Localized – Top Dead Celebrity, Døne and Despite Despair

Døne

As you’ve likely noticed, Andy Patterson is all over this goddamn city in the form of band membership. But hey, that’s because he’s been playing music here since ’89. He grew up jamming with the likes of bassist Cache Tolman, and their long-standing friendship has been underpinned by their mutual love for playing music. Patterson says, “We’re brothers, man. We’ve been playing forever, [and] it’s easy. Cache says, ‘I have some new songs,’ and we get together and we make new songs.” The ease with which the two joke reveals that Døne’s roots go deep. As Tolman says, “He’s like Meg, and I’m like Jack.”

After Patterson got in trouble with his parents and switched schools in 1989, the late Dave Runyan approached him and suggested that Patterson join the band Advance, whose drummer had just left to tour with The Dead. Tolman played bass in Advance, and Patterson saw them open for Chain of Strength. Patterson says, “I saw that show and [thought], ‘I don’t know what this scene is, but I definitely want to be a part of it.’” He later joined the band in its incarnation as Search. From there, Patterson and Tolman continued to be buddies. Tolman engaged in his tenure as a member of Iceburn in the early ’90s, then moved to Los Angeles, and finally to New York in ’98. “When I’d come home from New York, I’d always go in the studio to hang [with Patterson],” says Tolman. When Tolman returned to Salt Lake for good in 2006, the first person he called was Patterson, to get the jamming monkey off his back. As a musician, Tolman also has a proclivity to ‘play around,’ as it were, and started a preliminary band, CTSC, with the same drummer Patterson had replaced in Search. As history is wont to repeat itself, Patterson ultimately replaced him to form the bass/drum duo, Døne, with Tolman. “Basically, the same thing happened, but 20 years later,” Tolman says.

Døne played their first show at the first Crucial Fest in June of 2011 … after zero proper rehearsals. Being the musical friends that they are, Tolman and Patterson booked time at Mike Sasich’s studio to simply lay down some tracks. “We went in, set up drums, set up Cache’s rig … Cache showed me a riff, I played drums to it … [One] song was done, so we moved on to the next song. I think it was, like, 11 or 12 songs later—four hours later—we had a record,” says Patterson. “Then I get a call from Cache saying, ‘Hey man, we have a show.’ I said, ‘What do you mean we have a show—we don’t know any songs.’ And he was like, ‘What do you mean? We have a record!’” So, the day of Crucial Fest, Patterson “practiced” by “standing around Bar Deluxe all day, waiting for all the other bands to play, listening to our record on earbuds, trying to remember how they went,” he says. “Even onstage, I had my iPod in, and I would just skip to the next song and listen to the first couple seconds of it.” Aside from one slip-up on a song that Patterson had skipped over, the two musicians demonstrated their comfort with each other’s styles on the stage. Anderson continues, “It was kind of a trial by fire. But we’ve been playing together for so long that we have a vibe [where] I kind of know where he’s going with something.”

Although Døne has played a relatively small number of shows since then—one at Burt’s, two more at Urban and the second Crucial Fest—Patterson and Tolman’s minimalist musical approach puts the cherry on top of their already tight delivery. When I ask Tolman why bass is the only melodic instrument in Døne, he says, “It’s just the heaviest one they make … The other one’s got too many strings, and it’s all little. And I’ve been doing bass since the late ’80s. It served a purpose, and I figured out how to do it sonically.” The two keep it short and to the point with songs generally under two minutes. Not to say that the duo is lazy in terms of their composition, though—Tolman throws down some mad highs on that bass guitar of his (as he is also a closet guitarist), and his singing soars atop the instrumentation in a controlled tenor timbre, while Patterson strikes on-beat to generate stoner rock-influenced shots in the arm.

Døne’s debut album (or first band practice), Døne I, Døne ‘Em All, is available for donations at donebandmusic.bandcamp.com, but you may want to wait for Localized to obtain it: They’ll have the album available on tape, which will be the first release of a four-tape campaign, which will culminate in a double-vinyl release with each tape album on a side of a slab o’ wax. After Localized, the two-piece will start tracking their sophomore release, Døne II Much, But Not Enough. Aside from that, you’ll be able to find Døne “when something cool comes up,” as Patterson puts it.