Our last adventure of 2023 began as all epic adventures begin: with a failed breakfast order at Firehouse Subs at terminal B in Newark Airport. No oatmeal, three refunds, a stolen cookie and one “can I speak to your manager” later, we had three sloppy “breakfast subs” between us that could easily pass for prison food at a medium-security detention center. It truly was a nightmare and no-one should ever go to Newark Airport. It is a silly place.
Then we boarded a plane to Las Vegas for some reason, despite having to play in Oregon that evening. It being approximately zero o’clock, we all hoped to catch a little shut-eye, but Spirit Airlines—famous online for viral tiktok videos of fist-fights and passenger screaming matches—has decided to put the “cheap” in “cheap seats”. They were so plastic, unpadded and thin I truly wonder if they didn’t source them all from the bucket seats of demolished 1982 Chevy Chevettes. Sore bums. No sleep.
Then three hours in Vegas airport, where Jungle Jim was mercifully able to find a smoking area, albeit surrounded by massive money-sucking screens:
Then more butt-crushing seats for three hours up to Portland airport, then three more hours over a very rainy mountain pass in the dark in a rental car to someplace called Bend, Oregon, which I’m still not sure is a real place. If you’re following along at home with a calculator, you’ll notice that our arrival at this venue at 8pm PST would have been about 17 hours after we woke up at 1am PST. Yikes.
As we exhaustedly drove the Mount Hood pass in the torrential rain, I decided to subject the new NYC band members to one of the Dreadnoughts’ hazing rituals: listening to the Songs in the Key of Z albums.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of those albums to the early Dreadnoughts’ development in the long van rides. Songs in the Key of Z is a collection of “music” by “artists” who combine extreme self-confidence with unbelievably questionable musical talent.
Listening to many of the tracks, you go through stages: you start with derisive laughter, wondering how anyone could be such an idiot as to record this. Then as a group you joyfully start singing along, bonding over shared suffering in the usual way.
Then, in the final stage, your initial haughty attitude is replaced with something like awe or admiration: you marvel at the sheer chutzpah of someone who can make these intricately weird and truly awful sounds with such bravado. Bits of the song that sounded unspeakably terrible now sound like they are exactly where they are supposed to be. You realize that there is a sense in which the artist is much better than you. You are humbled. You now belong to Generation Key of Z.
And as a Dreadnought you take some of this energy on stage with you, not afraid to be weird or experimental, not afraid to challenge the audience or violate their expectations. This is where our ending to Elizabeth came from, our set-closing experimental thrash bit that goes on for 2 minutes and involves all the howling, screetching, smashing insanity we can conjure. Key of Z. Yeah, you know me.
On these drives, there is always one song that somehow grabs everyone’s mood, and driving slowly between towering rocks through the extreme rain, this song truly captured the feel of this particular drive:
According to Wikipedia, “a man calling himself Y. Bhekhirst was distributing his cassettes in New York record stores; handing them over to the clerks and then walking out abruptly without further explanation.” Yet, if ever further explanation was needed, it is here. This song is nightmarishly weird and bad and amazing. His timing is brutal. The lyrics are barely intelligible and strange. The chord during the line “tonight” feels dystopian. This is music to murder gerbils to.
So of course we played it on loop for like an hour, and got to our first show in Bend just on time, mentally fried from the experience and ready to get weird. More about the shows in my next post.
All I’ll say for now is that our bass player, Mr. Cream, went up on stage in Bend and unashamedly started making weird alien noises into the mic during a couple of the punkier songs. Welcome to Generation Key of Z, Mr. Cream!
After the huge show in Portland—stick around for stories of that one—King Louie and I found ourselves driving the vehicle back to our accom at 11:59pm on New Year’s Eve. “Oh geez, twenty seconds till 2024!” he exclaimed. “What should we do?” We looked at each other, nodded knowingly, counted the seconds down, pressed “play”, and let the magic of Y. Bhekhirst wash over us one more time.
And, of course, once the weekend was over, we walked back into Portland Airport, and as if in some kind of mind-melded brain sync, we all turned to each other and started tugging on collars and wiping fake sweat off our foreheads.
“Anyone else find it…?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Mr. Cream and Jungle Jim in unison. “It’s a little hot.”
Years ago while I was busking on the street in Ann Arbor, an older woman interrupted me in the middle of a song to hand me a cd, telling me she considers it her best work. It was her recently-finished album and she was shopping it around, hoping to catch the ear of some powerful record exec, and for some reason she thought handing it to a dumpy white guy on the street with an acoustic guitar and harmonica was an obvious stepping stone toward her goal.
The CD was in a plain white envelope, and she had scribbled “Allow My Soul To Sing My Song” on it with a dying fine-tipped marker, alongside some crude stars and rainbows. This woman was typical old Ann Arbor crunchy; basically an aging hippie from a wealthy upbringing with a touch of crazy.
The music is gloriously terrible; the kind of awful that you just want to sink into. Part folk music, part spoken word with off-key, warbly operatic singing, spacey synth lines and weird guitar solos, performed with all the sincerity and self-assuredness in the world. It’s truly beautiful how horrendous it is and I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who has heard it.
I’ve thought about uploading it to YouTube, because it deserves to be shared, to take on a life of its own. I think about her occasionally and wonder if she’s still alive, but I don’t think the CD even had her name on it, so I have no way to look her up.
If calling Newark Airport a "silly place" is a Holy Grail reference, good on you!