Smoker Dad Roll on Down a “Hotdog Highway”
On Hotdog Highway, Smoker Dad - a sextet spearheaded by brothers Derek and Trevor Conway - get closer to the veiny lineage of bands that were, per Greil Marcus, “committed to the very idea of America: complicated, dangerous, and alive.” Granted, it’s been exactly one half-century since he wrote that; things have changed. This country is hyperopic now - we’re more connected with cities thousands of miles away than the people who live down the street. “Rock n’ roll,” which Smoker Dad adhered to in a more general sense on their self-titled release and earlier, has no new ideas left; everything is destined to die at the hands of its creators, and rock is the archetypical example of this axiom. So at first you might hear the breakneck blues progression of “Armadillo” or the hazy swing of “On My Mind” and think “Oh boy, here comes another gang of ‘old souls’ exiled on Main Street.”
It’s not that serious, you know. It’s just six American men, peripatetic creatures of the double-lined highway, playing songs about taking shots and taking drugs and taking snapshots of life as a live band. Ignore what could be a double entendre; Hotdog Highway is meant to conjure the image of a pack of ballpark franks rolling along the cracks and sucking up dirt along the way. That’s the grand privilege of being an American band, where life and death bookend countless gas station runs and dingy venues with too many free drink tickets.
The band start painting that landscape within the opening moments of “PART II,” where Chris Costalupes’ pedal steel and Derek Luther’s bass imitate a big old vehicle sputtering to life. (Its title insinuates a continuation without a discernible beginning - there is no “Part I”) And then like the roadside blur of billboards and chain restaurants, the itinerant life prevails. Hearts are strung along, beer bottles clink conspiratorially, stocks of cigarettes run out and are refreshed, the cycle of nighttime revelry and daytime rumination rolls on.
In a way, it’s the ideal kind of record for a band that are meant to be seen live, which also means it’s kind of hard to review. The spirit of this kind of music has been evinced for nearly the entirety of recording technology - it’s not a coincidence that a rollicking version of Kokomo Arnold’s “Milk Cow Blues” fits seamlessly between two songs with “drinking” in the titles. And yet there’s a peculiar rebellion in summoning that spirit during an era that hardly remembers what it originally stood for. After “Rollin’ On’s” classically lengthy guitar solo lay a rhetorical question: “This shit ain’t workin’/Why do I sing along?” Right after, the answer: “Let’s go out tonight.”