In 1989, Go Dog Go entered the audio studio at Webster University, laying down tracks with a fan, musician, and budding audio engineer in WU student John Consiglio. In 2019, a bit of that work’s about ready for public release. Things happen. Things happened.
Like, the band recorded more, with longtime friend Perry Emge at his IKON Studio, after which, the band broke up before a proper release. And the 16-track master tapes traveled to a series of homes, apartments, and studios. And the players went on to do more music with more musicians. And, at one point, that WU master had to be baked (as in: oven-baked) to help loosen up the tape, making the thing playable again after being bound tightly for decades; it’s a one-shot process, though, and a baked tape had better come of the process in better shape than before, or… well, a project like Where Did becomes a lost masterpiece. And here we are today.
Tracy Wynkoop was the bassist of Go Dog Go and the player in the group who says that he never fully forgot the tracks that his band laid down for that decades-ago student project. Within the past year, he’s been chipping away at a solo album, which has also been years in the build-up. Wanting to strengthen his mixing and mastering ears on something else first, he decided that the Go Dog Go tracks would serve as useful test material. The band’s longtime friend, Emge, baked the tape (at his home base in the Pacific Northwest), transferring digital files to Wynkoop (who has long resided in Colorado), with Wynkoop bouncing the progress past his bandmates (who all live in St. Louis). The songs had traveled a long way from that first session in Webster Groves.
“Perry’s been living in Seattle and he found the tapes some time ago,” Wynkoop remembers. “He had to find someplace that had that oven; I’m not sure if it’s true, but I understand that the tape baking next to us was one of Nirvana’s. The process loosens the tape up, then tightens it up again when it cools off so that it’s back in good shape.”
That done, the tape can be run exactly one time before its playability is extinguished. Once Emge determined that the tracks were salvageable, Wynkoop continued his mission.
“Yeah, I’ve thought about the songs a long time,” he says. “We weren’t even quite finished when we left the studio, but there was enough there to release something, I thought.”
He ran the multiple steps of the process by his bandmates: drummer Benet Schaeffer, guitarist Mark Gray and multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Dominic Schaeffer. As with any art that passes through the decades, creators can stress out that their earliest works don’t hold up and Wynkoop had private concerns that someone, or another, may have enough reservations to put things back on hold, but “they gave me their blessing.”
That’s maybe not surprising, in that the majority of the band (the Schaeffers and Wynkoop) had already shared a life prior to Go Dog Go, via the influential Wax Theatricks (aka Earwacks). Like Wax Theatricks, Go Dog Go wasn’t a big draw around town, per se, and Wynkoop jokes that “we practiced when we played.” But play they did, at locations like Blueberry Hill, Cicero’s Basement Bar, Off Broadway, and the Broadway Oyster Bar. The group also served as mentors to other groups, like Consiglio’s A Perfect Fit, which would itself assist a burgeoning young group called The Urge. It’s not a huge stretch to say that Go Dog Go played a key role in a transitioning music scene at the dawn of the '90s, as multiple groups were toying around rock/funk fusions. Go Dog Go were cool, older brothers.
Although also a perfectionist about the quality of the sound, Wynkoop’s hoping that the material finds some ears among the band’s cadre of original fans. He’s created a label, Redd Records, to help get the material in the world, with his own solo debut following the Go Dog Go four-song EP, Where Did.
“It’s been fun,” he says. “There’s still a lot of work to do and it’s taken me a long time. But if there’s a good reaction from the first four songs” he’ll release the fuller complement of Consiglio- and Emge-recorded tracks as a fuller album, to be called Reward and released by the end of the year.
Unlike other groups that reunite for shows around the holidays, there won’t be a reunion show planned for Go Dog Go. A year ago, Wyknoop was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Since receiving the news, he’s sold his basses, being unable to play his lifelong instrument to his satisfaction. These days, he says that illness has affected him in different ways, “like my voice and balance.” Playing bass, he says, was like “I was 12 years old, first trying and learning how to play. It’s been weird not playing bass, very odd.”
The mixing and mastering work, he says, he can still tackle and he’s committed to, forgive the pun, mastering the art of mastering. (After sending some files of Go Dog Go material, he follows up with several questions about how it sounded in different environments, ever-working and curious.) The results will come out today on various streaming services, with four tracks from the late '80s possibly finding a new audience and certainly pleasing those who heard the material then.
Although he’d been coming to St. Louis for regular visits over the years, he’s been doing that less over the past year. This process, he says, has allowed him to reconnect with some old friends, his bandmates at that heart of that.
That near-lifelong connection, he says “is fantastic, it really is. It’s the best thing in the world.”
