps, occasionally stopped by when we practiced. Once, I was still living in my parents’ house on Hayford when I suddenly heard all this noise out front. It was the Dogs and a few others parking their motorcycles on my front lawn.”
Today
Fortunately, the founding members of the Dogs are no longer getting cuffed and booked. Molinare, who lives in the Los Angeles area with his family, recently retired after years of working in music business sales and marketing. Kay, 76, lives in Las Vegas and teaches tai chi at her 55-and-over community. But the term “retired” is used loosely in their cases. Recording and touring with the Dogs remains a priority.
While they’re separated from Lansing by approximately 2,000 miles, mid-Michigan is pulling them back for another homecoming show, their first in years, on Oct. 17 at Grewal Hall at 224. The Dogs will headline, with their friends’ bands the Drastics and the Strains warming up the stage. The following night, the Dogs will headline at the Lager House in Detroit, their adopted hometown.
On drums for this tour is Rob Klonel, filling the shoes of Tony Matteucci, who recently left the Dogs after playing with the group since 1983. Fans can expect to hear the group’s blood-pumping classics, like “Slash Your Face,” “Fed Up,” “Younger Point of View” and “Motor City Fever.” Their new single, “Secret Place,” is also on the 90-minute setlist.
For those needing to catch up on the band’s ferocious catalog of songs, Rum Bar Records releases “Unleashed,” a 24-song, 55-year retrospective album, next week.
“I retired a year and a half ago, but since I retired, I’ve been busier than ever,” Molinare admitted. “Now, I can spend all day on music.”
Roots
“My earliest memories are of living on Grand River and Turner in an apartment, right above where Pablo’s Mexican Restaurant is now,” Molinare said. “After my mother met my stepdad, we moved in there.”
From there, Molinare’s family lived on almost every side of the city. His stepfather worked locally at Motor Wheel Corp., and his mother was a homemaker. In short, he says, “I’m a Lansing-born-and-raised rock ‘n’ roller.”
Though she later became a Lansing resident, Kay’s earliest memories are of growing up three-and-a-half hours north of the capital city.
“I grew up in Petoskey,” she said. “I lived there with my grandparents. It was all Polish music in the churches and everywhere because that’s what I am, Polish Catholic. I grew up speaking Polish before English.”
By age 12, Kay had moved to the Downriver region of Detroit with her parents. During high school, she discovered the 1960s rock ‘n’ roll and pop music that saturated the Motor City airwaves. From Motown to the Beatles, she was all in. One of her fellow rebellious classmates was future MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer.
“I cut my hair like Ringo,” Kay recalled. “I didn’t think anything was wrong with it, but everybody looked at me like I was crazy.”
Over in Lansing, Molinare was on a similar trajectory.
“One Christmas, my mother played Elvis Presley’s ‘Blue Christmas’ album,” Molinare said. “I was 4 or 5, it was the late ‘50s, and I was just like, ‘Wow!’ It turned me on, and then the transistor radio days came along. I loved the Everly Brothers, Del Shannon and always watched ‘American Bandstand.’”
During the British Invasion of the mid-1960s, he started his first garage band while attending Dwight Rich Junior High School. This early band included Phelps, the future drummer of the Dogs.
While the group was fond of bands like the Animals and the Kinks, Molinare also had a few local heroes that looked up to.
“We would go to WILS’ battle of the bands and see the Plagues, the Ferraris and New Paris Bakery. But the Frightened Trees were just the coolest to me. They had that dark kind of thing going on,” he said.
The Dogs are born
As 1970 loomed, the poppy Lansing garage scene melted into the heavier progressive rock scene, and the Dogs were officially born. Although the group had already been gigging for more than a year as Virgin Thunder, the rebrand came after Molinare and Phelps were hipped to Iggy and the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by their new friend Kay, who’d just relocated from Petoskey to Lansing.
“I heard that and said, ‘We should call the band the Dogs!’” Molinare said. “I went home and told my mother, ‘We’re calling the band the Dogs!’ She was appalled by it. She said, ‘That’s all you think of yourselves?’ I thought, ‘This is good. My mom hates it, we’re getting a reaction!’”
Kay met Molinare and Phelps during a stormy period of her life. She had run away from home and landed in Lansing. While staying at a YMCA, she saved money for a bass guitar.
“The first song I ever learned was ‘Groovin,’ by the Young Rascals,” she recalled. “Then I just kept on learning.”
The band was steadily cutting its teeth at local high school gigs and parties across the state and even pierced the Detroit scene, opening for bands like Brownsville Station and the Rationals. All the while, Molinare was still a student at Everett High School.
“On Friday afternoons, I used to split school and drive out to play these frat kegger parties at these universities,” Molinare said. “We made $300 to $500 a weekend in 1969. Local bands today don’t make that kind of money. It was crazy.”
Molinare recalled opening for the band’s Michigan rock idols, MC5, at the Crystal Palladium on Crystal Lake that year. It proved to be a sobering experience.
“I was just riveted that a band could be that powerful,” he said. “But I remember Wayne Kramer asking Mary after the show, ‘Do you have any money I can borrow?’ I’m thinking, ‘These guys are signed to Atlantic Records and have no money?’ Now I understand that even if you sign a record deal, you can be just as broke as before.”
“Ron was a juvenile delinquent”
“After I graduated, things started changing in the band,” Molinare said. “Our drummer, Art Phelps, got married and ended up leaving the band. That’s when Ron Wood came into the band on drums. Ron was a juvenile delinquent in Lansing. I think he quit school in eighth grade. We hit it off with him great because he was a thug like (the Stooges drummer) Scott Asheton.”
Years later, in the summer of 1980, when hardcore band the Fix was Lansing’s newest punk outfit, Fix vocalist Steve Miller said he witnessed Wood’s wildman reputation firsthand.
“The Dogs weren’t part of our awareness when the Fix formed,” Miller said. “But Ron Wood, who had been their drummer, was part of the local scene. He was a badass troublemaker who made everything fun. Ron hosed down a Fix crowd of maybe 40 people with a fire extinguisher at a show at Hobie’s in downtown Lansing. He looked like he was working while he did it. Straight-faced, focused. I was a fan of his ever after.”
The Dogs hit their stride in the early-to-mid 1970s with their new drummer in place. The power trio moved to Detroit, making it easier than ever to gig across the city.
“Things started moving quite quickly — the sound and direction of the band,” Molinare said. “It got to the point where we were so punk rock, and the word didn’t even exist yet.”
On Dec. 27, 1974, legal woes once again hounded the Dogs after they opened a big show for Bob Seger at the Toledo Sports Arena.
“We were supposed to play right before Seger,” Molinare said. “We were all set up in front of 9,000 kids when Seger’s road manager tried telling us, ‘You guys are going to close the show instead of Bob. Bob’s tired and wants to go home to Ann Arbor.’
“We said, ‘We’ve been here all day! We’re not going to close the show, we’re already set up,’” Molinare continued. “And then they said, ‘Fuck you! If you play, you’re going to jail.’”
The next thing Kay remembers is police officers overtaking the stage.
“They beat us all up, chased us around the place and then took us all to jail,” she recalled.
Somehow, Molinare avoided getting booked that time around.
“They took Mary and Ron and our roadies to jail,” he said. “I was the only one in the band that didn’t get arrested. They all got charged with felony charges for inciting a riot. The court threw it out the next Monday.”
New York
Word spread following the Seger incident, and the Dogs were banned by Diversified Management Agency, the leading rock booking agency in the state. But that wasn’t a problem for the band, which had moved to New York City in August 1973 in search of a record deal.
What drew them out east? The New York Dolls had ignited a groundbreakingly grimy glam scene, and East Coast punk was about to redefine pop culture. Venues like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City were blossoming, and soon-to-be rock legends flooded Manhattan with new sounds. The Dogs wanted in.
“We hit the road to New York with no place to live,” Molinare said. “I remember my dear old mother asking, ‘Where are you going to live?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, Mom, we’re gonna make it.’ She started crying as we drove off. God bless her. But it was it was the most righteous thing to do. We were innocent, naive kids from Michigan, and we learned a lot when we hit the streets of Manhattan.”
Luckily for Molinare’s mother’s blood pressure, the band immediately found a place to stay. On their first day in the city, the Michiganders met a still-unsigned KISS. Molinare quickly sweet-talked the makeup-faced Paul Stanely into having the Dogs open a KISS show at the Coventry in Queens. Soon after, the group crossed paths with the likes of the Dictators, Suicide and future Blondie singer Debbie Harry.
“The Ramones would walk by us and say, ‘Cut your hair, you hippies,’” Kay said. “But overall, I didn’t like New York. I needed space, and New York didn’t have any space.”
Sunset Strip
Still restless, the Dogs decided to ditch the Big Apple and return to Detroit in fall 1974. They headed down to Florida the following year but then rerouted to Hollywood’s Sunset Strip.
“Los Angeles was happening,” Molinare said. “We got a new manager, and we ended up recording. We were one of the first LA-based bands to play Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. The Dead Kennedys opened for us, and then we recorded the infamous ‘Slash Your Face’ EP up there in ‘78.
“We were on a roll for a while,” he continued. “We opened for AC/DC’s American debut at the Whisky, played with Van Halen and opened for the Ramones. We did a lot of shit from ‘76 to ‘78.”
One night in ‘78, they encountered another punk legend, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, who attended a Dogs show in LA. The Pistols were days away from playing their final show at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, and Vicious was his usual, belligerent self. During the Dogs’ cover of “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” Vicious’ eyes pointed toward Kay’s bass.
“Sid came up on stage and wanted me to give up my bass,” Kay recalled. “I said, ‘Fuck you, Sid Vicious! I’m from Detroit. You’re only from London!’”
Molinare said there’s no video of the event, but there’s a still photo and an audio bootleg.
“There’s a recording of it that our late friend John Lindemann had,” Molinare said. “Halfway through the song, Sid got up and tried to sing. He was told, ‘Fuck you!’ and then tried to grab Mary’s bass, and she said, ‘Fuck off!’ He shuffled off the stage. We punked the punker.”
Never-ending story
In the following months, the Dogs ditched LA and attempted a career in England, but in January 1979, they came back “demoralized,” Molinare recalled. During the 1980s, an identity crisis hit, and the band temporarily rebranded as Attack and hired a woman lead singer.
“By the mid-‘80s, I said, ‘Fuck this, we’re going back to the Dogs,” Molinare said. “We started getting back to our roots. In the late ‘80s, ‘Slash Your Face’ was bootlegged on this popular ‘Killed by Death’ punk compilation. From that, this whole new generation of kids knew about the Dogs. We relearned to be who we are because of bootleggers. We got our shit back on track.”
While the Dogs never hit mainstream success or landed a major-label record deal, their cult status is strong. The original “Slash Your Face” vinyl sells for upwards of $500 and has been reissued a few times, most recently by Almost Ready Records. In the 1990s, Molinare was busy touring and recording with his other band, Little Caesar, which scored a deal with Geffen Records. But since the 2000s, the Dogs have consistently pressed new records, DVDs and reissues. Today, the band still gigs consistently, especially across the West Coast.
They toured Japan, where Kay and Molinare said they were treated like the Beatles. Fans cried when they walked on stage, a high point in their long career.
But the band is making no bones about it: The upcoming concert at Grewal Hall is also significant. It could very well be the Dogs’ final Lasing show.
“I guess this was my idea,” Kay said. “You know, let’s go back one more time. I have grandkids in Michigan that have never seen me play. I’ve got to make that happen.”
Molinare echoed that sentiment.
“We’re spending a lot of money to come back because if we don’t do it now, it’ll be one of those things we regret on our deathbeds,” he said. “We’re going to think, ‘We were fucking wimps and didn’t have the balls come back!’ We need to come back and play for our people and ourselves. It’ll be a celebration.”
Follow the Dogs at facebook.com/motorcityfever.
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