Talking Totally Toad with Dean Dinning

The music of Toad the Wet Sprocket is so baked into the DNA of Santa Barbarans of a certain era — when the only place to buy our music was in record stores — that my eyes nearly popped out of my head when I heard that this summer marks the 30th anniversary of their platinum-selling album Dulcinea. The homegrown band is hitting the road this summer on a tour that includes co-headlining with the Gin Blossoms, opening for Barenaked Ladies, and solo dates, including a stop at the Lobero Theatre on Thursday, August 29.

Ahead of the tour, I caught up with bassist Dean Dinning, a San Marcos High School grad — how is that no one ever calls these Royal alums frog princes? — who grew up in town alongside lead singer Glen Phillips, guitarist Todd Nichols, and original drummer Randy Guss (Carl Thompson now plays drums).

Let’s start with the origin story. Is it really true that Toad the Wet Sprocket met in a theater class at San Marcos? 

Let’s call it the theater department, but we were all in Oklahoma together at the same time, I believe. But people knew each other from various places. … None of us were, you know, sporty kids; we were singing and dancing kids.

So you started playing together? 

Yeah, really casually. … It was what we did on a Friday night. … Todd and Glenn started writing songs together. … When they wanted to finally play live, that’s when I came in. I was known for being kind of a keyboard guy. I wasn’t even a bass player at that point; I was playing keyboards on these songs that they had recorded. They had really good songs even right at the beginning. … They had structure, they went somewhere, and they said something. And it was different. I was aware of what was going on in the local music scene. I mean, I went to the Rollercade in Goleta and I saw the Tan play. But this was something else. 

How did you go from playing keyboards to playing the bass?

We were working on new material, and one day, there was a song that just didn’t seem to want to have a keyboard part. I had a bass and they said, “Do you want to try the bass again?” And so, I just put it on. I came up with a great part, that very first day that everybody liked. And I was like, “Hey, I think you know, I think this is something I can do.”

I had a misunderstanding between myself and the bass guitar early on in my life, I didn’t realize what you could do with it, until I really started listening to it and picking it out in songs and really getting into the Beatles, and a lot of ’60s music, like the Who and things like that. Once I understood that it could be much, much more than just playing the roots at the bottom of the chords, so that everyone else would sound good, that’s when it started to become fun. 

You still play keyboards sometimes, and you’re doing some new videos? 

We shot some videos a few weeks ago for a project that we’ve been working on, which is essentially an acoustic greatest hits album. It’s a reimagining of our best-known songs, but placed in an acoustic environment and recorded in the studio. It’s not a live performance. It’s not pretending to be a live performance. It is a very sculpted and very thought-out and arranged acoustic reimagining of a bunch of our songs, and we’re going to release the first three, one after another during the touring season.

So, with Toad, obviously, you’re touring this summer, but how much time does the band spend playing together when you don’t have a tour in the works?

We’ve been working on this recording project. So, we’ve been playing more than we have in a lot of years. … It’s been really great to have a project to work on during the off time. The tours are very planned; everybody’s got their own schedules and we need to put the tour in its own place, and we try to play at the time when honestly the best shows are out there, which is the summertime. 

That makes sense. I’ve always been curious about [Santa Barbara artist and musician] Brad Nack. How did he factor into your early career?

Brad was just really, really important. I don’t know whether anything would have happened without Brad. Brad came to a show. … And he had been in the Tan and had gotten a record deal with Warner Brothers. But then things didn’t really pan out and Brad still had a publishing deal with Warner Chappell. He needed to turn in 10 song demos a year, and he was behind. 

So, he made us a deal. “I want you guys to be my backup band on four songs, because I really need to get these finished and sent in. And instead of paying you, how about if I pay to have two of your songs recorded at the same session.” And we said, “Great.” So, we went in; we played on his songs; we recorded two of our songs. … And that was the beginning of our first album, Bread & Circus. 

We later went back with Brad; he wasn’t really our producer so much as he was what he called a coach. We recorded eight more songs, and put out Bread & Circus on cassette. Brad introduced us to a guy named Chris Blake, who had managed the Tan and had gotten the Tan their record deal. Chris loved our band and started working with us. So really everything came through Brad — I still hang out with Brad to this day. 

I love that. That’s a good story about the Santa Barbara connections, of which there are many. What can we expect from the Lobero show? 

It’s gonna be a great show. The Lobero is a great venue. It’s a great place to work. It’s right there in Santa Barbara; nobody has to drive anywhere. You can just come and have a good time. It’s going to be a nice night. 

Do you have a favorite Toad song?

It changes all the time. But I’m partial to a song of ours that we did on our album in 2015 called “California Wasted.” … I still love playing “Walk on the Ocean” every night. It’s a song that I don’t know if anybody else could have done that song except us. And I like it because it’s really unique. And it’s really weird that it managed to become a hit after “All I Want,” because we were like, “Let’s release something that sounds like only we could have done it and see what happens.” And it worked. And it sort of became a theme song for us as an artist. We’re identified with California. “Walk on the Ocean” has all these great images in it. It’s a very thoughtful song. It really sums up everything that we do, in a nice way. And we play it in every show.

Toad the Wet Sprocket plays at the Lobero Theatre (33 E. Canon Perdido St.) Thursday, August 29, 7:30 p.m. See lobero.org.