New Song Spotlight: "The Rodney Rocket"

As my friends and family know, certain online videos simply capture me. I return to them constantly and they renew my lust for life. One, for example, is Lady and the Tramp In Real Life, which I think per second is the greatest cinematic production of all time. But far and away the most influential online experience of my life was the time I saw this:

Yes, that’s a drunk, aging rural Canadian in a place called Rodney, Ontario having the time of his life repeatedly driving the “redneck armchair” over a snowy ramp.

It’s easy just to laugh at this video, it really is. It can seem silly, childish, even a little pathetic at times. Fair enough. But I’m not kidding when I say that I think it captures something important, something actually pretty deep and philosophical, something kind of dark and tragic. That’s why I wrote “The Rodney Rocket” and why that is a lead track on the new album. What is happening to Ray here is something more universal, something that so many of us can identify with.

First, he has clearly just made some new friends, and their unwavering confidence in his devilish, adventurous attitude is lifting him to extraordinary heights, figuratively and literally. “I been looking for these guys for 50 years,” he joyously shouts. Second, he has discovered something vaguely dangerous and new that he really likes doing. Third, he’s part of this group that’s got this amazing evolving language to express themselves with: dickered, gibbled, keep ‘er outta the cabbage, etc.

And, finally, of course, he’s more than a little bit dickered, as the video repeatedly shows. He’s been repeatedly visiting a mythical place called the “LCBO”, AKA the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which for the longest time was one of the only places you could buy booze in that Canadian province.

Yeah, so not everyone will get where Ray is at this point in his life. But ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you, I absolutely get where Ray is in this video. After all: new amazing friends, new fun vaguely dangerous activity, amazing new mode of expression, gettin’ good and gibbled on cheap booze… doesn’t that sort of sound like, I dunno, starting a touring punk band?

And the final key moment was the realization that OBVIOUSLY this had to be done in the style of Stompin’ Tom Connors, a Canadian folk musical hero who took the idea of “country music” to a new level by writing a song about pretty much every damn place in the… country.

Et… voila:

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But as for Ray? Well… nothing lasts forever. We heard from the channel owners that Ray was struggling with alcohol, and at the end of his final video he simply looks at the guys with pure hatred and drives off with a full tall can of booze in the front seat. Ray started with joy, mirth, revelry, and ended up with doctor’s orders to tone it all down and a set of soured relationships. That isn’t exactly what happened to all of the Dreadnoughts, or indeed to other punk/rock musicians, but let me tell you it’s what happened with some of us, and you can never go back to the time when you were ‘so damned eager, and it was all so big and new’.

All you can do is just face the current reality and ask: “Am I going to pretend like it’s fifteen years ago, for fun? Or accept this and just kind of fade away?” And this album, Roll and Go, is literally just a long battle cry in favor of… PRETENDING AS HARD AS YOU CAN BECAUSE WHY THE FUCK NOT AND FADING AWAY IS DUMB. Which is exactly what I have Ray darkly choosing in the song’s slower verses:

The doctor says I gotta quit the cans and quarts of beer
And so the journey forward is evidently clear

But when the nights are cold and dark and the hours roll away
I think of all the good times we had that winter's day

So carve it on the marble boys, when I am in the ground:

“They call me ray from Rodney, I am the liquor now!"

All sung to the tune of our original 2008 drinking song, “Fire Marshall Willy”, a true celebration of insanity and inebriation written at a time in our lives when there was no pretending.

So yeah, I’d say that was a great fucking video. And I can only hope that the song itself does some minor justice to that little life-story that so many of us share, that initial elation and joy followed by a sense of slow loss and confusion as a prior way of life disappears. That’s what “Rodney Rocket” is about. Fuckin’ rights, boys.

Anyway, as usual, you PAID subscribers get to hear the songwriting process. What was “Rodney Rocket” before it was “Rodney Rocket”…?

… it was supposed to be some sort of east coast Canadian sea shanty thing about gettin’ liquored. It never quite worked and felt way too stereotypical. The final line was supposed to be “the liquor is in me now” and after running over that about 127 times I got sick of it and shelved it. Then when this Ray concept came along, I resurrected the melody, and kabam. Magic. But anyway, here’s the bad quality phone recording from early 2021 when I was trying to write “the liquor is in me now”… and as always, thank you so much for your support!