At Work: Dogs In A Pile
photo credit: Ron Adelberg
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Dogs in a Pile are a young band. In fact, none of the five musicians are even old enough to have experienced a quarter-life crisis. Yet, some of the Asbury Park, N.J.-bred group’s members have already been jamming together for over a decade. Guitarist/ vocalist Jimmy Law and drummer Joe Babick are both the sons of Deadhead musicians and came of age in the shade of the Jersey Shore’s rich musical scene.
“Joe and I met around 2010— I was about 10 years old, and Joe was 5 or 6,” Law recalls during a Zoom call with the rest of his bandmates from their home studio. “We started jamming together because we both had instruments around our houses. And we kept playing together.” While still a pre-teen, Law started performing at Asbury Park’s iconic Stone Pony and sharing the stage with veteran players like Splintered Sunlight’s Butchy Sochorow, Juggling Suns’ Mark Diomede and Waynard Scheller of Rainbow Full of Sound.
Dogs in a Pile’s current iteration coalesced in 2018 when Law and Babick were introduced to fellow Garden State native and Berklee College of Music student, bassist Sam Lucid, who then connected them with his classmate, keyboardist/ multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Kaplan. Raised in Bellmore, N.Y., Kaplan started playing music professionally long before the first chin hair of his now burly beard sprouted and even received a scholarship from Billy Joel to study at the prestigious Boston school. A year later, another Berklee student, Manhasset, N.Y. guitarist Brian Murray signed on to complete the group’s current lineup.
“The first time Sam and I hung out at school, he invited me over to his apartment to smoke weed and hang. And, he had this funny little keyboard in his apartment so we started just bullshitting and talking music,” Kaplan says. “Then he asks me if I know ‘What a Fool Believes’ by The Doobie Brothers. And I’m like, ‘Of course!’”
The quintet quickly made inroads on the Northeast jamband scene, scoring choice gigs along the Jersey Shore and incubator spots at Port Chester, N.Y.’s Garcia’s. Despite some pandemic-related setbacks, they continued to perform as often as possible during the past two years.
“We all push each other to work really hard,” Lucid adds. “In the other bands that I was in, it was always difficult when the other people were not as passionate as I was about it. Everyone really wants to work hard in this band.”
Dogs in a Pile’s studio debut, Not Your Average Beagle, is a conscious blend of the quintet’s collective musical interests and love of jamming. “It’s improvised, and it’s fun,” muses Kaplan, who also produced the album. “As educated musicians, we’ve been exposed to a lot of stuff, and we enjoy a lot of different types of music. There’s shock rock, bluegrass, EDM, funk, jazz.” Additionally, despite growing up in the streaming era, the group made a conscious decision to sequence the record like a classic LP.
“That fusion makes it so that this journey through the jam world is unexpectedly filled with all these twists and turns,” Law says of the band’s next steps. “It’s almost hard to pinpoint where the hell we might be.”
