“It was as live and raw as you can get, and that was part of the attraction,” Michaud said. “We also played the right songs.”

Moon Dawgs still howling
Local 1960s band will reunite Friday for Festival FrancoFun

LEWISTON – Before they’d played a note, sweat poured from The Moon Dawgs.

The five men, all in their 50s and 60s, toted their amps and instruments up two flights of stairs into a steamy corner of drummer Bob Roy’s Lewiston warehouse.

While guitarist David Brissette tuned his aging Gibson guitar, wiping his brow as he ran through a few chords, saxophonist Roger Renaud blew the scales and bassist Bob Poulin plugged in his Fender and eased onto an amp, where he sat for the next hour.

“Ready?” asked Roger Michaud, lead singer and keyboardist.

A moment later, the group came alive.

Brissette strummed through the opening bars of the Doobie Brothers’ “Long Train Runnin'” and Michaud attacked the lyrics, singing at full volume: “Down around the corner/ Half a mile from here/ you see the old trains runnin'”

The ’60s rockers still know how to play.

And they’re preparing for their first big gig in two decades, playing Friday at 9 p.m. at the Festival FrancoFun at the Androscoggin Bank Colisee.

Are they nervous? Nope.

“After 45 years, if singing in front of a crowd is a problem, then we have a problem,” Michaud said. “There’s nothing that can happen on that stage that hasn’t happened 1,000 times before.”

The band never became so big that it hit national charts. But in its heyday – 1964, 1965 and 1966 – it was a big deal in Maine and in the Maritime Provinces. The band was written about in Cash Box magazine, and when national acts such as the Kingsmen, Freddie and the Dreamers and the Dave Clark Five came to the region, The Moon Dawgs were their opening act.

“We weren’t the greatest musicians,” Michaud said. “We weren’t the greatest anything. But we had fun doing it.”

Playing for money

They got together – and began playing in public – before they were old enough to drive.

“I was the baby,” said Brissette, 56. He was 13 when he joined Michaud, Poulin and Roy, all guys from the Androscoggin Avenue neighborhood in Lewiston.

They hung out together and quickly began performing, playing at the PAL (Police Athletic League) Hops that were a Friday night fixture at Lewiston City Hall.

Their first paying gig was a fraternity party at Colby College in Waterville. They talked an older kid, who was 16 and had a car, into joining the band so they had a ride.

“We get there and the place is packed,” Michaud said. “I had to use the piano in the basement of this frat house and half its keys didn’t work.”

Being a new band, however, they hadn’t rehearsed a lot of music.

“We had 10 songs,” Michaud said. It didn’t take long to play them all.

“We look at each other and say, ‘What do we do now?'” he recalled.

“Start again,” Brissette said.

Getting polished

By 1964, the same year the Beatles played the Ed Sullivan Show and began the era known as the British invasion, the boys were becoming polished.

“We were different because we had a saxophone and keyboards,” Brissette said.

Most of the time, the band consisted of Brissette, Michaud, Poulin and Roy. Other players would come and go. (Renaud joined in 1991).

“It was as live and raw as you can get, and that was part of the attraction,” Michaud said. “We also played the right songs.”

They played feel-good rock, songs like “Under the Boardwalk” and the Roy Orbison hit “Oh, Pretty Woman.”

“We always had so much fun playing,” Brissette said. “Every time.”

A lot of the gigs were college mixers. By 1966, they were traveling around in a blue Oldsmobile and hauling a trailer with a hand-painted moon dawg. Often, they’d make runs into New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, sometimes packing curling arenas.

“Every two weeks we’d get in the car and head to Boston to Gerald’s,” Roy said. They’d buy shiny, matching suits of sharkskin and rhinestones.

“In the summer, it was the Beach Boys look with seersuckers,” he said. “We never went on stage with jeans.”

Sometimes there were nerves, though.

When they opened for the Dave Clark Five in Portland, they felt instantly overmatched, given the band’s state-of-the-art instruments and amplifiers.

Michaud was defiant.

“We were there to show up the big band,” he said. “That was my feeling.”

It didn’t ease Brissette’s nervous when the time came to face the audience and nobody in the band moved.

“That curtain opened up, and I looked at him at said, ‘Count!'” Brissette remembered. “It was ‘Move! Let’s get going because I’m dying here.'”

They managed to start and finish unscathed. They always did. When a night went well, they had to be pulled from the stage.

“It was like, ‘The night’s over, dummy. Go home,'” Brissette said.

Still playing

Brissette still calls his work in the band “the most instantly rewarding thing I’ve done in my life.”

By the time the late 1960s hit, the band began to crumble. The guys went off to college, some joining other bands.

But they still got together from time to time. They played paying gigs in the 1970s and 1980s. The last big show was a 1987 reunion of the PAL Hop bands to benefit the United Way.

“That was the best,” said Roy. The Colisee, then called the Central Maine Youth Center, sold out all 4,500 seats.

Since then, they have played other benefits for the United Way and the Holy Family Parish. They have also played several weddings, mostly for their friends and family.

“Bob (Poulin) is an accountant. Roger’s got his business in the real estate end,” said Brissette, who works as a technician at Tambrands in Auburn. Roy owns Lewiston’s Steel Service Center.

“We’re all scattered,” Brissette said. “We get together when we have something in common. That’s music.”

Their decision to play the Festival FrancoFun was built simply on having more fun, the band members said.

They’re also having fun knowing that some of their old fans – the people who remember them during their sharkskin PAL Hop days – are looking forward to the show.

“My e-mails are full with people asking, ‘The Moon Dawgs are playing?'” Michaud said.

With their records selling on e-bay and some people wondering if their energy continues, the guys seem happy to prove doubters wrong.

As they rehearsed, the guys launched into a blistering rendition of “Runaround Sue,” with Michaud singing the words effortlessly as he played the piano.

He drew smiles from the others as they joined him in the background for the chorus:

“Here’s the moral and the story from the guy who knows,” Michaud sang. “I fell in love and my love still grows.”