Social Animals are back, Jack

Get ready to rock, Cloquet. The Social Animals are coming home to celebrate a new single and new owners at The Jack. Look for an edgier sound to rattle the hometown bar.

Local bars, after all, were the band's bread and butter a few years ago.

Made up of vocalist Dedric Clark, guitarist Tony Petersen, bass guitarist Roger Whittet and drummer Boyd Smith, three of four originally hail from Carlton County. Clark and Petersen are from Cloquet, Smith from Esko and Whittet grew up in Lino Lakes. Now, none of them live in the same town, and Clark doesn't even live in the same state.

That doesn't matter, said Clark. The Social Animals did their time, their years touring in a van to try to make it big.

Dedric Clark made time for an interview with his hometown newspaper.

"I never understood how rare it is for four friends to be in a band, how well we get along, until I moved to Nashville and realized very few bands did it the way that we did it," Clark said. "You know, four guys in a band booking their own shows, lying and pretending we're booking agents to get [a venue] and sleeping in the van together every night."

The hometown band is still working hard to rise to the top, albeit with a few bumps in the road. Signed to Rise Records in 2019, the band's European tour was shut down by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the four friends and bandmates retreated to different residences. Today, Clark lives in Nashville, Petersen in St. Paul, Boyd in Esko and Whitten in Duluth.

They have to travel to play together, and that's OK - because now it's more often for an audience of thousands versus a northern Minnesota bar.

Friday, Aug. 23 will be the exception, when the band celebrates the release of its single, "Use Me Too," as well as the purchase of The Jack by brothers Zach Zezulka and Ryan Lindstrom, friends of the band.

The Social Animals will be filming parts of the music video for the new single Friday along with performing a range of other originals at the popular downtown Cloquet bar. Audience members could be part of that video (provided they ignore the cameras and just have a good time, Clark said).

Little known fact: Zezulka played with Clark and Petersen 13 years ago before the Social Animals formed. Better-known fact: the menu at Carmen's - which Lindstrom and Zezulka also own - offers Dedric's Chicken Strip Basket in a nod to their one-time UMD housemate.

Next month, Clark will tour solo as the Social Animals, a move that's driven by economics. The Social Animals went independent in 2023, so Clark manages most of the band's business. In November, the entire band will tour.

Clark stressed that he's not doing solo shows to hog the limelight.

"I think sometimes it comes off that I want to do this whole thing by myself," he said. "That's not the case. That's just a symptom of the music industry at large that I have to do some of them by myself, just to make ends meet. If I had unlimited funds, we'd be doing full band shows the entire time."

The Pine Knot News reached out to Clark earlier this week for an update on this homegrown band that's reaching for the stars.

Pine Knot News: Your sound continues to evolve. Do you drive that or had your label said, "Oh we'd like to hear more guitar than banjo?"

Dedric Clark:PKN: I hate the banjo. Actually, me, Roger and Boyd are all pretty big anti-banjo guys.

That's another misconception, that the label was pushing us toward a different sound. We finished the record before we got signed, and we had already been moving toward that sound for a really long time. We didn't like where we were at, sonically. It felt like we were kind of just being like some hybrid of the Trampled by Turtles influence of Duluth and we didn't feel that was a super-strong representation of what we did as a band.

This one time we got an opening block for Dashboard Confessional. We were like, 'we can't go out and open for this huge rock band and play these banjo parts.' We can't do it. And Tony's like, 'Well, I don't know how to play the parts without the banjo. I can't just switch it to guitar.' (Editor's note: Petersen is amazing on the banjo, but also an incredible guitar player.) And Boyd took his banjo and hid it. He hid it, so Tony had to go up and play the guitar for the show. And then we got a whole tour with them afterwards, (sigh) so I think it was the right choice. It was a do-or-die situation. Tony wasn't happy about it, it wasn't exactly a super-fun time, but it's a fun story now.

PKN: How would you describe your music now?

Clark: We're pretty well-set as an alternative rock band, kind of taking a lot of stuff from the '80s, The Cure and stuff; that's what we all like to listen to. I feel like we were really influenced by the northern Minnesota style. Once we got out of there, and were traveling around, we're like, this isn't the kind of music we listen to. I'm into The National, War on Drugs and stuff like that. So we just naturally switched to that lane.

PKN: You described your new single as being about relationships, drugs and heartbreak. Sometimes when I listen to your lyrics, I worry about you.

Clark: You're not the only one. I'm doing better now. There were a couple rough spots. Sometimes when you're on the road constantly, you just develop habits that are not great and then you take them home with you.

And things can go haywire. At this current moment, I'm doing great.

PKN: It feels like you're very honest.

Clark: I try to be very honest in the writing. The lyrics are the thing that I take the most seriously and I spend the most time on. I feel like we certainly have developed a little bit of a reputation for that kind of content. But those were the extreme parts of my life that left the biggest impressions on me, and left the biggest impressions on the people around me too. And I want to be a source for other people who are experiencing similar things. I want them to be able to relate and find solace. It's not necessarily happy music, but that's not life. Things are hard. This isn't the happiest time to be alive. These are real issues.

PKN: Are you happy to be playing in Cloquet?

Clark: For sure, I love being able to come back home. I'm always pleasantly surprised at how much the people back home back us. People are rooting for us to keep going. It's like a breath of fresh air whenever I come back home to be like, 'Oh, we have people who care about this music.'

Also, I feel like northern Minnesota in general has influenced the cold blue aura of the band. It's very much blues and greens in this band when you listen. It's sad, difficult music sometimes, but that's six months of the year in Minnesota when you're in the grind of winter. There's a little glimpse of optimism in all the songs, and that's like the summer months in Minnesota. That makes it worth it.

PKN: How do you manage the difference between playing solo and playing with the bend? Do you play the same songs?

Clark: I play a lot of the same songs; I kinda just play them in the way that I wrote them, which is on an acoustic guitar in my room. Very rarely, I'll set up a whole entire song with drums and bass and stuff, just to try to get the juices flowing.

I prefer to play with the band so much more. I would rather play with my friends, 100 times out of 100. If I could, I would play with Roger, Tony and Boyd every show. If the stars aligned and it all made sense, that would be way better. ... It's very rare that anyone even has their close friends in the band anymore - it's more hired hands. So I recognize that what we have together as a band is very rare and very special. I love it. I don't see that changing anytime. It would never feel the same if it was other people.

Next week's bash is a precursor to a solo tour by Clark, supporting the band Under the Rug, that will start in Seattle on Sept. 9 and work its way back to the Midwest, spanning 20 shows. That will be followed by full-band shows in November, when the Social Animals open for Say Anything, doing 17 shows in 22 days, including one at The Fillmore in Minneapolis Nov. 19. They expect 3,000 to 5,000 people at most of those shows. "That should be pretty fun," Clark said.

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