Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the Music Lab podcast. My name is Doug and I'm so excited to be back with all of you for another episode of the podcast. Today we have Sam Calagione all the way from Maine, the CEO and founder of Dogfish Head. Welcome my friend. How are you?
I am wonderful. This is kismet. When Dog and Dogfish Head collide, who will prevail? Both of us. I hope.
It's like Outlast. Are you watching that show on Netflix?
It's pretty good. Yeah. What people will do when you haven't eaten in 30 days?
Oh jeez. I got to see that. That's never happened to me, though.
So, I want to, you know, some interviews that I do with bands and music professionals, I kind of start from the beginning or sometimes I start in present tense with you. You guys just celebrated 31 years of Dogfish. When I say that to you, what does that mean?
It makes the gray hairs on my chin tingle because I started, I've never really had another job. I started working on the business plan after graduating from college. I went to New York City and was taking some writing courses, working at a beer bar, not knowing it was a beer bar. I just went in to get a job at a bar, but it was a first generation craft beer bar and I fell in love with good beer. Within six months I bought a homebrew kit and started writing the business plan for Dogfish. So I've been really lucky to make my passion my vocation the entire way. Time flies when you're having fun or 60-minute IPA.
They say that living in New York City in the '90s was just a heyday. Talk about that experience for you. Was it?
Oh, it was amazing. I mean, just seeing shows and seeing Jeff Buckley at Sin-é and all the jam bands, like Blues Traveler and Spin Doctors playing tiny rooms there. And I just got really lucky. I moved in with these guys that we had mutual friends and they happened to be in a comedy group at NYU called The State. Right when we started moving in together, they got greenlit to do a show on MTV. So we were hanging out with all the folks on MTV. Craig Wedren from Shudder to Think became a good friend from that era. And it's full circle because a bunch of the guys had a great career, made movies like Wet Hot American Summer, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Reno 911. Now a bunch of them are traveling as a band called The Middle Aged Dad Jam Band and they sometimes travel with Weird Al Yankovic and a bunch of other cast of characters. So I've been really lucky to have all these creative people as part of my life since I started home brewing.
Well, you say it's a brewery with a music problem. I'm sure my listeners are going to see this episode and be like, why the hell is a brewery owner on here? But talk about why you have a music problem.
Well, I grew up kind of in the middle of nowhere. I was born in Queens, New York City, but my parents moved to the hills of western Massachusetts when I was 2 years old. I always proudly say I'm from New York. Being nowhere near a city, on the border of Vermont, the one thing that made me really lucky is again, this is the '90s, and to quote the great Minneapolis punk band The Replacements, they have a song called Left of the Dial. It's all about those indie and college stations that you'd find between 88 and 91 on your FM dial. Living in Western Mass, I could get the high school and radio stations for Hampshire College, UMass, Smith, Amherst. So I would spend my nights as a pre-teen just wandering the dial and I'd hear a hip-hop show from two kids from the Bronx that were at UMass, and then a punk rock show by these crazy women at Smith. It made me realize there were all these genres of music out there that weren't just top 40. That really informed my journey as a music lover.
Do you remember what you listened to when you guys made that trek down to Delaware?
When what do you mean which trek down to Delaware?
Well, like when you decided to move from New York City down to Delaware, do you remember what you were listening to? What your soundtrack was?
Yeah, I do. There was a song that we ended up using for when we did a show on the Discovery Channel by the Replacements called Beer for Breakfast. But I remember the first day I plugged in my brewing system in coastal Delaware and was, boom, the first day I was actually a professional brewer. I try to always listen to front-to-back albums in the brew house and the first one was Bee Thousand by Guided by Voices. That was a full circle moment when we got to collaborate with Robert Pollard and the band maybe 12 years ago on Beer Thousand. I think it was the 20th anniversary of that epic album. So I definitely remember that as the first album we played in the brew house.
Can you share a conversation that you had with Robert that you can share with the audience?
Yeah. So, my son's now as big a music head as I am and we share a love of Grateful Dead and punk rock. He's a 25-year-old sous chef at a fancy restaurant up here in Maine, but he has the musical taste of like a 64-year-old environmental lawyer. He's like Dylan and Phish and stuff like that. But I remember when Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices came and played Dogfish, I took him for a tour through the brewery and Robert Pollard walked right up to the bottling line and we were bottling the Miles Davis beer that we did called Bitches Brew and it comes in a giant 750 ml champagne bottle. He just grabs it off the bottling line. Totally. That one. Holy shit. You're giving me flashbacks, dog. Hell yeah. So he grabbed that bottle right off the bottling line and just started pounding it. Then he got on stage like two hours later and the show was too big to play in our room, so I rented out an old theater in Milton that hadn't been open for music. It had only been open for movies. So Guided by Voices plugs in, turns the amps to 11. The room's vibrating so much that the gold leaf paint on the ceiling is chipping off from the bass sounds. It looked like we were all standing in a snow globe. We're all drinking our faces off and paint is falling through the room as they played. Robert Pollard kept passing a bottle of tequila to me from the stage. He fell off the stage that night. They set up a full service bar on the stage. My son after the show got a poster signed by Robert, and Robert forgot that he also signed one for my son before the show. On the car ride home, my son was looking at both of them and said, 'Dad, how come the poster Robert Pollard signed after the show looked like a person's heartbeat that went into cardiac arrest where it just flatlined after like two bumps in it? Because he'd been having such a good time on stage last night, I don't think he could write anymore.'
I mean, that's a good segue. Do you have a piece of music, like an artifact, that you're most proud of, like a poster or an instrument?
Yeah, probably. I could tell you so many. The most prolific artist that I have paintings of from the music world is a musician named Jon Langford, who is in the famous first generation UK punk band The Mekons, coming out of Leeds, England in the late '70s. Fear and Whiskey is an album I'd recommend to your listeners by The Mekons. So I have a lot by him, but maybe the favorite is here in my cabin in Maine. I have a painting of a diver, like a 19th century diver, that was painted by Shane MacGowan from The Pogues. I bought it at a gallery. He had a show. I just missed his wife at the show. This was a year before he died. The gallerist said, 'Oh, you just missed Shane's wife.' I said, 'Well, I think I'm going to buy this painting.' Funny story she told me about that painting: Shane MacGowan took acid and was listening to the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds when he painted that. He cracked the 33 and a third album of Pet Sounds with a hammer and started eating it. He loved the album so much when he was on LSD that he wanted to ingest Pet Sounds so it became part of his body. He did that while painting the painting that hangs in our kitchen above my stereo system. So that one's probably the dearest to my heart.
That's awesome. That's such a cool story. So, you know, when you're starting out, one of the pillars of the company was original music. I commend you for that because for anyone that doesn't know the coastal Delaware area, 90% of the bars and restaurants have cover bands. There's nothing wrong with that, but you guys set out to deliberately just do original music. Talk about how much you think that was part of your success.
Yeah. As you said, it was one of the pillars. In fact, our sort of holy trinity was from the day we opened as the smallest commercial brewery in America in 1995. Our rallying cry was original beer, original food, original music. As you mentioned, at beach towns up and down the east coast, Jimmy Buffett cover bands are a dime a dozen. We had that in coastal Delaware and we said, you know what, we're going to do something where we only invite people where over 90% of what music they played was their own songs. We would have local acts that would kick ass sometimes, some would implode on stage, but then we'd get a lot of national acts on their way up or on their way down. We had The Strokes and Geese and Goose on their way up, and we had PM Dawn and Vic Chesnutt, rest in peace, on their way down. We had a whole litany of artists from across so many different genres. It's super cool to me. We have a whole wall as an homage to all the bands that played Dogfish that kind of made it, whether it was Japanese Breakfast or Chicano Batman. So it's a big part of our DNA. As we evolved from just booking original bands to collaborating with them, it really helped establish our bona fides as real music fans to talk to Miles Davis's family about having Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas play our stage, or Preservation Hall Jazz Band. It created real connections with musicians that led to really deep collaborative projects where it wasn't just about them on the stage but literally envisioning and creating beers together and labels together with so many artists. That has been central to our brand's distinction among 10,000 beer brands in the country, and also to our success.
Yeah. And Sam, I remember when I worked at the pub, the original pub, there was an electricity, an energy when bands played at that pub. Talk about that experience for a guest at the pub.
Yeah, that room, as you know, was very small, very intimate, low ceiling. Maybe we get 140 people in there on a good day. The sound was wonderful. It was a very warm wood because it was all wood with wood rafters. It was a sweet spot of sound. We would ply the musicians with free beer all afternoon while they were loading in and make sure they would go home with a ton of beer. We had more beer than money in those days, so we were very liberal with the alcohol on the way in and on the way out, which made for some wonderfully loose gigs on our stage. The stage was only like 12 inches off the ground and we would pull the tables out and put them upstairs. So the audience and the act were essentially in this great equilibrium. It was very personal and passionate. I can remember so many shows where afterwards the artists would say, 'I haven't played a room this small in 5 years, but I had an absolute blast. Thank you for letting us come and play.' I used to let the artists stay in my house when I couldn't afford hotel rooms. There were some crazy nights back at home keeping the party going with Will Oldham, who records as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, and The Handsome Family from Chicago would stay at my house. There was no separation of church and state when it came to how we embraced the artists that came through Dogfish Head.
Well, I feel you. We've started to house some bands and artists too that have been coming through town because the number one thing for artists now is the travel cost. Hotels are so expensive. If you need three or four rooms for the band, tour manager, sound guy, it really adds up.
Yeah. I have so much heart for touring musicians or just musicians in general right now. When you put the economics of a world that's shifted to primarily streaming into that mix, it becomes even more challenging. If I love an album, I'm very lucky that the brewery's been successful enough that I don't need to worry about paying my electric bill. So if I love an album, my wife's given me permission every month to go out and buy that album on vinyl because that is the way to buy music that usually gets the most percentage of that purchase into the artist's pocket versus streaming services that line the pockets of the executives and shareholders.
When the original pub closes and we design 2.0, I know obviously you had a huge influence on 2.0, but how much from a music standpoint did you think about 2.0?
For those of you listeners that haven't gotten to visit Dogfish Head's music room, it's in downtown Rehoboth Beach. It's on the same piece of property that our original beautiful little wooden pub was, but that pub was really antiquated. It was super hot, like 110 degrees to work in the kitchen because we cook over a wood grill and wood oven. It was very uncomfortable for our co-workers even though it was a lovely place to drink beer and listen to shows. So we bit the bullet maybe eight or nine years ago and built a from the ground up state-of-the-art new pub. It had no more seats than the old pub, seats the same amount of people, but has a really comfortable air conditioned kitchen for my co-workers and a way more elaborate stage than the first one. A true stage. When you walk in there, you can tell it was a room that was purpose-designed for live music shows. The stage really is the centerpiece. If we're not having a show and there's a World Cup match on, we'll put other stuff on the big screen on the stage, but we shut all the screens off and give the artists the respect when we have live music on that stage.
Yeah. Getting back to the original pub, from you living in New York City to going down to coastal Delaware, the pub had a very New York City kind of dive bar music venue vibe. Is that fair to say?
Yeah, totally. I mentioned the jam bands in New York. There's a small club called Wetlands that had a very funky interior. I became good friends with the owner Pete Shapiro, who also owns Relix Magazine and all the Brooklyn Bowls. He's a great friend. But I did rip off some of the more quixotic and down and dirty graffiti-ish vibes from places like Wetlands and CBGBs to start Dogfish Head.
Yeah. So, is there a show that you saw at Dogfish that really stands out to you personally?
I'll tell you one that stood out in a bad way and one that stood out in a great way. A great way would be having The Modern Lovers play Dogfish. Literally, other than the Velvet Underground or the Ramones, I don't think there's an artist that personified the birth of punk quite as much. That one was meaningful, existential as a punk rock lover to have him and the band on my stage. But another crazy one was randomly we had these Spanish-speaking folks, very eloquent, show up and say, 'Hey, we've heard you guys have booked all these famous national artists. We are the Gipsy Kings and we have a night off and we're here on vacation in Delaware after playing Philly or New York. We would love to take your stage for $1,000 for an acoustic set.' I was like, 'Holy shit, that's so cool.' I looked on the internet and saw that the Gipsy Kings really did play in Philly or New York the night before. So we said, 'Fuck it,' put the show on, took flyers all around town because we had no time to promote. They played an amazing set, just three guys and their flamenco guitars. But the next morning I got to the brewery and I'm opening it up, this is still in the era of fax machines, must have been around '98 or '99. A fax comes through with Sony or EMI letterhead, some big record label, and they're like, 'We understand that you promoted a show last night by the Gipsy Kings. Those people were not the Gipsy Kings.' So it was a fake Gipsy Kings band going around the country doing fake shows, but they were such good musicians that people believed it. I just thought it was hilarious that they played as the Gipsy Kings because they were really like gypsies and they were kings at their subterfuge.
Well, they're nothing like the Pain Relievers.
No, no, thankfully for them. The Pain Relievers is the name of my beer geek hip-hop band that I'm in with our longest tenured brewer, Bryan Selders. We like to say we're probably the finest beer geek hip-hop band of our generation. We're also the only beer geek hip-hop band of our generation.
I mean, what was it like to play on stage as the Pain Relievers? It had to be a thrill for you, man.
Yeah, it was. We just played at the Craft Brewers Conference, a three-set in Philly like two months ago. But the absolute pinnacle of our career was the same night that it was probably the absolute bottom. What's the artist that does 'Wild Thing'? West Coast rapper. Tone Loc. So the Pain Relievers got to open for Tone Loc at a beautiful theater, I think in Portland, Oregon or Seattle. We love Tone Loc, he was awesome. His rider was that he wanted wings from Hooters and every different colored Gatorade. We loved that as a rider. So now the Pain Relievers ask for that wherever we play. There's a great video that somebody took of us going off the stage and Tone Loc going on the stage. They say, 'Hey Tone Loc, what do you think of the Pain Relievers?' He goes, 'Oh, they're really nice guys.' He listened to us playing, singing our hearts out, and he tried to say something nice. The only thing he could say nice about our rapping skills was that we were nice guys, but we'll take it.
He's a class act all around.
Own people. So good. So yeah, that was fun. If people go to YouTube and look up Pain Relievers, the last word spelled V-A-Z-V-A-Z at the end, you'll see some really fun music videos that we've done throughout the years.
So, you've met a lot of people in your career. Is there a musician that when you met him or her, you had a fanboy moment?
Yeah, so many. I would say Hall of Famer, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Joan Jett was existential for me because that was the first concert I ever saw. Then I got to interview her. I do a quarterly interview series for Creem magazine, which I grew up reading Creem, Rolling Stone, and Relix. I've gotten to collaborate with all three of those amazing music publications. That's been really heartwarming. I would also say getting an email from Phil Lesh from the Grateful Dead after he'd seen a show we'd done about Miles Davis. He reached out and said, 'Hey, we'd love to do something with you in the Grateful Dead.' When we launched our first Grateful Dead beer like 12 years ago, American Beauty, we launched it at a room called Terrapin Station, named after a Dead album, up in the Bay Area that he and his sons, who are also amazing musicians, run. Meeting him that night, he came out and said, 'Hey Sam, I got a brand new liver. I can't drink, but I smoked one up in your honor. Believe me, my sons are having plenty of your beers on that stage tonight. We're glad you're here.' That was a pretty heartwarming moment as a big Deadhead.
That's amazing. Yeah. So let's go into the Grateful Dead and the beer series. Obviously it's a no-brainer to have that relationship, but what really has been that impact to you as a business and to you personally?
Yeah. Now it's super rewarding. It's probably the most robust, intricate, dynamic, longest tenured music collaboration we have ever or will ever do. Now the centerpiece, rest in peace Phil, the centerpiece of that relationship is the relationship between myself and David Lemieux, who's the Grateful Dead's archivist and historian. I was just texting with him yesterday to celebrate a new track released by the great band Ween. They're doing an extended album release for the anniversary of their country album. They put out a song about Jerry Garcia passing on. I shared that with David Lemieux and we had a great chat about it. So it's been the most rewarding, robust, multifaceted music collaboration we've ever done. There's a text thread with me, my son Sammy who's 25, a huge Deadhead, his best friend Dash, a filmmaker who's a Deadhead, and David Lemieux. We keep running lists of underrated live tracks from the Grateful Dead. From that text thread, every year we work with Record Store Day and Dogfish Head, and now three times in a row we've released collaborative Grateful Dead Dogfish Head albums on Record Store Day featuring live tracks that my son and Dave Lemieux and I curate ourselves. That's a really fun component, not to mention the beautiful recipes themselves. We decided to not just do them as a one-off in a big fancy champagne bottle, but as everyday drinkable beers. Now our Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale, last year it was the fastest growing craft beer in all of America from any craft brewery. That one's off to a great trajectory. This year we came out with a companion beer. The first one, the Juicy Pale Ale, is an ale, but this year we came out with Citrus Daydream. That's a lager infused with lime and fonio, which is a fruity African grain.
So Grateful Dead was the first band you collaborated with? And then was it Miles Davis next? Is that chronologically how it worked?
No, I think it's actually the other way around. I think Miles was the first one because Phil Lesh saw the show about Miles Davis. That show that we did. And I think maybe the one we did with Pearl Jam came out before the first Grateful Dead one as well. We did a beer celebrating the 10th anniversary of their first album, Ten.
Yeah. So you had mentioned your first concert that you attended. My first concert was in 1996. I'm a senior in high school. Alanis Morissette comes to Hersheypark Stadium for the Jagged Little Pill tour. And this little band from England called Radiohead opened up for her.
And what year was that? 96.
