Comes the Dawn
Let's DO this
Sitting in JFK airport at 5am, whorfing down $29 french toast, sitting next to one of those goddamned horrid airport families who think that they should loudly say any goddamned inane thing that comes into their plain little heads, I think back over the last couple of weeks and realize that while it feels kind of ho-hum to me, to many it would sound downright insane.
I mean, forget about playing to 15,000 people at a beer festival in northern Quebec last weekend… that was insane. Real rock star stuff. It feels pretentious to say this though, but when the crowd is that big and that far away from us, the Dreadnoughts are not at their best. We need people in our faces. It’s too impersonal.
Luckily, the evening before, we played this club gig at L’Anti in Quebec City that was absolutely off the hook. Sean from the Creepshow joined us on Bass—his stage name with us is of course “Potato Man”— and as soon as we hit the stage, we knew things were going to get wild. For some reason I started screaming at the audience that they weren’t real punk rockers, that they were just a bunch of entitled Millennial poseurs, and that in my day we didn’t even watch the band, we went outside into the parking lot and did drugs like normal people. Don’t know where that came from. They responded well:
And “in your face”? Yeah it was in your face; literally. We brought out this huge plate of fruit and chocolate bars on stage and proceeded to shove a lot of it down our pants. Let me tell you, if you haven’t shoved a whole bunch of grapes down your pants and then leapt around on stage, give it a try sometime. In the darkness of the stage it looks like little rabbit droppings keep falling out of your pants.
Then we invented this game called “Lady and the Tramp” where we refused to play another song until something from the fruit basket—a banana, an orange, a kit kat bar, etc—was placed into the mouths of one of us and an audience member. The two participants had to snarf away at the object with no hands until they met in the middle. The best one was the kit kat bar. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen two grown men try to no-hands “meet in the middle” of a kit kat bar using nothing but their sweet hot lips.
Now, in completely unrelated news, a couple of us came down with COVID after that weekend. This, I should stress, had NOTHING TO DO WITH THE LADY AND THE TRAMP GAME. I emailed Fauci and asked him myself: he said you can’t get COVID by meeting random strangers in the middle of a banana. Anyway, one of these Covidians was supposed to make it to the UK gigs that start… tomorrow. We realized two days ago that the Valiant Violinist was too Barfy to get on a plane. So what do you do?
Well, you fucking goddamned panic is what you do. We were about three hours from pulling the plug on this beautiful little run of shows we have planned.
But we are so lucky to have such an incredible network of people willing to help. And before you know it, Steve from the band Greenman Rising (check ‘em out, we’re playing with them in Nuneaton) had connected us with a super talented fiddler, and she agreed to learn literally all of the 20 song set list with three days notice.
Seriously? How are we this lucky? With all due respect to bass players, which is to say none at all, this isn’t a bass player going down and someone needing to hit the stage with some chord sheets. This is someone with grade 8 violin certification pouring two straight manic days of study into some pretty intricate parts. How does that happen on this kind of notice? Horseshoes up our butts, that’s how.
And so here I am, already feeling a bit queasy from the undercooked French toast, ready to jump on the plane and get into the venues and drink some real frickin’ CIDER make these shows HAPPEN. Who knows what insanity lies in store for us this time? Maybe’s we’ll just do drugs in the parking lot like normal people. Maybe we’ll see sailfish! Leaping, majestically, across the luminescent orb of a setting sun! Maybe we’ll die!
#legendsneverdie