On first inspection, there’s nothing that unusual about Meric Long when he sloshes in from a rainstorm to take shelter in his neighborhood taqueria in San Francisco’s Mission District. Look closely, however, and you’ll spy huge, pointy talons jutting out from his fingerless gloves.
“They’re my dragon nails—fake but really strong,” explains Long, who employs them in plucking a tinny old National guitar in his anachronistic folk/punk duo the Dodos. “I used my real nails for a while, then we left on tour; after two shows, they just broke. So now I even have a manicurist, but I poke through everything.” He claws the air for emphasis. “I can’t help it! I’m dangerous, I tell ya!”
Look even closer, beneath the ash-pale 27-year-old’s shaggy black bangs, and some subtly exotic features become evident. “My mom is from Tahiti, but she’s Chinese,” says Long. “And my dad’s from Oakland, but he’s white as snow.” For an entire summer, Long relocated to Tahiti, worked at his uncle’s bread shop and soaked up as much culture as he coud, which could account for the far-off, tribal feel of Visiter (Frenchkiss), the Dodos’ second album.
“I went to some drumming ceremonies in Tahiti, and the drumming is really random there, not polyrhythmic like African drumming is,” says Long, as his own powerhouse percussionist, Logan Kroeber, ducks in out of the rain to join him. “But they have dancers who are really the centerpiece of it all, so it’s pretty much just drummers and one beautiful woman, shaking her butt faster than humanly possible. It’s incredible—everybody in the audience is transfixed, just watching her butt.”
Long studied West African Ewe drumming, experimented with difficult Asian devices such as the two-stringed erhu and wound up playing with a gamelan ensemble. But once he stumbled upon vintage blues artists such as Mississippi John Hurt, his retro fingerpicking style was set. Meeting the metal-minded Kroeber led to 2006’s Beware Of The Maniacs and now Visiter, whose name and childish-scrawl artwork were taken from a gig the Dodos played for a special-ed class.
Long’s music is every bit as unorthodox as his background, with the only constant being his classic-crooner singing voice. There are a few gentle janglers, but Visiter is all over the aesthetic map, with arena-rock stomp (“Jodi,” “Paint The Rust”), tom-tom pounding (“Winter”), locomotive chugging (“Red And Purple”) and even a rumination on shuffling through a city park unnoticed (“Park Song”). This eccentric-yet-accessible approach is tailor-made for today’s heavily hip-factored TV-series soundtracks, and it seems a long way from the sounds of Tahiti.
“I’m gonna try to make it back there someday soon,” vows Long. “Come to think of it, I don’t know why I ever left. I should’ve stayed there.”
At which point Kroeber’s hand shoots up like a rocket to interject. “Uh, hey, if you don’t mind, Meric, I wouldn’t mind going to Tahiti.”
After all, what cruel fate could ever befall a friendly Dodo on some scenic tropical island?
—Tom Lanham
