Dosh's World

It was an abrupt exit from home at a time when most kids still had at least two years of restless gestation. Dosh didn't stay at Simon's Rock, but he stayed out East, trailing the Dead for a stint, living out of his van, and auditing music classes at Bard in upstate New York. He started a band and called it Como Zoo. They made frequent trips to New York City, where Terry Dosh remembers people thinking it was Cuomo Zoo, after the then-mayor of New York Mario Cuomo.

Dosh was having fun, but he was floundering and he knew it. In 1997 he decided to come back to Minneapolis. He was in deep with student loans. His parents took him in rent-free and he accepted a job teaching music to kids aged three to six and driving a school bus for Lake Country School, the Montessori school his father had co-founded. As young boys, Martin and his younger brother Paul (who is now a professor of Latin American Studies at Macalester College) were students there.

The job allowed him time to focus on his musicianship. "I realized I needed to get my shit together," Dosh says. "I wasn't taking myself seriously enough." Between shifts at the school, while his father worked from a home office on the third floor, Dosh would practice his drums in the basement for hours at a time. He started studying once a week with the rigorous and enormously talented Dave King (Happy Apple, the Bad Plus). "It wasn't noise," Terry Dosh remembers, "it was purposeful sound."

Dosh was going out constantly, zeroing in on a scene of jazz and experimental musicians who played in bands and organized informal jam sessions. He wanted in. For a while there was a jam session every Friday night the Front. At the end of the night, the musicians onstage would invite people up from the crowd. "I would always want to play drums," Dosh remembers. "I'd get there at like 10:00 and wait around all night, and they would get me up there at like five minutes to 1:00. I'd play for five minutes and the lights would come on."

Eventually, he was invited to play percussion for a spell with the Sensational Joint Chiefs, a group of well-dressed white guys with a singular focus on the horn-drenched funk and soul of an era 40 years gone. Dosh was bent on innovation. "I'd bring hubcaps down there—all kinds of weird percussion stuff. And I'd just sit there and bang on things and throw things on the floor."

In the end, innovation won. Two members of the Joint Chiefs joined Dosh in a venture they called Cropduster, then Lateduster. The band was built symmetrically: two drummers, two guitarists, and two DJs on four turntables. Eventually a drummer and a DJ fell out and Dosh started with the multitasking—setting up a keyboard alongside his drums.

Andrew Broder was in Lateduster with Dosh. "Marty has a real—I don't want to say childlike, because it's not primitive—but he's always just had a real experimental sense." When Broder struck out on his own, forming the beloved Minneapolis experimental rock band Fog, he lured Dosh in for a bit, where he continued to expand his responsibilities. "You could really see him testing the waters to see how much he could do at one time. Then he got himself a looping pedal and the rest is history."

• • • • •

DOSH MADE HIS FIRST ALBUM without any thought to performing the compositions live, he says. He just hunkered down in another basement—this one in a house he was renting owned by Lake Country School—with his looping pedal and the rest of his early rig and started recording sounds into an uncomplicated home recording setup.

He put the record out with his own money and called it Dosh. Sometime between finishing the recording and holding his self-released record in his hands, he booked a solo show at the Dinkytowner, a sort of home-base club for Twin Cities experimental music. It was 2002; he had been playing drums for 15 years and piano on and off for 24. He had never been onstage alone. Jeremy Ylvisaker, who played with Dosh in Fog, remembers that first show. "It was like teaching yourself how to juggle in front of an audience," he says.

"If something goes wrong up there," Dosh says, "even now, it could be one of 25 things that has gone wrong. The troubleshooting is the hardest part."